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Finally decided to tackle Proust, and I'm maybe 100 pages into Swann's Way. So this guy is just like the biggest wuss in the world, yeah?
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Dec 16, 2014 17:55
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Pompous Rhombus posted:I got about 250 in to Swann's Way myself. Those Russian nesting doll sentences sure are something. I do like it, just goddamn this kid is "sensitive". Taking a break to read The Sense of an Ending. About 2/3 done, enjoying it.
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Dec 18, 2014 07:49
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Honest Thief posted:Been re-reading The Karamazov Brothers and if anything Dostoyevski knew people, as in the way we behave and lie to ourselves. He was a pro, is what I'm saying, I guess I've tried this book twice, quitting once about 50 pages in and more recently after 125 pages or so. Odd, because The Idiot is one of my favorite books. Is there a particular translation I should get for a third attempt?
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Feb 21, 2015 22:10
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Thunder Moose posted:I was wondering if someone could recommend me a good book in the same vein of Dune? I've reread the original series (the ones by Herbert) and still find myself wanting more, or rather something similar. I've also already read Norstrilia which I consider to be somewhat if not entirely similar. If you liked all the political shenanigans, A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) and Shogun will satisfy.
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Mar 17, 2015 13:33
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Thunder Moose posted:I enjoyed the politics of the series; the "plots within plots" that Mr. Herbert did such a masterful job creating. To the poster who recommended ASoIaF I have already read a Song of Ice and Fire series and enjoyed it a great deal. Definitely Shogun, as mentioned above. Also, The Count of Monte Christo.
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Mar 19, 2015 12:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:And it was originally written as a Dr. Who episode. Woah, didn't know that. Did the doctor's role morph into Ford? Or maybe Zaphod? Or is it too different note compared to the original concept to compare?
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Jun 1, 2015 19:57
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Franchescanado posted:My book club is having us read The Martian by Andy Weir and I'm really not feeling it at all. I'm trying to give it a chance, but it's just so boring. I thought it didn't live up to all the internet nerd hype. I got through it easily enough, but it's not a fair comparison because I listened to it on Audible. The rest of the book is basically what you've read so far. It's kinda clever in all the complications and solutions and whatnot but it's not revelatory.
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Jun 26, 2015 08:56
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Interesting how varied the reactions to Palahniuk's works are. I think he's an abysmal writer but with often interesting themes. I didn't like Choke at all and Survivor was meh but Invisible Monsters's theme was tremendous (though executed with his typically mediocre style).
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Jun 28, 2015 06:13
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:I've never read any of his books so I picked a couple up. Even he says fight club was a better movie than it was a book so I wasn't worried about that one. I liked Choke as a movie and thought it touched on some really interesting themes. They seem like they'll be fairly light reading so at the very worst I lose a couple of hours to The writing is just so wretched that it can be a struggle to get through. His hallmark deal is to introduce a recurring motif that is used in lieu of actual character development (in Fight Club, whenever emotion is needed to be displayed it occurs in the form of "I am Jack's raging spleen" or w/e. In Invisible Monsters, it's in the form of a photographer asking for poses from a model, i.e. "Give me anger. Give me longing"). He does this in every book and it's oh so tiresome.
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Jun 29, 2015 08:32
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books.
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Baby Babbeh posted:It's this. Palahnuik's books are all about equal with each other in terms of quality, but he's a pretty narrow prose stylist and his writing is most interesting when the shtick is new to you. It's like watching a magic trick that's been spoiled for you — once you know to keep your eye on the magician's hands it stops being entertaining and starts being "Oh, I see what you're doing there." I see what you're saying but I feel like King is a much, much, MUCH better writer.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:46
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There's an Audible version of Infinite Jest. How does that work, I wonder.
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Feb 4, 2016 03:46
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Das Dead Zone is pretty good.
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Apr 20, 2017 14:47
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Your Taint posted:Do you know of any books that are historians writing "what ifs" about various events? /r/historicalwhatif , sort by best. You have to be a flair'd / verified historian to answer iirc. Some interesting threads.
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Jun 5, 2017 03:23
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Safety Biscuits posted:There's a quotation from a writer who began their career in one language and then switched to English about how difficult learning to write in English was. I think it describes slogging from one city to another, at night, with only the other city's distant lights for encouragement. i might have misremembered though, cos I think it's Nabokov and I can't find anything when I google using his name or this description. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
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Aug 2, 2017 08:38
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How do you think Stephen King will be regarded in 100 years? Say what you will about him but he's usually entertaining, he's rarely schlocky in a Dan Brown type of way, he's probably sold more books than any author ever (except God, I guess). I feel like there are a lot of similarities to Dickens, who pet my understanding was regarded in much the same way during his life but whose reputation has grown over time.
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Jul 29, 2018 16:59
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Rand Brittain posted:What are some good options for soothing books about nothing? I really enjoy the parts at the beginning of murder mysteries when they aren’t murdering yet and just spend ten pages on how they run a hotel. I could use some books that do that for the whole run. I feel like John Updike's Rabbit series might fit. They're not-quite stream-of-consciousness novels that are about a mundane guy's life. They're probably the first books that really turned me on to how the beauty of a book could be in the writing itself and not necessarily the plot. The first in the series is Rabbit, Run and the plot could be described as basically Al Bundy's life with all the jokes stripped out.
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Jul 30, 2018 06:32
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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?
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Oct 1, 2018 22:26
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Himuro posted:Thanks guys and gals. I seem to have two reading speeds my brain likes to work at. Maybe three, counting non-fiction. For fiction I can read pretty dang fast but it's overall not as satisfying an experience as my slower speed. I guess you could call it reading for plot vs for the overall experience of the book and so I primarily use the faster mode for plot-oriented genre fiction (which I've more and more come to consider largely one and the same). Read at a speed that gives you the maximum amount of pleasure imo.
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Oct 26, 2018 21:33
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chernobyl kinsman posted:someone once pointed out that Brown Eyed Girl is clearly about anal sex: Simon & Garfunkel's Cecilia is about a guy threatened by his gf using a dildo, cmv
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Nov 5, 2018 05:19
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Bought Ship of Theseus a week or so ago and finally took it from its packaging and opened it. WTF. I see now why it's not on Audible. I'm kind of intimidated to even start it.
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Dec 12, 2018 03:52
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I read through the preface. I'm debating just reading through the book itself and then going back through the annotations vs. doing it all at once. And I presume the color of the ink indicates the timeline?
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Dec 12, 2018 18:08
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I'm reading Breakfast of Champions, and is nobody feeding Kilgore Trout's bird while he's on his adventure?? I'm up to the part where he's with the trucker going through Philadelphia. I remember the scene where he offers to let the bird go out the window and the bird chooses its cage instead but that's it. hosed up to let your bird starve. Maybe he left like a bigass pile of birdseed and one of those 5 gallon jugs of water
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Mar 31, 2019 00:11
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mike12345 posted:I'm in the mood for some epic fantasy tale, and thought about giving Otherland by Tad Williams a try. I kept seeing recommendations, but never really felt like reading another fantasy epic. So I check the first book on Audible, and it's something like 24+ hours. Lolwhat? Not sure what to expect, is it worth listening/reading? That's pretty typical for epic fantasy. I'm sure books from, say, the Stormlight Archives series are even longer. I wasn't a fan of Otherland but for some reason I've always bounced off of Tad Williams' work.
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Apr 19, 2019 12:46
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm wondering what options I have to restore the quality of some old audiobook mp3s that were ripped from tapes. They're no longer on sale anywhere and don't show any signs of being so, but I'd like it if there was anything that could be done to remove mild hissing and quality issues and slight variations in tone from cassette to cassette. Is this something we have the technology for yet? So, you'd have to set up a batch for it which is a bit more than I've done but audacity does (or did, some years ago) have an option to sample a section of audio and remove that sample from the rest of the recording. I did this to about 20 mp3s of songs from a live show that had terrible tape hiss, just sampled a bit of the recording that was nothing but hiss and told it to remove that from the rest of the MP3. The results were way, way better than I could have expected. Again, that was a long time ago -- probably a decade now -- but the option was there and I figured it out myself easily enough so just poke around in audacity and it should be fairly obvious.
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Jul 29, 2019 06:08
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Oh, good. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank a human heart for recommending Porius and to whoever recommended Salammbo. Any other books like that you people can think of? Like exotic, fantastical, packed with weirdness but not genre fantasy. I assume you've read magical realism -- Jose Saramago, Haruki Murakami, Borges et al? E: also probably my most frequent recommendation, The Magus by John Fowles. Despite the name, it's not genre fiction. regulargonzalez fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 17:54
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Quad posted:I got called pretentious today, because my desk at work has a few books on it, mostly from Vonnegut (who writes at, what, a 6th grade reading level?) and now I'm gonna just buy Actual Pretentious books to fill out the space because gently caress that guy. Finnegan's Wake. Annotated version.
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Nov 20, 2019 18:46
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I really wouldn't have expected a take this stupid from you. IDK, I get the sentiment. Everyone's had the experience of "falling into" a novel, where you stop seeing the words and don't notice turning the page, you just live within the story, and it's a fantastic experience. And then there are times you marvel at the use of language or structure - it would be very difficult to "fall into", say, House of Leaves or Ship of Theseus. Which is a better experience? That depends on the reader I suppose but I enjoy both in different ways.
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Jan 11, 2020 23:48
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ToxicFrog posted:I've almost completely abandoned paper books in favour of digital; in particular, being able to lay the book flat on any surface without it flopping closed (a perennial problem with MMPBs), easily hold it one hand (a problem with hardbacks and TPBs), and turn pages with any part of my body (a problem with everything) is a huge advantage even apart from the whole "I can keep a thousand books in my pocket" thing. I was about to ask what other body parts you use to turn pages besides fingers then realized I really don't want to know
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Jan 13, 2020 17:34
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Alec Eiffel posted:I read a sample and, yeah, it’s too trivial. The book I am thinking of is simply just lists with no preamble or explanation. Presidents. Shakespeare plays in chronological order. Things like that. Good luck on your Jeopardy appearance
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Jan 23, 2020 01:03
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There's a convention I've seen in a lot of 19th / early 20th century adventures where it's claimed this is a real account the author has verified and is relaying the true story to the reader (Tarzan, Frankenstein, countless others that I can't recall at the moment). Was this taken at face value by the public or was it a lampshaded trope?
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Apr 6, 2020 23:50
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TheAardvark posted:Can anyone think of any decent modern written characters/settings with a lot of short stories? GRRM's Tuf Voyaging. Larry Niven's Draco Tavern and the collected Thieves' World books are about a setting but have recurring characters. regulargonzalez fucked around with this message at 06:39 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 06:31
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Ya know, Exit Through the Gift Shop looks at all of the arguments y'all are making but in a much more interesting manner and everyone should watch it instead of making the same arguments not as well.
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May 30, 2020 07:54
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Memento posted:Sorry to interrupt the current discussion, but does anyone have recommendations for kid-lit books for 8-9 year olds that are currently reading everything they can find and asking to read things off my bookshelf that are way too advanced for them? I was a pretty advanced reader at that age and thinking back, I got really into Hardy Boys around then and the Oz books. Fun mystery/puzzle books were my jam too, like Encyclopedia Brown and T.A.C.K.
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Jun 30, 2020 21:04
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sigher posted:The one thing I was kinda looking forward to with my Kindle was to read Sheet Music with it; but that's basically impossible with the size, it wasn't why I got in it the first place but it would have been a nice bonus. I've gotten used to reading books on it just fine and I love the device, it's just a shame sheet music is a no go (some of the sheet music I've bought on Amazon won't even open on the Kindle since it isn't formatted for it). I've looked at eReaders specifically for musicians and the prices are literally insane. I'll just read sheet music on my PC or printed page for now. What about a cheap tablet? The Fire HD 10" is bigger than an ereader and cheap af. Takes a little bit of fuckery to run Google apps (including the app store) but nothing that an hour or so of tweaks won't solve. E: I feel like an ereader would be a poor solution for sheet music anyway due to its slow page refresh. An 8" or 10" Fire tablet should fit the bill perfectly. regulargonzalez fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 22:30
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Roth posted:I've been using all the extra free time from work being closed to get back into reading books. It helps to load up on some caffeine or a Ritalin, improves your focus
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Jul 27, 2020 07:11
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I think I'll read a Harry Potter next, so you guys can really shine with your quotes. Take a drink every time Dumbledore's eyes are twinkling. If the book's main conflict could be solved with the Time Turner they had no problem using in book 3, finish the bottle. I'm revisiting the series myself right now and while it's still fun and there's a lot to like, the warts and general clunkiness are much more apparent. I mean, it's a kid's series so I'm not going to be too hard on it. But (why am I spoiler tagging Harry loving Potter) Why didn't fake Moody just ask Harry to hand him a book or something that was actually a port key instead of hoping he made it through all the challenges and was the one to touch the trophy? And the whole portrayal of house elves is hugely problematic, particularly if you read it as an analogue to African slavery. Could a 20-something man really pull off a portrayal of a late-50s auror well enough to fool people for an entire year who actually knew Moody, like Dumbledore and Snape? Book 4 used to be my favorite but it has a ton of problems.
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Sep 5, 2020 14:47
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I mean in the series's defense, Rowling does do a pretty great job in making each book a little older and a little darker than the one before. Book 6 iirc opens with a pretty harrowing scene, all the Umbridge stuff in book 5 (especially her implied fate), lots of deaths in book 7, it's all a long way from the fairy tale atmosphere in books 1 and 2. They're fun yarns and I think are at their best at recreating the feeling of being a middle school / high school student and the joys and struggles of being an 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 year old. I'd say they're about as important and worthwhile as, say, The Count of Monte Cristo.
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Sep 5, 2020 17:05
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The 90s ended when nu-metal became a thing. Based on Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Freak on a Leash I'm going to ballpark it at June 2000ish.
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Sep 11, 2020 16:06
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I think I had a similar problem a couple of years ago and it was solved by either switching browsers or turning off ad block or no script or something like that. So try disabling extensions on the audible page and / or a different browser.
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Sep 13, 2020 03:38
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That actually might make for an interesting thread: reading through the major new public domain works. New thread annually to start fresh.
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Jan 1, 2021 04:47
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