The Unreadables

After completing a year-long course on Proust's In Search of Lost Time at the now-defunct Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco from 2000 to 2001, eight of us found our company so convivial and the discussions so engaging that we have continued to meet every Tuesday evening since then from 7:00 to 9:00. Will de Soria graciously and sumptuously hosted our meetings between 2001 and 2003. Between 2003 and spring 2005 we rotated hosting. Throughout the remainder of 2005 Mitch Altman, (in)famous inventor of TV B-Gone, generously welcomed our meetings in his comfortable corporate office.

At the present time we are rotating hosting among members.

The current Unreadables are Mitch Altman, Chris Bolton, Mark Calkins, Arthur Manzi, Daniel Ng, Pam Rosenthal, and William de Soria. Jay Siskin is an intermittent member; former members include Salem Buchholz (may he rest in peace), Camillo Cimis, Penni Kimmel, and Philip Hauger.

To date we have read the following texts:

2000-01
  • Proust: In Search of Lost Time
2001
  • Montaigne: selections from the Essays
  • Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma
  • Stendhal: The Life of Henry Brulard
  • Saint-Simon: selections from the Memoirs
  • Musil: The Man Without Qualities
2002
  • Mann: The Magic Mountain
  • Joyce: Ulysses
  • Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
  • Woolf: To the Lighthouse
  • Cunningham: The Hours
  • Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
  • Stevens: selected poems from The Palm at the End of the Mind
  • Zizek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real
  • Melville: Moby Dick
  • Svevo: Zeno's Conscience
2003
  • Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
  • Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
  • Homer: The Iliad
  • Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida
  • Homer: The Odyssey
  • Virgil: The Aeneid
  • Augustine: Confessions
  • Ovid: The Metamorphoses
  • Dante: The Divine Comedy
2004
  • Genet: Our Lady of the Flowers
  • Ariosto: Orlando Furioso
  • Lampedusa: The Leopard
  • Cervantes: Don Quixote
  • Plato: The Symposium
  • Milton: Paradise Lost (unfinished)
  • Forster: A Passage to India
  • Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
2005
  • Thackeray: Vanity Fair
  • Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead
  • Rousseau: Confessions
  • Voltaire: Candide
  • Rousseau: Reveries of a Solitary Walker
  • Schreber: Memoirs of my Nervous Illness
  • Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
  • Musil: Young Törless
  • Eliot: Middlemarch
2006
  • Beckett: The Trilogy
  • Tolstoy: War and Peace
  • Kafka: selected short stories
  • Goethe: Faust
  • James: The Awkward Age
  • Fuentes: Terra Nostra
2007
  • Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
  • Herodotus: The Histories
  • Lucan: Pharsalia (aka Civil War)
  • Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem
  • Barnes: Nightwood
  • Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
  • Blake: selected poems
  • E. Brontë: Wuthering Heights
  • C. Brontë: Villette
2008
  • Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
  • Tolstoy: Anna Karenina


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