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Bundt Cake posted:Id say skip the plague and just read the stranger and the trial by kafka. I really enjoyed The Plague personally, a lot more than The Stranger.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:17
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Bleeding Edge was probably my least favorite Pynchon book. I thought I would love it a little more since it takes place in my own coming-of-age wheelhouse rather than being set in the 60s or whatever but I found that to actually be a detriment. None of the characters are even slightly memorable to me. It could just be that tech stuff bores me in general though
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May 12, 2015 17:24
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Pursuant to the thread title, I just finished Lolita.
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May 18, 2015 21:39
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I am about to finish Pale Fire and so far this has been one of the most amusing books I've ever read, although the way the narrative weaves together leaves a lot to wonder about.
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Jul 26, 2015 07:13
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He doesn't even strike me as that much of an rear end in a top hat, just intensely sad and lonely. Of course I'm still not sure exactly what parts of his story "really" happened in the first place.
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Jul 26, 2015 11:29
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What does the Real Literature thread think of Aldous Huxley? I read Island which was... Not great, as far as literature is concerned, but Utopias are always less interesting than their shithole counterparts. I enjoyed the style of writing even if the novel fell flat in the plot department. I also really enjoyed The Doors of Perception to the point that I wish he had just written Island as a treatise on the ideal society rather than couching it in the form of a novel.
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Aug 4, 2015 03:31
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Burning Rain posted:i tried to read'island' as a kid because i thought it's an adventure story like robinson crusoe. i took it from the library two or three times but never finished it. are there adventures in the second half? No, there isn't really a plot. It's basically dude gets injured and sits in a hospital bed while the entirety of Western civilization gets brutally owned in the arena of ideas
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Aug 4, 2015 17:54
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ulvir posted:discovering that the plague is better than the stranger This post is from like 3 months ago but this was exactly my reaction to Camus. I was completely indifferent to The Stranger and I loved The Plague. I tried to read The Fall but the second person narrative was weird V. Illych L. posted:oh just put up The Plague by Camus or something I second this I finished The Master & Margarita yesterday and, while I enjoyed it thoroughly, I know that my depth of understanding of the book was lacking due to my unfamiliarity with much of the mores of Soviet Russia that the book is steeped in. The book is usually billed as a satire, but the satirical elements were a bit lost on me. There is an obvious dig at the atheistic Soviet attitudes, but I don't quite see how those elements are satirized. The book reads like a Pagan-themed fantasy novel at parts, and the whole ball scene played out in my mind like something out of an animated movie. Heath fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 05:17
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I def wanna go back to it sometime soon. I just finished The Handmaid's Tale and enjoyed that a lot so perhaps I will revisit The Fall
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Nov 30, 2015 05:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Switchblades behind the 7/11 Blunderbuss duel at dawn
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Dec 25, 2015 01:33
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blue squares posted:Whats your major? I would assume Human Sexuality
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Jan 13, 2016 01:44
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Quagga posted:Have any of you read The Master and the Margarita? I tried reading it a couple months ago -and was digging it- but I felt like I needed a companion to understand all the Russian poo poo... so I stopped reading it. I felt like I was missing some of the humor either due to culture differences or the translation I was reading. Any tips on that one since I'm stupid? The book is funny and entertaining independent of the satirical points it tries to make. I know dick about Russia in general and I still found it worth a read. It's a farcical fantasy story at the core of it.
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Mar 6, 2016 20:17
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DoctorG0nzo posted:I always joke that The Master and Margarita's humor, especially Behemoth, seemed like a weird 1920s prophecy of the internet-age, non-sequitur heavy, frequently dark/violent humor. Definitely the most "modern" comedic work I've read from before 1950 or so. The whole theater scene felt like it should have been animated.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:43
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blue squares posted:That's what your imagination is for "Could have" rather than "should have" is probably more accurate. The book feels like it could have been a Don Bluth production.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:11
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I'm reading Pynchon's Against the Day and so far I already like it way better than Vineland or Bleeding Edge, which are the last two I read. I feel like he writes two different sorts of novels, ones more like V., Gravity's Rainbow, AtD and then more "casual" ones like Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice that are fun but not as engaging to me.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:21
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The only DFW I've read was part of The Pale King. I picked it up mostly because it takes place in Peoria, which is where I grew up, and his descriptions of the place are spot on, especially the color of the Illinois river, which he describes as "bourbon" colored.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:47
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I find it hard to reread any book even if I loved it. It feels like there's too much else to read to spend time rereading
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Mar 8, 2016 05:59
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mallamp posted:I have even worse problem. I have really lovely memory (probably because I'm 16 and depressed) so I can't brag with cool quotations or even details of stuff I've read unless I read it twice AND I mostly don't read things twice. As a result I spend hundreds of hoiurs reading stuff I'll forget. gently caress literature actually I can never remember quotes from books so I tend to take photos of them with my phone as I read. Basically what I'm saying is you would be justified if you killed me, a millennial.
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Mar 9, 2016 01:20
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Criminal Minded posted:^^ lol M&D will be my next one. GR and maybe Pale Fire are the only books I would consider rereading because they seem like the kind of book you almost have to run through twice.
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Mar 9, 2016 01:35
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Nakar posted:Have you considered the use of bookmarks, pencils, highlighters, or ebook notes? Because any of those things would probably be better than taking photos of a book. Marking books is a sin. And so are ebooks. I mostly send parts I like to friends.
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Mar 9, 2016 02:20
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Tree Goat posted:if there is a part of a book i want to remember i just repeat it, aloud, gradually increasing in volume but decreasing in phrase frequency until i go from whispering as fast possible to shouting at full volume at seemingly random intervals. I'm told this is the best way to read Finnegans Wake.
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Mar 9, 2016 02:30
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I loving hate when people write in books because if I try to go back through the book and read it myself my attention gets inordinately drawn to the things they highlighted when usually the things people choose to highlight are trivial parts of the text or circling a single word and writing a bunch of question marks next to it. I can't say I've found any writing in a book that was insightful enough for me to have appreciated it being there more than I was annoyed by it. Plus most of the time when I do find a book with writing the notes mysteriously cease about 40 pages in
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Mar 9, 2016 19:27
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Reading should be like nature hike rules, take only memories, leave only greasy thumbprints and stains from rice falling out of your Qdoba burrito
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Mar 9, 2016 20:08
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Who ruined the thread title
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Mar 10, 2016 01:12
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I feel like the books with the best marginalia are the ones that don't tend to end up in the hands of anyone but the owner, so nobody ever sees them until they end up in an estate sale.
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Mar 10, 2016 08:20
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blue squares posted:Look at this poo poo. People are so selfish If you're highlighting more than 1/3rd of the entire loving page just put a sticky note on it jfc. Like what is the purpose of being like "hmm everything on this page seems important, better highlight everything except this sentence so I remember" Re: libraries as homeless shelters. I've only recently moved here and spent the day at the library yesterday and it does seem to be 90% homeless people hanging out and reading or using the computers and frankly I am glad that they can do that. Heath fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 19:34
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Gorn Myson posted:Marginalia and highlights are fantastic. All of you that don't like it, please give me your address so I can come by and draw all over your books. I will show no mercy. What is the point of ]* over three quarters of the page instead of just marking the page Edit: lol at "Bush." though. Heath fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 19:50
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Am I supposed to enjoy reading Fernando Pessoa or am I supposed to feel dead inside
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Mar 11, 2016 22:52
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Hate Fibration posted:I finally started reading the copy of Against the Day I've had for ages, and the names of the characters alone make the book worth it. Sup AtD buddy  If you've read Vineland there are some nods.
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Mar 13, 2016 04:21
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There's a family mentioned offhand named the Uckerfays.
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Mar 15, 2016 07:44
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The Dennis System posted:Honestly, I don't see how anyone could enjoy The Pale King. Sentences describing different time periods just put in randomly in the middle of a paragraph about a completely different subject. Long paragraphs describing the details of accounting methods. I mean, I loved Infinite Jest, but the pale king is just unreadable. I guess it's probably just over my head. It takes place in my hometown of Peoria and his descriptions of some of its features (the river in particular, which he describes as "bourbon colored") are spot on so it has a personal charm for me.
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Mar 27, 2016 08:41
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I loved Pale Fire. It's kind of a slog your first time through because, depending on how you choose to read it, you're going to spend the first 90% of it trying to figure out what the gently caress is going on and why all the commentary won't shut the gently caress up about Zembla even though the word occurs exactly one time in the poem and none of his stories make a lot of sense until it slowly dawns on you that he is completely delusional about virtually every aspect of his life. There are two stories running and even though they are deeply intertwined it almost feels like it's by accident. It's such a clever way to deliver a story and casts a wide net of interpretations.
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Apr 5, 2016 08:17
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gently caress you right in the neck for making me aware of this
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Apr 10, 2016 21:38
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:Thomas Pynchon joins the forums, finds them not to his liking. I'm choosing to believe that's really him.
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May 12, 2016 08:41
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Speaking of Pynchon, I'm about 800 pages into Against the Day and my motivation to read it has ranked. I am loving determined to finish it and I'm trying to read at least 10 pages a day but it's going to take me a month at this rate. This is probably the longest single story I've ever read and keeping track of the 25 simultaneous plot threads among the mathematical terminology and space-time bending is daunting the hell out of me even though I have enjoyed most of this novel.
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May 14, 2016 08:51
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Nanomashoes posted:You're at the Eastern Europe and Central Asia parts, right? I can't imagine getting bored there, those are fantastic. It's not boredom as much as fatigue.
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May 14, 2016 20:28
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I picked up an old paperback copy of Borges' Ficciones. I have never read Borges, but I just opened at random to The Circular Ruins and enjoyed it a lot. Is the rest of his work mostly surrealist like this?
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May 15, 2016 23:27
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blue squares posted:now read The Plague
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Jun 9, 2016 17:40
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I've picked up Against the Day again and made some decent progress on it. I am definitely going to finish it god damnit, if only so I don't have to carry around this incredibly heavy book anymore. Kindle eReader whatever whatever don't care shut up
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Jun 10, 2016 00:57
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emdash posted:I love that book and even when I only get 200-400 pages into a reread, I feel like I got something out of it I'm kind of burned out on the second half of it and the Reef-Cyprian-Yashmeen love triangle on top of the dozen other characters having individual plots is getting exhausting to mentally sort through. That said, it's worth it for the occasional moments of weird brilliance.
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Jun 10, 2016 07:28
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