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Finished The Last Samurai, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Felt a little bit self-indulgent in places but the last quarter or so of the book more than made up for it. About to start Kornel Esti, which I partially picked up just because even the back-cover review dedicated half of its wordcount to assuring everyone how much it sucks to be Hungarian.
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Feb 23, 2021 01:34
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I'm putting my novel about schizophrenia up online. Its format is not ideal for e-books (and I don't want to go through Amazon) so it's all going up on a website where it's free to read. There's five chapters up at the moment, and I'll be adding the rest as fast as I can get the raw text coded for HTML. http://whatisharmony.com/ - This is a book about schizophrenia. It is also about many more things.
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Feb 23, 2021 19:41
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Idaholy Roller posted:Just to change the subject a bit but I need some books by LGBT people for the forum book challenge if anyone can help us out. Stone Butch Blues
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Feb 23, 2021 23:15
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the liber al vel legis
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Feb 23, 2021 23:26
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So many posts. What the gently caress. *reads every one*
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Feb 24, 2021 00:44
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Shibawanko posted:his "fascism" was just a reaction against the environment he existed in, he became like that in tokyo university surrounded by disgusting, secretly misogynistic intellectuals who called themselves socialists, kind of like the character shunsuke in forbidden colors (tokyo university is still full of these guys by the way). mishima saw that platonic intellectualizing led to a kind of arrogance and detachment from reality, something which he also perceived in himself and which he hated about himself, i think he was essentially right to hate this. this is also why he hated dazai, a writer who was basically as self destructive and vaguely aristocratic as he himself was, but in a languishing, vain and passive sort of way Fascinating. What's a good place to start with Mishima? What's his place in modern literature and his importance?
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Feb 24, 2021 01:36
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Jupiter Jazz posted:Fascinating. What's a good place to start with Mishima? What's his place in modern literature and his importance? I started with Spring Snow and it was very good. But I don't think there's really a wrong choice.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:47
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thehoodie posted:Stone Butch Blues also this. it's free to read via leslie feinberg's website, too
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Feb 24, 2021 03:21
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Jupiter Jazz posted:What's a good place to start with Mishima? There's a lot of good places to start. You can start at the beginning with Confessions of a Mask. I started with The Temple of the Golden Pavilion which was great. You can also try The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Jupiter Jazz posted:What's his place in modern literature and his importance? It's too early to say? He is certainly well read internationally, both after his death and when he was alive. He was always rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize before his untimely suicide. And I think if he had lived longer, he would have won it.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:47
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HamsterPolice posted:It's too early to say? He is certainly well read internationally, both after his death and when he was alive. He was always rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize before his untimely suicide. And I think if he had lived longer, he would have won it. HIS SECOND TRIED OK?
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Feb 24, 2021 04:48
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I thought it was his second and third both failed before he did himself in.
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Feb 24, 2021 04:57
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I've been reading And Quiet Flows the Don from my grandparents' bookshelf. I get the sense that not a lot of people outside of Russia read this book anymore, maybe because it was state approved literature in the Soviet Union under Stalin? When you hear that you think "propaganda". It's socialist realism I suppose, cossack life as depicted in the book is very harsh and backward, romantic in some sense but miserable for most and especially women. It's not for me to gauge how true this depiction is but I can certainly believe it. Despite that it's not an unsubtle morality play like you would maybe think, even the protagonists are incredibly harsh at times. I do have a suspicion that the sometime protagonist is going to side with the reds while his wife-beating enemy and rapist friend are going to side with the whites down the line though. At the part I'm at now the protagonist as a young cossack goes to be evaluated for military service, they're weighed and examined like animals. The protagonist's horse which he had to buy himself for 140 roubles (while he earns 8 per year) is rejected. As a piece of trivia the song "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" was apparently inspired by a lullaby in this book, I noticed the similarity before I found out.
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Feb 24, 2021 10:46
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Jupiter Jazz posted:Fascinating. What's a good place to start with Mishima? What's his place in modern literature and his importance? some people say that asia never had a romantic movement like we had in europe, mishima is probably the closest japan had to someone like byron most people start by reading confessions of a mask but i always thought it was a bit less developed than some of the later stuff like temple of the golden pavilion or the sailor who fell from grace from the sea. i also like the thirst for love and the sea of fertility (especially the final book)
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Feb 24, 2021 11:52
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Mrenda posted:I'm putting my novel about schizophrenia up online. Its format is not ideal for e-books (and I don't want to go through Amazon) so it's all going up on a website where it's free to read. There's five chapters up at the moment, and I'll be adding the rest as fast as I can get the raw text coded for HTML.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:42
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Grevling posted:I've been reading And Quiet Flows the Don from my grandparents' bookshelf. I get the sense that not a lot of people outside of Russia read this book anymore, maybe because it was state approved literature in the Soviet Union under Stalin? When you hear that you think "propaganda". It's socialist realism I suppose, cossack life as depicted in the book is very harsh and backward, romantic in some sense but miserable for most and especially women. It's not for me to gauge how true this depiction is but I can certainly believe it. Despite that it's not an unsubtle morality play like you would maybe think, even the protagonists are incredibly harsh at times. I do have a suspicion that the sometime protagonist is going to side with the reds while his wife-beating enemy and rapist friend are going to side with the whites down the line though. At the part I'm at now the protagonist as a young cossack goes to be evaluated for military service, they're weighed and examined like animals. The protagonist's horse which he had to buy himself for 140 roubles (while he earns 8 per year) is rejected. As a piece of trivia the song "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" was apparently inspired by a lullaby in this book, I noticed the similarity before I found out.   
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Feb 24, 2021 20:11
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Really happy to see this, really mad that it's blocked at my job. The whole thing will probably be completely uploaded tomorrow. At the moment I have Part 2/three months post-psychosis uploaded.
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Feb 24, 2021 20:36
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Quiet Flows the Don is really good especially the war bits. There’s like a lot of pages just like describing troop movements and army logistics but I even liked those parts! I’ve heard the Daglish translation is meant to be the better one if anyone’s interested in picking it up in English
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Feb 24, 2021 22:21
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The entirety of What Even Is Harmony is up now on http://whatisharmony.com/ I'd love to know if any of you have read it and what your thoughts are.
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Feb 25, 2021 03:25
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true.spoon posted:It really is worth a read and stands with the great Russian novels for me. It has been a while but from what I remember it deals with people who couldn't become the New Soviet Man in a surprisingly non-judgemental fashion. The covers of the (awesome) GDR edition should give you a good idea whether it is for you. Yeah it really feels that way and if anything is blamed it's just socio-economic realities. For example that divorce is not something you can do for any reason. I just wish Nabokov had read this because he'd probably detest it and that would be funny, unfortunately it's not on the list. Morning Bell posted:Quiet Flows the Don is really good especially the war bits. There’s like a lot of pages just like describing troop movements and army logistics but I even liked those parts! I’ve heard the Daglish translation is meant to be the better one if anyone’s interested in picking it up in English These are cool and I also love the bits about day to day life, the plowing and harvesting, fishing, taking care of the horses etc. that goes on. It's also interesting to compare the communal life they live with how most of us live today, with obvious drawbacks like never being alone but also something of an allure for the same reason.
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Feb 25, 2021 09:06
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i’m reading Levi’s periodic table, and it’s really good
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Mar 1, 2021 08:23
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ulvir posted:i’m reading Levi’s periodic table, and it’s really good Have you read If This Is A Man? Equally good, heartbreaking.
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Mar 1, 2021 22:26
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I haven’t read that one yet, but it’s been recommended in TBB and possibly this thread before, and it’s definitely on my to-buy list I really enjoy the cynical (and most likely true) observations he has about non-jewish people in his life that didn’t turn fascist. almost never out of a strong conviction that it’s wrong, but always due to some character trait of theirs that by chance of luck happened to make them not bother going down that dreadful road
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Mar 2, 2021 08:41
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I'm reading the periodic table too because I just read truce and it was really good
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Mar 2, 2021 10:31
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Shibawanko posted:some people say that asia never had a romantic movement like we had in europe, mishima is probably the closest japan had to someone like byron I loved the whole tetralogy, but the last gave me an odd niggling feeling that I'd missed something really essential. Maybe this is an overreaching interpretation, but did you attach any importance to the cuckoo bird mentioned in the last two pages or so? I thought it was a tiny hint from nature that Honda had been being given a facsimile of Kiyoaki rather than an authentic reincarnation, almost as if some malevolent deva had mockingly engaged in some kind of divine version of brood parasitism like cuckoos are known to practice.
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Mar 2, 2021 16:08
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Ceramic Shot posted:I loved the whole tetralogy, but the last gave me an odd niggling feeling that I'd missed something really essential. Maybe this is an overreaching interpretation, but did you attach any importance to the cuckoo bird mentioned in the last two pages or so? I thought it was a tiny hint from nature that Honda had been being given a facsimile of Kiyoaki rather than an authentic reincarnation, almost as if some malevolent deva had mockingly engaged in some kind of divine version of brood parasitism like cuckoos are known to practice. its been years since i last read it so i dont recall that part exactly, i remember honda going up to the temple and finding the empty garden and how the abbot/princess doesn't even remember him or kiyoaki, what you say sounds plausible since the last incarnation is clearly a fraud of some kind and i think it throws into doubt whether any of the other incarnations were really what they seemed to be or whether honda had been chasing some kind of fantasy. the final incarnation gets adopted by honda and as thanks he gets shat on by the evil young man and he squanders his money, so yeah pretty much like a cuckoo
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Mar 2, 2021 16:22
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that whole ending owns. i don't think there was ever another book or movie or anything where you get such a complete feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness
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Mar 2, 2021 16:38
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Klara and the Sun Out Now https://twitter.com/publicroad/status/1366771209879379971
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Mar 2, 2021 17:30
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I read the first section of Klara (the first 45~ pages) and it is so delicate and fragile that I had to stop reading because I didn't want to rush through the experience. I think it also maybe won the award for novel that most quickly made me want to cry (5 pages).
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Mar 3, 2021 02:45
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Based on earlier posts ITT I started reading My Brilliant Friend. So far so good. I recommend the HBO series which is also good.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:51
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Klara and the Sun is phenomenal.
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Mar 6, 2021 08:32
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My head has been full of thoughts about Klara and the Sun so I am going to braindump my feelings in a big chunk of spoiler text. The novel strikes a balance of horror and hope that is really disorienting. The great irony of the book of course is that Klara is a Person, and an extraordinary person with a depth of caring and kindness and spirituality that far exceeds the humans around her, but she is treated at worst like a vacuum cleaner and at best like a thoughtful maid. More striking is the irony that Klara is an exceptional child, but not a single person cares for her the way they care for Josie or Rick. The thoughtlessness with which she is abandoned at a dump to "slow fade" like an outdated cellphone is of course striking and abominable. But the thing I find viscerally painful in the story, that actually makes me feel nauseated, is that the adults are complicit in a plan to have Klara "continue" Josie. And this involves coercing Klara into consenting to self-annihilate to become another person. Ishiguro's novels often have blurbs about how they are like illusory worlds suspended over an abyss. I think Klara and the Sun is situated above that abyss as well. Klara is such a tender character, written with an abundant goodness that combines a faithful dog, a children's book character, and Christ. Her conception of being a good Artificial Friend is caring for people's wellbeing, reprieving their loneliness, and intruding upon their privacy as little as possible. The second time she prays to the Sun in the barn at sunset, it struck me how pure and gentle she is--her pleas to the Sun involve showing it courtesy and thoughtful deference to its right to personal space, and she hopes that because she is fulfilling her role as an ever conscientious and kind helper, the Sun (and by extension the creators who guaranteed her existence) will be pleased with her and grant her selfless wish. Her defining characteristic, I think is that she 1. has a sense of smallness of self while also 2. having extraordinary meaning-making abilities. Klara's observational skills are commented on at length in the book, but I think it's not merely her ability to observe accurately that is unique. Because she is a child, she misinterprets the way reality operates around her because she has so few points of reference to work with--she sees the homeless man and his dog and mistakes their waking up for the existence of the Sun's miraculous healing abilities. She sees the Cootings Machine and mistakes it for the sole agent of Pollution in the world, and so on. A character comments on AFs almost always giving accurate advice. And Klara's belief that Josie will recover ends up being well-placed. I think that her childlike misinterpretations of things like the Cootings machine are not physical assessments but rather assessments of the symbolic significance of things. 1. The Sun is generous, provides good to the world, and is happy when once-lonely people are reunited in love. 2. Machine pollution harms all living beings and sickens the world. Which is to say that another one of the ironies of the book is that Klara, an artificial being, recognizes and lives by natural law, but the humans don't. She believes in grace and acceptance and the generosity of what is given freely and naturally. But the humans in the story are engaging in a society of peer-pressured gene editing that kills their children because they believe so thoroughly in meritocracy. She symbolically recognizes the Cootings machine as a synecdoche of the reason that Josie is ill--construction equipment that makes everyone sick and unhappy but that is deemed necessary for the further development of society. I think the greatest tension I have with the book is the conflict of Klara's small sense of self with her abundance of spiritual and empathetic grace. She is neglected and exploited by the people around her, even the ones she cares about with every fiber of her being, but she shows only love and deference--seems to exist in a state where she is incapable of experiencing anything but love and deference. I think her great triumph is at the very conclusion of the book, when she realizes that she could have continued Josie perfectly, but that she would have no control over the Josie that exists within other people. More than anyone, she's in the position to know if humans are nothing but external phenomena, but she finds the irreducible heart of living beings that the adults in the book had all given up on. She becomes more human than the humans. But everyone in the book walks away from her and leaves her to die alone, even as she spent her whole existence reprieving them of their own loneliness, because their own imaginations and observational powers are so diminished that they can't recognize her as a real person. I can't help but think that when Klara tells Josie that she thinks every person is a little lonely, that clearly means that Klara is lonely too. But the humans are so grossly incapable of serving Klara as well as she serves them--the kindest thing Josie does for her is stack some boxes up so she can look out the attic window. Basically, I think you can really see the children's story roots of the book in how it models the ways humans should treat one another: quote:The novel initially began life as a children’s story. Ishiguro wanted to create a book for 5 or 6-year-olds with bright illustrations and a simple narrative. Klara was to be a “doll-type figure, or a small animal.” He shared the idea with his daughter Naomi, who was then working in a bookstore. “She said, no way,” he says. “You cannot tell this story to children, you would traumatize them.” Ishiguro's novels often have endings that are like a slap in the face, saying, "Wake up!!" I feel like this novel modulates its tone slightly. It's a slap in the face and a shout: "The world could be kind, if only we'd wake up!!"
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Mar 6, 2021 18:45
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Hello, thread. I was running low on books in my to-read list and I managed to get through this entire thread over the last month and now I have too many so thank you. Apparently I posted a bunch of years back trashing Dreiser and forgot this existed. Also the discussion of Mishima throughout, particularly the last few pages, was pretty great and helped inspire me to pick him up after watching Paul Schrader's movie a few months ago and feeling conflicted about the politics and aesthetic but intrigued. Just thought I'd throw in a few recommendations from stuff I read last year I really liked: Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things is incredibly difficult to get through but a really interesting metaphor for how society treats victims of sexual harassment and assault. It's really heavy but a fantastic use of fiction to explore dark subject matter. And some Canadian authors I haven't seen come up: Dionne Brand writes poetry and prose and all of it is incredible. Theory is a bone dry satire of academia and has a delightfully awful narrator, Love Enough is a fantastic short story collection. And her poetry book Ossuaries is solid too. André Alexis is probably more middlebrow and a solidly entertaining writer. His Fifteen Dogs won our Giller Prize a couple years back, but he also has a collection called the Quincunx Saga which flirts with magical realism and Pastoral is my favourite from it, with its incredibly on-the-nose Beethoven references. Also gently caress Ben Lerner. Segue fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 05:53
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making GBS threads on Dreiser? Sister Carrie is good.
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Mar 11, 2021 07:32
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ThePopeOfFun posted:making GBS threads on Dreiser? Sister Carrie is good. Yeah it was An American Tragedy which, while I remember liking the core of the story, the writing and style were just so bad to be distracting. It wasn't the worst book for message, but for presentation, woof. But hey I just picked up a sci fi tome called Children of Time so my lit cred is falling anyway.
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Mar 13, 2021 14:04
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Finished reading the Odyssey (Thales translation) which was pretty great, in high school we only read excerpts so it was cool to read it all in context. The slaying of the suitors, which is teased and prophesied from the beginning, was great when it finally happened. Sudden and brutal, great payoff. Anyway changing gears and trying out the Divine Comedy.
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Mar 14, 2021 04:59
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I'll always associate The Odyssey with some random nonsense from someone I read online as a teenager who bitched that it was "illogical" for Argos the dog to still be alive when Odysseus finally got back to Ithaca.
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Mar 14, 2021 05:02
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That part was just incredibly sad, immediately dies upon recognizing him. One old rear end dog. Of all the things to complain about, incredibly nitpicky. I liked how the footnotes of the translation pointed out contradictions and controversy between translators on specific passages. Would get a lot of enjoyment seeing them all in a room hashing it out.
Balloon Time Hooray! fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 14, 2021 |
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Mar 14, 2021 05:07
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argos also appears in one of my favourite poems:Sheila Wingfield posted:Odysseus Dying
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Mar 14, 2021 05:17
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:argos also appears in one of my favourite poems: Awesome, thanks for sharing. Thinking back, for all the lamenting and sorrow thats talked about, Argos's death is the one that actually evoked a real reaction from me, guess I'm not the only one!
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Mar 14, 2021 05:31
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Jupiter Jazz posted:At the risk of sounding utterly pedantic: lmfao. I seriously hope you’re twenty
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Mar 14, 2021 16:59
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