What Fiction are you reading this week, October 9, 2022?

[lounge_jam]

16. Mostly Hanif Kureishi

1. I picked up Hanif Kureishi's Love + Hate, a collection of essays and short fiction. Pieces that stood out in the collection: a) his piece of Kafka (titled "Kafka and His Father's Excrement" IIRC; the book is buried under a pile of clothes, and I'm too lazy to retrieve it, and b) his reflections on being conned by an accountant and losing nearly all his savings - the piece, like the other ones in this collection, focuses on the ways in which love and hate tend to affect our relation to the world. He posits several similarities between the two, and some of his insights are deeply thrilling. I also read his other collection of fiction and non-fiction called "Dreaming and Scheming" a while back and loved it too. Kureishi's shorter works actively aim to blur the assigned differences between fiction and non-fiction, so I have no qualms posting this in the fiction thread, as opposed to the non-fiction thread

2. Other than that, I'm doing some ecology-related readings - now focusing on what they call a climax community: An interesting concept since it problematizes the common way of looking at human action as cultural as opposed to natural. Some discussions in this context regard human activity, too, as falling under the domain of the natural. The challenge then is to prevent us from absolving ourselves of the responsibility to consider the effects of our actions.