General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.

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Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Like goodreads or something?

# ¿ Jan 29, 2022 06:12

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 05:12

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

loving Billy Pilgrim over here. Homie you know what year it is

# ¿ May 26, 2022 05:17

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Get the ISBN and start googling for torrents I guess. Scans are probably all locked behind some private tracker though.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2022 03:36

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Want for it to be extra stupid. Amazon has owned Goodreads for almost a decade

# ¿ Jul 7, 2022 20:10

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

I do not understand how someone can unironically believe that Hazel Shade is the author of Pale Fire. I'm sure I'm not the only one who did a reread when people started talking Nabokov again, but coming off that I go peek around to see what the intellectualists have been dreaming up. I get the obvious Botkin wrote it, I can even gently caress with the J.Shade theory, but when you start saying nonsense like Hazel did it, it becomes pretty hard to take you seriously. Granted I haven't actually read their arguments because I have somewhat a value on my time, but I don't think it would be persuasive at any rate. Really you might as well say Gradus scrawled the whole thing on his Cell walls to explain why he shot John, if he did.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2022 04:05

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Tree Goat posted:

hello, i will try to make the case for hazel

although it will be halfhearted, because i don't think the text strongly supports that reading (although it is a fun one to try to support post hoc) as per:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3785652&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post462937221
and also because it's been a while. i also don't have boyd's book on hand atm so i don't have his textual arguments available. i don't even remember what his final thesis even was, tbh (it was either a two-narrator case with hazel writing "pale fire" but kinbote existing in some form as a separate narrator that is "haunted" by hazel, or one-narrator case for hazel). i also note that he (seems to have?) recanted the hazel theory in later work, so i'm not certain if there are significant extent groups of "hazelians" left, as opposed to shadeans etc.

in any event, the argument i would make goes something like this:
1) nabokov is not above making subtle or otherwise easily overlooked "solutions" in his writing. so solutions of many particular potential complexities are in play
2) the structure and content of pale fire supports its reading as a puzzle box book: discovering the circumstances of shade's death and kinbote's life. the poem itself makes occasional self-descriptions of itself as a mystery. from his prior work, we know that nabokov himself was also not above using cryptic crossword levels of language games to provide clues for textual mysteries of this sort.
3) 1) and 2) together, combined with the lack of a strong textual case or academic consensus around the work, mean that looking further afield is not only permitted but perhaps even more likely to align with whatever nabokov's authorial intent was here. John Shade and Kinbote are "too easy" as answers for the intended author of the poem and so we have to look elsewhere (shades of Borges' "In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?").

so that's enough to at least get to "a wacky thesis about who is meant to have written either 'pale fire' the poem or kinbote's commentary is acceptable", and gives us some license to ignore or at least downplay the otherwise strong textual evidence that john shade is the poet.

for hazel specifically as narrator, we gotta go off of vibes though:
1) even ignoring kinbote's gloss, and the near-death experience referred to by "And one night I died.", the poem occasionally alludes to or at least supports a post-mortem writer. (it's "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain", after all).

2) hazel's ghost specifically appears several times as an image

there's even an extended bit in canto three there shade denies the existence of his daughter's ghost while various noises recurr:

with recurring noises over the next few stanzas while he and his wife play chess

3) there are several parts of the poem that "work" well if we assume hazel is at least in conversation with (or "haunting" the poet).
for instance: "She took her poor young life. I know. You know." the relatively simple rhyme scheme of the poem (remember the actual quality or intended quality of the poem itself is a matter of debate) would also fit well with hazel, who after all is shown to take after her father and whose only dialogue in the poem is to play games with language.

so that's how you would get to "there's something fishy going on, and hazel's ghost is involved". how you get from that to a fuller "solution" of the book i think requires some more spadework.

again, i think this is a hermeneutical parlor trick rather than a particular strong reading, but there you have it.

The most damning thing about the theory to me is there's no why to it. There's no reason in the text for us to believe that Hazel would create Pale Fire the poem, and even less for her to create the gloss. Shade creating the poem is simply him trying to deal with the trauma of his daughter's suicide, and Botkin creating the gloss is a way for him to lionize the object of his unreturned affection, while also coyly slipping in his own megalomaniac delusions. Having that be the story is perfectly congruent with everything in the text, the quote unquote final secret being that Kinbote is really just Botkin.

I can entertain the idea that Shade wrote both the poem and the gloss though, imagine him working for so long on this poem dealing with his daughters suicide and realizing no matter how much emotion he pours into it it'll never reach the level of Frost. So he starts doing a fake gloss of it, he brings in this rich imagined life, he morphs his annoying neighbor/colleague into Kinbote an obsessive stalker, and creates this fiction of him being killed. Now his poem is ensconced inside this bizarre tale of false kings, assassinations, new criticism, daring escapes, beautiful princesses. He's turned it from a poignant but forgettable poem by a nobody to an object that demands study.

So both of those maintain a logic to the authorship, whereas the Hazel theory feels like someone throwing something out there that's insane just for attention. Then backing it up limply with some slight implications that maybe ghosts are real. It lacks any motivation

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 01:04

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

You should absolutely reread it. Everyonce in a while I start thinking that there's a lot of peeps who've got some good prose goin', then I read some Nabokov and realize they're all loving amateurs who need to get the gently caress out

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 05:50

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Van Veen is such a prick lmao

# ¿ Aug 20, 2022 02:01

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

There is a literature thread I suppose it goes there

# ¿ Sep 3, 2022 03:26

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Gripweed posted:

I'm currently reading Snow Falling on Cedars and getting pissed about how much it loving sucks.

Switch it up and read something good. I recommend the Master and Margarita

# ¿ Oct 11, 2022 02:29

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Nut up homie

# ¿ Oct 15, 2022 20:02

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

If I have to hear about Maple Grove one more time I'm going to reach into the novel and strangle Mrs.Elton myself

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 20:52

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

The best I can say about The Alchemist is that it's short. It's a poor story that can be summarized with the phrase "Follow ur dreams" and nothing more, save your time and read a synopsis so you can get your co worker off your back.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2022 23:07

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Never read abridged works

# ¿ Feb 8, 2023 22:31

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Island of Dr.Moreau, not creating but fighting against nature using science to try and uplift animals into humanity

The invention of Morel, preserving rather than creating life. A scientist captures a small three day gathering into an endless loop on a deserted island in the Atlantic.

Cat's Cradle man steals the power of God to end itself without valuing that power and destroys itself.

There's a lot of more direct doctor creates man stories but a more unorthodox angle to contrast against seems more useful to me.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2023 01:08

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Flying an entire class to another country just to read a novel seems like a very poor use of school funds.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2023 20:33

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Fahrenheit 451 but for YA is a undeniable moral good and should be encouraged.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2023 02:43

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

StrixNebulosa posted:

wait poo poo this is the general chat I'm sorry!

Pick up a collection of Borges. Ficciones or Labyrinths. Also Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

# ¿ May 19, 2023 19:19

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

The Invention of Morel as well.

# ¿ May 19, 2023 19:26

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

I'd assume foreign classics downloads are depressed by using bad, antique translations.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2023 23:08

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Go see a production of it. And watch Throne of Blood.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2023 15:33

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Breakfast of Champions is the goat

# ¿ Jul 29, 2023 02:34

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

That essay is one of the worst things I've ever read. I even partially agree with him regarding JR, but his case is so poorly constructed you lose all sympathy with him before you even get to his point.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2023 21:53

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

I can't imagine trying to use Goodreads to find a book to read, their recommendations are either horrible, pushing anything that has the same or similar title or author rather than any actual connection to anything, or other editions of works you've already read, I can assure you my first inclination on finishing The Red and The Black was not to read the same tale told again but translated differently.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2023 03:37

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

StrixNebulosa posted:

https://thegreatestbooks.org/

1 . In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust <--- never heard of it
2 . Ulysses by James Joyce <---- tried reading it once, not for me
3 . Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes <---- OK valid this one can stay
4 . One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez <----- haven't read
5 . The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald <------ I will invent a time machine to go back to fitzgerald and stop him from writing this to save me from the most interminably boring high school semester (followed by preventing mark twain from writing huck finn. he may write everything else but not that one)

Let's fix this list

What it should be:
Remove Great Gatsby
Moby Dick higher
Remove Hamlet, plays aren't books
Remove The Odyssey, poetry is not books
Swap Madame Bovary with Sentimental Education, Bovary is more incisive, but SE is funnier and speaks more to both the unstable political times it was set and to our own times.
Remove Dante, Poetry is not books
Swap Lolita with Pale Fire, move Pale Fire Higher
Brothers K and C&P need to be seperated because having two of an authors works together is unaesthetic.
Swap Catcher in the Rye with Franny and Zooey, but keep Catcher on the list higher up.
Swap Pride and Prejudice with Emma, and then remove it, boring novel
Remove Huck Finn
Remove Illiad, Poetry is not books
Replace Catch 22 with Gravity's Rainbow
Swap Sound and Fury with Absalom, Absalom!, and move it into the top ten
Replace Grapes of Wrath with East of Eden
Replace The Trial with The Castle and remove the rest of Kafka, too much
Red and Black should be moved down on the list, I love Stendhal but he's sloppy as hell as a writer, likewise Charterhouse of Parma should be removed.
Remove Jane Eyre, worst Bronte
Remove Aeneid, poetry is not books
Ficciones should be in the top ten
Remove all Hemingway, mf cannot write for poo poo
Remove Leaves of Grass, poetry is not books
I feel like the Rushdie doesn't actually belong but I haven't read it so I cannot say for certain.
Remove Candide, for the best of all possible lists
Remove the two Sophocles, plays are not books
Dead Souls should be Higher
Remove Kerouac, that poo poo sucks
I've never even heard of The Good Soldier, I assume it's trash
Remove Animal Farm
Remove Vanity Fair, seriously nobodies read this in a hundred years
Remove The Waste Land, poetry is not books
Journey to the End of Night should be higher
Replace Slaughterhouse Five with Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions
Remove Charlotte's Web, what the gently caress are we even doing here
Remove Paradise Lost, Poetry is not books
Remove The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, not a book
Faust should be much, much higher
Remove Flowers of Evil, poetry is not books
Remove The Decameron, the film adaption sucked

Luckily they left off a bunch of better novels to make up for all the non books, and bizarre decisions in ranking. Master and Margarita, Fathers and Sons, Ada, Eugene Onegin, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich need to be added from Russia. American fiction is also woefully underrepresented. Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day, Blood Meridian, Wise Blood, JR should be added. Maybe Libra too. They also have like zero Asian authors, throw some Mishima, Soseki, Kawabata, Three Kingdoms is a little boring despite the impact, but Water Margin should be there. Definitely more that would make it but I haven't read them.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2023 21:50

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

List Gets demented the farther you go, Harry Potter is 209 and Atlas Shrugged is 212. The Stand is just below Plato's Republic at 201 and 202 respectively, and both are higher, along with Atlas Shrugged than The Book of Disquiet, Gravity's Rainbow, Steppenwolf, and Salinger's Nine Stories.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2023 22:01

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Cugel the Clever posted:

I've got a dumb question that I don't know where it better fits. I just finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and adored the author's writing style of dense, clever prose. I gobbled it up, so was a little surprised to see some of those I'm reading it with report they found it frustratingly hard to follow, frequently requiring backtracking and rereading a sentence a couple times for it to click.

But more striking was my realization that I actually experience the same sort of frustration with writing that offers, ostensibly, a far lower readability bar. A few examples where it stuck out would be The Hunger Games, Jay Kristoff's Stormdancer, and Susan Burke's Semiosis. All would score as very readable, but in each I actually found myself stumbling awkwardly through, getting hung up on, I don't know, the excessive simplicity of the sentence structure and narrative presented? Each was an outright painful read.

The same isn't true for obvious children's books. Reading "See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!" doesn't leave me in a befuddled state wondering if I've missed something deeper. I guess I'm just coming at this YA-level literature with the wrong calibration?

My intent isn't to put down those who enjoyed those books, just shout my confusion into the void. Am I crazy? Pretentious? Is this unreadable readability a known, named phenomenon with any research behind it?

Different people find differing material more or less difficult. Like a lot of Goons in a lot of situations you're making mountains out of molehills and massively overthinking; many of the works you list are garbage, the reason you bounce off them is not readability it's that they aren't in any way interesting or challenging. Imagine a chess match and you're playing someone much more talented than yourself, you might struggle with every move, but you will be engaged. If they give you a handicap of turning all your pawns to queens than you won't be, even if you're poor enough that you still get outplayed the experience will still be unenthralling with the knowledge that you both aren't actually being held to any standard nor are you making interesting decisions in your match.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2023 08:24

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Lying on your stomach with your head over the side and the book on the floor is a great way to read

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 20:38

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Count of Monte Cristo is the longest uninterrupted period of reading I've ever engaged in I believe. I went from page three hundred or so to the end in one stretch over night because I just couldn't put it down. Felt like my eyes were bleeding afterwards.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2023 00:37

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Yeah that's the one Penguin uses

# ¿ Sep 29, 2023 01:01

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

I don't think I've ever read a Frenchman's writings about Italy and not loved it.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2023 04:02

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

anilEhilated posted:

So who is y'all's tip for this year's Nobel prize? I've seen some betting odds that seemed to claim the surefire bet is Murakami, which is a choice I'm honestly not a fan of.

Murakami is going to win because all awards are determined primarily by how much I personally will be upset, and my god would Murakami winning an award for writing piss me off. Might as well give a iPhone voice memo of an angle grinder album of the year.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2023 05:02

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

A beaten to poo poo book is a well loved book

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 17:04

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Well I know one person who is making sure to never read it now.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2023 18:53

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Take a picture of each page, print them off at a Kinkos, bind together, and bam free book.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 00:03

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

That was Joyce, Napoleon just preferred Josephine to not bathe for three days before he met her again and Franklin was a horndog and proponent of the paper bag theory.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2023 18:43

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Don't worry about the poo poo you aren't getting. A lot of the mysteries in the first half are semi explained later on. And don't spend all your energy trying to "solve" the novel on your first reading, it's not designed for that.

Don't immediately start hitting up pods or writing on the novels before you finish Urth. It'll end up sneaking strange ideas into your head that'll be hard to shake.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2023 19:35

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

It is not

# ¿ Nov 14, 2023 01:58

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Alhazred posted:

Skip the play.

The play is the only way to understand the ending without Urth. It's also fun.

Anyways what's the worst back of the book quotes you have ever seen on a novel. Got my copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson today and found this gem on the back.

John Semley, The A.V. Club posted:

Half philosophy, half poetry, Notes on Cinematography reads in places like The Art of War for filmmakers.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2023 21:39

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 05:12

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

It does have that same energy, a man desperately not wanting to be there and experiencing these horrors.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 02:09

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.

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