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I'm sure it varies from university to university, but one of my professors explained textbook authorship to me as basically a way of obtaining academic street cred. He told me basically a resume which says you wrote a book is infinitely more impressive than one that does not. To hear him tell it you basically can't get a job at some schools unless you've trotted out your opinions as fact in an explanatory text of some sort. He'd written a really outdated book on the Internet that he used in his class and urged us to buy second hand.
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Mar 10, 2010 08:47
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deety posted:I live maybe five minutes from a good-sized BN. Their selection isn't great, but it would still be my go-to bookshop just based on location if it wasn't for some funky humidity problem they seem to have. I hardly go there any more, because it's too common for me to find something I want only to notice that the pages are all wavy and the covers are curled up on every copy. They also have these huge windows on the second story, where the sun bleaches the spines of everything on the nearby shelves. Yick. I've noticed this with BN too. The one I used to live by had some flooding problems about 4 years ago when a water pipe burst, so I put the amount of lightly water-damaged books down to that, but I went there recently and there's still curled covers and yellowed pages on books that were fairly recent releases. It's like they know nothing about book preservation. I guess it's more likely that they don't care because the people who come in to buy their giant stockpile of home improvement books, illustrated hand gun guides and conspiracy rags about the Templars don't really give a poo poo.
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Mar 23, 2010 03:12
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Oleum Animale 68C posted:Is there a book series about a high fantasy world undergoing an industrial revolution? Seems like I heard of one, but looking for "high fantasy"+"industrial revolution" just turns up the old computer game Arcanum. Thanks! What comes to mind is Perdido Street Station, although it's more steampunky, I guess, and the fantasy setting is pretty far from your generic Not Middle Earth. Wonderful prose for a genre novel, but it sort of meanders and goes nowhere. The ending sucks. Highly recommended! China Mieville has also written some other novels set in the same world, but I haven't read them. I've heard that the quality is sort of inconsistent but The Scar is the best of the bunch. Edit: Also if you sort of loosely define your terms there's there's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell set around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Loosely, I say, because its basically set in an alternate earth where things used to be a generic high fantasy setting, magic went away, and now it's started to come back. Really though it's an attempt at marrying the form of novel that was popular in the 19th century with a form of fantasy that came much later. Good, again a tad meandering, and probably not exactly what you're looking for. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Apr 30, 2010 |
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Apr 30, 2010 10:31
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Checkered Slacks posted:It might have been sometime mid/late last year before I registerd, when someone posted a short story about Neptune or Poseidon in a thread about some author (I'm almost certain it was a male author). That sounds like Franz Kafka's Poseidon, although your description is a little vague so I can't say for sure. Actually, Poseidon is more of a snippet than a full story, so I'm thinking it might not be what you're looking for. Regardless, I think it's probably Kafka's most unambiguously funny story. Here it is in its entirety, although I don't think this is the best translation: Franz Kafka posted:Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted — and he did have very many — but since he took his job very seriously, he would in the end go over all the figures and calculations himself, and thus his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him; in fact, he had already filed many petitions for — as he put it — more cheerful work, but every time the offer of something different was made to him it would turn out that nothing suited him quite as well as his present position. And anyhow it was quite difficult to find something different for him. After all, it was impossible to assign him to a particular sea; aside from the fact that even then the work with figures would not become less but only pettier, the great Poseidon could in any case occupy only an executive position. And when a job away from the water was offered to him he would get sick at the very prospect, his divine breathing would become troubled and his brazen chest began to tremble. Besides, his complaints were not really taken seriously; when one of the mighty is vexatious the appearance of an effort must be made to placate him, even when the case is most hopeless. In actuality a shift of posts was unthinkable for Poseidon — he had been appointed God of the Sea in the beginning, and that he had to remain.
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May 10, 2010 04:34
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I dunno, if you get to the point where you have to force yourself to read by setting page goals, doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? I think most people read because it's relaxing and enriching, if it becomes just another treadmill to hop onto then you lose that.
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May 23, 2010 10:31
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Honestly I think that'd be a really popular feature and that scares me.
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May 24, 2010 01:19
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That's a good question, actually. What other book discussion sites are there? I know librarything, but that's sort of a giant hodgepodge clusterfuck of everything. Are there any other book discussion forums dedicated to thoughtful, informed discussion?
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May 25, 2010 07:29
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I'd certainly be interested. I've read a lot of older detective fiction (Chandler, Hammett, etc.) but I haven't really followed the genre into the modern age. I'd like to see what other authors I should check out.
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Jun 13, 2010 19:54
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I'd say 9 is about the perfect time to read To Kill a Mockingbird. The prose is pretty straightforward and when I read it for the first time, around that age, I sort of enjoyed the scene setting childhood adventures portions that come before the trial begins more than I have on subsequent readings, when I was just eager to get to the courtroom drama. I think adults tend to identify more with Atticus and want to get to his parts while kids have a better appreciation of Scout's POV.
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Feb 3, 2015 19:23
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There are different types of stories. Some are very plot driven and really don't offer you much BESIDES anticipation, so if you know how it ends you're probably not going to enjoy it much. On the other end of the spectrum, something like Moby Dick is explicitly not about it's plot — whether you know how it ends or not is irrelevant because roughly 80 percent of the book has nothing to do with that. Probably most books fall somewhere in-between. Personally, I'm the sort of reader who reads the first couple of chapters, and if I like it enough not to put it down immediately, I skip ahead and read the last couple of pages to see how it ends. Usually that actually enhances my enjoyment — I read the end without a whole lot of context so it's fun for me to see how the story gets there. Also maybe it's a kind of gently caress you to the author, that yeah they may have taken a lot of time writing this thing but I'm about to spend a lot of time reading it so that minor act of rebellion signifies that I'll be taking my pleasure from their work how I want. I'm weird.
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Feb 23, 2015 20:29
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I would say that the footnote story gets better later in the book, but it's never quite as interesting as the Navidson Record. They sort of converge thematically but Johnny never, like, appears in the House or anything like that. You don't HAVE to read Johnny's story, but part of the fun of the book is how Johnny's mental state starts to correspond to the things that happen in the manuscript, so you'd be missing out on the metatextual experience in favor of a more conventional ghost story.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:36
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Justine
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May 6, 2015 20:48
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I have the Exegesis, got it from a well-meaning family member that knew I was a big Phillip K Dick fan. Don't read it. As great and original a writer as Dick was, the Exegesis was never meant for public consumption and it shows. The Exegesis isn't a book, it's a chronicle left behind by an increasingly unwell Dick as he tried to puzzle through his obsessions on paper — basically it's nearly a 1,000 pages of Time Cube-grade paranoid ranting. Even if you're a serious Phillip K Dick fan, you aren't going to get much out of the Exegesis unless you're also a massive sperg or a Bible Code enthusiast. Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 19:28
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OMG Robots in Time is SO BAD. It says it's Isaac Asimov's even though some dude wrote it long after he died and it really has nothing to do with anything Asimov wrote besides the 3 laws of robotics
Baby Babbeh fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Jun 27, 2015 |
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Jun 27, 2015 06:58
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Franchescanado 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 don't think his writing is BAD, per se, but he definitely runs into problems because his voice is so strong that he almost can't write any other way. He's comparable to Steven King — they both have certain vocal ticks that get really annoying once you've read them extensively, but King is marginally less tedious because his style is at least broad enough that you don't feel you're reading the same story over and over again.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:41
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Exactly. King has range, Palahnuik does not. Really, while I bag on King a lot for his prose, he's really impressive to me because he's been able to maintain a fairly high bar of quality over a very long, very prolific career spanning many different genres and novel styles. He may be a pulp writer, but he's a drat good pulp writer. I doubt any of the more literary authors I read could hold a candle to him if they tried to match his pace and his diversity of subjects.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:49
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Quandary posted:I'm about halfway through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell right now and its really really good and everyone should read it. Fantasy for people who read at above an 8th grade reading level and appreciate characterization. It is pretty good, but a bit meandering. I realize part of that was the author consciously looking to emulate the form of period novels, but it gets a little tiresome by the time you get to the end.
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Jul 16, 2015 17:49
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I think it takes a bit of time to get going, honestly. I wasn't really hooked on it for the first 40 pages or so, felt it really start to come into its own right around the time Joe escapes Prague and was really into it for most of the middle of the book, and then was a little let down by the ending. It's a good book, but it left me a little flat. I much preferred The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
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Jul 24, 2015 23:02
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A Tin Of Beans posted:Been reading Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings and it fuckin' owns and makes me think I should finally sit my rear end down and read Water Margin. I'm partial to the Sidney Shapiro translation, Outlaws of the Marsh.
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Aug 14, 2015 21:38
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