ada, or ardor, speak, memory, blood meridian, the road, bluets, gilead

english is but a playground in which the most beautiful creations can be made—recognizable by even somewhat attentive eyes, if only one possesses the genius to construct them. to me, nabokov is still king when it comes to prose (lukewarm take, unfortunately) but mccarthy comes close. i hope to read suttree and outer dark soon. the prose in bluets and gilead take on lyrical and devotional flavors, respectively, both trancelike in different senses.

the sun also rises, cannery row, tender is the night, austerlitz, lust

it is one thing to convey emotion effectively through text. it is another thing entirely to transport that emotion to you though it's not explicitly written down, like a stowaway in cargo.

a wild sheep chase, hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world, 1q84

metaphysically very satisfying. after all cerebral thought, there still lies what is to be done in the world. through answering life's call to adventure (1q84, hard-boiled wonderland, wild sheep chase), we transform ourselves and actualize, ending up in the world we didn't know we had wanted and needed until now.

ficciones, the master and margarita, strange pilgrims

the major appeal of novels that fall under the genre of magical realism for me is that even as they create fantastical worlds, they are still portals into our own.

stag's leap, crush, reality sandwiches

despite it being poetry, this was packed with good ideas for prose writing. as gabriel garcia marquez said about short stories, the difficulty of writing a good short story is that it is equally as hard as writing a good novel. the same can be said about poetry or other short media.