Hey everyone
Some of us are reading Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges this winter break and have formed a Book Club group here on this community forum.
We will discuss the book by replying to this topic as we make progress. If you want to participate please feel free to join the @book-club group and chip in with your interpretation of the world that Borges creates in his short stories.
Happy reading!
For those who are still around campus, the library has some copies, both in English and Spanish:
Yeah, sorry, I realized later that the English edition is in the special collections, only checkable for few hours at a time.
I just (re-)read the first story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius which is also freely available at http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf (for those who are still deciding, this might be a good “tasting” of the flavor of Borges’ writings in this collection).
@book-club anyone else wants to go first with sharing their thoughts on this first story?
Oh hey I just read “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges because I found it sitting around the CS department! If Borges is still Borges then “Ficciones” ought to be fun. “The Aleph” dealt with what is identity when there is probably someone living your exact same life right now, what is the present, how can small objects and ideas that we see every day symbolically capture the complexity of life and the world. Is “Ficciones” similar?
I have only read two stories from Ficciones so far, but yeah, they were a lot of fun! The stories dealt with imaginary worlds instead of identity. I was planning to read Aleph after finishing this first collection. I am sure you will like Ficciones as well.
Funny, that I found my copy of Ficciones lying around in TTIC. And the first two stories from the Reading on Research reading group going on in the School of Computer Science at CMU this past Fall: