D. A. Hosek

Category: dewey decimal project

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 901 JAC Dark Age Ahead

    This was my first read for this project after the  ibrary reopened after the first Covid shutdown. In the apocalyptic summer of 2020, this seemed an appropriate introduction to the final 100 of the Dewey Decimal System—history. Written in 2004, Jacobs was warning of an impending “dark age” where we wiykd see a collapse of society…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 892.1 GIL Þ

    For a long time, I had managed to confuse in my mind Gilgamesh and Beowulf, most likely because of the earliness of the two narratives. I did puzzle about how I had managed to miss the flood story in Beowulf, not realizing my mistake. But then, I have a long history of this sort of…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 882 EUR Iphigeneia at Aulis

    Greek literature gets its own decade in the 800s and I decided to pull this one off the shelf since (a) I’ve heard the title before (thanks to an assortment of operas whose titles I’ve heard even if I’ve never seen/heard any of them) and (2) it was reasonably short. Many of the classic Greek stories…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 871 VIR The Eclogues of Virgil

    And now I’m moving on from Spanish/Portuguese to Latin in the literature part of the Dewey Decimal System. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note the cultural biases implicit in Dewey. the 800s—literature—follow a similar structure to the 400s—language—with a decade each for German, French, Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, Latin and Greek with all other languages crammed…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 863 VAR A Writer’s Reality

    After Eco, I decided that I would definitely give a similar book by Mario Vargas Llosa a shot. Vargas Llosa is probably the most important influence in the novel I’m working on right now and it’s always interesting to see what a writer has to say about their craft. This book is based on a series…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 853 ECO Confessions of a Young Novelist

    If I weren’t already a fan of Eco’s writing, I would pick this up for the ironic title alone—Eco was 48 when he published his first novel The Name of the Rose, and 79 when he published this slender volume. Eco playfully explores the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and gives some insight into his own creative…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 843 KRI Powers of horror : an essay on abjection

    The 840s put me in French literature, I spotted Kristeva’s name on the spine and, having read Desire in Language during my MFA, I decided I’d read this. I’d forgotten that I hated Desire in Language, finding her writing incoherent and her uncritical acceptance of Freudian theory laughable. I also had read another Kristeva book along the way on…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 832 BRE Saint Joan of the stockyards : a drama

    After a couple rounds of writing about writing, I decided to go for some actual writing when I got to the 830s, “German and related literatures.” Spotting this book, I decided that a bit of Brecht would be  good refreshment. It’s a bit of a “lost” play, one which never saw a theatrical production until after…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 820.93 GOL Sexual repression and victorian literature

    After my disappointment reading Mamet, I decided to go in a direction that was bound not to disappoint because I would come at it with low expectations: An academic approach to some obscure corner of literary study. This is one of those books that I sometimes wonder how it got on the shelves and if…