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Shibawanko posted:i actually read moby dick for the first time today. immediately hooked, this is great so drat good. I first read it on a train running south along the coast from Edinburgh. Incredible experience. Read it again years later and it was much funnier.
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Dec 18, 2022 22:36
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Shibawanko posted:i actually read moby dick for the first time today. immediately hooked, this is great its real good. No idea why I never got around to reading it until a couple years ago but was great. But I'm pretty sure teenaged me would have been less enthusiastic
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Dec 19, 2022 01:19
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Herman melville is so good, i read his shorter works like benito cereno, billy budd and bartleby earlier this year and every single one owned. Gonna have to get myself onto his other books e: no, wait, the confidence man first. I've heard that's great
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Dec 19, 2022 01:28
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His early novels are great. Typee, Omoo, and Mardi form a trilogy where the first two are these charming, funny semi-factual travelogues and the third starts out like that then evolves into this nutso Swiftian odyssey. Northwestern Press publishes all his stuff and they might still be on sale for the holidays.
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Dec 19, 2022 02:59
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Anyone got any opinions on Adolfo Bioy Caseares? I stumbled upon The Invention of Morel the other day and seeing as it inspired, supposedly, my favorite film I decided to give it a read. It wasn't great, but not terrible. It felt like diet Borges. The way Borges can take an absurd situation and extrapolate it out to come to startling conclusions that one wouldn't have ever come to if taking the same situation without the askew view he provides. Morel felt overly narrativized, the situation the exile finds himself in is far more interesting that the man himself yet most of the narrative is spent with him groping around questions of Ms.Faustine and her love life rather than the implications of the Island and his own inability to truly determine if not he was also just an echo of a man. Although in typing this I believe some of my frustration is that the concept was better used in Last Year at Marienbad which I've already seen. At any rate, is there any other English works worth reading by the man? For better or worse the man's legacy seems totally overshadowed by his friends.
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Dec 19, 2022 04:52
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Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, is miraculously good. Not only was the prose some of the most beautiful I have ever read, but the emotional impact of the book was so powerful. It actually made me cry twice
blue squares fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Dec 19, 2022 |
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Dec 19, 2022 20:30
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Bilirubin posted:especially since Henry IV, Part 1 is excellent and among my favourite of his plays. And the stupid meme is confusing Henry IV with Henry VI, if you are going to meme about history, at least get it right. I like Twain, I think his editing on Grant's Memoirs might be his most underrated work. For a work written by a dying man in more or less contant pain, they are remarkably lucid and wonderfully written.
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Dec 20, 2022 02:30
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Ras Het posted:I don't know that guy since literalily I live in the 19th century. I'm reading Mirbeau who lost in postation recommended here like eight years ago which one? torture garden is really wild and some of his short stories are good as well
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Dec 23, 2022 04:30
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blue squares posted:Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, is miraculously good. Not only was the prose some of the most beautiful I have ever read, but the emotional impact of the book was so powerful. It actually made me cry twice Actually it's bad op hth
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Dec 23, 2022 04:44
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A human heart posted:which one? torture garden is really wild and some of his short stories are good as well Diary of a Chambermaid. It was good but the translation was cringe, something Jarman from the 60s or so Now I'm reading Alice Munro because the history of Kymenlaakso I'd been reading was too heavy to lug to my parents
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Dec 23, 2022 11:01
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blue squares posted:Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, is miraculously good. Not only was the prose some of the most beautiful I have ever read, but the emotional impact of the book was so powerful. It actually made me cry twice Don’t read The Marriage Portrait, except for one paragraph about a tiger it’s extremely bad
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Dec 23, 2022 13:28
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Lobster Henry posted:Don’t read The Marriage Portrait, except for one paragraph about a tiger it’s extremely bad Haha yeah I couldn’t finish it. Total agree, the tiger scene was very good but everything else stank. I think it was rushed out to capitalize on Hamnet’s success
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Dec 23, 2022 15:03
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Trying to figure out which Russian novel to read next. I've only read Tolstoy & Dostoevsky's major works (W&P, Anna K / C&P, Karamazov, Notes) and want to either read more Dostoevsky or one of the books I bought during few trips to really cool hole-in-the-wall used book store called Human Relations in Bushwick. Fathers and Sons + Smoke by Turgenev, The Overcoat & other stories by Gogol, Hadji Murad by Tolstoy, or The Devils/Demons by Dostoevsky which I've tried to read a few times but could not get very far (Brothers Karamazov is my favorite book). I know Devils is probably one of his least discussed or praised works likely for a reason but always thought the premise was awesome.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:29
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I really love Devils, which I read as The Possessed. I'd absolutely recommend it.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:56
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Read Nabokov
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Dec 24, 2022 05:41
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derp posted:Read Nabokov a friend of mine once observed the irony of one of the greatest masters of English literature was writing in his second (or third? IDK) language.
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Dec 24, 2022 07:00
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Bilirubin posted:a friend of mine once observed the irony of one of the greatest masters of English literature was writing in his second (or third? IDK) language. conrad too
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Dec 24, 2022 07:04
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Bilirubin posted:a friend of mine once observed the irony of one of the greatest masters of English literature was writing in his second (or third? IDK) language. He was taught English as a child along with Russian and French. It's not his mother tongue, but it was not something he acquired later in life.
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Dec 24, 2022 07:40
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Read Gogol
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Dec 24, 2022 14:41
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knox posted:Trying to figure out which Russian novel to read next. I've only read Tolstoy & Dostoevsky's major works (W&P, Anna K / C&P, Karamazov, Notes) and want to either read more Dostoevsky or one of the books I bought during few trips to really cool hole-in-the-wall used book store called Human Relations in Bushwick. Sorokin or Limonov
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Dec 24, 2022 17:16
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Unfortunately you’re not allowed to read Russian novels right now because that would be a betrayal of Ukraine. You’re playing right into Putins hands
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Dec 24, 2022 17:32
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Ras Het posted:Read Gogol
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Dec 24, 2022 17:37
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knox posted:Trying to figure out which Russian novel to read next. I've only read Tolstoy & Dostoevsky's major works (W&P, Anna K / C&P, Karamazov, Notes) and want to either read more Dostoevsky or one of the books I bought during few trips to really cool hole-in-the-wall used book store called Human Relations in Bushwick. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
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Dec 24, 2022 17:39
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blue squares posted:Unfortunately you’re not allowed to read Russian novels right now because that would be a betrayal of Ukraine. You’re playing right into Putins hands Wasn’t there a Guardian or something article with essentially this premise that furthermore said that the psychology of the characters in the Russian classics revealed the inherent weaknesses of their national character
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Dec 24, 2022 18:28
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Tree Goat posted:Wasn’t there a Guardian or something article with essentially this premise that furthermore said that the psychology of the characters in the Russian classics revealed the inherent weaknesses of their national character The Superfluous War
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Dec 24, 2022 19:27
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knox posted:Trying to figure out which Russian novel to read next. Gogol remains my #1 guy. Please read The Overcoat soon
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Dec 25, 2022 14:36
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got a couple of holocaust related books for christmas this year, zofia nałkowska’s medallions, and alone in berlin.
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Dec 26, 2022 14:52
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Gogol it is, then probably give Demons by Dostoevsky 3rd try.
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Dec 27, 2022 20:42
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Late to the party, but don't sleep on Andrey Bely's Petersburg, preferably in the Ellsworth translation.
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Dec 27, 2022 21:01
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Everything I’ve read by Nabokov was incredible. Also, demons is awesome, super relevant themes to modern politics as well. To throw one out there that has not been mentioned, Pushkin has some pretty good short story collections. He’s less internationally known than who else has been brought up, but is basically considered the father of Russian literature. You could also try the master and margarita if you want to try some more modern Russian lit For non-fiction, The Gulag Archiepligo is imo a life changing read. A first hand account of the rise of Stalin and life in the gulag with some incredible insight into human nature. It was written in secret while the author was in exile. If you’ve ever heard “the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of men”, that is pulled from this book.
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Dec 28, 2022 16:45
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Heart of the Dog by Bulgakov is also excellent.
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Dec 28, 2022 23:39
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Gaius Marius posted:Heart of the Dog by Bulgakov is also excellent. It's one of my favorite books.
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Dec 29, 2022 03:03
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The Chums just got to Venice in Against the Day and I'm finally starting to get a clearer picture of what's actually going on. I was having a lot of trouble trying to understand the sections on Light, and whether or not Aether was needed as a transmitting medium or not. The "Transportation" Lew experiences after being blown up, and the talk of the mirrors in Venice, perhaps even the difficulty the Chums have in entering the Hollow Earth are plenty of evidence that we're looking at a sort of double reality. Not in the sense of paired worlds, a Terra and Antiterra. More that there's a grounded, realistic world and then a sort of unreal world of possibility that lives on top or besides that. The Chums and all their various super adventures belong into that category, it's the realm of all the hope,wild dreaming, and "Psuedo"scientific and magical thinkings that could not of yet be unproven, and so exist in a state of suspension until they're collapsed, like the waveform of a particle. It's no wonder that the crossover point between that world and the real world is the World's Fair, an event that even existing in reality has a sense of optimism and utopianism that draws to it the other world. The problems the Chums have with their instruments following the worlds fair, and the general discord politically and emotionally they feel after their meeting with the professor following the fair is that waveform collapsing. The Prof in his resentment of Tesla, someone who's the ultimate scientific dreamer and utopianist, agrees to sell his services to Vibe to stop the free flow of energy to the entire world. And instead collapse and commodify it. The Tesla Coils would have been the height of Anarchism, there's enough energy for everyone and each can have as much as they need. Vibe destroying that dream just as he plots against the actual Anarchists in the Mine reduces the possibility space of the future of humanity and reduces the unknown element that possibility hides in. Vibe's son refusing to kill or danger the elephant when he was in Africa could be seen as a sign of him rejecting his Father and his ways. In reference to the Elephant executions of the Vibe's friend and Tesla's enemy Edison. He certainly seems like an ill fit for the family, and in the greater scheme of things seems to want to be on the side of the Outsiders rather than the Owners, politicians, and Commercial scientists. Kit Traverse allowing himself to become indentured to the Vibes leads me to believe that we're going to have something of a flip flop in the warring families. TWIT is an enigma to me, they seem to be something of a safeguard of the mystical. To the point that the fact that they're mysterious and enigmatic matters more than any actual secrets they can hold, for if you don't know what they're hiding they could be hiding anything. Despite that, the false smiles and ineffable qualities they give off to Lew, the character whose judgement I've come to trust the most, makes me wonder if they are truly so innocent as they seem. The Chums super organization as well, the Inconvenience is literally what it says in my view. And Inconvenient fact that some people will literally transcend the current and the politics of it all, so I feel confident in siding with them, but the Russian ship that seems to be keeping tabs on them, the orders to help with the Scarsdale expedition to unbury the dead god, and being used as a taxi to ferry around Lew when he was full AntiAnarchist gives me the impression that they're being sold out. Gonna throw out a guess that like the hole to the interior slowly closing, the title Against the Day refers to to constant struggle of the counter culture to keep alive the spirit of countering culture in the face of overwhelming capital and force being turned against it.
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Dec 29, 2022 22:49
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That's the first level of the critique which is why they appear as the framing device. God I envy you
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Dec 29, 2022 23:36
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Read some Balzac, such as Père Goriot. You can see a line of descent to Dostoevsky in the monologues.
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Dec 30, 2022 10:28
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Just read all Balzac, it's what I'm doing and I can assure you I'm 4% of the way there
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Dec 30, 2022 10:41
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I’m looking for some advise on finding worthwhile stuff — I feel like even nominal sources for “literary” fiction sort of push the same blah MFA boilerplate. What are y’all’s strategies for finding stuff new and old? (And no, having friends is NOT an option)
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Dec 30, 2022 13:15
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First things first, avoid anything published in the last thirty years. After that it's just keeping your ears open, get a notepad or a note app and jot down anything that sounds interesting to you whenever you hear it. Podcast says something is good, write it down. Cool Movie that's an adaption, write it down. Pleiadians come to you in a dream to reveal the secrets of sacred geometry and the great American novel, write it down.
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Dec 30, 2022 13:23
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Gaius Marius posted:avoid anything published in the last thirty years. Except Eimear McBride.
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Dec 30, 2022 13:59
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Gaius Marius posted:First things first, avoid anything published in the last thirty years. Elaborate on this? Just personally curious as someone who's having difficulty navigating the swamp of contemporary lit
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Dec 30, 2022 14:28
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