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derp posted:This sounds really cool, but how will you know when you've finished it? Serious question, that sounds like an extremely enjoyable way to read a book, but is there any way to be sure you've read it all? or is not knowing part of the fun
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May 31, 2020 19:57
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you could mark the entries you've read with a pen or something, I don't think tracking a nonlinear progress is too hard with a book
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May 31, 2020 20:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Its kind of fun because its about a person with horrible genetic deformities going through their family history of secret incest that lead to their birth that does sound pretty fun
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May 31, 2020 20:02
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nut posted:I’ve been on a tear of making myself read contemporary Canadian fiction but it’s been so hit or miss I need something else for a while. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a multigenerational story that i read relatively recently and enjoyed
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May 31, 2020 20:07
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Thanks for all the recs they all sound great middlesex sounds hilarious and Because I was a fan of geek love
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May 31, 2020 20:23
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i’m reading middlemarch which also has middle in the title
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May 31, 2020 21:32
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nut posted:I’ve been on a tear of making myself read contemporary Canadian fiction but it’s been so hit or miss I need something else for a while. You'd probably enjoy The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie if you enjoy magical realism and multigenerational epics. I find it one of the more accessible books by Rushdie.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:23
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LinYutang posted:You'd probably enjoy The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie if you enjoy magical realism and multigenerational epics. I find it one of the more accessible books by Rushdie. I just finished Midnight's Children, my first Rushdie, and it would fit the bill as well.
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Jun 1, 2020 01:43
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I’ve written everything down because they all sound good. I finally knocked out the stranger today and i liked it a lot until the ending. I thought the character as an existentially disconnected person was funny and well done but I just didn’t like the character’s emotional (but not emotional) breakthrough at the end. I think the nihilism is pretty evident without having to be so overt about it but I guess finding happiness in absurdity is nice nut fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 01:59
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So I've read a bunch of other stuff by thread favourite Sadegh Hedayat, and my suggestion is to just stick to the Blind Owl, tbh. The rest of his output, including his other well known novel Hadji Agha, seems to be quite well written socially critical realism, very much what you would expect of pre-modernist writers, but not nearly as good as Flaubert or Chekhov, for instance. Unless you are really into stories about how being an rear end in a top hat is bad or are curious about early-mid XX century Persian lit, of course. If you want to read something like The Blind Owl, check out Hushang Golshiri's The Prince - it's about the dying prince of a deposed dynasty who is slowly going mad trapped in endless repetitions of his memories. Good stuff. Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 07:15
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Today I found out they stopped changing the thread title on us because people complained and I am deeply heartbroken
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Jun 1, 2020 14:52
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Okay after sleeping on it I get why the protagonist in the Stranger has to have a revelation and accept the absurd (since it appears central to Camus’ philosophy). Being wildly ignorant of philosophy, what is the school of thought where the need to understand and characterize life is eschewed? It seems everything I was reading is rooted in humans having a need to know the unknown. Maybe people have decided it is always there? Or is it nihilism?
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Jun 1, 2020 15:18
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism Absurdism is generally viewed as a response to and rejection of nihilism, but that very rejection requires some shared fundamental assumptions.
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Jun 1, 2020 15:20
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nut posted:Okay after sleeping on it I get why the protagonist in the Stranger has to have a revelation and accept the absurd (since it appears central to Camus’ philosophy). Being wildly ignorant of philosophy, what is the school of thought where the need to understand and characterize life is eschewed? It seems everything I was reading is rooted in humans having a need to know the unknown. Maybe people have decided it is always there? Or is it nihilism? Well, if we are talking Camus he is almost always tied into the school of Existentialism although I am not sure if you could call eschewing the understanding of life to be an existentialist position
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Jun 1, 2020 15:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism The fact that this article includes as chart to determine whether something is absurdist, existentialist, or nihilist is funny to me
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Jun 1, 2020 15:25
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I think The Stranger has endured not so much because of whatever philosophical point it may be making, but because Meursault's weird instinctive, semirobot behaviour, only betrayed when he is in a position where whatever he does won't matter, is something that everyone can relate to on some level, and is explored in a nuanced way in the novel. Meursault is partially a modernist hero who ignores futile rules about crying when you're supposed to, but that brings him no benefit whatsoever, since we live in a society
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Jun 1, 2020 15:40
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I'm reading 100 Years of Solitude for the fifth or sixth time
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Jun 1, 2020 15:41
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ohhh I think I get it, nihilism is like hey what's the point and absurdism is like ya that's the point and existentialism is like or your point at least.Ras Het posted:I think The Stranger has endured not so much because of whatever philosophical point it may be making, but because Meursault's weird instinctive, semirobot behaviour, only betrayed when he is in a position where whatever he does won't matter, is something that everyone can relate to on some level, and is explored in a nuanced way in the novel. Meursault is partially a modernist hero who ignores futile rules about crying when you're supposed to, but that brings him no benefit whatsoever, since we live in a society I guess I never really felt like I could relate to Meursault until the end. I like your reading
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Jun 1, 2020 15:55
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 lol
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Jun 1, 2020 15:57
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nut posted:
it owns so hard
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Jun 1, 2020 16:04
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tag urself I'm "nullified by death"
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Jun 1, 2020 16:32
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I'm "value existing is a logical possibility"
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Jun 1, 2020 16:34
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derp posted:This sounds really cool, but how will you know when you've finished it? I made little marks by the entries I had read but also it's not really the kind of book you "finish"
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Jun 1, 2020 16:46
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"Come to the knowledge of God" checkin in
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Jun 1, 2020 17:37
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i'm no
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Jun 1, 2020 17:43
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nut posted:Okay after sleeping on it I get why the protagonist in the Stranger has to have a revelation and accept the absurd (since it appears central to Camus’ philosophy). Being wildly ignorant of philosophy, what is the school of thought where the need to understand and characterize life is eschewed? It seems everything I was reading is rooted in humans having a need to know the unknown. Maybe people have decided it is always there? Or is it nihilism? The Myth of Sisyphus is usually considered a semi-mandatory philosophical companion piece to The Stranger (so much so that they're often bundled together in French editions) but I'd tend to agree with Ras Het: Camus's philosophy isn't really why the novel has been so popular
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Jun 1, 2020 19:08
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i like camus fine enough but i read a book some years back that repeatedly referred to him as “that great coward” and made fun of him for dying in a car crash and that has stuck with me.
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Jun 1, 2020 21:29
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WatermelonGun posted:i like camus fine enough but i read a book some years back that repeatedly referred to him as “that great coward” and made fun of him for dying in a car crash and that has stuck with me. One of the first investments I’ve ever put into learning anything about philosophy was a public lecture about the intersection of free will and neuroscience at a uni in the city I lived in. In the talk, the only thing I remember is the speaker talking poo poo about his opponents and making fun of them for being dead.
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Jun 1, 2020 21:43
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nut posted:One of the first investments I’ve ever put into learning anything about philosophy was a public lecture about the intersection of free will and neuroscience at a uni in the city I lived in. In the talk, the only thing I remember is the speaker talking poo poo about his opponents and making fun of them for being dead. This has been the entirety of philosophical discourse since before Socrates offed himself.
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Jun 1, 2020 21:46
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nut posted:how have you been reading it? front to back or jumping between dictionaries? I've been sitting on the male version for a while and maybe lockdown is the push I need to go for it. I have mostly been reading front to back but have occasionaly jumped forward or reread entries when I felt like it. I also read the appendix fairly early on. I think just reading it however you feel like should be fine. Reading the appendix early will definitely make you want to fit the contents of the dictionary to the events in the appendix, but that's neither a good or a bad thing. derp posted:This sounds really cool, but how will you know when you've finished it?
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Jun 1, 2020 22:37
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Just picked up Correction by Bernhard, and Austerlitz by Sebald, as well as a collection of poems by Cavafe. Stoked for all of then.
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Jun 1, 2020 22:42
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thehoodie posted:Just picked up Correction by Bernhard, and Austerlitz by Sebald, as well as a collection of poems by Cavafe. Stoked for all of then. Correction is so good man.. stuff a bird full of polyurethane today!
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Jun 2, 2020 07:30
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much love to the people giving the friendly lit thread a shot I saw the current argument in there and got very angry so it is good that it is there and that I am not in it
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Jun 2, 2020 14:49
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nut posted:
speaking of nihilism, I recently remembered my attempt years ago to read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. I'm thinking about having another try. any thoughts on that book? seemed like a precursor to the Beats... drugs, sex, drugs, poverty (or the trust fund kind of poverty).
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Jun 2, 2020 18:37
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It's real horny
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Jun 2, 2020 18:45
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finally finished 2666. what a wild ride. I'm getting a lol out of all the goodreads reviewers calling it 'clearly unfinished' i guess because it was published posthumously and doesn't have 'the end' written on the last page after a description of how everyone lived happily ever after. it seems i'll have to read his other novels to find out the meaning of the title, which, according to some excerpts in the afterword, has something to do with a graveyard, or the graveyard of existence, possibly how everything will just fade to nothingness and be forgotten at such a far out date. I loved it.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:45
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derp posted:finally finished 2666. what a wild ride. I'm getting a lol out of all the goodreads reviewers calling it 'clearly unfinished' i guess because it was published posthumously and doesn't have 'the end' written on the last page after a description of how everyone lived happily ever after. His novel The Third Reich was also published posthumously after they found the manuscript in a drawer. I loved, though I would probably agree if someone said the ending was the weaker part.
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Jun 2, 2020 19:00
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My next choices are My Struggle Part 2 (sadness?), Tropic of Cancer (horniness?) and 2666 (feeling horrified?). I dunno derp your rave review might be pushing me to that.
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Jun 2, 2020 19:01
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It was really good, and for such a long book I was impressed that it never seemed to lose it's way (even though it went all over the place) and was always densely packed with powerful imagery and ideas that despite how far apart they might seem on the surface, were always closely related. And there was no point (except some brief scenes of extreme violence) where I wanted to stop reading, and no part that felt 'bogged down' or bloated. Very impressive and impact and i'll be thinking about it for a long time.
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Jun 2, 2020 19:23
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derp posted:It was really good, and for such a long book I was impressed that it never seemed to lose it's way (even though it went all over the place) and was always densely packed with powerful imagery and ideas that despite how far apart they might seem on the surface, were always closely related. And there was no point (except some brief scenes of extreme violence) where I wanted to stop reading, and no part that felt 'bogged down' or bloated. Very impressive and impact and i'll be thinking about it for a long time. I'm juuuuust about to wrap up my semester, so this is definitely going on my free-time list. Thanks for the great rec.
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Jun 2, 2020 20:25
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