In other news, I just finished reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. It’s definitely not quite the masterpiece of Crime and Punishment, the psychological musings of the protagonist are not nearly as visceral, but you there’s a similar appraisal of pride, morality, and justice within the piece. In total, I found the work entirely confusing. Sentence by sentence it seemed muddled and without any direction. By the end of section and the work as a whole it somehow came together. It’s a nightmare to try to dissect, because the individuals parts don’t seem to really contribute to the whole at all. If you take any individual paragraph out of the story and read it, you’d be hard-pressed to construct from that any sort of narrative at all. So much time is spent pulling out bit of the protagonist’s personality, but not directly and not even through interesting anecdotes. Rather, a paragraph of nothing gives up a phrase or a ‘tik’ in the wording that suggests part of the narrators mental state and history, but even that is nothing unless compared against similar giveaways later. The individual hints come across as nothing and only the aggregation makes any sense. It’s fascinating, and mind-boggling.

In a complete departure from Dostoevsky, the next book in the queue is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame). I’m only a chapter or two in so I’ll save that for next week.

I’m also playing Napoleonic Total War. Excellent game, but my computer is choking on the battles. I need to toss some more RAM in, I think. Maybe soon, but not this week. I’ll be in New Orleans soon and it can wait till after that. I’m excited for the vacation. Images soon forthcoming…