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4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
very dense and tiring. extremely creative but the sheer weight of words sometimes feels extremely clunky and exhausting to read through. need to re-read.
Great book. Full of wonderful twisting stories. It takes the horror out of cosmic horror and cranks the weirdness up to 10.
You know what's awesome? Reading something that people have been recomending to you for years and finding that no only was it an amazing read, but that it outstripped even your best expectations for it.
adventurous
challenging
dark
inspiring
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
An interesting read, it’s easy to see why it inspired so many subsequent writers. At the same time it’s a struggle to make it through some of the prose, and I’m unsure if this is due to the translator, the structure of the original language, or the style of Borges himself. In any case, not a light read at all.
I was also surprised to see so many repeated elements - first and foremost being the idea of labyrinths which clearly fascinated Borges - but also tendencies like starting most stories with a sentence about an individual in a place at a time interacting in some way with a piece of writing. It surprised me that an author that is renowned for thinking deeply and introducing or elucidating some exceptional ideas would use such a seemingly formulaic approach to introducing so many stories. It might be just this collection, I haven’t read his other work, where this pattern emerges, but like this eccentricity, there are numerous themes and ideas that repeat throughout most of the short stories of this collection, so much so that these feel like the preparation for some magnum opus, as if Borges could feel a connection between them and was searching for a way to tie these ideas together.
Anyway, worth reading, but definitely take it slow and try not to get lost in the extraneous details.
I was also surprised to see so many repeated elements - first and foremost being the idea of labyrinths which clearly fascinated Borges - but also tendencies like starting most stories with a sentence about an individual in a place at a time interacting in some way with a piece of writing. It surprised me that an author that is renowned for thinking deeply and introducing or elucidating some exceptional ideas would use such a seemingly formulaic approach to introducing so many stories. It might be just this collection, I haven’t read his other work, where this pattern emerges, but like this eccentricity, there are numerous themes and ideas that repeat throughout most of the short stories of this collection, so much so that these feel like the preparation for some magnum opus, as if Borges could feel a connection between them and was searching for a way to tie these ideas together.
Anyway, worth reading, but definitely take it slow and try not to get lost in the extraneous details.
i lost the plot i will be trying this again soon
These stories are great. So cerebral, so nested, a good read on the day you want to think about things differently. I especially enjoyed "The Library of Babylon," where the entire universe was an infinite library containing every possible book, and "The Lottery of Babylon," where fate was decided by an enormously complicated lottery that nobody understood. I will likely revisit this book later, but it was fun to just read a few stories here and there as I wanted to.