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Oh god, please don't make reading this thread a challenge, ok? Berating other people's choices is just going to take this thread all "meta" and then I won't see cool posts about neat things people are actually reading (Prince Valiant used to be good? Who knew?!?!), just bad posts that don't actually mention any books at all. Let's try to make sure every post for the next few pages mentions at least one reading goal you're setting for yourself and/or at least one actual, specific item of readable material. If you really want to get crazy, maybe even include a statement of opinion about that item of readable material you've just read or plan to read! If your statement of opinion is about another poster, and not about an item of readable material, it's probably off-topic for this thread! My challenge: Now that I'm the Book Barn mod, I'm going to read every Awful Book of the Month this year. I don't always read them because most of my reading these days is either fantasy fluff or historical fiction, and the Awful Books tend to be more literary than I have the energy for sometimes. It's been decades since I read The Master and Margarita just because every time I see it on my shelf, I'd think "that book was really good, and really hard. I will read something with a dragon in it instead." No more! Now I will bravely slay that dragon! By which I mean, book! I mean the harder book! You know what I mean. At least, once a month. Rest of the month, it's all dragons, all the time. Dragons with lasers and loose cannon cops breakin' the rules.
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Feb 9, 2014 09:07
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Walh Hara posted:Catch-22 is pretty much my favourite book ever, but I still find it a difficult book to recommend to friends. I could rave about it all day and write an essay about how brilliant the book is, yet when I recommend it to people I always feel that I have to give some disclaimers "don't worry if the overarching story is confusing", "it's not chronological but it doesn't matter", "there is slapstick, but it's necessary to counteract the otherwise depressing story", etc. I imagine it's one of those books you either fall in love with or don't get at all. I think the best way to read Catch-22 is the way I did: as a ten year old running hard up against the first book that was ever legitimately too loving hard for him to understand (well, apart from my father's idea that leaving Gravity's Rainbow lying around was a good substitute for sex ed, but that's a different story). My pain and bewilderment was a mirror of Yossarian's! It was my introduction to surrealism and absurdism and postmodernism and it'll always have a special place on my shelf. I'd read All Quiet on the Western Front by then and I got the whole "war is BAD" thing, but that was my first exposure to war as horrible absurdity. I think the largest value in the work is that it created and gave a language to describe the special kind of hell that exists between its pages. Without Catch-22 we wouldn't have MASH, we wouldn't have Full Metal Jacket.
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Feb 11, 2014 02:54
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Chamberk posted:I read the whole trilogy in the past few years, and the best (and worst) thing I can say about Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen is that they're more of the same. They're no better than Bridge of Birds, and there are a few repeated plot points... but if you enjoyed Bridge of Birds, there's no reason not to read them. The main problem with them is just that they're always read immediately after you've just read Bridge of Birds. They end up feeling like re-treads and suffer by the comparison. I suspect if you hadn't read BoB, or if you lower your expectations going into them, you'd be pleasantly surprised.
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Feb 18, 2014 06:31
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If you're reading Herodotus get the Landmark Edition. Copious footnotes on every page and extensively annotated maps throughout.
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Feb 22, 2014 06:17
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TrixRabbi posted:Goodreads is telling me I'm on track with 3/26 read. adhuin posted:2. Promise of Blood - Powder Mage #1, by Brian McClellan MVerlie posted:goal is 30 books this year. Not trying to single you three out but these posts are just examples from the last page or so of something I wanted to bring up, remind everyone about, & see if we need to update or change. Some of you may have noticed that I've redone the Forum Rules post. One of the rules in there is "do not reply to any thread with a mere list of book titles and no other explanation or discussion." That's actually always been a rule here for years now, but for some reason in this thread in particular I've noticed people tend to ignore it. I mean, on the one hand, I get it in that this thread is a little different from the rest of the forum and basically an ongoing personal challenge log for a lot of people. On the other hand, if you aren't sharing some thought you had about the book you just read, there's not much for other people to discuss or much reason for other people to read what amounts to your personal log. I don't want to discourage people from their challenges, etc., but as of now I am planning on enforcing the "post something beyond mere book titles" in this thread also. If you list books, say something about either why you plan to read them or what you thought of them. Doesn't have to be an essay, even just a word or two is probably fine, but please make some minimal gesture towards discussion. Thanks!
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Feb 23, 2014 20:43
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bollig posted:
Good luck on your reading challenge! Just in case you missed the new (well, old, but newly enforced) rule about stating some opinion about the books in your challenge and not just posting a list of titles, though, I'm quoting this block of text to demonstrate the absolute minimum I'm going to let slide under the rule. Technically, "kicks 'blink' in the balls" is an opinion about a book, so you're good, but without that sentence that post would've been a probation.
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Mar 19, 2014 20:47
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bollig posted:Whew. Okay, I didn't quite get that from the OP. Is that a Book Barn rule? Or just a thread rule. Thanks. It's a book barn rule that's actually been in place since forever, but for some reason everyone in this thread had fallen out of following it, hence all the reminders. Basically, the idea is that you need to post *something* about at least one book, so other people can discuss with you and get something from reading your posts, not just post empty titles.
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Mar 20, 2014 00:07
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Stravinsky posted:I will die with a copy of Ulysses or a history of the Iranian Revolution blocking my airways. If they all catch fire you can literally die in the burning of Persepolis.
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Mar 29, 2014 19:06
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Stravinsky posted:I agree, its not a contest. In reality nothing anyone does on these forums (bar someone hunting me down to murder me because they are mad that I'm questioning grapic novels place in a thread inside tbb) effects me personally. If your problem is that this is all metaposting then I can take it to the tbb general thread or qcs if that helps you. Yeah this is all a bit too meta. For what it's worth, here's my current thought process on this question: 1) It's really tempting to give you a mod challenge to write a book report on Persepolis but you don't deserve that so I won't. 2) As far as I'm concerned graphic novels fall within the definition of "book" and are hence fine for discussion in this forum; there's some overlap with BSS sure but I don't see that as a problem that needs to be solved. (Think about it: any rule on that front would get mega-stupid mega-fast, just in terms of enforcement.) 3) That said, I'm also not going to police this thread into some sort of super safe space for book hugs. This is SA after all, and a certain amount of ribbing people for their book choices is also fine so long as it stays roughly on topic to actual books (however defined). 4) Anyone who has any further thoughts on those questions feel free to PM me about it. I'm open to persuasion here but let's keep it out of this particular thread. If you post something in QCS you'll probably need to PM me a link because QCS is a scary place and I don't exactly read it much. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Apr 10, 2014 |
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Apr 10, 2014 20:29
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:The Tamarack Murders - Patrick McManus WAit, the Fine and Pleasant Misery guy wrote mysteries? How are they? Any good?
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Apr 29, 2014 03:50
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Guy A. Person posted:
Oh neat! Did you read my King Arthur thread and get inspired, or just independently?
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May 3, 2014 01:11
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guppy posted:I never really thought about it, but short stories in a collection obviously must be in some order, and someone has to pick them, and there are usually going to be some that are stronger than others. You might as well arrange them most advantageously -- strong early so you're drawn in, strong late so you look back fondly on the book, anything you don't like as much somewhere in between. One book I'd really like to put up for the BotM at some point is Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. It's *technically* a book of short stories, but all the short stories are in the same place, involve different generations of the same families, and are arranged in chronological order. The net effect is that the book as a whole functions as a single (somewhat loosely structured) novel.
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May 6, 2014 13:17
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Xik posted:"Haha, look at all those idiots posting about comic books in the book barn". Yeah, this. As per the old forum title, Don't Post (Child) Porn Here. This isn't complicated, people. This doesn't apply to books with actual literary or artistic value, obviously. I don't even care that much about adult erotica either way, as long as it's in book format. If you want to make a thread about your favorite Tom O'Finland coffee table books, that's fine. But if I know you're deliberately just trolling and you post a bunch of stuff that looks a hell of a lot like pure kiddie porn I'm not going to go research that poo poo to figure out whether or not it has literary or artistic merit or is just pure raw child porn. I don't want that stuff in my search history. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:39 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 14:25
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So how should I chastise all those who have failed their challenge this past year?
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Dec 29, 2014 04:51
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