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Razzled posted:"What makes a strong female protagonist?"
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Oct 2, 2018 10:40
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regulargonzalez posted:Who are the Shakespeares of other languages? That is, a writer who had a profound effect on the very language itself and whose works are still read, discussed, and performed (in the case of playwrites) today? Henrik Ibsen, Ivar Aasen
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Oct 3, 2018 19:35
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I started reading a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories. Boy, those weren't all winners, were they? This dude killed another guy, so the dead guy turned in to an evil horse, and the killer was forced to ride an evil horse every day even though he didn't like it.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:58
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poe rules but there are a good few poe stories that blow rear end, like the one thats just an elaborate setup for a punchline where the narrator thinks hes seeing a monster far away but is actually just looking at a spider up close, or the one about "diddling" which was written back when "to diddle" meant "to defraud" and not "to fingerfuck", although the latter story is now extremely funny for reasons poe did not at all intendquote:Diddling- or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle- is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining- not the thing, diddling, in itself- but man, as an animal that diddles. quote:What constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. "Man was made to mourn," says the poet. But not so:- he was made to diddle. This is his aim- his object- his end. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's "done." quote:Your diddler is guided by self-interest. He scorns to diddle for the mere sake of the diddle. He has an object in view- his pocket- and yours.
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Oct 12, 2018 06:22
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Speaking of stuff not holding up well over time! The second story in the Poe collection, after the evil horse, is about a dude who travels aboard a ghost ship. Spooky enough. There's several points in the story where the narrator describes parts of the ship that I assume a read of the time would've been like "that's hosed up, a boat shouldn't be like that" but I'm just like, oh it has a ... mizzen mast? Is that good? But the whole thing is just leading up to the big twist, the shocking revelation that the ship is traveling towards one of the great dark passages in the South Pole that modern science now knows lead directly into The Hollow Earth!
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Oct 12, 2018 14:37
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People in the past were so loving stupid, oh my god
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Oct 12, 2018 14:38
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I've never been a big fan of Poe because he is one of those writers whose "legend" overshadows their actual work like Sylvia Plath and Tom Wolfe
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Oct 12, 2018 17:18
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Guy Goodbody posted:Speaking of stuff not holding up well over time! The second story in the Poe collection, after the evil horse, is about a dude who travels aboard a ghost ship. Spooky enough. There's several points in the story where the narrator describes parts of the ship that I assume a read of the time would've been like "that's hosed up, a boat shouldn't be like that" but I'm just like, oh it has a ... mizzen mast? Is that good? My dad & some school mates wrote a hard boiled thing when they were kids, and I remember wondering what a carburateur was when I read it (Burger, the main guy, his assistant/mechanic Nick had the catchphrase "the carburateur, crap!" when he was fixing Burger's sweet ride). Seems to me like the same kind of thing as wondering what a mizzen mast is.
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Oct 12, 2018 19:31
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Guy Goodbody posted:Speaking of stuff not holding up well over time! The second story in the Poe collection, after the evil horse, is about a dude who travels aboard a ghost ship. Spooky enough. There's several points in the story where the narrator describes parts of the ship that I assume a read of the time would've been like "that's hosed up, a boat shouldn't be like that" but I'm just like, oh it has a ... mizzen mast? Is that good? Imagine not knowing what a flying jib-boom or fore-topgallant staysail was, just imagine Mel Mudkiper posted:I've never been a big fan of Poe because he is one of those writers whose "legend" overshadows their actual work like Sylvia Plath and Tom Wolfe Why not go for the big guns there and just say Kafka anyway, re: Poe: https://imgur.com/gallery/lnOAS
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Oct 12, 2018 19:39
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Imagine not knowing what a flying jib-boom or fore-topgallant staysail was, just imagine I stole that for the funny pictures thread
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Oct 13, 2018 02:37
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Guy Goodbody posted:I stole that for the funny pictures thread Al, the tool assistant, doubletook and said, "why, that's so Goodbody..." Awkward. Nobody knows what that means, Al thought. He felt as if everybody was watching & laughing, even himself. Viewing himself through a small analogue screen. A sudden rush as he felt himself fall backwards, the distorted image of himself getting still smaller while smiling harder. The laughter was assaulting his eardrums from all sides. Small, louder, smaller, louder, until a light shone and God spake unto him: "Behold, such is that good body." The laughter grew louder and did not stop.
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Oct 13, 2018 04:01
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Guy Goodbody posted:But the whole thing is just leading up to the big twist, the shocking revelation that the ship is traveling towards one of the great dark passages in the South Pole that modern science now knows lead directly into The Hollow Earth! that one rules dude Guy Goodbody posted:People in the past were so loving stupid, oh my god - forums poster Spork Turglorb of the year 2209, referring to early 21st century belief in string theory
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Oct 13, 2018 05:03
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Guy Goodbody posted:People in the past were so loving stupid, oh my god the present as well
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Oct 13, 2018 06:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I've never been a big fan of Poe because he is one of those writers whose "legend" overshadows their actual work like Sylvia Plath and Tom Wolfe The bell jar owns, actually
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Oct 13, 2018 07:57
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OK, point to Poe. The story about the teeth pervert is pretty good
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Oct 14, 2018 20:01
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How many fuckin stories did Poe write about some rear end in a top hat who makes the story of psychologically tormenting his wife into an early grave all about him?
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Oct 16, 2018 02:54
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I read a ludicrous amount of detective fiction from the 1800s to the 1960s and my god is reading the actual Sherlock Holmes stories rather than what we see in the movies and TV a revelation. I genuinely don’t understand why people think it’s good, it really wasn’t even that original at the time either and even Conan Doyle thought it was pulp rubbish as he was writing it.
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Oct 16, 2018 09:11
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I love the later stories after he brings Sherlock back from the dead and clearly doesn't give a gently caress. * the WWI story written to boost morale where Sherlock becomes a super patriotic spy and roams around with Watson catching evil German spies * the one where Sherlock needs some intel so pretends to be a cobbler or something, courts a young maid for weeks, asks her to marry him, then disappears without a word once he has the information he needs. When Watson is concerned about the poor girl who just lost her fiance, Sherlock is like "Meh, she'll be fine, women like some tragedy in their love life" * the one where Doyle wrote a play and then decided "Hey I can just publish this as a story as well and make heaps of money", so it's this weird third person narrative that all takes place in one room * the one where an elderly man wants to be able to bang his new young wife so takes a serum that turns him into a monkey * the one where a lady appears to be a vampire drinking her newborn child's blood, but she is actually sucking poison out from when her step-son keeps trying to murder the baby by shooting poison darts at him * the one where Sherlock and Watson break into a guy's house and hide behind the curtains while a lady murders the guy and stomps on his face. Sherlock is like WELP WHAT COULD WE DO *wink wink* after stopping Watson from intervening, and later when Sherlock points out that it was a famous actress who murdered the guy, they decide not to say anything. * the one where Sherlock jumps out the window of another guy whose house he had broken into, allowing the jilted mistress to throw sulfuric acid at the guy's face, completely disfiguring him. Sherlock is again like WELP WHAT COULD WE DO and intervenes to get her sentence reduced to the bare minimum * Watson periodically getting concerned about their increasingly criminal behaviour (such as breaking into people's homes, not intervening when people get murdered/mutilated/etc) but is always reassured by Sherlock saying "No it's ok, we're the good guys"
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Oct 17, 2018 16:50
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In 1929 Ronald Knox wrote the rules of detective fiction in his Decalogue, and those rules have stuck in British fiction ever since. You can go through them and name the Holmes story this bullshit, in the literature of the time, was spawned by. quote:The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
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Oct 17, 2018 18:09
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Plenty of Golden Age detective fiction broke those rules anyway. Like that one Poirot where the murderer is revealed to have been none other than the narrator themselves all along.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:59
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Wheat Loaf posted:Plenty of Golden Age detective fiction broke those rules anyway. Like that one Poirot where the murderer is revealed to have been none other than the narrator themselves all along. http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Bremen/e316k/316kprivate/scans/chandlerart.html edit: I appreciate Doyle for the same reason I appreciate Hammett and Chandler: iconic characterization. Holmes and Spade work the same kind of magic: they are characters who walk onto the stage and conjure an entire era up around them. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 21:21
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I think Rex Stout is still my favourite detective novelist. He had such great characters.
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Oct 17, 2018 21:33
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Bremen/e316k/316kprivate/scans/chandlerart.html I've always wanted to track down the books he calls out towards the end of the essay: "Without him there might not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival Wilde’s Inquest, or an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of Twelve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like Kenneth Fearing’s The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, or even a gay and intriguing Hollywoodian gambol like Richard Sale’s Lazarus No. 7." Has anyone read any of those? I figure if Chandler liked them, they've gotta be good.
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Oct 17, 2018 21:37
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Wheat Loaf posted:I think Rex Stout is still my favourite detective novelist. He had such great characters. I like Walter Mosley and John D. McDonald in the same way that I like Rex Stout -- read the books in order and you get this wonderful sense of place. Nero Wolfe never moves, but Manhattan turns and changes around him . . Ben Nevis posted:I've always wanted to track down the books he calls out towards the end of the essay: "Without him there might not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival Wilde’s Inquest, or an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of Twelve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like Kenneth Fearing’s The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper, or even a gay and intriguing Hollywoodian gambol like Richard Sale’s Lazarus No. 7." I haven't -- good idea though, I should track them down next. Milne's Red House Mystery is a free kindle download.
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Oct 17, 2018 21:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I like Walter Mosley and John D. McDonald in the same way that I like Rex Stout -- read the books in order and you get this wonderful sense of place. Nero Wolfe never moves, but Manhattan turns and changes around him . . Stout is a long time favorite of mine, really probably the one who got me into mysteries at all. And even then it was circuitously through the A&E show. I've been reading the Mosley books slowly, so I don't run out. I may have to check out McDonald as well. I don't think I know him.
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Oct 17, 2018 21:53
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William Faulkner was apparently a big Rex Stout fan. This is amusing to me because Faulkner - just from his own writing - doesn't seem like the sort of guy you'd expect to sit and read stories about a big fat guy who solves murders in his spare time.
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Oct 17, 2018 22:43
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Sadly, I've not been too enamoured of Stout's non-Wolfe books. Admittedly, I've only read The Great Legend and The Red Threads of that group, but neither was as enjoyable. Likewise, I don't think the Goldsborough Wolfe novels I've read lived up to Stout's. It's really the combination of Stout and Wolfe, Archie, Fritz and Cramer.
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Oct 17, 2018 22:56
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Stout is very much a formula writer; you know going in that the book is almost inevitably going to end with Wolfe calling everyone into his office, explaining how the murder was done, and pointing out the murderer for Cramer to grab. But he's great at it, and he knows how to make use of his formula to heighten tension, like in cases where Wolfe is forced to break his rules. My favorite anecdote about Stout, though, is that he deliberately avoided using real brand names in his writing because he hated the idea of giving companies free advertising. That's why Archie smokes "Marleys" and drives a "Heron."
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Oct 17, 2018 23:14
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Jeff Bezos (personally, I assume) turned off the Also-Boughts for me on Amazon.com, leaving just the super lovely Sponsored recommendations that are utterly worthless and I am way more buttmad about this than I probably should be. Jeff, the Also-Boughts are 90% of why I use your dumb site and it's the only useful book recommendation system that you've got, you bald gently caress, turn it back on or I swear, I'll bitch on the internet about it real hard.  Oh and from Googling, it seems it's probably coming for the rest of you as well, if you don't have it already.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:27
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Megazver posted:Jeff Bezos (personally, I assume) turned off the Also-Boughts for me on Amazon.com, leaving just the super lovely Sponsored recommendations that are utterly worthless and I am way more buttmad about this than I probably should be. Jeff, the Also-Boughts are 90% of why I use your dumb site and it's the only useful book recommendation system that you've got, you bald gently caress, turn it back on or I swear, I'll bitch on the internet about it real hard. Oh, it's like the time Jeff Bozos decided to turn wishlists into giant scrolling pages, instead of paginated pages you can load on separate pages. Meaning that my 200+ item strong wishlist that I've been building since I was a teenager now makes chrome crash. Thanks, Jeff! That said, to be kinda helpful, look up the book on goodreads, see what's related to it? It won't be as useful, but hell.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:43
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StrixNebulosa posted:That said, to be kinda helpful, look up the book on goodreads, see what's related to it? It won't be as useful, but hell. Unfortunately, Goodreads is fairly garbage in that regard. I just hope they might turn it back on, if they're just A/B testing this usability cancer or something.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:50
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StrixNebulosa posted:Oh, it's like the time Jeff Bozos decided to turn wishlists into giant scrolling pages, instead of paginated pages you can load on separate pages. Meaning that my 200+ item strong wishlist that I've been building since I was a teenager now makes chrome crash. Thanks, Jeff! At least they put the search function back in.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:16
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Any great/classic books open with a terrible starting sentence/paragraph?
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Oct 22, 2018 23:46
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feedmyleg posted:Any great/classic books open with a terrible starting sentence/paragraph? that crazy long explanation of how to pronounce "Lolita" It's not that hard of a name to pronounce!
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Oct 23, 2018 00:02
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Megazver posted:Jeff Bezos (personally, I assume) turned off the Also-Boughts for me on Amazon.com, leaving just the super lovely Sponsored recommendations that are utterly worthless and I am way more buttmad about this than I probably should be. Jeff, the Also-Boughts are 90% of why I use your dumb site and it's the only useful book recommendation system that you've got, you bald gently caress, turn it back on or I swear, I'll bitch on the internet about it real hard. They're at the bottom of the page now, after the reviews. At least they are for me.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:20
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Do you think the Narnia TV series will get to the part where the heroes do black face?
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Oct 23, 2018 02:17
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Guy Goodbody posted:that crazy long explanation of how to pronounce "Lolita" It's not that it's hard, it's that he gets off on it.
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Oct 23, 2018 07:56
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Thoughts on people representing that they read a book, only to later admit they listened to it on audiobook? Idk why but for some reason it really irks me. Less of an investment? I can't read a book while driving to work.
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Oct 25, 2018 03:20
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Nurglings posted:Thoughts on people representing that they read a book, only to later admit they listened to it on audiobook? Idk why but for some reason it really irks me. Less of an investment? I can't read a book while driving to work. That's the pettiest possible thing I can think of. There is no difference in the book the person consumed. Also I'd say it's more of an investment because audiobooks are more expensive than books, and they guaranteed take more time than reading. You have to set aside time to read, sure, but it's more effective than an audiobook. Bonus problem if the book's narrator decides to do stupid voices for characters.
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Oct 25, 2018 03:46
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Nurglings posted:Thoughts on people representing that they read a book, only to later admit they listened to it on audiobook? Idk why but for some reason it really irks me. Less of an investment? I can't read a book while driving to work. It's totally different and they haven't really 'read' the book because the act of listening completely changes how you interact with the text.
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Oct 25, 2018 04:06
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