|
TBB sucks because there's not a book version of SMG.
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 13:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:44 |
|
|
Serious post though: It's not the fact that there's so much genre fiction exclusively. Just look at CD, the front page is the following: - lovely movie thread - An animated movie sequel - Transformers - A Tom Cruise Scifi film - A comic book movie megathread - Godzilla - Star Wars - TMNT - The Lego Movie - Anime(tion) megathread All of these are the movie equivalent of "genre books". The reality is probably just that people (read: goons) don't read all that much, and when they do they don't really like discussing it online. It doesn't really help that there's not a coordinated ad campaign for most books so you don't even have a shared experience for a large number of people.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 14:07
|
|
|
House Louse posted:Normally I just sit back and enjoy this thread but if you think Twain and Austen are boring, have your heard examined, they're both hilarious. Even if Austen is a bit of work because she doesn't explain herself for people reading two hundred years later, you could read, you know, an annotated edition or something. Part of the issue is that there's a natural language drift (even with 50s Sci-fi or whatever it's pretty clear that people don't talk like that any more), it makes it kind of hard to follow. This is doubly true if you're relying on cultural context that isn't present in the modern day (i.e., the whole nobility thing is pretty foreign for American readers).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 17:21
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:Shakespeare wrote plays, largely in verse. Reading it aloud will help you get a handle on what's being said. Well that's the other thing, Shakespeare wrote in a manner that was explicitly not in a natural fashion (he did a bunch of contractions to keep iambic pentameter, for instance). Also going back to culture he wrote a lot about issues that just don't ring with audiences today (Othello's background is about being a hero of Venice over the Ottomans which is roughly equivalent to US v Russia today). SleuthDiplomacy posted:No one has even mentioned Vonnegut yet. Y'all makin' me sick. I never read Vonnegut as a kid because my dad apparently hated his writing for reasons unknown.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 17:46
|
|
|
dogcrash truther posted:Your not being trendy, because there's pretty much no other choice. It's like saying, "Boy, you know what, in my opinion, Shakespeare was an influential writer. Definitely one if the greats of not THE greatest English playwright of the last 500 years." Shakespeare was common trash and the only reason he's remembered now is that the common people actually liked his plays.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2014 07:51
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:Look at this joker never read Hemingway in highschool. For Whom the Bell Tolls had about a third of it written in Spanish.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2014 01:57
|
|
|
LLCoolJD posted:
That preface was so badly written that it turned a lot of people in my class off of the book. The actual novel wasn't that bad though!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 17:24
|
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:
Is that where Woody Allen gets his inspiration?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2015 19:39
|
|
|
The new Hunger Games film is actually much better than a good chunk of the Best Picture nominees this year.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2015 03:09
|
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:If you are going to learn a language just for ancient texts quit being a bitch and learn Chinese at least Yeah, some of those can be funny at least. quote:These seduction cases are the hardest of all. There are five conditions that have to be met before you can succeed. First, you have to be as handsome as Pan An. Second, you need a tool as big as a donkey's. Third, you must be as rich as Deng Tong. Fourth, you must be as forbearing as a needle plying through cotton wool. Fifth, you've got to spend time. It can be done only if you meet these five requirements.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2015 22:50
|
|
|
Libluini posted:The irony here is for many ancient Sumerian cultures demons weren't all bad. They had evil, good and neutral demons. If you had bad luck, a well-drying plague demon would start living in your village's well. If you had good luck, a plague-protection demon would show up and instead protect your village. Or you would have that weird tree with a female demon just living in it. (I guess that would be the neutral option.) Then again a lot of Sumerian Gods would just torture you after death to the extent that the people outright feared the afterlife.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2015 14:30
|
|
|
Cannery Row has one of the best openings imo quote:“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.” Speaking of which, I need to read more Steinbeck. Travels with Charley sounds like the sort of book I would love.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2015 10:30
|
|
|
AYC posted:So my takeaway from this thread is that genre fiction is distinguished from more sophisticated stuff by quality of writing? Age probably also helps in that respect. There's an above average chance that Stephen King is viewed as literature in 50 years or so.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2015 15:11
|
|
|
blue squares posted:
Maus is the usual answer here.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2015 03:01
|
|
|
guts and bolts posted:I usually get Watchmen in response whenever I ask this. Watchmen is like going "Well if cartoon characters/Who Framed Roger Rabbit really did exist then the government would hire them to be invincible assassins". Or I guess that's Miracleman, but same author.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2015 03:43
|
|
|
Shibawanko posted:You don't have to try and redefine a whole category in order to allow yourself to enjoy dumb poo poo. Everybody enjoys dumb poo poo. Sherlock Holmes is dumb crap and will waste your time. It will not be the kind of thing you remember on your deathbed. If you need it to get through the day though then by all means read it? It's really not that complicated. I dunno, I mean I remember some Sherlock Holmes stuff pretty well, like the falls or that one story that ended up with the Englishwoman having a half-black baby that she was trying to hide from the world.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2015 12:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:44 |
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:
The extension of this is the idea that you can't think and discuss things about a work unless it's considered literary (i.e., has social affirmation); "turn your brain off" and all that. You can find out a whole lot about people based on what they feel is the "standard" of the time. I understand why we're not discussing "The Ideology of D&D Novels" in this thread though because it's explicitly cordoned off to generate novel discussion, at least compared to the rest of TBB.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2015 17:01
|
|