WHAT I'M READING:

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

comments: It took me a long time to psych up for this one, and even longer to get through it. Crime and Punishment took me something like three months to finish; this book took four. Not that I was reading it steadily, mind you. Fortunately, my Vancouver vacation gave me time and motivation to finish the last two-thirds of it within a week. The thing about Dostoevsky is that he's as good a writer as he is a philosopher, but the level of difficulty is so damn high depth-wise that it takes you an hour to make it through ten pages. Reading him is exhausting but exhilarating; you'll come away feeling like you've really accomplished something. The themes are easier to see and appreciate in this novel than they were in Crime, though, and the Christ-like Prince Myshkin is a helluva lot more approachable a character than Raskolnikov was. The large supporting cast is brilliant, although it's hard to keep all those Russian names straight. (It took me a while to realize that Ganya and Gavril Ardalionovitch were the same person.) If you give it the patience and attention it deserves, this book yields insights that will literally take your breath away.

Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories

comments: I've been meaning to introduce myself to Chekhov for some time now, so I figured I'd turn August into my own personal Russian Literature Month. I'd read various bits of praise for his work, but none of it prepared me for these stories. In three adjectives: short, simple, pure. "The Night before Easter" ranks right up there with Joyce's "The Dead," far as I'm concerned. Chekhov himself once wrote that great writers "describe life as it is, but because each line is saturated with consciousness of its goal, you feel life as it should be in addition to life as it is, and you are captivated by it." I don't know if that realist ethos holds for all great writers, but it's definitely true of Chekhov. For me, each of his lines is saturated with inspiration. This is one of those truly rare writers who hits me full force, who reminds me of why I fell in love with literature in the first place, and who fills me with the desire to produce some of it myself.

WHAT I'M WRITING:

Archive reviews of Phone Booth, Darkness Falls, and The Animatrix. The latter may end up turning into a longer article about the media convergence aspects of the Matrix films and computer game.