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thehoodie posted:Though Libra is undoubtedly a better book. Maybe Delilo's best Libra is incredible. I haven't found a DeLillo I've liked as much yet, though I have yet to try Mao II or White Noise.
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May 12, 2022 01:11
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The Crying of Lot 49 is the best book Pynchon wrote. I haven’t read later Pynchon but when you realize his style of “paranoia” is rapid inductive logic, Crying represents the greatest example of how one person can totally lose their mind.
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May 12, 2022 03:51
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I rec Crying to many many people in my life, and many bounce from it. It kills me, it's short and snappy, but still distilled Pynchon. And these fools bounce from it
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May 12, 2022 03:58
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thehoodie posted:Though Libra is undoubtedly a better book. Maybe Delilo's best Yeah, it's probably his best, but I read Underworld when I was getting back into baseball and so I'll always love it most. Gaius Marius posted:I rec Crying to many many people in my life, and many bounce from it. It kills me, it's short and snappy, but still distilled Pynchon. And these fools bounce from it That's a bummer. Everyone I recommend it to loves it.
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May 12, 2022 04:51
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Franchescanado posted:Would it happen to be the Anchor Literary Library edition? I don't have Giles Goat-Boy, but those are the editions I have for his other books. I do in fact have one. It's in decent shape, some creasing on the spine but no major breaks, a little rounded on the edges.  I also have a trade paperback version with what looks like a child's scribbling in ink pen on the cover. 
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May 12, 2022 18:15
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Gaius Marius posted:I rec Crying to many many people in my life, and many bounce from it. It kills me, it's short and snappy, but still distilled Pynchon. And these fools bounce from it I've just read GR, and found the first quarter hard to get through. But once it dawned on me that he's making real the very mad and very modern reaction to the world people would have if they actually embraced the madness I read the rest in about three days.
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May 13, 2022 12:46
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Nova69 posted:
that sound is the massive roil of indigestion that rumbles through the stomach and throat whenever someone mentions david foster wallace and thomas pynchon in the same sentence.
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May 13, 2022 14:40
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np19 posted:The Crying of Lot 49 is the best book Pynchon wrote. I haven’t read later Pynchon but when you realize his style of “paranoia” is rapid inductive logic, Crying represents the greatest example of how one person can totally lose their mind. It's even more haunting when you learn what Pynchon was up to while he was likely writing it.
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May 13, 2022 14:44
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Danger posted:It's even more haunting when you learn what Pynchon was up to while he was likely writing it. ….go on?
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May 13, 2022 18:18
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Sandwolf posted:….go on? Pynchon worked for Boeing doing technical writing and internal propaganda for SAGE, the network connecting the Bomarc missile system, a pre-pre-cursor to the internet that allowed the secret nuclear missile installations across the US to talk to one another. Literally an invisible message system carrying disavowed information across the country. Before that he studied physics at Cornell and had been courted by navy intelligence. SAGE would become Arpanet, which would become Darpanet, which would become the internet. Danger fucked around with this message at 20:19 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 18:32
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Gravity's Rainbow spooked me because I read the passage about a certain chemical connection resembling the image of the snake eating its own tail, and the same night I meet someone with a book with this image on the cover about ankhs and this sort of thing. In any case, I think I need to know now as much about Mickey Rooney as I possibly can.
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May 14, 2022 17:41
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I've started reading The Magic Mountain and am having a bit of a rough time of it. I don't mind reading about The Blandest Young White Guy Imaginable taking some shocks to his system (I assume; I haven't got very far in), but does Thomas Mann have to be so goddamn self-important about it? Proust didn't come off this self-absorbed, and his narrator spent seven volumes talking about himself. There's just something insufferably smug about his writing style so far that pisses me off, like he's convinced of his greatness as a writer in a way that I generally associate with the likes of Ayn Rand.
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May 16, 2022 21:09
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Hans Castorp is supposed to be a monumental and dislikable dweeb. just roll with it, it gets a bit better as the novel hits its stride
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May 16, 2022 21:26
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I did get that impression of him, to be fair, but it also came with a helping of "Now let's not be too hard on Hans Castorp; Hans Castorp is just a young man after all." More like Hans Castwerp.
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May 16, 2022 21:52
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Danger posted:Pynchon worked for Boeing doing technical writing and internal propaganda for SAGE, the network connecting the Bomarc missile system, a pre-pre-cursor to the internet that allowed the secret nuclear missile installations across the US to talk to one another. Literally an invisible message system carrying disavowed information across the country. Before that he studied physics at Cornell and had been courted by navy intelligence. Sorta gives you the deep dive on why Pynchon has, 1) been so incredibly concerned with surveillance/intelligence paranoid characters, and 2) never been photographed*. * Yes, I know.
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May 16, 2022 21:58
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Balzac is the opposite of a page turner. His work so far is enthralling, but you know that the second you do some character or another's gonna gently caress up their own happiness.
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May 17, 2022 03:42
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Girl, Woman, Other really is quite wonderful. Its basically prose with no the appearance of poetry but it still works. The line breaks, lack of punctuation, etc do contribute well to creating a nice flow and allows for surprising little details
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May 19, 2022 02:24
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I read Herzog by Saul Bellow, and it was very engaging even though it felt very sexist and bigoted, especially at the beginning. I think if something like this was written thirty years later it would have had a entirely different ending. The book kinda ends with Herzog acting like everything was gonna be all right because he was losing the urge to write letters because he was with Ramona, even though it seems to me that all the underlying problems he had were still there. Including the unresolved traumas from his family and the assault.
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May 26, 2022 02:11
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I'm really not sure if this is the right place to post this, I also tried the history book thread and didn't get any responses there, but after recently reading the Morte d'Arthur and a few other Arthurian texts I got kind of curious about the other medieval Matter, the Matter of France. For those who don't know, in the early Middle Ages there were considered to be three great "Matters" or story cycles in currently circulating literature: the Matter of Rome consisted of classical Greco-Roman mythology and history, the Matter of Britain mostly consisted of Arthurian legend though there were a few other unrelated or tangentially related topics covered, and the Matter of France mostly consisted of the stories of Charlemagne's court and its wars against the Moors and Saracens. Obviously there's not shortage of English language translations of classical Greek and Roman material, and pretty much everything related to Arthur is easily available in English, but aside from a few translations of the Song of Roland I've been having a pretty hard time finding stuff related to the Matter of France that I can actually read. Anyone know of any good translations of source materials, or barring that any later retellings of the legends and stories involved, that I might be able to track down?
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May 26, 2022 04:30
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We covered just Song of Roland in one of my survey classes and we read the Brault translation (it also has copious annotations iirc) but there’s also a Norton edition by Goldin (which we read excepts from). Honestly, it was a slog, but I’ve never been a fan of medieval romances. It’s insanely long and real pain to go old french -> modern french -> modern english. There’s also a LOT of room for translation errors and simply different interpretations (we also read a paper comparing Brault and Goldin), and most serious scholars are just gonna read it in modern/old French so there’s just not a lot of English demand. You’re probably not going to find the entire carolingian cycle in one book in English, but each major geste has a translation available, usually from a university press.
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May 27, 2022 14:50
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taco show posted:We covered just Song of Roland in one of my survey classes and we read the Brault translation (it also has copious annotations iirc) but there’s also a Norton edition by Goldin (which we read excepts from). Honestly, it was a slog, but I’ve never been a fan of medieval romances. Yeah I have the "New Larousse Classics" Modern French translation by Guillaume Picot with line connections to the original and commentaries on translation decisions and grammar differences. If you can read French its really accessible but its of its time
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May 29, 2022 06:03
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I'm most of the way through chapter four of The Magic Mountain, and I'm beginning to enjoy it more, if for no other reason than pure schadenfreude. Mann: This guy are sick Castorp: No I'm not! I'm just acclimatizing! Mann: You're anemic, coughing up blood, and hallucinating about an old boyhood infatuation. You've been this way for a over a week already Clavdia: *slams door* hello there, handsome Settembrini: You're never getting out of here, lol Joachim: *sighs* Yeah, better get used to it, cousin Meaty Ore fucked around with this message at 14:55 on May 30, 2022 |
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May 30, 2022 14:52
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Lol that might convince me to pick it back up. I bounced hard off the first couple chapters last time I tried, I think it's one of those novels you've got to be in just the right mood for.
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May 30, 2022 14:57
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I mean, it is still incredibly dry. It isn't until at least partway through the third chapter that the author starts showing his hand. Besides chronicling the misadventures of his incredibly dense hero, Mann also seems intent on showing the entire rear end of the late 19th-early 20th century European medical establishment.
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May 30, 2022 15:36
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To me the idea seemed to be that Hans is only mildly ill, if at all, but the unreality of the sanatorium beats the actual reality of life down there, so people are always drawn back. Joachim is disappointed because he prefers reality but is actually ill
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May 30, 2022 15:46
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Started Zeno's Conscience yesterday. First chapter is about the 100+ times he has smoked his "last cigarette" and sneaks out of a clinic in order to keep smoking. Good stuff
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May 31, 2022 02:36
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The smoking bit is by far the best bit of the book.
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May 31, 2022 22:09
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Third policeman by O’brian. It was okay, it didn’t blow my mind. I wasn’t expecting it to be that surrealistic at all, so that was a nice surprise. It had some fun parts, but overall it didn’t make me want to keep reading, even though it’s short. I also wasn’t a fan of Swam when I read it a couple years ago, so maybe I just don’t like the dude.
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Jun 1, 2022 14:54
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derp posted:i care more about prose than reading a story, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This was a while ago, but aren't that the same thing?
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Jun 1, 2022 20:43
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prose used in this context usually means the language, such as choice of words or how the sentences flow
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Jun 1, 2022 20:46
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Roger Ebert posted:It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it
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Jun 1, 2022 21:27
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My go to example is Lolita, since I've struggled with trying to think of what to say in response to "What's it about?" Strictly speaking it's a book about an abusive, rapist pedophile told from his perspective, and that will never sell anyone on it, and it doesn't suffice to say that "it's one of those books that's about more than what it's about" or other such vague gestures at hidden depth. Everybody cringes when you describe Lolita in terms of its story because the story is utterly unappealing if you're simply describing the plot. The beauty of the book is in its prose and the ways in which you have to view the narrative that lies beyond just what you're being told explicitly in the text, all the little language games that Nabokov plays, all the subtle connections and repetitions of themes that appear throughout it. I read the original version initially and loved it, but then I went back and read Alfred Appel's annotated version and it blew my mind just how dense it was. There's no way to get that idea across to someone casually who has not already read it or is not familiar with the idea that the joy of reading is usually something transcendent in the writing itself rather than just dumbly following plot beats
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Jun 1, 2022 23:25
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Heath posted:My go to example is Lolita, since I've struggled with trying to think of what to say in response to "What's it about?" Strictly speaking it's a book about an abusive, rapist pedophile told from his perspective, and that will never sell anyone on it, and it doesn't suffice to say that "it's one of those books that's about more than what it's about" or other such vague gestures at hidden depth. Everybody cringes when you describe Lolita in terms of its story because the story is utterly unappealing if you're simply describing the plot. The beauty of the book is in its prose and the ways in which you have to view the narrative that lies beyond just what you're being told explicitly in the text, all the little language games that Nabokov plays, all the subtle connections and repetitions of themes that appear throughout it. I read the original version initially and loved it, but then I went back and read Alfred Appel's annotated version and it blew my mind just how dense it was. There's no way to get that idea across to someone casually who has not already read it or is not familiar with the idea that the joy of reading is usually something transcendent in the writing itself rather than just dumbly following plot beats It is transparently done to seduce you into HH's mindset without him or the characters or the reader being involved in it, and despite saying that from the very beginning, people will misread it until the end of time. What a glorious and sickly sweet novel.
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Jun 2, 2022 02:46
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That annotated Lolita is really excellent. It was my first copy of the book (as an idiot 16-year-old trying to be excessively clever in AP English), and it's probably the only reason I got anything out of that book as a dumb kid.
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Jun 2, 2022 03:36
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Antivehicular posted:That annotated Lolita is really excellent. It was my first copy of the book (as an idiot 16-year-old trying to be excessively clever in AP English), and it's probably the only reason I got anything out of that book as a dumb kid. Yeah the only way a student on first read is going to get the point, is if Nabokov himself hammers it home. I like his later-edition preface where he says "my critics are dumb and they should feel dumb"
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Jun 2, 2022 04:40
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I hate that it's basically impossible to talk about that book to any normal person without sounding like a creep, but it is amazingly good and opened my eyes to what literature can be
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Jun 2, 2022 05:38
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There was a Lolita podcast that was an interesting deep dive into the book, movies, plays, etc. One of the highlights was a therapist who specializes in abuse describing how society has overlooked Dolores in the same way as Nabokov intentionally does—most people basically buy HH’s narrative at face value and therefore do the exact thing that they critique the book for. Also all of the directors of various adaptations are sick fucks who think it’s a romantic story.
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Jun 2, 2022 05:48
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There's a point in the book that shook me, especially on the re-read, where Dolores says, unambiguously and directly to HH, "You raped me." It's where Nabokov doesn't just pull the veil aside, he rips the whole thing off. I don't know how you can read the book and not feel her utter contempt for him.
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Jun 2, 2022 06:00
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Take it from me, media literacy is hard. One of the reasons I wouldn't ever read Lolita is because I am exactly the kind of gormless rube that wouldn't get it. The other is that the subject matter is utterly unappealing. But I think I understand the difference between prose and story now at least. OscarDiggs fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 06:49
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don't overthink it. prose is simply text in its regular form, i.e. not poetry. derp's saying he cares more about the way a story is written than the story itself
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Jun 2, 2022 07:44
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