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Hey hold on more stuff happens than that. There's a whale fart joke, for example:Moby Dick posted:His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:51
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I liked the sudden mega dose of homoeroticism when Ishmael is pressing sperm with queequee
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Jan 4, 2016 09:52
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Normal Adult Human posted:I liked the sudden mega dose of homoeroticism when Ishmael is pressing sperm with queequee I like it because it's a plot point in another good book, The Art of Fielding
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Jan 4, 2016 09:59
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You should read all three. All are good but I agree GR is the most enjoyable.
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Jan 4, 2016 12:01
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You should read War & Peace because it is not American
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Jan 4, 2016 13:25
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Ras Het posted:You should read War & Peace because it is not American You're assuming OP is American. NOW WHOSE BEING AMERO-CENTRIC???
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Jan 4, 2016 16:04
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blue squares posted:You're assuming OP is American. NOW WHOSE BEING AMERO-CENTRIC??? No I'm not. No one should read American fiction
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Jan 4, 2016 16:11
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Ras Het posted:No I'm not. No one should read American fiction Jorge Lois Borges?
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Jan 4, 2016 16:13
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That's quite the dumb opinion
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Jan 4, 2016 16:19
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Borges? I barely knew him!
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Jan 4, 2016 16:43
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One of the greatest works of American fiction just got a reprinting http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf
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Jan 4, 2016 18:28
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Please participate in this month's BOTM, its a real book and everything, not a single wizard in it any where!
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Jan 4, 2016 19:56
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I read the Poisonwood Bible after being nagged to for like a year and a half. (I don't really have a good reason I took this long to read the book). I liked the writing style, but I found the book emotionally draining, probably because I spent most of it being angry and hating characters. If last year was any indication, it's the time of year I binge on Japanese lit. Last year I read everything of Banana Yoshimoto's I could get my hands on (my library didn't have the Lake). Once school starts up again, I'm thinking about checking out Mishima again. I still want to read that Sea of Fertility tetraology. Though my school library does seem to have some stuff of Kenzaburo Oe and Kobo Abe. I'm sure they have Murakami too (who doesn't) but I don't really know what to read with him. I loved Wind-up Bird Chronicle and didn't really care for Kafka on the Shore. If I want to read more Murakami, where do I go from here? Or who else can I read? I have a copy of I Am a Cat I still need to read, but I'm not sure I'm in the mood for that one.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:11
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Please participate in this month's BOTM, its a real book and everything, not a single wizard in it any where! I'm down. I started reading Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee but it's depressing the poo poo outta me and this book sounds like a vacation for my brain.
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Jan 4, 2016 21:06
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Caustic Chimera posted:I read the Poisonwood Bible after being nagged to for like a year and a half. (I don't really have a good reason I took this long to read the book). I liked the writing style, but I found the book emotionally draining, probably because I spent most of it being angry and hating characters. Murakami's short stories get overlooked a lot but they are pretty good. I also liked Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, though opinion is pretty mixed on that one. Mishima, Oe, and Abe are all better than Murakami, though. Mishima and Abe are in a two-way tie for my favorite Japanese author right now, though there are lots of authors I haven't even touched yet. I actually just picked up Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories after someone mentioned it here, so I'm excited to check those out.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:13
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Caustic Chimera posted:I loved Wind-up Bird Chronicle and didn't really care for Kafka on the Shore. If I want to read more Murakami, where do I go from here? I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle after 1Q84 and found it to be something like 1Q84 Lite. Or rather, 1Q84 is a whole lot like Wind-Up Bird without an editor. So once you get past the repetition, you'd probably like it. One big plus is that, while it includes the same extraordinarily lengthy side-stories as Wind-Up Bird, none of them are about World War II.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:34
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Yeah, Murakami's short stories are really good, you get the interesting ideas with less meandering around talking about listening to the Beatles while cooking noodles. It is surprising that you loved Winding Bird but hated Kafka, can you elaborate on that? They were my first two of his and seemed pretty similar but that was a long time ago. I might recommend, rather than going right for 1Q84, going for a few of his shorter novels and seeing which aspects of his writing you like best. Norwegian Wood is the only novel I can think of that has none of his magical realism, while Hardboiled Wonderland doubles down on it, going almost fully into sci-fi. Those are his two works that I find the most disparate. His newest one (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) I found good and also super representative of his style, although that might be because I was returning to him after a long while. I agree that Abe, Oe and Mishima are better overall writers, although I am not a huge fan of Mishima. Abe does the magic realism/surrealist thing way better, taking it to more interesting places, but his writing doesn't feel as light and approachable. Abe's probably my favorite although I need to read more of his stuff. Oe's stuff is just intensely personal and much more visceral than like any Japanese author I've read. I haven't read Banana yet but will probably sometime in the next few months.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:51
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Well, I finished Moby Dick on Sunday. I read every word of it, and I loved every word of it. I'd say the "digressive" chapters were the best parts, but then there's Ahab and his speeches, and Stubb and his muttered monologues to himself, and Ishmael swooning over Queequeg (aka "George Washington cannibalistically developed"  ), and everybody else. It was a genuine pleasure to read and I'm sorry it's over.Back a few pages, people were posting about teaching and learning literature in school -- as I was reading Moby Dick, the thought came to me that I was really lucky to be reading this for the first time as an adult. The mindset of a student reader, at least for me as a student, is/was so narrow and tense. You're reading everything with the thought of filing this and that detail away in case you get quizzed on it, and looking for this or that angle to write the inevitable paper on, and you don't know what you'll get quizzed on or what your paper's assignment will be, so you're trying to cram all this in your brain in the event that you are asked to spit it back out for a grade... At least I was like that. Take the infamous chapter 32, Cetology. I loving loved that chapter, it was so funny and charming, and no wonder -- I'm a cataloging librarian. Not only is Melville cataloging whales, he's absurdly using the book size system to do it....I couldn't not love this chapter. But as a high school student, I'd probably have skimmed through it trying to memorize which whales are in which categories and what their descriptions were. As a college student, I'd probably have been looking out for salient syntax or symbolism so I'd have something to say in class. I wouldn't be, uh, just reading it, mindfully. In both cases, I'd be too young to appreciate the humor in it, or in the last lines: quote:But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! But my God, the imagery in this book. quote:but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. quote:I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. quote:He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. quote:But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. quote:"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee." 
Rabbit Hill fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 14:01
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No one has Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand stories, but it looks like several libraries in town have The Lake, Thousand Cranes, Snow Country, and Beauty and Sadness. So I'll probably look into him. If you had any ideas of where to start based on those it'd be appreciated. If not, I'll just pick at random and hope it works better than my second try with Mishima. Got it. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1Q84, Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and Murakami's short stories. I think I saw some links to his short stories published in the New Yorker, and I just hadn't read them yet. Maybe I should make some time. Guy A. Person posted:Yeah, Murakami's short stories are really good, you get the interesting ideas with less meandering around talking about listening to the Beatles while cooking noodles. It is surprising that you loved Winding Bird but hated Kafka, can you elaborate on that? They were my first two of his and seemed pretty similar but that was a long time ago. Well, I checked my goodreads, since this was like four years ago, but I guess I read Kafka first. I remembered wrong. I thought for sure I had read Wind-up first. At any rate, I bought them both at the same time for some reason. I didn't leave any notes as to why I didn't like Kafka as much as Wind-up, but if I had to guess, I felt like I understood Wind-up better? Or at least I had a better feel for it. I recall a lot of "what the hell is going on" in Kafka, but I don't quite remember that in Wind-up. Maybe I was more used to it by then. I had never thought it strange myself. One of my friends liked Kafka and disliked Wind-up. So I had just figured you disliked one of them based on your personal preference. Of course this is a sample size of two. Very scientific.
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Jan 5, 2016 15:07
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Rabbit Hill posted:
Ch. 93 The Castaway posted:But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
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Jan 5, 2016 15:19
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Hey guys I can't stop reading bad books and I just started the Wheel of Time. Goodbye forever I guess
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Jan 5, 2016 15:22
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why would you do that
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Jan 5, 2016 15:27
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here's a really good book i'm reading right now that i will recommend to you because its immediately captivating and its not some poo poo like wheel of time: Another Country by James Baldwin. so far its loving great. read that instead
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Jan 5, 2016 15:28
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but I read 120 pages last night and I like it. I have been wanting to get lost in a long fantasy series for a while, like I did back when I was a kid. I also have that Kingkiller book, and Earthsea, and the first book in Brandon Sanderson's new series. i'm sorry. Something I have noticed, though, is that while I love to read serious literature, I find I can't read them for as many hours in single sittings as I can with horror/scifi/fantasy. With a good genre book, I can read for eight hours without stopping, sometimes more. I read the entire final harry potter book in a day. I've never done that with a real literature book. I wonder if that is just because of the brainpower required.
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Jan 5, 2016 15:31
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et tu blue squares EDIT: I double dog dare you to read Piers Anthony
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Jan 5, 2016 16:03
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Mel Mudkiper posted:et tu blue squares I'll start with the best one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Her_Panties
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Jan 5, 2016 16:10
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drat man if you’re going to read dumb fantasy at least read Malazan or something
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Jan 5, 2016 16:27
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I read one wheel of time book which I think turned out to be a prequel. It was the first book where I ever fell asleep reading it, the plot was something like the chosen one had just been born and the good witch ladies need to find him, so they set up a census booth and spend 300 pages doing a census trying to find him, and they don’t. That was it. It could have been a fantastic farce/parody come to think of it but it was deadly serious
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Jan 5, 2016 16:29
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:drat man if you’re going to read dumb fantasy at least read Malazan or something Yeah that was my other option but I wasn't sure about the whole "everyone is a god" thing ack, let's not turn this thread into fantasychat
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Jan 5, 2016 16:35
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I tried to read wheel of time but you can basically figure out what happens in a book by looking at the cover. I think my least favorite thing about fantasy is when a book tries to set up a whole universe by basically ripping off Tolkien and giving everything slightly different names. I just want to read a book, I don't give a poo poo about the history and farming culture of your not-Shire.
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Jan 5, 2016 16:56
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Cloks posted:I tried to read wheel of time but you can basically figure out what happens in a book by looking at the cover. That's only the first 400 pages or so of the first book. The rest of WoT is closer to anime than anything else, including Tolkien. But since each picture takes a thousand words . . .
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Jan 5, 2016 17:33
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Actually, since we're on the subject, I did a bunch of googling and figured Malazan would be a better way to go, since it's obvious what happens in WoT (the hero wins), whereas I have no clue where Malazan might go.
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Jan 5, 2016 17:48
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apropos being a loving child, I can't understand why it took me so long to start reading war and peace.
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Jan 5, 2016 17:52
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ulvir posted:apropos being a loving child, I can't understand why it took me so long to start reading war and peace. bad timing; a tv show just started of it. watch that isntead
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Jan 5, 2016 17:53
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I read Goat Mountain by David Vann over christmas. I was thinking it would be my last novel of the year but it was compelling enough that I powered through it with time left over to squeeze in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. I liked Goat Mountain well enough; the scenic descriptions and deliberations on Genesis, man's primal nature, and family ties were well-written and engaging. The musings on Cain and Abel were interesting. That being said, a lot of the criticisms I read afterwards definitely rang true: inappropriate voice for the POV character & jarring tonal inconsistencies, repetitive descriptions & word choice that could have benefited from another pass of editing, laying out symbolism but then going ahead and explaining it for the reader anyway. The parts about mankind's impulsive brutal primal nature didn't really seem to have a satisfying point to them either and weren't exactly novel-enough observations to stand on their own. It felt philosophical just for the sake of being philosophical but didn't really bring anything new to the table. Overall, the book sometimes felt like it had been dumbed down to be a more accessible McCarthy-lite experience. I think in the future if I feel like reading something Cormac McCarthy-esque I'll just read Cormac McCarthy instead, since this was very similar but less polished and less satisfying in the end. I'll probably at least check out Legends of a Suicide and maybe Aquarium though, since they seem to be Vann's highest rated works and don't sound like more of the same South-Western setting, and I definitely liked Vann's writing more than I found fault with it. Moacher fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 18:08
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blue squares posted:bad timing; a tv show just started of it. watch that isntead I'm doing both
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Jan 5, 2016 18:18
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Moacher posted:I read Goat Mountain by David Vann over christmas. I was thinking it would be my last novel of the year but it was compelling enough that I powered through it with time left over to squeeze in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. I support of this moderately positive review of David Vann, best writer.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:22
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blue squares posted:Actually, since we're on the subject, I did a bunch of googling and figured Malazan would be a better way to go, since it's obvious what happens in WoT (the hero wins), whereas I have no clue where Malazan might go. Yeah, Malazan is a different kind of bad. It's what happens when an anthropology PhD who thinks adding ap'stro'phes to e'veryt'ing is good writing decides to make a novel out of his RPG characters. It's different and not dumb but definitely has its own set of problems.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:34
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Moacher posted:I think in the future if I feel like reading something Cormac McCarthy-esque I'll just read Cormac McCarthy instead, since this was very similar but less polished and less satisfying in the end. I'll probably at least check out Legends of a Suicide and maybe Aquarium though, since they seem to be Vann's highest rated works and don't sound like more of the same South-Western setting, and I definitely liked Vann's writing more than I found fault with it. Goat Mountain and Caribou Island and probably his most McCarthy-esque. Aquarium is entirely different in context and its his best novel imho. Legend of a Suicide is interesting in a stylistic way that McCarthy never did, so it gives you a very different experience. I cannot really say more without spoiling what makes it so interesting.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:48
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I think Cormac McCarthy is overrated, and is so beloved on the internet because he takes basic genre plots and writes them pretentiously, which makes nerds feel super smart for reading them
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Jan 5, 2016 18:51
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