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barkingclam posted:Lately I've been reading a lot of Vladimir Nabokov's short stories. Some are better than others, but a the best of them have this great mood of everything being just a little bit off, a great tricky sort of feeling: A Visit To the Museum or Terra Incognita immediately come to mind. There are so many layers of meaning in Nabokov's short fiction, you really can't go wrong. Speaking of trickery, one of his stories ("Vasiliy Shishkov")may be the ultimate literary prank: basically, a critic kept denigrating Nabokov's writing, so Nabokov wrote poetry he knew the critic would like under a pseudonym, got the critic to praise the pseudonym, then wrote a short story with the psuedonym as a protagonist, at the end of which the psuedonymic protagonist evaporates into thin air. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/apr/17/weekend7.weekend2 http://books.google.com/books?id=sV...20story&f=false
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Feb 10, 2014 22:22
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Walh Hara posted:
The important thing to remember about reading The Name of the Rose is that Eco front-loads a lot of his crazy description as a test to his reader. If you read in a little ways you'll get to an epic-length description of the monastery doorway. In his postscript Eco talks about how he made that doorway description deliberately intimidating to scare away readers who weren't going to be able to handle the rest of the book. It's a test -- if you get through it, whether by skipping ahead or reading straight through, you can probably handle the rest of the novel, even if you just do it by skipping over all the hard parts and reading for story. Declan MacManus posted:Give Pale Fire a spin and realize that Nabokov is loving with you because that's all he knows Nabokov is loving with you and it's beautiful. Poutling posted:1) Serena by Ron Rash - I think Ron Rash is going to blow up this year the way Daniel Woodrell did after the movie Winter's Bone hit the big leagues since this book is being made into a movie. This is a fantastic book, very much a Southern Gothic with Shakespearean overtones, and Serena is a fascinating and engimatic character. I was at a book festival once with a friend of mine who was a presenter and he took me along as his guest to the opening keynote speaker,Dorothea Benton Frank, known for such menopause-lit "classics" as The Land of Mango Sunsets" (hint: it contained the phrase "the sunset was the color of mangoes"). We were in the far back, sitting through her odious reading so we could get a crack at the fancy buffet, because at the time a free meal was a big deal for both us. We turned around and saw Ron Rash (who apparently knew my friend somehow? I didn't know him from Adam at the time) already powering through the buffet tables, completely ignoring the speaker, and beckoning to the two of us with a hand that held a plate full of salmon. Man has his priorities in order. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 15:18
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Walh Hara posted:
If you read it as a thirteen year old boy it's amazing because Salinger did an amazingly good job of putting all the angst of a teenage boy onto paper. If you read it any earlier you don't get it at all and if you read it later you think "why am I reading a whiny teenage brat?" Basically it does what the author meant it to do, really, really well. That doesn't mean it's necessarily something you should feel you have to read.
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Feb 20, 2014 23:56
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barkingclam posted:I don't have my copy handy, but I was always under the impression that Nabokov didn't want readers to think Humbert was anything short of a monster. So I've never really understood what people meant when they call it a love story, unless they're really trying to excuse HH or something. Yeah, I think a large part of what Nabokov was trying to do with Lolita was maximize the tension between "beautiful writing" and "horrible subject."
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Mar 14, 2014 15:05
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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 11:00
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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. The Collected Fiction Of Jorge Luis Borges is a good place to start for South America.
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Apr 20, 2014 18:44
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Chesterton's great. I'd also suggest The Napoleon of Notting Hill. It's just as fun and thoughtful as Thursday but considerably less deliberately cryptic.
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May 25, 2014 12:51
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Stravinsky posted:Evidence being that he has multiple videos where he has his autism on display because he was laughed out of a subforum where the userbase had rushed to the defense of another lper who was emotionally manipulating a women and other people. I am all for giving people another chance, but this poster decided to pop in and openly shill for a book so that he can get some cash via amazon referrals, I think it is valid to tell that person to gently caress off. This is fine! This would probably also be a good reason to use the report button! If you do use the report button and say "this dude is spamming links for referrals" I'll be happy to check it out! If all you say is "gently caress off" I'm going to slap you down instead, because content-less flaming is against the rules of this forum. It's not against the rules of other forums, so if that's what you want, post there instead. The other reason it's important to use the report button is that I don't read every single subforum here so if some rear end in a top hat is being a shithead on another subforum and then comes in here, I'm not going to magically know the history. If you say "gently caress off, stop spamming your video links" that tells me to deal with the spammer. If all you post is "gently caress off" then all I see is some guy spamming "gently caress off." If you don't tell me what the problem is, I don't automatically know! quote:Now that I have written a paragraph in which I explained why the person should gently caress off like this was old gbs, let us look at if this was good thing to do. Really its not. Its long winded and gay. Lets look to Reymond Carver's earlier works to appreciate minimalism and perhaps embrace it. Brevity is the soul of wit after all. Two words like "gently caress off" encompasses everything that needed to be said, especially so if you look at the post he was referring to. So in conclusion, RichardGamingo is a fuckhead who should gently caress off and loving stop probating/banning people for dumb rear end reasons. Please don't poo poo up the thread with crybaby whining. If you don't like a decision I've made feel free to PM or email me about it. This isn't old gbs, this also isn't new gbs. We only have like three rules that are specific to this forum, follow them. One of those rules is "don't post empty flaming." If you want to tell a dude to gently caress off, just include a few extra words explaining why (i.e., "gently caress off and stop spamming your youtube links.") (Also you probably shouldn't use "gay" as a pejorative but w/e) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 21:23
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| # ¿ Dec 11, 2025 00:20 |
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CountFosco posted:What? I really enjoyed the description of the monastery door! I can't understand a mind-set that would find that intimidating. The monastery door isn't meant as a bar to Umberto Eco readers; it's meant as a bar to Dan Brown readers. I did skip it the first time I read the book, but then again, I was like twelve.
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Jul 15, 2014 13:20
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