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Wolpertinger posted:Plus, If I recall correctly, he literally made up his own long, complicated-sounding words, You remember incorrectly, everything in BotNS is English, however obscure. Also it functions perfectly well as an adventure/travel story even if you don't dig into the real substance of it so I'm really not sure what your problem was. Iamblikhos posted:imo best possible intro to contemporary poetry is older poetry I agree with this. Maybe it's true of every artform in any cultural context but with American poetry there's a distinct "line of succession" where each generation of writers was clearly responding to the one that went before (usually with frustration and impatience.  )edit: Which means that as much as I love the man's own writing, William Carlos Williams is indirectly responsible for beat poetry and I may never forgive him for that. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 00:25
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Poutling posted:Poetry is so subjective though and is really a dying art form, which is sad. It's such a hard sell to people, even people that are open to reading 'non genre' books flinch when I mention poetry. I really don't understand why this is. Poetry has all the best aspects of great literature -- the focus on form, on incredibly dense and interconnected meaning -- but in a small enough package that you can see the whole thing at once. You can exercise all the same mental muscles without committing to some behemoth of a novel. (And of course, if you want a behemoth, there are always verse epics.)
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Jun 20, 2014 03:20
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Smoking Crow posted:The reason is that it's not story based. Some people can only relate to a narrative, which most poetry isn't. I guess if you go by sheer volume that might be true but I would think that for the majority of human history most poetry actually has been narrative-based.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:25
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Virtually nothing that happens in Book of the New Sun is random, it just happens for reasons that Severian isn't aware of (or, occasionally, that he deliberately hides from the reader until it slips out by accident later.) I'm not trying to convince you to enjoy it, since that's entirely subjective, but the whole point of BotNS is to challenge the reader and create something that reveals more of itself with every re-reading of the entire series. And of course very little of that is going to come through if you stopped after one book and then read a synopsis on the internet.  I'd be happy to defend it in more detail or talk specific examples if you want but we should probably take it to the Gene Wolfe thread so we're not barfing sci-fi/fantasy all over this one.
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Jun 20, 2014 04:01
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Everyone should read Virginia Woolf, probably starting with Mrs. Dalloway. It's more or less Woolf's attempt to beat James Joyce at his own game -- following her reaction to Ulysses, which depending on who you ask fell somewhere between grudging respect and outright loathing -- and arguably she succeeds. Plus literary feuds aside the language is beautiful and I can't name a single book that left me with a greater sense of well-being after I was finished.
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Jun 21, 2014 18:57
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Wait, Harold Bloom wrote a fantasy novel? I have to see this. 
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Jun 26, 2014 18:34
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Whalley posted:Mo Yan is loving incredible. Everybody should read at least one novel by him. He sounds fascinating, any suggestions of where to start / best translations?
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Jun 28, 2014 21:21
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I like genre fiction but it'd be nice to have one or two threads that aren't about it at all times.
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Jul 11, 2014 13:38
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Actually this thread is funny + good and people going "we had a real book thread that made it all the way to page six! What more do you want" is reason enough to justify its existence.
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Jul 11, 2014 14:23
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Actually it's just funny that people format their posts so viewers can read as little as possible, in a forum about books. "Give me your book recommendations, no time to read!"
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Jul 11, 2014 21:10
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You should look down your nose at bad prose and overwhelmingly conservative themes, which happen to coincide with sf/fantasy nine times out of ten. When I talk about genre fiction (and I'll be honest, I talk about it a lot more than I do real literature) I pretty much concede from the start that it isn't going to achieve any kind of technical mastery and just focus on the message and politics. The exceptions should be treasured of course but it's not hard to get goons to do that in the first place, while it's incredibly hard to sustain a thread about anything else.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:22
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CestMoi posted:If you are writing expressly with the purpose of "wouldn't it be sick if rthere were dinosaurs in Chicago" then you work is less likely to endure the ages than someone who is writing to cpnvey a brutal image of the human condition IMO Ephemeral lit studies a hundred years from now are gonna be hella rad, though.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:35
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edit: I was going to argue about Walt Whitman but it turns out half the poets I would have preferred to him didn't start writing until their 30s and thus can't really be counted as 19th century. Welp! I still think "no other choice" is an exaggeration, though. The 19th century can't be that bad. 
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 04:08
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All Nines posted:How modern are we talking? If there are any living poets who are actually good I haven't encountered them yet, so recommendations would be great. Maybe he means Modern with a capital M. Turn of the century types, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, all those guys.
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Jul 15, 2014 15:17
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Nobody in the Kafka thread would have any faith in its value. It'd be full of half-finished posts and when it ran its course they'd probably be so embarassed by it all they'd ask for it to be sent to the gas chamber.
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Jul 15, 2014 15:42
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Translated poetry owns, you just have to get over the idea that it's the original composition, because honey, it ain't.
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Jul 21, 2014 00:55
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CestMoi posted:There are no good books that are easy to read. Look at this joker never read Hemingway in highschool.
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Jul 31, 2014 19:57
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What I take away from this argument is that y'all probably chew the covers of your books.
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Aug 4, 2014 07:32
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Nabokov's short stories are pretty approachable compared to Pale Fire, if you want another alternative. Let me see if I can find the exact collection I'm thinking of. edit: It was Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 23:37
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Scarlet Letter owns, it's one of the most fun things you read in highschool. A story about obscenely hypocritical religious people, oppressed lovers, and how much small town life sucks? Sign teenage me the hell up.
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Aug 31, 2014 17:29
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LLCoolJD posted:As a rough survey of the 20th century's respected books and authors that's a useful collection. The rankings themselves are ridiculous. James Joyce and Ayn Rand have their strong suits, but their novels don't sit alone atop Mount Olympus as peak (no pun intended) literature. Please do tell me about Ayn Rand's "strong suits."
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Aug 31, 2014 21:56
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LLCoolJD posted:How many female authors of her day wrote with such zeal? And here I was afraid this thread had stopped being funny. e: The women's suffrage movement in America came to a head within her lifetime, and she was contemporary with Virginia Woolf, Ida Tarbell, Harper Lee, Dorothy Parker... Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 23:27
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Rand differs from the contemporaries I listed in that she's an awful hack advancing an even worse cause. Also, journalism and essays are literary forms, which is why I mentioned womens' suffrage. (And Ida Tarbell, for that matter.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 01:38
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Ras Het posted:Unless you have Infinite Time that's a really absurd task to take on. Try reading The Bible and then report back on whether that was a lot of fun. I did this as a teenager and it actually was a lot of fun, and it gave me a frame of reference for a lot of other art and literature that I draw on to this day. I heartily recommend it. (Just don't read it for the same reason I did, I was a snotty kid and I wanted to count contradictions or some dumb poo poo.)
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Sep 30, 2014 15:19
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The Doctor posted:I've been in the process of reading the Old Testament for getting on two years and I'm finally almost finished. I have a hard time believing anyone else has subjected themselves to this, especially for the purpose of just being snarky; it's been an incredibly arduous task. It takes hours just to read 20 pages. Which translation you use makes a huge difference. Find one of the ones that's more about the beauty and readability of the language rather than perfect literal accuracy and especially don't pick one just because it was the traditional English translation for centuries. e: Obviously these guidelines might change if you're reading it as a believer or as a student of history or whatever, but if you're approaching it as literature that's what I'd do. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 17:25
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Kit's Big Book of Fart Jokes with the Devil
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Oct 27, 2014 18:40
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juniperjones posted:Not all literature is Moby-Dick. I wouldn't be too hard on him, not everybody is cut out for reading. I mean, he doesn't want to read literary classics, you evidently didn't want to read the 30 pages between his post and the end of the thread. v v
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Oct 28, 2014 03:17
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