Clark Nova posted:

That was Bravest of the Lamps, pbuh

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3833655

Gaius Marius posted:

Wolfe's the GOAT

derp posted:

as far as genre goes gene wolfe is good imo, though i havent read him since i got into lit, so i probably wouldnt enjoy him much now, but his book of the new sun was close enough to being an actual good book that it made me notice how trash most sci fi and fantasy actually was, and i had to start looking around for other stuff to read - then i found lit, the end.

Gaius Marius posted:

You missed a large part of it then. Ern as part of his recloning into the library is only able to talk and act in stereotypical fashion. That's why he's brought on to help solve the case, but it also means that his words and actions can often be incongruent with his thoughts. Regardless it seems you've also missed that the woman who hired him was also a reclone, the father was trying to achieve a sort of immortality by cloning himself and his wife. Like Ern she cannot act outside of the limitations imposed upon her by her father, a man obsessed with old pulp novels. Leading to her rather stereotypical femme fatale-ish actions.

There is also some heavy commentary on police brutality and repression with the implication that they simply reclone suspects and then torture them until they confess and then use that confession to arrest the suspect. Since no "actual" people are hurt it's fine.

That said I found it pretty mid, Wolfe can do very good dialogue but he doesn't quite pull off the pulp dialogue which really hurts the work. Try reading Fifth Head, it has many of the same themes but is much better written for channeling Proust rather than Hammett. The second part of the work is inscrutable though.

DeimosRising posted:

(if he'd finished the books he'd know almost everything is laid out extremely explicitly in the final chapters, and most things well before that), that Severian is only a put upon hero in his own mind, etc. he didn't even pick up on the fact that he was in part reading a catholic allegory, which he fucken loved.

hannah posted:

just wanna ask; what’s the pacing of Against the Day, and Gravity’s Rainbow?

ulvir posted:

i started with Stoner today, its decent enough. realism is a good change of pace after a whole bunch of Fosse, Bolaño etc the last few months

How has literary culture changed since you started out in the 1970s?
Old codgers always say this, but it seems there’s been a creeping retreat into infantilism. When I was middle-aged, you had a comparatively large group of people for whom a new novel by Iris Murdoch or a new book of poems by Robert Lowell was an event eagerly looked forward to. We don’t want difficult books now. A friend said to me: “You see supposedly grownup people on the train unashamedly reading Harry Potter books; they should be reading grownup books, not children’s books!” When I started reading as a little boy, of course I wanted an escape from the small town where I was living. But what I discovered was that the escape you get from art isn’t away from the world but into an infinitely wider one – into life.

How do you view the younger generation of Irish novelists?
When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more. Fiction writers in Ireland now seem just to be writing about their immediate lives and the lives of their friends. That wasn’t the point at all for my generation; we were interested in what people are, not what they do. In my non-crime books I don’t care who does what; I’m investigating the poetic possibilities of language and trying to address the question of being.

...

A friend asked me the other day: “In The Singularities there’s this guy who gets out of jail, but in your previous books was he not already out of jail?” I said: “It’s fiction! I can do what I like!”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/12/john-banville-the-singularities-theres-been-a-creeping-retreat-into-infantilism

quote:

Beginning with Christine Falls, published in 2006, Banville has written crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black.[23] He writes his Benjamin Black crime fiction much more quickly than he composes his literary novels.[24] He appreciates his work as Black as a craft, while as Banville he is an artist. He considers crime writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".[25]

quote:

We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin's day.Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
On Swithin's day.

We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,
For I did not know, nor did she infer
How much there was to read and guess
By her in me, and to see and crown
By me in her.
Wasted were two souls in their prime,
And great was the waste, that July time
When the rain came down.

Blurred posted:

Penguin Little Black Classics

Blurred posted:

Bilirubin posted:

Read Some Real Literature: Abridged Edition

Blurred posted:

Last year I had the urge to get back into reading 'real literature' after several years of reading almost exclusively non-fiction books. I have two young children which makes it difficult to find any consistent, quiet reading time, which really discouraged me from getting stuck into any long, dense novels. So I decided to buy the Penguin Little Black Classics box-set, because each of the books are only ~50 pages long, and I thought it would be a great chance to expose myself to authors I've never read before without needing to invest too much of my (rare) free-time.

DeimosRising posted:

tbf only some of those are abridged, a lot are just shorter works.

What did you think of the book of Tang dynasty poetry? I assume the four poets are Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and...maybe Yishan?

Blurred posted:

It was only three poets, and yeah it's the first three you mentioned. I remember enjoying it, but it's difficult for me to cast any meaningful judgement it because I don't really have any frame of reference to measure it against - this was my first time reading Chinese poetry, ancient or modern. There's a good mix of styles in it - some poems are more lyrical, others are more prose-like; some are impressionistic sketches of nature, others are more narrative-driven, etc. - but I remember finding the content and imagery of the poems to be very stereotyped. Everything was autumn breezes, cherry blossoms and flowing streams. Maybe that's just a function of the genre at the time, though - like I said, it's difficult for me to judge. A lot of the more narrative-driven poems seemed to be about men leaving their families to go to war for some reason, but I'm not sure if that's because it was a typical subject for poets at the time, or if it's just an editorial decision made by the collators. The poem written by Li Bo from the perspective of a soldier to his children sticks in my head for being particularly touching.

So yeah, I can definitely recommend it to someone who just wants a brief exposure to ancient Chinese poetry to see what the lay of the land like (that's what this series is best for) but hardcore ancient Chinese poetry fans would obviously want something more substantial than the 30 or so pieces here.

Puppy Burner posted:

Read Augustus and there's a part near the end where the author just drops that homosexuality is bad actually. Stuck out to me as very not in-character for a Roman emperor, who rather famously enjoyed loving men. Otherwise it's basically Stoner but he's emperor instead of a lovely prof.

Puppy Burner posted:

Read Augustus and there's a part near the end where the author just drops that homosexuality is bad actually. Stuck out to me as very not in-character for a Roman emperor, who rather famously enjoyed loving men. Otherwise it's basically Stoner but he's emperor instead of a lovely prof.

wiki posted:

Homoerotic themes occur throughout the works of poets writing during the reign of Augustus, including elegies by Tibullus[35] and Propertius,[36] several Eclogues of Vergil, especially the second, and some poems by Horace. In the Aeneid, Vergil—who, according to a biography written by Suetonius, had a marked sexual preference for boys[37][38]—draws on the Greek tradition of pederasty in a military setting by portraying the love between Nisus and Euryalus,[39] whose military valor marks them as solidly Roman men (viri).[40] Vergil describes their love as pius, linking it to the supreme virtue of pietas as possessed by the hero Aeneas himself, and endorsing it as "honorable, dignified and connected to central Roman values".[41]

By the end of the Augustan period Ovid, Rome's leading literary figure, was alone among Roman figures in proposing a radically new agenda focused on love between men and women: making love with a woman is more enjoyable, he says, because unlike the forms of same-sex behavior permissible within Roman culture, the pleasure is mutual.[42] Even Ovid himself, however, did not claim exclusive heterosexuality[43] and he does include mythological treatments of homoeroticism in the Metamorphoses,[44]

Augustus, page 309ish posted:

To that instant of pleasure some dedicate all their lives, and become embittered and empty when the body fails, as the body must. They are embittered and empty because they have known only the pleasure, and do not know what that pleasure has meant. For contrary to what we may believe, erotic love is the most unselfish of all the varieties; it seeks to become one with another, and hence to escape the self. This kind of love is the first to die, of course, failing as the body that carries it fails; and for that reason, no doubt, it has been thought by many to be the basest of the varieties. But the fact that it will die, and that we know it will die, makes it more precious; and once we have known it, we are no longer irretrievably trapped and exiled within the self.
...
But that kind of love which is friendship has seemed to me best disengaged from the pleasures of the flesh; for to caress that body which is of one's own sex is to caress one's self, and thus is not an escape of the self but an imprisonment within it. For if one loves a friend, he does not become that other; he remains himself, and contemplates the mystery of one that he can never be, of selves that he has never been.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I get that some horrible keyboards don't have an Å-key but what's up with the "aa"?

Puppy Burner posted:

And his famous laws, that he definitely obeyed and were not for show, against incest (lol), adultery (lol), prostitution, and homosexuality. He was not gay (arguably the term doesn't even apply in the historical context) but gay sex was very in fashion during his reign and among his class so it seems likely to me that he indulged. I'm more familiar with Vergil, Ovid and Horace than detailed Roman history though so if there's some definitive source of Augustine heterosexuality, mea culpa I guess.

Edit: for context the gay sex inferior part is in reference to Ovid's Art of Love, but changed

It stuck out to me.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I am deeply annoyed finally reading Knausgaard to discover he really is as good as the universal praise offers him

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I get that some horrible keyboards don't have an Å-key but what's up with the "aa"?

apophenium posted:

Which one ya reading?

apophenium posted:

So far Mishima's Thieves is not that great. Or at least not up my alley. Maybe it's the translation. It's all kind of sweeping narration without like sticking into a scene with dialogue or whatever. Some cool moments and it's short so I'll see it through.