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fez_machine posted:ahh Moby Dick, the first Kaiju That isn't funny at all
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Dec 27, 2023 04:31
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Scylla and Charybdis are right there.
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Dec 27, 2023 16:52
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There's 𒀭𒅎𒂂 (Anzû), the gigantic half-lion, half-eagle demon/dragon who was also said to be half-man. It was slain by the god Ninurta in the Epic of Anzû. It also had a snake for a dick for some reason. The Sumerians had a lot going on.
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Dec 27, 2023 17:16
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nice obelisk idiot posted:There's 𒀭𒅎𒂂 (Anzû), the gigantic half-lion, half-eagle demon/dragon who was also said to be half-man. It was slain by the god Ninurta in the Epic of Anzû. It also had a snake for a dick for some reason. The Sumerians had a lot going on. My doctor assured me this is normal
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Dec 28, 2023 01:06
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Also a fish can't be a Kaiju cause they can't attack a city on land they'll just sink some boats
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Dec 28, 2023 07:29
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Heath posted:That isn't funny at all who's laughing? nice obelisk idiot posted:There's 𒀭𒅎𒂂 (Anzû), the gigantic half-lion, half-eagle demon/dragon who was also said to be half-man. It was slain by the god Ninurta in the Epic of Anzû. It also had a snake for a dick for some reason. The Sumerians had a lot going on. three halves??
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Dec 28, 2023 16:41
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DeimosRising posted:three halves??
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Dec 28, 2023 17:07
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FPyat posted:It appears that Coatzee’s new novella The Pole is about a man from Eastern Europe, not an upright cylinder. I think you mean Middle Europe.
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Dec 30, 2023 08:35
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derp posted:I bought a used terra nostra online, and the copy that I got was autographed. I googled and it looks like his reals signature too I got a translation of Le crépuscule, au loin from the Salvation Army's shop for something like 1½€ and it had a squiggle in biro on the front leaf. Turns out it was Elie Wiesel's signature. He did visit Finland in 1990 and the book had been published in Finnish in 1988 so that checks out. (It wasn't a very good book.)
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Dec 30, 2023 08:44
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Started The Lesser Bohemians last night. McBride rules, but I liked A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing more from the start. The prose in this one is similar, but more straightforward and less like reading thoughts as they appear in a characters mind.
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Dec 30, 2023 19:41
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I started reading Crime and Punishment as my first real lit book last night. So far I’m hooked. I will report back if it’s as good as 40k novels.
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Dec 31, 2023 16:11
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I wonder how the hell I read To the Lighthouse five or six years ago and didn’t get much out of it. There’s something astonishing on every page of this book!
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Dec 31, 2023 16:35
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Yeah, To The Lighthouse is absolutely stellar. I read it just after the New Year this year and had such an unexpected emotional reaction to the last 20-30 pages.
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Dec 31, 2023 16:55
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FacelessVoid posted:I started reading Crime and Punishment as my first real lit book last night. So far I’m hooked. I will report back if it’s as good as 40k novels. Probably not.
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Dec 31, 2023 20:17
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FacelessVoid posted:I started reading Crime and Punishment as my first real lit book last night. So far I’m hooked. I will report back if it’s as good as 40k novels. It was my favourite book when I was like 15 so it should compare well
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Dec 31, 2023 22:47
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Should we even bother doing the thing about which translation of C&P because I get bored of it
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Jan 1, 2024 00:43
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I have a very lovely illustrated double copy of The Gambler and Notes from the Underground that I'll never read because it's P&V
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Jan 1, 2024 01:28
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Gaius Marius posted:I have a very lovely illustrated double copy of The Gambler and Notes from the Underground that I'll never read because it's P&V Pesearch and vevelopment
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Jan 2, 2024 08:11
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I don't go in for P&V myself, but a Russian Dostoevsky-lover did tell me about this video where they're evaluated favorably compared to Barnett and Hogarth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6thCyertFQ
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Jan 2, 2024 11:01
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Last Russian Opinion I saw on Dostoevsky called it "Ghastly Rigamarole" and implied the whole oeuvre was as overwrought as it was overrated.
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Jan 3, 2024 15:29
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people sure love having all the wrong opinions about Dostoyevsky
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Jan 3, 2024 17:19
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Dostoevsky is good, it is weird to think otherwise
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Jan 3, 2024 17:34
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ulvir posted:people sure love having all the wrong opinions about Dostoyevsky He's good despite being a, Tony Soprano voice, Degenerate Gambler. Doc Fission posted:Dostoevsky is good, it is weird to think otherwise 
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Jan 3, 2024 17:57
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Lobster Henry posted:I wonder how the hell I read To the Lighthouse five or six years ago and didn’t get much out of it. There’s something astonishing on every page of this book! The dinner scene in To The Lighthouse is one of my favorite passages in any book, and there's been more than one moment in every Woolf book I've read where I just have to put the book down for a second because the cumulative emotional impact is so overpowering. She just went beast mode at all times.
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Jan 4, 2024 00:03
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How’s The Gambler? People seem to deem it a lesser novel of his.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:03
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More like Dostoy-whatevs-ky  Magic Hate Ball posted:The dinner scene in To The Lighthouse is one of my favorite passages in any book, and there's been more than one moment in every Woolf book I've read where I just have to put the book down for a second because the cumulative emotional impact is so overpowering. She just went beast mode at all times. I finished my reread and now I seem to be accidentally rereading the whole thing again. It’s a lot to absorb and it’s really good!
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Jan 4, 2024 10:51
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Gaius Marius posted:He's good despite being a, Tony Soprano voice, Degenerate Gambler. Nabokov Was Wrong About Dostoevsky
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Jan 4, 2024 15:44
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rngd in the womb posted:Yeah, To The Lighthouse is absolutely stellar. I read it just after the New Year this year and had such an unexpected emotional reaction to the last 20-30 pages. Insanely beautiful book. Read Part II and III after popping an edible on a flight, and was silently tearing up the whole time. Also, in an intersection with Dostoyevsky chat, read it not long after reading The Idiot, and found they paired nicely. Felt like there were some nice parallels in the way Mishkin and Mrs Ramsay's idealized perspectives of the people around them sort of uplifted them, or allowed them to be their more ideal selves. Also Part 1 in each book ends with an all timer dinner scene.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:19
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Loved To The Lighthouse, might just be my favourite book ever Currently reading White Noise and it is simply incredible. Approaching half way finished so there is much more to come so I am happy but also kind of sad it will end.
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Jan 6, 2024 04:14
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Just finished dead souls. Absolutely hilarious
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Jan 6, 2024 05:34
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grabbed V from the library cuz i've no experience with Pynchon and this thread convinced me to read this over Crying of Lot #. hefty drat book. i'm finding it hard to keep up with him sometimes but worth it if i take the time to reread and follow where his ideas are going. the set piece with spotlighting pig porking that guy's wife was mintGaius Marius posted:Let us know how you liked it in the end, I've been eyeing it for a minute. Trying to get into some other Japanese lit that isn't Kawabata or Mishima
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Jan 6, 2024 18:14
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cumpantry posted:grabbed V from the library cuz i've no experience with Pynchon and this thread convinced me to read this over Crying of Lot #. hefty drat book. i'm finding it hard to keep up with him sometimes but worth it if i take the time to reread and follow where his ideas are going. the set piece with spotlighting pig porking that guy's wife was mint Another poster lost to the toxic Pynchon lit bros. It’s a drat shame…
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Jan 6, 2024 19:16
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thehoodie posted:Just finished dead souls. Absolutely hilarious Yeah its fantastic. Has to be high on the list of the great unfinished novels.
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Jan 6, 2024 20:54
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Syncopated posted:Yeah its fantastic. Has to be high on the list of the great unfinished novels. It's finished though, just missing intended sequels which from what we have wouldn't've been any good anyway
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Jan 6, 2024 22:23
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The Lesser Bohemians is great, but as intense as one would expect an erotic drama of trauma, passion and sexual violence/patriarchal domination to be. I find it difficult to read more than a few scenes in one sitting.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:51
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Finished Woolf's The Years. The last segment collects basically every character who's still alive into a single room, and it made me wish I'd kept track of them in a chart because a lot of them I just plain forgot about, not because they're forgettable but because the book moves between them so often throughout that you really only get glimpses of many of them (also I read this over too long a period). I'd rank this somewhere above The Waves and below To The Lighthouse, but it contains some of my favorite themes (failure to connect, the unrelenting passage of time, the way some people do everything they can to hold on to the nowness of now) and expresses them so unbelievably beautifully that I almost want to reread it right away just because I can't believe that it was all in there.
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Jan 8, 2024 06:43
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Finished Augustus by John Williams Great work. He tells in letters, broadsheets, poems, and recollections Octavian's shaky early years as his destiny is forever bound to Rome by the adoption of his posthumously by Julius Caesar, his struggles to slip between the Antonian and Republican cracks while gaining for himself enough personal power and acclaim that he himself can start making moves, his growing callousness or seeming callousness as he is forced to make more and more difficult decisions working with the senate that condoned his fathers assassination working with Antony whom is flagrant in his use of Julius's name in his own collection of power and condemning his own friend to death despite his own love of the man. Of course he outplays and outstays all of his enemies who realize that his feigned naivety and deference to custom were an act just at the moment his dagger is at their throats. The second part takes place after his marriage to Livia and becomes a parallel tale of an increasingly isolated and dejected Augustus reminiscing about the past with his friend group who grow smaller by the years as disease and age start to claim them contrasted with a middle aged Julia the Elder (Octavian's only biological child) alone with her mother in enforced exile for some unsaid transgressions reminiscing herself of how much she loved her father as a child and how much he loved her, but how she couldn't fully understand the way he could be such a warm fatherly figure before switching to a cold and calculating Emperor who would marry her off to her cousin, the his best friend, and finally his stepson without concern for her opinion. As he tells her when she is young, Augustus has two daughters, Rome and his little Rome, Julia and it is with much grief that both of them realize the full extent of these words as both struggle with the excesses of power granted to them by the positions they hold, but also the limitations that calling yourself the First Citizen has; of making yourself so synonymous with the state that to change the state one must cut off it's head. Part 3 is shortest but has the longest uninterrupted section. Of Augustus on the eve of his death lamenting his fortune to not die sooner. He remembers the horrors of the Civil Wars, of men and women being killed like dogs on the streets, of Roman turning against Roman to gain just a inch more power; and how he delivered them from that horror only for them to retreat to the shadows and begin to plot like snakes against the man who gave them their lives. All of his friends are dead, his marriage is purely political and he knows that his wife and stepson are largely the creators of the misfortune he feels now but that in Tiberius lies the only man capable and acceptable enough to reign without all of his work being for naught. Augustus barely saved his one daughter from Tiberius and now he is forced on his death bed to hope that he will treat his second with more respect. It does play a little fast and loose with history which might have just been the fifty years worth of scholarship that Williams lacked we have now, but that doesn't change that the work is awesome in it's ability to weave the characters from the history books into a narrative that is as compelling as it is depressing. There is a part near the end with Augustus lamenting that he should live so long; this is a man who ruled a quarter of the world's population or near enough, whose name lives on today, who was deified as a god even before his death, whose every whim could be law if he wished it, and when he says he wished he had died younger like Agrippa or Caesar you not only sympathize you agree with him. Very excited to read some more Williams after I finish Fuentes.
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Jan 8, 2024 22:49
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Don’t have much to add, but, great write up of Augustus! I enjoyed that book a lot.
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Jan 10, 2024 18:12
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still navigating my way through V, it's become very captivating with how it tells its story. how many narratives set out to achieve what Pynchon does here, bouncing from viewpoint to viewpoint while still telling a coherent tale? between this and Kokoro, i feel i've been seriously treated and made aware of all sorts of creative ways to weave plots together. but in contrast i read through The Great Gatsby since it takes up space on my shelf, not having done so since high school, craving a novella, any at all. fitzgerald sucks
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Jan 13, 2024 03:24
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I need help understanding what is meant when an artwork is critiqued as being "sentimental." I'll see a work that affected me strongly be praised for not being burdened with sentimentality, so it doesn't seem to mean being an emotionless vulcan. On the other hand, it doesn't quite appear to be criticizing schmaltzy or cheap emotionality, but some deeper and more serious disagreement about the nature of feeling.
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Jan 13, 2024 09:42
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