Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

311

No End To It

rereading Paula Fox's Desperate Characters

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about a woman named Sophie who gets bitten by a cat. a book that Franzen read in 1991, fell in love with, and thinks is hugely underrated. the book itself doesn't sound worth reading to me but the last paragraph in this essay isn't that bad

Franzen, J. (2012). No End To It. In Franzen, J. Farther Away. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 311-320

321

Desperate Characters is a novel in revolt against its own perfection. The questions it raises are radical and unpleasant. What is the point of meaning--especially literary meaning--in a rabid modern world? Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it's opposed? Why not be rabid? Why torment ourselves with books? [...]

he doesn't really answer this though lol

—p.321 by Jonathan Franzen 6 years, 9 months ago

Desperate Characters is a novel in revolt against its own perfection. The questions it raises are radical and unpleasant. What is the point of meaning--especially literary meaning--in a rabid modern world? Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it's opposed? Why not be rabid? Why torment ourselves with books? [...]

he doesn't really answer this though lol

—p.321 by Jonathan Franzen 6 years, 9 months ago