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Talmonis posted:That's not to say that all "high literature" are boring, but it just seems that way when Twain and Austen are held in such high regard. It doesn't help matters that "popular fiction" is derided for the very sin of being created for entertainment. Normally I just sit back and enjoy this thread but if you think Twain and Austen are boring, have your heard examined, they're both hilarious. Even if Austen is a bit of work because she doesn't explain herself for people reading two hundred years later, you could read, you know, an annotated edition or something. And if you're going to watch an Austen adaption, watch the BBC one.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:03
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computer parts posted:This is doubly true if you're relying on cultural context that isn't present in the modern day (i.e., the whole nobility thing is pretty foreign for American readers). Fortunately it's almost totally irrelevant too, as she doesn't write about the nobility, and even your ignorant American readers know that nobility are oldfashioned, hereditary, and think they're superior to everyone else.
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Jun 19, 2014 03:30
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That was Tibor Fischer's review of Yellow Dog. It ran on the Telegraph's leader pages, and it made fun of the title. I remembered there being a row about it, but I just looked on Wikipedia and apparently he was so upset with its reception he moved to Uruguay for two years. Good stuff.
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Jun 21, 2014 17:40
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Oct 15, 2014 04:02
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JackKnight posted:T'was not my intent to troll. The author is dead.
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Oct 25, 2014 11:20
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Earwicker posted:Actually it's a real pain in the rear end to hold all those books with one hand while trying to push the boulder with the other Try balancing them on your head, it's good for your deportment.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:14
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CestMoi posted:Nah Uncle Toby says something about Tristrams mum not wanting a male midwife because she doesn't want anyone to see her **** at which point Tristram's dad snaps his pipe and ends the conversation and Tristram goes on this big thing about how not having the word said is more inherently funny than saying the word and he's trying to guess what word Toby might've said, if he hadn't been cut off. I think I read it wrong and he actually was guessing words like "backside" and "covered way" and decided covered way would be most likely, on account of Toby's dick being crushed by falling masonry. Hurr hurr, "cut off".
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Jan 22, 2015 05:35
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Libluini posted:Yeah, that kind of happens if you want to write six books and plan for it, then die while writing the third one. Then someone else has to take what was written and some notes and somehow construct a book with a sensible ending out of it. Makes me wish Peake could have had someone to finish the series, like Robert Jordan had. Maeve Peake wrote another one which was published a year or so back, the title was Titus something.
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Jan 29, 2015 02:03
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all according to keikakuAngusPodgorny posted:And sometimes the translators leave a word untranslated for no reason I can discern like: "In the evening when the wind had dropped a little, they went out on the groyne [pier] to see the steamer come in." (Nabakov, The Lady with the Dog). They're even both one-syllable words, so it's not like just saying "pier" would change the rhythm, certainly not as much as sticking an annotation in did. That's not even untranslated. "Groyne" is a perfectly good English word. Footnotes are the best for stuff like this. gently caress endnotes though.
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Feb 12, 2015 02:05
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I like the implication that Papa looked at Fitzgerald's wang but not vice versa.
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Mar 18, 2015 15:48
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What are you saying, Morrissey has never come. That is is being worshipped by thousands of Smiths fans face.
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Apr 23, 2015 15:02
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Grimson posted:Yeah but it's all after the fact including the gospels, and anyways what got canonized as Mainline Xtianity had more to do with legitimating the institutional church that had emerged than with identifying the oldest, trillest, most purestrain Christ (or assessed the latter in light of the former, at least) Quit being a loving child and read some non-canonical gospels.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:28
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Smoking Crow posted:I thought it was A Child Called It but that's a different book by a terrible person 
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Sep 15, 2015 15:05
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IIRC the new translation of Jin Ping Mei is by a father-son team, which must have been interesting. Goons are sure to enjoy it, there's a bit where a guy is getting a bj and needs to piss so the girl tells him to piss in her mouth.Mel Mudkiper posted:Its their version of The Scarlet Letter more or less in terms of loathing it because they were forced to read it young and just not connecting with it. Story of the Stone is mainly popular with women 40+. Don't forget that written Chinese back then was very different to now, even though it's not that old a book.
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Oct 27, 2015 07:15
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Popular Human posted:A pun derail. Oh, boy. No, if the thread's been derailed, it's no longer a pun the tracks. I'm reading The Moonstone, it's not bad. The narrators are great fun.
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Nov 4, 2015 16:54
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iccyelf posted:Anaïs Nin. Kathy Acker. Virginie Despentes' Baise Moi. These are all good pricks.
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Feb 7, 2016 10:04
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http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/03/hemingway-reassures-fitzgerald-about-his-penis.html Relax, you can just google F Scott Fitzgerald penis instead. Much more respectable.
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Jul 27, 2016 15:44
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud This had a great first chapter but the rest of it was about twice as long as it should be, not that good overall.
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Aug 2, 2016 08:42
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Arrrthritis posted:I want to read Journey to the West. Anybody got a version they recommend? Anthony Yu's translation is the only complete English version, I think. Waley's only translates a fraction of the text.
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Aug 14, 2016 02:24
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:I didn't really like the book much though I love Russian literature from that time. About the only part I really loved was the description of the harvest - it was a great passage. That's great but what about the description of Karenin deciding to confront Anna and then chickening out? I also really liked the character descriptions, like Stiva's early on, or Vronsky doing his accounts, or his mum being angry with him because he was in love with Anna.
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Aug 19, 2016 04:26
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Solitair posted:Since someone asked about Journey to the West translations recently, how about Romance of the Three Kingdoms? What's the best translation of that? Moss Roberts. He's done a huge complete translation and an abridged version. There's also an older translation, but I haven't read it because it's in Wade-Giles; it's probably cheaper though.
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Aug 20, 2016 02:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The Man who was Thursday is one of the great pieces of Christian literature because it truly captures the judeo-christian God's essence as a passive aggressive manipulative rear end in a top hat The story is a nightmare, the point is that God's not like that at all.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:13
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A human heart posted:I'm just guessing here since I don't know anything about the publishing world but this probably has something to do with a lack of literary magazines or journals(or just magazines that will publish short stories)? I remember reading something comparing American writers now to the writers of like 40 years ago and they talked about how writers back then had a lot of different options for a story, you'd even get high profile guys publishing stories in playboy or other places and there were more opportunities to get published because of how many editors there were, whereas now there's like three magazines that anyone's heard of that will publish stories and they're all run by the same two people in New York. I imagine it's similar in other places as well, at least to some extent. The Playboy bit is because Hugh Hefner deliberately set out to make Playboy into a highbrow magazine as well as a girlie mag, and had the budget for it. Playboy used to be one of the best-paying markets in the world. These days, I don't think many general-interest magazines have the resources to do that, or the belief that printing short stories would be worthwhile. It's a vicious circle. Abalieno posted:It's so crushingly sad because it could almost be seen as what happened to DFW himself: he died after he tried hard to fix his addiction, and he could have probably lived a little longer if he didn't try so hard. You loving idiot, can't you see the differene between addiction and needing medicine to survive?
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Sep 22, 2016 17:29
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At this point the list of people who haven't won the Nobel is probably more impressive than those who have.
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Oct 1, 2016 12:04
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No man it's hilarious.
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Oct 13, 2016 14:44
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Yeah, I agree. A prose version isn't that faithful to the experience of hearing Homer perform in archaic Greek, but you've got to admit that a poetic translation would be verse.
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Oct 28, 2016 02:51
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true.spoon posted:At the risk of making enemies: I am some 150 pages int Gravity's Rainbow and I can't remember the last time a book has made me this angry. I always finish what I start but Pynchon is trying his hardest to make me stop. First of all, I hate his style. It's willfully obtuse to the extreme, the constant listings get really tiresome and occasionally branch out into pages after pages of basically unreadable wild associations. Everything gets bogged down with unrelated details which feel like an exercise in creative writing (similar to how every character needs to get some quirky traits but this is a pet peeve of mine and I won't hold it against him). What a man smokes while writing a novel is his own business.
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Nov 14, 2016 14:27
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:im worried that if I sign up for secret santa one of the other book barn posters will assign me a brandon sanderson novel A legit fear, but the number one rule for "what present should I get" is "read his post where he said what he wanted". If you say no fantasy crap, you shouldn't get any. Tree Goat posted:Already got mine picked out Well come on and sign up then!
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Nov 17, 2016 15:29
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CestMoi posted:I will send a PDF chosen at random from my "Sex Magick" folder to all participants. Thanks for your generous offer! I'll email you after signups are finished to let you know how many PDFs you'll need to send me.
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Nov 21, 2016 17:00
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Bilirubin posted:For my next novel I am debating between the following: Don Quixote, I want to read it too and if three of us are reading it we can start a thread 
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Nov 22, 2016 13:27
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I just finished The Virgin Suicides and it's well-written, it's interesting, it's got Joyce's fingerprints all over it, but it would have been a hell of a lot better with any actual characters in it.
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Dec 14, 2016 18:19
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at the date posted:Fantasy is like pornography: I know it when I see it. Adult fantasy: pornography. Children's fantasy: fantasy.
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Dec 23, 2016 18:40
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Burning Rain posted:If you mean Pevear and Volokhonsky, they are supposed to be the good ones. Yeah there's this one article saying they're rubbish but all translators get that and Pevear does that to other translators too. I don't read Russian so I don't know how good the translations are but I like them and they're pretty literal so they can't be all bad.
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Jan 3, 2017 07:48
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So Marlon James is writing a fantasy trilogy. http://ew.com/books/2017/01/10/marlon-james-dark-star-fantasy-trilogy/ It's literally for 12-year-olds.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:16
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Shibawanko posted:It's really fun in parts, specifically where he describes the gay bar which is probably the only bit of straight up life affirming prose he's ever written. What about The Sound of Waves?
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Jan 13, 2017 02:09
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blue squares posted:Speaking of Lincoln in the Bardo, it's not even a novel. I thought about buying it because Saunders is doing a signing at my bookstore, but I looked through it and there are pages and pages of dialogue written out in the style of a script. Tons and tons of white space. There is no way it is anything more than a novella if you're going by word count. $28 is too much for such a short work. Look at Joyce padding out Ulysses with that Nighttown crap 
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Feb 25, 2017 03:45
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Feb 28, 2017 08:50
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Franchescanado posted:I've never read any of the Bronte sisters, or any Jane Austen for that matter. I've read Silas Marner by George Eliot, wasn't a fan. You should read Jane Eyre and Emma too. OTOH, the only good bit in Agnes Grey is when one of Agnes' brattish charges is torturing a baby bird so she drops a rock on it to put it out of its misery.
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Mar 2, 2017 16:30
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J_RBG posted:I read James Baldwin's Another Country, and it was v good. I went from that, which was all kinds of interesting, to the driest possible translation of Apuleius' The Golden rear end, which I'm giving up. Why are classicists so hosed. If your boring-rear end introduction stresses how funny and cool the book is, why would you make the prose come across like a cheat sheet for your boring class Try seeing what Steven Moore says, he's full of himself but knows a lively translation when he sees it. Have a glance at The Novel, An Alternative History.
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Mar 19, 2017 07:11
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Casaubon posted:I've only read the first volume but I think it works best as a reading list, it's more of a series of plot synopses than a history. There are other questionable aspects like in the 'Hebrew Novel' section where he presents the documentary hypothesis as fact and suggests that the only people who don't accept it are fundamentalists. It allows him to extract 'novels' from the Tanakh but his readings are fairly shallow in the light of the work of people like Robert Alter. Agreed, but although his attitude to religion is irritating, I can't fault him for not knowing everything. Unless you've been to university recently you're not going to know the documentary hypothesis isn't the state of the art.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:39
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