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Slackerish posted:Has anyone here read A Naked Singularity? I've heard good things but I read the first 20 or so pages and it felt like DeLillo pastiche and I'm not a huge DeLillo fan in the first place. A co-worker of mine whose opinion I respect handed it to me to read last week and I have it sitting on my desk right now, but I haven't cracked it open yet.
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Mar 17, 2014 12:00
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Guy A. Person posted:
Yeah, your going to love The Blind Owl then. Honestly a passing familiarity with the TBD will make understanding what's happening in the story so much easier but since you are set on reading it you will probably pick up on one or two things that I didn't the first time around.
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Mar 18, 2014 03:27
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Honestly, TDB is something I have been interested in for awhile based on it being referenced in/influence on other stuff. This just gives me an excuse to move it out of "I'll read it eventually" land.
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Mar 18, 2014 19:11
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Slackerish posted:Has anyone here read A Naked Singularity? I've heard good things but I read the first 20 or so pages and it felt like DeLillo pastiche and I'm not a huge DeLillo fan in the first place.
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Mar 19, 2014 15:44
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A slew of books by Italo Calvino are on sale today for the kindle daily deal. Unfortunately not If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..., but Invisible Cities is good and he is a great writer in general.
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Mar 21, 2014 02:18
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Guy A. Person posted:A slew of books by Italo Calvino are on sale today for the kindle daily deal. Unfortunately not If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..., but Invisible Cities is good and he is a great writer in general. Thank you for pointing this out.
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Mar 21, 2014 02:50
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Guy A. Person posted:A slew of books by Italo Calvino are on sale today for the kindle daily deal. Unfortunately not If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..., but Invisible Cities is good and he is a great writer in general. Italian Folktales is awesome and weird as heck. It's also pretty huge.
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Mar 21, 2014 03:33
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ShutteredIn posted:Italian Folktales is awesome and weird as heck. It's also pretty huge. Nice. I ended up just buying them all (except Cities which I have a physical copy of).
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Mar 21, 2014 05:56
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I'm reading Heart of Darkness and the first half or so was really bad and dull but then they got attacked(?) in a boat and the narrator went insane and is lamenting the loss of his black cannibal engine man and complaining about hippo meat and it's good now I would recommend it.
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Mar 31, 2014 22:38
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CestMoi posted:I'm reading Heart of Darkness and the first half or so was really bad and dull but then they got attacked(?) in a boat and the narrator went insane and is lamenting the loss of his black cannibal engine man and complaining about hippo meat and it's good now I would recommend it. Oh wow, I actually tried reading this book just last week, but stopped after part one because I couldn't enjoy it. I've always had problems with prose from old books (old = before the world war 1 I guess) so I thought that must be the reason why I dsliked it despite it getting so many great reviews, but maybe I just didn't read far enough before quitting. I'm not entirely convinced to continue reading based on what you wrote though.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:00
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Everyone should give Conrad a chance and a half, especially with other books than HoD. No disrespect for Heart, it's fantastic, with a couple of perfect moments in there, but it's not his best work (The Secret Agent).
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Mar 31, 2014 23:21
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Walh Hara posted:Oh wow, I actually tried reading this book just last week, but stopped after part one because I couldn't enjoy it. I've always had problems with prose from old books (old = before the world war 1 I guess) so I thought that must be the reason why I dsliked it despite it getting so many great reviews, but maybe I just didn't read far enough before quitting. I'm not entirely convinced to continue reading based on what you wrote though. PArt 1 really overdoes the flowery language for sure but Part 2 has him getting way more obsessed with the idea of Mr. Kurtz and the more obsessed he gets the better the book gets and the less he uses words I have seen before but don't actually know the meaning of. Just keep going with it since you've read basically half already.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:28
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Mr. Squishy posted:Everyone should give Conrad a chance and a half, especially with other books than HoD. No disrespect for Heart, it's fantastic, with a couple of perfect moments in there, but it's not his best work (The Secret Agent). The Secret Agent is really, really good, and it's got a lot of action and suspense for dudes who can't handle slow-paced talking on a raft for 90 pages.
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Apr 1, 2014 13:38
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I just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road and I am not sure what to make of the end. Why does the boy suddenly end up with other people? It somehow feels out of place with the rest of the book for me and with the whole tone that was set throughout I expected a much different ending. Did I miss something or does it just not fit well?
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Apr 1, 2014 14:16
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elbkaida posted:I just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road and I am not sure what to make of the end. Why does the boy suddenly end up with other people? It somehow feels out of place with the rest of the book for me and with the whole tone that was set throughout I expected a much different ending. Did I miss something or does it just not fit well? It's been a while but, but my recollection is that The Man is dying throughout the whole book, just like the world is dying. The Man is trying to figure out what do to with his son. I was expecting the Man to die at the end and The Boy to meet a grisly end. The fact that CM left it up in the air was a pretty big relief to me.
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Apr 1, 2014 15:29
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The Man was also way more cynical while the Boy is more trusting and hopeful. The Man is basically just trying to survive, but that is not enough to actually "carry the fire" into the future, you have to trust in other people and be hopeful for better days. So the ending was not a cop-out, it was a fulfillment of the Boy's arc.
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Apr 1, 2014 16:09
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I didn't like the end of The Road either. I totally understand why it ended the way it did but to have some (Mormons? Some reason I think they were Mormons) family following them the whole time and just take the kid was really kind of a cop out.
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Apr 1, 2014 17:00
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CestMoi posted:PArt 1 really overdoes the flowery language for sure but Part 2 has him getting way more obsessed with the idea of Mr. Kurtz and the more obsessed he gets the better the book gets and the less he uses words I have seen before but don't actually know the meaning of. Just keep going with it since you've read basically half already. Yeah it definitely gets better after that for sure. The books really starts as soon as the main character;s obsession starts. It its really the opposite of Moby Dick. Heart of Darkness becomes more narrow and targeted as the main character becomes obsessed wheras Mobey Dick has Ahab waxing endlessly upon whaling.
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Apr 2, 2014 08:36
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edit: never mind. I was trolling about irrelevant poo poo in moby dick, which isn't really a necessary point to make. rasser fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 21:42
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Oh man, I love Heart of Darkness. The prose is so layered and the atmosphere so intriguing. It kind of makes me sad because most of the people I know hate it. I am currently reading Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball. If you thought House of Leaves's schtick was interesting but just not necessary/not worth slogging through the bullshit, then this is the book for you. It's like every couple of pages there's some new development/narrative device that leaves me just mouth to the floor. Fuckin' great book.
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Apr 4, 2014 05:04
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I loved Ball's The Way Through Doors. I know a lot of books get described as "dreamlike," but Doors really nails the feel of dream logic.
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Apr 5, 2014 01:22
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Declan MacManus posted:The Secret Agent is really, really good, and it's got a lot of action and suspense for dudes who can't handle slow-paced talking on a raft for 90 pages. The Secret Agent is awesome because almost every character is a caricature, but the psychology is so nuanced they're all weirdly believable as actual people. Most of the book is dead-on black humor stemming from the disconnect between their internal logic and the actions they take, although it gets progressively more and more serious on a domestic level. The portion towards the end describing Winnie's thoughts before she acts out, only spanning what must be a couple of minutes in real time but stretched out considerably on the page, is so intense I broke out in a cold sweat reading it the first time through. Also, the fact that Kazynski apparently idolized the professor is hilarious as he's easily the most pathetic character in the book. If you approach it as a spy novel though, you'll probably be disappointed. Conrad is fantastic but you really have to push through his detailed descriptions of characters, his slow plot buildups, and accept some of his stylistic quirks before you get to the core of his stories and what makes him such an idiosyncratic writer. Heart of Darkness really benefits from rereading (along with most of his other stuff) as the structure and intent isn't always immediately obvious. Reading "King Leopold's Ghost" also helped put it in the historical context of the Congolese genocide. I've had to read it twice in an academic context and the historicity was completely glossed over in favor of analysis on a purely literary level, which is really a rote case of missing the forest for the trees. I guess what I'm trying to say is that reading Conrad can be extremely laborious, but it's totally worth the investment.
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Apr 5, 2014 03:42
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Where the hell are people actually finding Three Drops of Blood? I wanted to read it after hearing about it, but even on Amazon used copies are $100 and new are like $400. Is there a source for it that isn't outrageous? (Also how the gently caress is a book published in 2009 that expensive?)
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Apr 5, 2014 04:15
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Full Fathoms Five posted:Where the hell are people actually finding Three Drops of Blood? I wanted to read it after hearing about it, but even on Amazon used copies are $100 and new are like $400. Is there a source for it that isn't outrageous? (Also how the gently caress is a book published in 2009 that expensive?) Wow. That's amazing because last time I checked it was $25 but you had to wait like two weeks. Here's a link to a bunch of stories that Dr. Iraj Bashari translated and provides on his website: http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BdOwl/Sadeq.html Stravinsky fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 06:37
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Amazing, thank you! I'm genuinely kind of curious what the size of that print run must have been. To see that kind of price tag on a relatively recent fiction publication is nuts. That's the kind of price I'd expect for like an essential reference material that had one print run in 1945 or something.
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Apr 5, 2014 07:10
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talktapes posted:I've had to read it twice in an academic context and the historicity was completely glossed over in favor of analysis on a purely literary level, which is really a rote case of missing the forest for the trees. That's insane. You would think they'd at least mention that there were legal worries over the book because of the NDA the company made their workers sign. I'm currently reading Nostromo and it's the most Conrad Conrad I've ever read. The first section tries to convey 50 years of history in a small town, and action scenes will break off for paragraphs describing day-to-day life. It's very disorienting.
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Apr 5, 2014 10:58
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talktapes posted:I've had to read it twice in an academic context and the historicity was completely glossed over in favor of analysis on a purely literary level, which is really a rote case of missing the forest for the trees. I think in academics you tend to compress a lot of things into a tight schedule and historicity tends to get paved over unless it's some brief context. If you have eight books to get through over 15 weeks then you can't really dick around with even really interesting history. Except Moby Dick. Moby Dick always gets the red carpet rolled out.
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Apr 11, 2014 04:50
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It depends on the scope of the class. My uncle teaches English, and when he teaches Victorian novels he gets plenty of time to show how hosed up and strange a lot of the Victorians were. Except George Eliot. She knew what the score was. (I may have just finished Middlemarch. What a great book.)
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Apr 13, 2014 04:27
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Slackerish posted:that's true, the other part I found pretty difficult was the scene where recktall brown dies. It took me like four months to read the book and I didn't realize how many characters they recalled from France until I looked over the annotations I'm reading JR right now and it is definitely easier to understand and digest in relation to The Recognitions. Same basic style, that of dozens of characters slowly revolving closer and closer to that of the central character/premise. As for the dialogue, it is virtually non-stop and is done in a really cool way. The focus shifts from person to person, but only when there is contact and conversation already going on, so the thread is unbroken and constantly meanders around. You only get one side of phone conversations though, which takes some getting used to. JR the character is also hilarious and awesome.
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Apr 13, 2014 10:45
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Dreylad posted:It depends on the scope of the class. My uncle teaches English, and when he teaches Victorian novels he gets plenty of time to show how hosed up and strange a lot of the Victorians were. I saw a movie about George Eliot wherein she rode a horse into a dude's office and had the horse take a dump on his desk.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:20
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So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:00
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Guy A. Person posted:So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend. Borges' short stories of course from Argentina Season of Migration to the North by Talib Salih from Sudan The Day the Leader was Killed and Wedding Song by Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer from South Africa The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy from India Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh from India Shame by Salman Rushdie from India Earwicker fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 19:25
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a good Nigerian novel. I haven't read the rest of his Africa trilogy, but they're supposed to be pretty good as well. I've also heard good things about the authors Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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Apr 20, 2014 19:29
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Guy A. Person posted:So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend. The Collected Fiction Of Jorge Luis Borges is a good place to start for South America.
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Apr 20, 2014 19:44
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Guy A. Person posted:So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend. Obscene Bird Of Thy Night by José Donoso. It was the best thing I read last year. Carlos Fuentes is really good, and Terra Nostra is a really good read in my opinion.
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Apr 20, 2014 19:53
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Fictions is the best Borges and everyone agrees it but you should also read the other stuff and also all his essays because they are so good http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html
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Apr 21, 2014 02:44
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I just bought some hair removal creme for my balls but amazon wouldn't give me free delivery unless the order was over £10 so I bought Mason & Dixon too.
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Apr 21, 2014 02:46
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Snow by Orhan Pamuk, from Turkey Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, from South Africa
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Apr 21, 2014 20:12
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Guy A. Person posted:So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:08
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Guy A. Person posted:So I am trying to expand my reading habits and one of those ways is trying to read more lit from other cultures/countries. I have Europe covered pretty well, as well as Russia, Japan and a little from China (Mo Yan mostly). Looking for any recommendations from South America (I got Marquez and Bolano covered), Australia, India, the rest of East Asia, the Middle East, ummmm, anywhere else you guys recommend. Europe is a lot of cultures. Which have you covered/would you like covered?
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Apr 23, 2014 12:02
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