https://www.newyorker.com/books/book-currents/salman-rushdies-literary-inspirations

It’s no mystery why I opened this tab–I’ll read about anything that offers a peek into the mind of Salman Rushdie!

Of the four books he mentioned, I’ve only read Candide, which as a great influence on me as well. I will have to read the others. Add them to the list. In all honesty I have not even ready most of Rushdie’s novels, despite him being one of my favorite authors. There’s just so much to read and I don’t have time. I don’t have time to read a short article in the New Yorker, clearly, let alone a wholeass novel. But maybe just spend less time generating those tabs in the first place. Partially, I see this 500 tabs exercise as penance for spreading my attention so thin. It’s well known that everything the devil does to us we do to ourselves. It’s a relevant observation given that Rushdie’s most famous book is about Satan, right?

Anyway the book on this list that I’m most likely to read next is The Master and the Margarita, which looks fascinating. The one I’m unlikely to read but that I’m heavily intrigued by is Amerika, which I may even have lying around somewhere. I’m a little hesitant to ready novels by Kafka because they’re mostly incomplete, inconsistent, and hard to follow. But I guess that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? I’m thinking about Kafka, sitting in an apartment in Prague, imagining America, which he only knows about from the travel literature he’s read, and using it as a fantastic setting for an existentially-tinged narrative. You could really do that with any place, if you had enough imagination, were able to escape from the version of reality imposed from all corners, if you really wanted to, right?