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mdemone posted:Yeah they're conflating the narrator voice with the author's personality and I'm pretty sure it's just the first-person effect. It's annoying but it makes me want to help them read books better aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Aug 8, 2023 04:02
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Holy poo poo lmao. I do not understand why people seethe when confronted with something outside their knowledge, that is the best part. Finding some cool poo poo to educate yourself on or letting some ununderstood reference slip into your dormant brainspace only to be suddenly contextualized by future events. Don't people remember how sick it was being a kid and learning new poo poo every single day?
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Aug 8, 2023 04:10
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I can’t imagine Nabokov had to try much at all to seem cultured.
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Aug 8, 2023 04:13
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mdemone posted:Yeah they're conflating the narrator voice with the author's personality and I'm pretty sure it's just the first-person effect. It's annoying but it makes me want to help them read books better the stupidest part about that quote is that 100% by 'he' they mean nabokov and not HH
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Aug 8, 2023 04:18
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I couldn’t find this drama, so I Googled “twitter lolita,” and that was a completely predictable mistake.
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Aug 8, 2023 04:21
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ThePopeOfFun posted:I can’t imagine Nabokov had to try much at all to seem cultured. Yeah that's sort of the thing that drives me crazy. He was so bright and well-read and talented. on the list where other writers read them and think "oh gently caress me why do I bother" Edit: sorry I didn't finish that thought. That's why he can come off as "I'm smarter than you" because he is. So the tone was exactly right for HH. It must be reminded that Nabokov was himself a victim of childhood sexual abuse. He may well have produced the single most accurate portrayal of that dynamic ever in the history of media, albeit from the predator's perspective. mdemone fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 04:41
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mdemone posted:Yeah they're conflating the narrator voice with the author's personality and I'm pretty sure it's just the first-person effect. It's annoying but it makes me want to help them read books better https://www.theonion.com/its-not-nice-to-be-smarter-than-other-people-1819584000
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Aug 8, 2023 06:48
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Syncopated posted:Haven't actually read it and I think it's more aboiut social media than smart phones per se, but I've read good things about Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. I've read and enjoyed this – definitely captures how stupid Twitter bullshit can consume you, and then how stupid it can seem once you're actually back dealing with real life. (I don't know if it goes into terrible Lolita discourse at all though) I just finished reading Climbers by M John Harrison, which I really liked. Some really evocative landscape writing about Thatcher-era Yorkshire. I think he's more known as a sci-fi writer but I haven't read anything else by him yet.
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Aug 8, 2023 13:24
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Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is crushing and good. The way the narrator comes to grips with her own hypocrisy, the constant patriarchy, politics, class issues, the drama of the Lina or the Solaras manipulating everything rules. I’m especially moved by the neighborhood’s struggle to make any sort of life, contrasted against the new world Elena has pursued. Might as well be written today, including the fascists, and also the wealthy left savior types who have no idea or plan for interacting with working class people, beyond using Lila to organize or Pasquale to swing a stick. It’s wonderful to read a narrator who is so self-critical and honest about herself, but in a chronological way so that our perspective grows alongside her own realizations about herself. It’s nice to read books that begin with outward practicalities and small exterior changes to illustrate interior realities, thereby granting access to both. I could go on, but I’ve read too quickly for a deeper look. Read Ferrante!
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Aug 18, 2023 15:05
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Just started reading Ici, ailleurs by Matthieu Simard (in translation as The Countrty Will Bring Us No Peace). super depressing and slightly creepy so far. No idea where the hell it's going, love it.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:19
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managed to find De ansatte in the original danish in a bookshop (along with Inger Christensen) 
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Aug 21, 2023 12:42
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Nice  Finished the Simard book last night, that got pretty dark.
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Aug 22, 2023 10:17
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nobody can accuse flaubert of romanticising suicide. that arsenic scene at the end of madame bovary was brutal
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Aug 23, 2023 19:11
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I can't imagine people accusing Flaubert of romanticizing anything. Dude really threaded the needle between realism and romanticism. His scenes are far too vivid to be really real but the mundanity of his two contemporary novels defies any sense of romanticism. Hell they're almost a rebuke of it with Bovary thinking she's a romantic heroine and Frédéric thinking he's young Werther. To me it feels like his romanticism is not for living but for life itself, if that distinction makes sense to everybody. The only author who feels the same to me is Nabokov. Also like Nabokov, underrated as a writer of gut splitting comedy. I need to grab a copy of Salammbô, everything I've read makes the work seem absolutely buck wild and yet totally forgotten in America Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Aug 23, 2023 |
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Aug 23, 2023 21:21
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I'm reading The Sound and the Fury, and it's enjoyably disorienting. I'm still in Benjy's mind/memories, and it's been slow. I didn't do any pre-reading, I'm just going in blind, so I didn't know basic things like if Versh or Luster were one of the siblings, or a family member, or one of the black workers for the house (and Versh isn't in the character appendices). I'm just going page by page and being methodical. Faulkner's prose is incredibly approachable, but his structure is convoluted as hell. So it's both easy to read and hard to follow. Faulkner's been on my to-read list for a while, and I finally dove in after Cormac McCarthy's passing, since he was such an influence on him. I was surprised how much influence, though. They're literary kindred spirits.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:31
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Franchescanado posted:I'm reading The Sound and the Fury, and it's enjoyably disorienting. I'm still in Benjy's mind/memories, and it's been slow. I didn't do any pre-reading, I'm just going in blind, so I didn't know basic things like if Versh or Luster were one of the siblings, or a family member, or one of the black workers for the house (and Versh isn't in the character appendices). I have a Dalkey Archive copy with the voices in different colors like Faulkner always wanted. It's intimidating as hell. Edit: Folio Society, not Dalkey. Sorry mdemone fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Aug 24, 2023 |
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Aug 24, 2023 15:43
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mdemone posted:I have a Dalkey Archive copy with the voices in different colors like Faulkner always wanted. It's intimidating as hell. oof I want that real bad
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Aug 24, 2023 15:45
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mdemone posted:I have a Dalkey Archive copy with the voices in different colors like Faulkner always wanted. It's intimidating as hell. That probably goes for a hefty sum nowadays. I did read about that after I started the book, and it sounds a bit more approachable than the regular version. It's no more difficult than other stream-of-conscious books, so far. If they did another edition with the different color fonts, I would like to grab that copy. Maybe in a few years when it goes into the public domain we'll get one.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:46
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Aug 24, 2023 15:48
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drat, that's beautiful. Read it!
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Aug 24, 2023 15:51
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Franchescanado posted:drat, that's beautiful. It's scary. I've read other Faulkner so I know what I'm probably in for. I'm given to understand it's his most difficult novel.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:53
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mdemone posted:It's scary. I've read other Faulkner so I know what I'm probably in for. I'm given to understand it's his most difficult novel. I haven't read it, but I believe Absalom, Absalom! is considered more difficult.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:56
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Absalom Absalom is probably the most difficult work I've ever read. It's insane how effortlessly it slips between time periods and perspectives.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:59
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Bilirubin posted:Welcome back! Really bloody good. If I'd known even more about Moore's life and work than I already did (which was quite a bit) then I'm sure I would have been even more engrossed. Strip out the fantastical parts and it's a biography of a parallel him, and his parallel family tree. It's also a dense and heartbreaking paean to Northampton's past and the decline of working-class Britain. But it's also a grand millennia-spanning journey in block time where everything happens at once, every event stacked on top of each other. And it's also also an exploration of "madness" and a dozen other things too. It's also very, very long, and if I hadn't been listening to the audiobook then it would have taken me two or three months to read, rather than one. mdemone posted:What did you think of Book Two? Definitely not as gripping as Books One or Three, but had some fantastic parts to it. The Dead Dead Gang weren't very interesting to me but I liked how they blundered through all these other stories and were the conduit for Moore to pour out details of his cosmology. And it's clear that telling those stories is important to the greater whole of the novel, given the echoes back and forth. But also it can be a bit of a slog when it's just the kids.
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Aug 24, 2023 16:41
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what publisher is behind that beauty?
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Aug 24, 2023 17:01
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mdemone posted:I have a Dalkey Archive copy with the voices in different colors like Faulkner always wanted. It's intimidating as hell.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:10
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The book has the Folio Society logo on the spine.
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Aug 24, 2023 17:12
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speaking of cool books check this out: https://vol.co/product/the-books-of-jacob/ and its 30% off currently due to the sitewide sale here: https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com i got one, gunna be so scared to actually read it though
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Aug 24, 2023 17:45
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Franchescanado posted:The book has the Folio Society logo on the spine. Oh duh. I mixed it up, it's Folio Society of course
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Aug 24, 2023 18:18
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mdemone posted:I have a Dalkey Archive copy with the voices in different colors like Faulkner always wanted. It's intimidating as hell. I would think the color coding would make it less intimidating. I wonder how much Faulkner really wanted the color coding and how much that's just more Faulkner apocrypha. The color coding doesn't seem that necessary to me since he already uses italics to indicate the time shifts and keeping strict track of time periods doesn't seem necessary to understanding Benjy's section. It even seems a little against the spirit of Benjy's section. He can't keep track of time. If you want to obsess over time, Quentin has you covered. Franchescanado posted:I haven't read it, but I believe Absalom, Absalom! is considered more difficult. Yeah, The Sound and the Fury really isn't difficult past Benjy's section while Absalom, Absalom! remains challenging and rewarding all the way through. They're worth reading together because Quentin's relationship with Caddy is why he's so interested in learning what happened between Henry and Charles Bon. Speaking of Faulkner apocrypha, my favorite example is the back cover of my copy of A Fable talks about how Faulkner was able to describe the harrowing conditions of WW1 because he experienced them first hand, but the closest dude got to the fighting in WW1 was loving around in Canada for a couple years.
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Aug 24, 2023 18:49
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, The Sound and the Fury really isn't difficult past Benjy's section while Absalom, Absalom! remains challenging and rewarding all the way through. They're worth reading together because Quentin's relationship with Caddy is why he's so interested in learning what happened between Henry and Charles Bon. So Sound and Fury first, then Absalom, Absalom! second?
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Aug 24, 2023 19:08
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Bilirubin posted:So Sound and Fury first, then Absalom, Absalom! second? That's the order in which they were written and published, but you could read them in either order if you wish. It may actually be more interesting to read A,A! first because then you're wondering what exactly Quentin sees in the Sutpen story that causes Shreve to say it's why Quentin hates the South. You may also want to read "That Evening Sun" and "A Justice" as those two short stories also feature Quentin.
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Aug 24, 2023 21:09
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I read Human Acts by Han kang, like someone else in this thread I think, I didn’t know anything about the historical events this novel is based on, and I found it very moving, frightening, and humbling to think about them. However as a novel I thought this was a complete slog. I really couldn’t get on with it at all. The place, the situation, the people — none of them were evoked in a way that brought them to life for me. Oh well. I also read warlock by Oakley hall, which is a western that is available in a NYRB edition and was named one of the great American books by Thomas Pynchon, so it has Literary Cred. And it rules. It delivers all the Western goods (outlaws, showdowns, etc) but it has excellent lucid style and it’s structured as a complicated series of interlocking moral quandaries. There’s a big cast of characters and everybody gets compromised or stuck in agonising ways. Very well done imo. I also recently read welcome to hard times by EL Doctorow which is another literary western. And obviously there’s cormac McCarthy. If anybody’s got more, let me know!
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Aug 29, 2023 13:04
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Lobster Henry posted:I also recently read welcome to hard times by EL Doctorow which is another literary western. And obviously there’s cormac McCarthy. If anybody’s got more, let me know! This sounds really good. I've never really looked into E. L. Doctorow before, and he has some cool books. Loon Lake stuck out. Does anyone know if it's any good?
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Aug 29, 2023 13:45
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Lobster Henry posted:I read Human Acts by Han kang, like someone else in this thread I think, I didn’t know anything about the historical events this novel is based on, and I found it very moving, frightening, and humbling to think about them. However as a novel I thought this was a complete slog. I really couldn’t get on with it at all. The place, the situation, the people — none of them were evoked in a way that brought them to life for me. Oh well. I vastly prefer the vegetarian over human acts prose-wise
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Aug 29, 2023 14:40
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Franchescanado posted:This sounds really good. I've read Ragtime and The March. Both were fun and relatively light historical fictions that aim more to give a sense or "vibe" of the period and place in question (turn of the century NYC and Sherman's march to the sea, respectively) than be factually correct historical accounts. Both were perfectly fine reads, but they did feel reductive and safe.
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Aug 29, 2023 17:42
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Ragtime is an old favourite of mine, I think for sheer energy and pleasure in a narrative it’s tough to brag. However I’ve heard “plays it safe” before, so your mileage may vary. Billy Bathgate is a fun gangster story which, like welcome to hard times, is elevated by doctorow’s excellent craftsmanship. I read the march recently and I thought it was solid, a good read, especially the parts that focused on Sherman himself. You could do much worse as literary fiction goes!
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Aug 29, 2023 19:03
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ulvir posted:I vastly prefer the vegetarian over human acts prose-wise The Vegetarian was incredible, I hope her new book is good as well.
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Aug 31, 2023 16:49
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I finally read Moby Dick and absolutely loved it. Now I'm reading Blood Meridian. I figured it was time to finally get around to reading some of these books that I've kind of put off forever for no reason. I feel like I only really absorbed about a quarter of what was going on in Moby Dick but honestly I'm fine with that, I had tried picking it up two or three other times in the past few years and I think I was too focused on trying to "get" it and just got mentally bogged down in the process of reading it, while this time I just went into it with less expectations and just set out to let it kind of wash over me. I think a lot of the Whale Facts sections, as interesting as they were, didn't really stick with me in any way but there are other bits of the book that will probably hang around in my memory for a long time. The sperm bucket scene really is striking, lol
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Aug 31, 2023 17:08
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You don't really have to remember the whale facts that much, just keep in mind that whales are fish and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. e: also it is sinful to hate a whale, don't hate whales Herbert Stencil fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 17:16
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