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Name: Safety Biscuits Number: 100 Booklord's challenge: Yes
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Dec 31, 2016 08:30
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:54 |
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Nice wildcard. I'm off to a slow start. 1. Angkor by Michael D. Coe 2. The Translator by John Crowley 3. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss Angkor is a non-fiction book about the Khmer Empire. A bit heavy on geography at first and kings and dates later on, but apparently the only source for how people actually lived in Angkor is an incomplete account from a Chinese visitor who was there for a few months in 1296. Highlights: priests ritually deflowering pre-pubescent girls, thieves putting their hands in boiling oil as a trial by ordeal. Coe tries to make it interesting. Some nice photos. The Translator is a novel about an American student meeting an exiled Russian poet in 1962. Has a lot of imagery about ice snow etc. being bad due to the Cold War, cold, geddit? but much of it rather moving and mysterious. The bit about being a runaway kid during the Revolution were good. I felt Crowley was repeating himself a bit too much stylistically (the wind imagery is also in Daemonomania). Read Keats. Tristes Tropiques: Messy, noisy, only about half is the main course (fieldwork in Brazil), the rest being reflections on anthropology, writing, Islam, India, etc., autobiography, and only vaguely relevant narrative. A collage, written in haste. The flow of his ideas, unbound by narrative, is baggy and capacious. It's a book of philosophy interrupted by other stuff, not a travel book. The world in it is dying and almost hopeless. It's funny and dense with interesting details and narrative. The anti-Islam stuff at the back is funny. Groke posted:7. Among Others by Jo Walton. Set in 1979/1980, it's either the tale of a 15-year-old Welsh girl dealing with reconnecting with her estranged father after losing her twin sister and getting away from an unstable and abusive mother; or the same girl wading in fairies and magic and saving the world from her mother who's an evil witch. In either case she's doing it while trying to adapt to boarding-school life, getting some kind of social life together, and reading an awful lot of classic and then-current science fiction, and discovering SF fandom. Obviously has some elements of autobiography in there (presumably not so much in the fairies and saving-the-world department). Thought this was a sweet book. It's definitely a fantasy by the end, and it's really not good either; I posted in the sf thread about it already. Twelve already? Cheer up, I'm sure you'll find a new job soon 
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Feb 1, 2017 02:19
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What's wrong with it? Urne-Burial is short, not too hard to find, and a way off the beaten track. Sounds like a perfect wildcard to me. Read The Garden of Cyrus with it too, they were originally published together. ulvir posted:I'm not going to pretend to understand half of Gravity's Rainbow, but I enjoyed it for the most part. I loved how full of intertextuality this book was, ranging from Homer's classic plays to burlesque, as well as speculative linguistics. Guess I have to reread it in the future, cause the structure just screams "repeated readings". What do you mean by speculative linguistics? It's been so long since I've read it that I've no idea what you're talking about.
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Feb 1, 2017 11:31
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Franchescanado posted:I feel like this is a reference to the Kenosha Kid gag? ulvir posted:speculative might not be the correct phrasing, but around the midpoint Pynchon goes on for several pages discussing phonetics in a bunch of languages (some of which I believe are fictional) and a grapheme. reminded me of Borges tbh I don't remember this section at all but I have a vague idea it's something to do with Tchitcherine. Man there was so much in that book and so much went over my head.
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Feb 2, 2017 06:23
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Ras Het posted:Also their conservative party is called Left No that's the UK.
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Feb 3, 2017 19:49
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4 Hadrian VII by Baron Corvo/Fr. Rolfe 5 Hamlet by William Shakespeare 6 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 7 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany 8-9 Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun Hadrian VII by Baron Corvo/Fr. Rolfe Horrid Edwardian gay Mary Sue racist Catholic Classically educated idiosyncratic wish fulfilment drivel. Hamlet by William Shakespeare It's good. It's Christian. It's funny. The gravedigger is the only guy who's Hamlet's equal in a text lousy with mirrors (Horatio, Laertes, Ophelia, Claudius). Better constructed than Lear but not as extreme. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Gravity's Rainbow for kids. I should have read it when I was a teenager. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany Two linked essays. The essay is about cruising in Times Square, and there's a bit where a woman is nearly thrown out of a porn cinema because “This is a nice place”. It's interesting, but the second one is much deeper and more theoretical – it's a marxian analysis of cross-class, accidental, contact, and intra-class, deliberate, networking. Unfortunately I haven't read enough theory to understand it, so I won't say more. Recommended if you want to consider that public sex might be morally good. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun The complete short stories by a Modernist who brought written Chinese into the Twentieth Century by shifting the register from Literary/Classical Chinese to vernacular. Really good stories – moving, historically important, funny, scathing, satirical. Very involved with contemporary Chinese happenings (written in the 1920s). Sometimes seems to be re-inventing Modernism by himself, without models; one story even has brief stream of consciousness. Few duds. Translation into US English by William A. Lyell is also good. Strongly recommended. (Counted as two books because that's how it was originally published, btw.)
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Apr 3, 2017 17:12
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Wildcard me droogs
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Aug 10, 2017 09:29
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USMC_Karl posted:I'll offer you one, but feel free to turn me down. I've already bought The Fishermen, but I'll keep an eye open for this one, too.
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Aug 17, 2017 22:19
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Haven't updated for ages and I'm never going to make the target now v vThe Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan An American flower child goes on holiday to Europe and dies. Years later, her younger sister follows to discover what happened. Slow start. Dionysiac. It's really irritating that the older sister is named Faith. The younger, Phoebe, is convincingly damaged by her experiences; it's not always fun to read. A really impressive debut. The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin I forgot to note anything about this at the time, or post in the thread, but it was interesting and the sturcture matched the circle/line imagery nicely. Here, There, Elsewhere by William Least Heat-Moon Collected travel writing by the author of Blue Highways. Most of it's good with occasional lapses, but the articles about travelling to the UK are weak. I'm not sure if that's because he's out of his knowledge, or looks better when he's talking about stuff I don't know about. Exotics and Retrospectives by Lafcadio Hearn The guy who wrote Kwaidan. Five longish essays about Japanese culture – frogs, musical insects, climbing Mt. Fuji, Zen, and inscriptions for the dead – which are interesting, and ten short ones with occult drivel explaining why people like blue and not red, and stuff. Borders on  . The second half is really overwritten, I suppose because he has nothing to actually write about.The Trader, the Owner, the Slave by James Walvin History book about British slavery/abolition, in the form of three biographies: a slaver who later became a priest and abolitionist; a plantation owner in Jamaica; and a slave, in fact, Oludah Equiano. Interesting, but pretty shallow and unsatisfying. Interesting to see it focus in on slavery, more and more intimate. About Writing by Samuel R. Delany Part creative-writing instruction, part discussion of how to make a career of writing, part discussion of the nature of the canon/literature etc. Gives the impression that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the writer's life, equally inspiring and forbidding. V. by Thomas Pychon Of a piece with GR, but not as good, you can see the development though. Some really good stuff, still. Very confusing... The Terrors of the Night by Thomas Nashe Elizabethan pamphlet about how awful dreams are, also demonology and why fortune-tellers are all liars, exuberant, apparently improvised, vigorous, echoes of Othello and Macbeth. Conamara Blues by John O'Donohue Irish poetry. Stark, lyrical, gets repetetive. Mostly they are about nature and meditative stillness. The Jesus poems are good and there's a few more human ones towards the end, which make a nice change – it was getting wearying and humourless. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare It's a comedy, but almost a tragedy – twist it a bit and it's Othello. I was expecting Beatrice and Benedick to be the main draw, but they're only really a subplot. Don John, the bastard, would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. The central fake-out scene doesn't really hang together (why's Hero sleeping alone? How do Borachio and Margaret not wake her up? What's Margaret's deal? Why does Borachio turn his coat, didn't he realise it was this serious? And why doesn't Conrade say anything at all after being arrested?) Also, it's odd that Beatrice is never explicitly identified as Antonio's daughter. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë My fourth or so read. This time I particularly noticed that the Christ figure is wrong, quite a few big references to Sense and Sensibility and Oedipus (and less important ones to a range of imaginative writers, especially 1001 Nights) and that Jane fucks a dude with no hand or eyes, ugh. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Logical to read next. Clever reworking of the original, especially Bertha/Anoinetta's name and the house-burning at the beginning. Good descriptions of the landscape. Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom Middle class. The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma This was nominated for the Booker? Why? Journeyman stuff, especially the overuse of flashbacks. I think the Igbo proverbs were good, but I'm too ignorant to say if they were really good or just cliché. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin The trick with the protagonist was good. Shame about the paucity of landscape descriptions, which kind of hobble it as epic, and the basic metaphor of orogenes = the oppressed is silly. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez An amazing novel. Crammed and pulsing with life. Fascinating. I was bewitched by the opening, then found that pleasure developing, darkening, recomplicating as the story emerged. I should read about the history of Columbia to get more out of it, but what I got was horrible enough. And yet, there's hope too.
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Oct 5, 2017 05:45
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code:The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane Not really interesting; it seems kind of flat and mechanical, although it's not terrible either The Man with Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-yi Excellent novel, like Murakami but better. The parts reflect each other and refer to each other, it's theme and structure mixing. It's bleak but touching and realistic; hits the spot between denial and despair. It's modern and up to date but in touch with the outside world. It's a look at the depressing side of Taiwan, especially if you're Aboriginal. So good. Stay for the metatextuality. Oh, and the sex is good too. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Ignatius Reilly probably isn't as hilarious as he seemed in 1981, but some of the comic setpieces are, and the setting and dialogue are really good. Shame about the ending. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 05:01
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Do you know something about literature, though.
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Nov 29, 2017 07:14
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:54 |
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I read about 35 books in total (out of a target of 100) so that was a disaster numbers wise. I also failed the booklord challenge, in particular not posting in any of the threads for the three or so books I read. vv
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Jan 11, 2018 16:57
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