Adventures in Reading: Still Not Sure About Dickens edition

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Lem famously hated both film adaptations of Solaris. Reading the book, it's not hard to see why: the book is about the inability to communicate that would have to form the core of interaction with an alien species, and neither movie is about that. It's difficult to see how any movie could be about that (the final conversation scene in My Dinner With Andre excepted), and like any good science fiction property, there's enough other good material in the premise to make Tarkovsky's movie work. 

The most provocative idea in the book is that the search for alien life has nothing at all to do with what might be out there, but is rather entirely about holding up a mirror to our own humanity to find out what makes us special. It makes sense, on a level: we'd like to learn something about ourselves and don't mind using someone or something else to do it. In this way we can make sense of why there was a Space Age, which lasted into my childhood, but now there is not: the hope that there might be something out there curdles, gradually, into the reality that there's probably nothing, and the limits physics imposes on us--the vast distances of space, hostile conditions, the omnipresent radiation that would more likely sooner than later kill anyone who could overcome the first two--and the only thing this particular mirror can reflect back to us is our smallness and fragility.

 

Goethe, Elective Affinities
Now here's a really weird one. A Romantic-age nonmonogamus dream constantly and thoroughly undermined, from the German genius who (I discovered) kept a wife and a mistress and many other lovers besides. Mannered and stylistically romanticist and so very much not for everyone, but interesting.

 

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svjek
The novel has begun to suggest the possibility that Svjek might not actually be a little slow, but intentionally trying to prevent himself from ever having to fight. An unfinished novel, alas, so we'll never know.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
400+ pages in and still not certain whether I'm going to finish it, a real step down from the top David Copperfield-Oliver Twist-A Tale of Two Cities-Bleak House top tier.

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
If I never encounter another 100+ page party scene again in my reading life, I'd be fine with it. The section on how car travel works compared to walking or traveling by train was interesting, because it's pretty much a complete inversion of how we think about it now (for Proust it's the car that allows you to see things spontaneously as they are and connect together what would otherwise seem disparate, which I think is how no one experiences it these day).