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Quad posted:Which reminds me, what happened to Viconia, anyway? One day she just wasn't a mod anymore. IIRC, she was running a thing where you'd pay her to play Warcraft on your behalf and when some guy undercut her prices on SA-Mart, she flipped out and banned him so she wouldn't lose business. She was banned shortly thereafter. She also licked a toilet, which is gross as hell.
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Nov 14, 2011 21:48
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I might take part in this. I've got a Norton anthology with a different translation - it's by John Ciardi - but if I have time, I'll try and keep up.
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Nov 18, 2011 05:14
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You mean deckle edge? That's still common today and something the author usually asks for, to give the book a certain look. I personally don't care about the edges, but I know some people who are really OCD about it and won't read a book with them.
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Dec 23, 2011 05:38
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Merry Christmas, all. Anybody get books this year?
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Dec 26, 2011 04:05
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Didn't get too many books this year, just a collection of David Halberstam's sports features, a couple textbooks on composition (gifts from my sister/her uni's used book store) and a history of UK punk that seems interesting, but hasn't gotten great reviews. And I picked up a used copy of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy I'm looking forward too.
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Dec 28, 2011 00:38
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Himuro posted:Maybe we have the word lolita wrong? I brought this up to a friend and he suggested I have the term 'lolita' completely wrong. He corrected me in saying that a lolita is also a desirable young woman (from a man's point of view), and that the word may or may not have anything to do with in relation to being sexual precocious. I'm going by memory here, but doesn't the word predate Nabokov's novel? I remember reading a story in Harpers or something a while back about a similar story with the same name from the 20's.
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Jan 8, 2012 17:43
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Here's the article I was thinking about, it seems the term's been around for a long time.Jonathan Lethem posted:Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita. It's a good read, if you got a few minutes, I'd recommend reading Lethem's whole essay.
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Jan 8, 2012 18:08
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UnfurledSails posted:Any advice on rebuilding a reading habit? Read what interests you. Don't worry what people think, just read what you like. Don't think of it as work - reading can be a liesure activity. Read when you have down time, like before bed or when you're on a bus. If you aren't liking something drop it, you don't have to finish it. Basically just read what you like; if it feels like a chore, it'll become one.
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Jan 15, 2012 04:43
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Joramun posted:Treat it like playing an RPG. Finishing a page is winning a random battle, finishing a chapter is a level-up.  Just read to enjoy, it only becomes work if you want it to. If you have to come up with stuff to rationalize it, you're overthinking it.
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Jan 16, 2012 02:41
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Conduit for Sale! posted:Has anyone else been getting books from Amazon that are slanted and twisted like someone's been wrenching on them? There's no actual damage to them and they're fine after I put them on my bookshelf for a while or put some heavy books on top of them, but it's still kind of annoying. This happens to me once in a while. Maybe it was damaged in shipping? It's not a big deal, I just assume it's why I was able to get a book so cheap. snoozeallday posted:I want to read a book thats going to possibly change my life. Something thats going to make me a better person. And I want it to be relatively recent. With any luck, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Chabon will be. You didn't ask, but if I had to recommend one book between them, it'd be Franzen's The Corrections.
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Feb 9, 2012 01:03
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mcustic posted:Over my dead body! But seriously, my hatred for Franzen aside, I think that we can't even try to guess what will be considered a classic from our time. Probably something that has had commercial success but little critical acclaim. Think shopaholic and that kind of crap. It usually happens like that - most of the 19th century classics were their equivalent of soap operas at the time they were published. Well, the poster asked who will still be read in 20 years and I don't think The Corrections is going to fade away any time soon. I don't think it's too unfair to look that ahead that far, since tastes aren't going to completely flip around in less than a generation.
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Feb 9, 2012 22:28
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Paragon8 posted:It's actually quite interesting. Wasn't Dickens or something the Tom Clancy of Victorian times? Broad populist literature? Same with Shakespeare. Maybe, if you want to essentially ignore the social context of Dickens work.
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Feb 12, 2012 20:25
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If it becomes our generation's Pamela, I really hope it means we're going to get a Joseph Andrews, too.
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Feb 15, 2012 00:04
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The NYRB is having a big sale with their classics series. Some good stuff you can get for under ten bucks: Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels, Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows, Der Nister's The Family Mashber, William Gresham's Nightmare Alley. There's a bunch of cool stuff to choose from!
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Feb 24, 2012 19:51
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I dunno, I kind of like stuff that has the same spines: the old Vintage Contemporaries series, those Penguins with the color bar on top, etc.
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Mar 9, 2012 00:06
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Ornamented Death posted:I guess it depends on how cheap we're talking here. If you're paying full price for paperbacks, you'd really be better served making the switch to eBooks. If you're getting them for a quarter a piece at Goodwill, then you could probably just buy another copy for the same price as any sort of protector. That's pretty much why I try to avoid hardcovers:. Used paperbacks are also just as cheap (or even cheaper) and it's easier to flip them at used bookstores once I'm finished reading them.
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Mar 20, 2012 01:53
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It's the same where I am. Last time I asked, it's just because they're harder to move, especially if they're more than few years old (since people can just buy the paperback then). In other words, nobody's going to give me more then a couple dollars credit for my Too Big to Fail hardcover.
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Mar 20, 2012 03:11
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Yes, I too enjoy classic lit but only when it has supernatural creatures. Some of my favorites are Portrait of the artist as an undead man, The life and opinions of tristram shandy, werewolf and War and peace and cthulhu.
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Mar 28, 2012 02:40
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escape artist posted:Does anyone use Audible.com? Have you checked out Itunes? It runs a little more per book - $24 for Calico Joe there, $7.50 with an audible membership - but there's no membership fees, so you might end up ahead if you only buy a few audiobooks a year.
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May 4, 2012 02:55
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Quad posted:What are the best ways to find "what's new"each month? Goodreads' lists are almost entirely self published fantasy porn, going into a Barnes & Noble is just tables full of severly bland looking lit. Is there a good blog for this, sorta like how Pitchfork used to be with music, or RT with film? Amazon has a page for new releases. If you click around on your recommendations, you can filter it to just upcoming stuff or new releases.
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Jul 9, 2012 00:18
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seravid posted:I'm confused, how can a classic be so drat expensive? This edition was published in 2001, I'm not looking for some long lost relic here. Well, it's because the hardcover is out of print, which always drives prices up. Have you tried using BookFinder? You can search through ISBN, so you can find the edition you want. If you're okay with paperback, The Book Depository has the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (which usually have nicer bindings than their regular editions) for $17 with free worldwide shipping. Alternately, you could try asking if your library could get it from another library.
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Aug 4, 2012 04:25
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toanoradian posted:This post may be caused by me fasting. A.J. Liebling's Between Meals has some of my favorite food writing and deals almost exclusively with French food and Paris of the first half of the 20th century.
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Aug 16, 2012 23:15
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I think e-readers are okay for casual reading, but it's easy to start skimming and jumping past stuff you don't like, plus you're reduced to passive reading. Unless the Kindle/Kobo/etc have changed, you can't write notes in the margins and underline and dogear pages you want to refer back to. Footnotes are a hassle, too. Until they offer a different experience than reading a book, I'm not too interested.
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Oct 27, 2012 18:29
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Argali posted:Has the Book Barn ever tried a book exchange kind of thing? I was thinking a stickied thread like the one on RPG.net would work well here - people post what they're willing to trade/sell, and what they have to trade/sell. It's been talked about before, but I don't think it ever happened.
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Oct 27, 2012 23:27
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Question(s): Several years ago, I went on a sports book collecting binge. Most in very good shape, a handful ex-library if I thought they were particularly interesting. Now, they're collecting dust and taking up room and I'm never going to get to them and barely have interest in most. Just curious: what kind of books are they? Are they biographies and the like or those annual guides and record books leagues put out each year?
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Nov 22, 2012 03:05
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Mixed bag, but mostly biographies. Sports covered are almost exclusively basketball, football and baseball. You could try online sellers like Better World Books have a place nearby where you can drop them off. I think Better World might even pay shipping, too, if I understand this form right. Alternately, if you have Jack McCallum's Unfinished Business, I'll take it off your hands.
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Nov 23, 2012 04:34
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Yeah, it sounds like he's a racist crank with a self-published book. I think you're reading it correctly. For what it's worth, I think Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks would be more up your alley.
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Dec 14, 2012 20:07
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Other good book review places: The Millions New York Times (I'm a big Kakutani guy myself) The Barnes and Noble Review Los Angeles Review of Books The Toronto Review of Books (they let me write for them on occasion!)
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Dec 16, 2012 04:56
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That drat Satyr posted:Could anyone recommend a good book on Greek deities (and perhaps their respective cults)? Alternatively, something that digs into the the theological beliefs of lesser-known religions - say, for example early Mesopotamian religious beliefs? I've got a copy of Robert Graves The Greek Myths which is an interesting (if a little over my head at times) breakdown of Greek mythology. I also thought Ovid's Metamorphoses was a good overview of some of the same topics, too. I liked AD Melville's translation, but it's done in verse. Penguin has a prose translation, but I'm not familiar with it. barkingclam fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Dec 27, 2012 |
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Dec 27, 2012 23:28
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shirunei posted:I'm looking for general reading books on the Byzantine Empire especially anything in or around the reign of Justinian I. Procopius' Secret History is a crazy read about the darker sides of Justinian (and really throws Theodora under the bus, too).
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Jan 1, 2013 04:40
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Here's a good preview for what's coming out this year. Highlights for me: a new William H. Gass novel, Speedboat by Renata Adler, The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee and a new Pynchon book (that may or may not come out this year). But there's a lot of interesting stuff coming out in 2013.
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Jan 7, 2013 21:47
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hobbez posted:Anyone read Ulysses? I have never felt like something was so very far above my head, and I have read some "difficult books". But that is the point I suppose. In the archives there's a good thread about Joyce/Ulysses which you might find helpful. Also this post is full of good advice for a first reading, too!
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Jan 12, 2013 00:24
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Has anyone picked up Lawrence Wright's Going Clear yet?
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Jan 19, 2013 21:21
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I'm interested in it, but it's not officially for sale in Canada because of libel laws. I might order a copy from abroad once the price does down a bit.
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Jan 20, 2013 21:28
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You don't have any independent bookstores there? That really sucks, I can do without being near a giant store but I like having a small one near my place so I can order stuff in and look at new titles and etc.
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Jan 28, 2013 21:47
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Wade Wilson posted:Recently had someone send me a link to this site. Other than the site design being terrible, knowing when/where massive book sales are going on has been kind of nice. Cool, thanks for this. I like going to sales, even if I've got a ton of books I haven't gotten around to reading yet.
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Mar 21, 2013 16:13
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Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) died earlier today at 82. Here's his obituary in the New York Times.
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Mar 22, 2013 16:43
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Ugh, I always forget Ellmann's biography of Joyce goes for like $40. Anyone read it? Is it worth dropping that much on?
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Mar 26, 2013 18:13
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Joramun posted:You're in luck, it's currently discounted to 23 bucks on Amazon. I'm in Canada, so with shipping it's about $32. I guess Book Depository's the way to go ($24 there), but like I said: has anyone read it?
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Mar 27, 2013 03:15
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screenwritersblues posted:Anyone have a suggestion on where to start with Bukowski? I've searched and asked a few friends, but no on can give me a good answer. I want to get into his fiction first. There's a great anthology called Run With the Hunted collecting excerpts from his novels, poetry and other writings that's a nice overview of his writing. I'd recommend it over one of his novels since it covers his entire career in chronological order, starting with his stories about growing up and ends with his book about Hollywood.
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Apr 24, 2013 16:23
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