read some of this, anyway.

Never again.

The Discourse was much better than Archaeology, which was a real slog. From: http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/12/30/books-read-in-2007/

Foucault talks to himself a lot in this one.

Only a part of it... but maybe later I will read more. What can I say? A lot of big words from Foucault. Not that I'm surprised.

It is very difficult to write a review for a book that you're 100% sure you did not understand. However, I'm still rating it at four stars, because it is Foucault and I trust him to know what he's doing.
Also, I will reread it when I think I'm ready to understand it to a greater extent than I do now - but this will possibly be in something like 80 years, who knows.

I couldn't tell if it was a translation issue or the writing style of the book was just that incoherent, but I felt like I was reading in another language for most of the book. Oddly, the appended lecture transcript was incredibly readable. Part of this was word use, but a big part was also punctuation and using complete sentences. This made a dense topic pretty indecipherable, and considering it's a translation and thus went through English-language editing, there really isn't an excuse for the, frankly, awful use of grammar and punctuation.

This is an important book, and if you can wade through the mess of words there are some rewarding snippets of wisdom in it. As a PhD student in history and museum studies, a lot of the secondary works I read are rooted in Foucault's (or Weber's) theories. I read this to get a "closer to the source" understanding of his ideas, but I honestly couldn't tell you his major points, no matter how much I underlined and annotated. It's probably something I will read again, mostly because I will have to in order to actually get anything out of it.

It feels disingenuous to review this book after only reading it once, especially considering my first Foucault work. These concepts are not to be trafficked in without rapt attention. I'm looking forward to reading Discipline and Punish next to see how the frame work established here is applied to his later works.

Honestly not sure I quite understand what I just read. But incredibly well written.