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Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It looks like an interesting little read, and seems to have a pretty engrossing plot.
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Apr 26, 2009 03:52
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mastapasta posted:
It seems like a really long book, but a lot of it goes really fast. Very interesting narrative, and a really good story (at least in my opinion).
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May 6, 2009 03:38
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atrus50 posted:On page 26 and counting. Are you just reading it cold or do you have a commentary to go along with it? I don't speak 60-70 different languages, so all the puns go over my head without one. thegloaming posted:I also recently bought Ulysses Ulysses is an awesome, awesome book. I'm on p. 300 right now and I can't put it down, even though every time I finish a section I have to read something online that explains all the esoteric references and what exactly just happened. It's maybe the toughest book I've ever read (Finnegans Wake not included because you don't really 'read' the Wake). Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 05:03 on May 18, 2009 |
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May 18, 2009 05:00
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Lamar posted:Just picked up The Know It All by AJ Jacobs. Seems pretty cool. I read this earlier in the year and found it surprisingly entertaining. It's neat how he basically wrote a biography in encyclopedia-format, and there's some interesting trivia in there.
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May 26, 2009 01:43
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fuzzknot posted:I just bought Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses, both by James Joyce. I was primarily reading The Count of Monte Cristo but will probably set it aside to read Finnegan's Wake. I bought the James Joyce books because my Irish grandfather recently passed away, so there's been a surge of Irish everything around my house lately. Ulysses is an absolutely amazing novel. I just finished it two days ago, and want to wish everyone here a happy Bloomsday! Finnegans Wake (drat the apostrophe, Joyce hates conventional punctuation) is...something else. I've always been told to read Ulysses first, but I do own a copy of the Wake. It's more to show friends then actually attempt to read, though one of these days I'll tackle it.
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Jun 16, 2009 05:34
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Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I've heard a lot of good things about it.
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Jun 18, 2009 02:41
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Snowmanatee posted:Just started A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I'm going to be reading Ulysses soon and a few people have suggested I begin with this one. Eh, it'll give you some back story on one of the main characters, but Ulysses is easy enough to jump into (I've only read a few pages of PoAYM).
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Jul 3, 2009 00:32
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The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. I always wanted to read the so-called 'first novel' ever since I saw it a few years ago at a bookstore. It's pretty long, so it ought to keep me busy for a while. I bought the Penguin classic edition, which has all sorts of nice footnotes and pictures. As an aside, I absolutely love the Penguin classic series; they publish some of the most obscure pieces of old literature out there, and are nice enough to usually couple them with end notes and scholarly introductions. I could die happy locked in a comfortable room with the complete set and enough food/water for the rest of my life. Thalamus posted:The Metamorphoses by Ovid I would suggest reading the Homeric epics, The Aeneid if you can get your hands on it, and The Metamorphoses (especially The Metamorphoses) before attempting Dante. It'll make a whole lot more sense (I mean, you probably have an edition with explanatory footnotes, but it's nice when you can recognize classical references on your own). Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jan 4, 2010 |
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Jan 4, 2010 04:18
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:Just started Infinite Jest last night and love it so far. We'll see how much I like it a year from now when I finish! It really is an incredible book, though as a doc you might find some of the information on drugs suspect. Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Mar 4, 2010 |
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Mar 4, 2010 16:29
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Folderol posted:I've had The Satanic Verses on my list for quite some time; I hope you'll come back and post your impressions in the "What Did You Just Finish?" thread after you're done. I really enjoyed it when my bookclub read it last year. It's really neat how Rushdie develops and crafts characters, and the conflicts of Eastern and Western culture makes for a good story.
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Mar 14, 2010 03:01
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SilkyP posted:
I read it about a month ago. I really enjoyed it, especially the last part. It starts a little slow, but really picks up by the fourth part.
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Apr 20, 2010 01:09
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SilkyP posted:Welp, just got a few dozen pages in and I'm wondering something, is it alright if I know hardly anything about some of the literature being referenced and don't consider myself very knowledgeable about literature in general? Yeah, the first part is completely about the academics, who's specialty is literature (and thus the heavy references). However, it's not at all like that the rest of the book, especially the third part (which is nothing short of amazing in its terseness and sheer volume of events). Don't worry too much if you don't know who Goethe is, the story doesn't depend on that sort of knowledge at all.
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Apr 21, 2010 01:31
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Cakebaker posted:My birthday was yesterday. Got: I saw Jeffrey Eugenides speak at an alumni dinner I went to the other month. I haven't read Middlesex yet, but he seemed like a really cool guy.
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May 26, 2010 16:43
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I've been reading Cao Xueqin's Story of the Stone (or Dreams of the Red Chamber) for the past week. It's pretty long (I'm only on chapter 16), so the translators split it up into five separate volumes. I'm reading the Penguin Classics translation, which so far has been pretty engaging. Highly recommend for anyone who likes East Asian literature, though I still have a long way to go with it.
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Aug 16, 2010 22:10
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FetusOvaries posted:I just began Ulysses. Haven't read many books in a while. Any advice? Like the previous poster suggested, don't worry about getting the volume of annotations. You'll find that you'll just be looking at it every sentence, and you'll never finish reading the book. Interesting to read, but not necessary I'd say. Basically, just take it a page at a time, and keep maybe a pace of ~20-30 pages a day. I took about 6 weeks to work my way through it, but it was worth it. If you find yourself totally confused after reading a chapter, don't be ashamed to check out the Sparknotes summary. I know I know, real men don't use Cliff Notes, but this isn't high school, and goddamnit, if I'm confused I don't feel bad reading what someone else thinks about it. I found that usually I picked up on about 60% of what happened in a given chapter.
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Sep 5, 2010 05:19
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Folderol posted:I've also dived into The Satanic Verses by Rushdie. The prose has so far been spectacular: vivid and imaginative. But I'm just a few pages in at this point. This is an excellent book. It gets a little heady at times, but stick with it and you'll be glad you did.
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Sep 13, 2010 03:09
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I just picked up I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume. Looks interesting, ought to be a fun read.
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Sep 24, 2010 04:49
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Hedrigall posted:The first chapter made me go out and buy this at my uni's bookstore: Good for you. I was embarrassed that I'd never read the Iliad, so I finally sat down and churned it out last November. It was really enjoyable, and I'd recommend it to anyone. Really, there's a whole ton of good classical work out there that gets ignored. Blendy posted:Monkey: A Journey to the West (Inspirational) (Kherdian's version, which I didn't like as much as Waley's). I read the unabridged Journey to the West (W. J. F. Jenner) earlier this year and really liked it. Sun Wukong is maybe the greatest figure in Chinese literature, with the possible exception of Wang Xifeng from Dream of the Red Chamber. Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Sep 28, 2010 |
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Sep 28, 2010 17:17
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Jive One posted:Just came home from a long day of work to find an awesome birthday present consisting of all 3 volumes of Penguin Classics new Lyons' translations of Arabian Nights. I have their older "best of" version with the Burton translation, but getting the complete 1001 stories plus extras sans the expurgation was a fantastic surprise. Woah, now I have to get this. Thanks!
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Nov 8, 2010 06:11
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I just started The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, edited by Robert B. Strassler. This is an amazing edition, with all sorts of maps showing EXACTLY which random Ionian city had which famous people living there, along with copious annotations. I tried to read Herodotus without any sort of annotations earlier and couldn't get past Book 1. I'm so glad I bought this book even though I already owned a 'traditional' copy (with no footnotes). I'm already deep into Book 2, and hope to finish it by the end of the year.
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Dec 6, 2010 19:59
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Red Crown posted:I just got 2666 based off the many and varied praises it received. I'm working through the first part, but the heart of the story so far is a love triangle between 3 academics who all study the same reclusive German author, and frankly it couldn't get much more unrelatable if it tried. The next parts are about something else, so I'm continuing, but I feel like its going to have to do a lot to tie it all together. Just keep going. I found the first part a little slow too (though not unbearable), but it definitely is worth finishing.
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Jan 17, 2011 17:55
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juliuspringle posted:How are you reading House of Leaves? I ask because reading it from beginning to end isn't working for me and I'm wondering if there is some trick to getting through it. For the record I'm stuck on the introduction. I dunno, I read it just like a traditional book and got through it okay. I will admit though that I didn't read the entire giant list of architectural features (you'll know what I'm talking about when you get there).
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Feb 20, 2011 22:52
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barkingclam posted:Picked up Rashomon and other stories today. I just watched (and loved) the movie and I'm curious to see how it compares. I also grabbed a couple of used books, too: Stephen Bach's Final Cut a book about Heaven's Gate, the movie that killed an entire film studio, and Prometheus Bound, another Greek tragedy I've been meaning to read. Akutagawa is quite the story teller and I hope you enjoy his work.
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Mar 18, 2011 07:03
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I just started The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It's a somewhat modern English translation, though well done and still poetic (I'm using the Nevill Coghill translation). Can I say I've still read it even though it's not in Middle English? Sometimes I feel like I'm cheating. I can stumble through the Middle English okay if I take my time with it and look up some of the words/have a side-by-side translation, but I don't want to spend half a year reading it.
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Mar 30, 2011 02:57
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Arnold of Soissons posted:I think if you say "I read {something not written in English}" as an English speaking person in an English speaking country that people assume you read a translation. Otherwise you'd probably say "I read {something not written in English} in the original {not English}." Yeah, that's how I normally role (I'm impressed with your Latin skills though, I only made it out of 101 a few years ago and I've forgotten most of my grammar  ). I feel like this is a little different though, as it's still in a form of English that is vaguely readable. Another example would be those new 'translations' of Shakespeare you can get from the 'No Fear Shakespeare' books; people have rewritten line-for-line entire plays in modern English. Sure, it makes them more understandable and is a nice aid for high school kids, but it kills the beauty that is inherent in reading a Shakespeare play as originally written, and if someone claimed they read the play and they only read something like that (and not the original), I don't know if I'd buy that. Not to be too pedantic or anything.End derail.
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Mar 30, 2011 13:58
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Dr Scoofles posted:Silly as it sounds, I never gave a thought to translations before. I just assumed it was a copying exercise rather than a creative or artistic process. The Inferno is the first translation I've ever read with the original language right beside it. I can clearly see the Italian version has a rhyming scheme whilst the English has none. I wonder if a poet translating this would atempt to recrate that in English, or is it nearly impossible? Dante is great, I wouldn't mind a thread. There are longstanding debates regarding whether poetic translations should stay as literally true to the text as possible, thus loosing some of the meter and a lot of rhyming scheme, or if they should take 'creative license' to translate it into rhyming metered English. You can also try to keep the meter while ignoring rhyming, giving you more of a mixed translation. One captures what is actually said more accurately, the other captures the style and feel of the original text more accurately. Personally, I prefer 'literal' translations that keep meter; I don't really like straight prose translations of poetry (there's a version of the Canterbury Tales that does this, and it's terrible). There have been some translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that are written as straight prose, and I think they read like garbage. On the other hand, translations that actually try to preserve rhyme can be interesting, but I feel that they go to such lengths to do it that you abandon the original text too much. That makes me uncomfortable. One the other hand, I read Goethe's Faust a year ago. In the original German, it's a play with dialogue in meter and verse. The translation I read was quite literal, so it was completely rewritten in prose with no meter. It actually worked pretty well. So I guess it just depends. Translation becomes extremely important when it comes to works dealing with frank matters. You don't want to read any translations of Eastern literature if they were done by uptight moralist from the 1800s-1950s; bowdlerization is a real issue if a translator didn't start to work in the 80s. My rule of thumb is this: if a translation comes from before the 50s-60s, I'm very careful with reading it and I only will if I cannot find a more recent translation, or if the translator is still held in high esteem by academics today (this is easy enough to investigate). If it comes from before 1900, I'd rather waste my time on YouTube videos of cats than touching that poo poo. Sure there are exceptions, but I find this rule works pretty well. Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Mar 31, 2011 |
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Mar 31, 2011 16:49
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Wyatt posted:I just assumed this was how everyone read. I always have at least three going at a time. I have a hard time reading more than two at a time. Usually what I do is have one long novel going, and then on the side a collection of short stories. That way I can read the short stories when the novel is getting boring, then go back to the novel without forgetting what the plot was of the shorts (as they're so easy to read in one setting). For example, right now I'm reading DFW's Pale King and Aesop's fables (translated and edited in a wonderful collection by Laura Gibbs - http://www.amazon.com/Aesops-Fables-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199540756/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303510693&sr=8-1). I just go back and forth, and it's great.
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Apr 22, 2011 23:18
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