Reading

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paulofilmo
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Reading

Post by paulofilmo »

My summer job finished on Friday, so I'm trying not to go crazy while I wait to hear back from potential employers.

I thought I'd try reading! I need to get lost in something.

So, tell me what you recommend. What are you reading (if anything), and what do you think of it?

Do you even like to read?

Criticker book club?


Here's a list I'm interested in. Thoughts on these are most welcome:

TROPIC OF CANCER by henry miller
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by ernest hemingway
INFINITE JEST by david foster wallace
THE FALL by albert camus
On the Heights of Despair by Emil Cioran
DUBLINERS by james joyce
THE BELL JAR by sylvia plath
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

although i should probably begin with something much more simple.

Suture Self
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Re: Reading

Post by Suture Self »

paulofilmo wrote:FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by ernest hemingway
INFINITE JEST by david foster wallace
THE FALL by albert camus
DUBLINERS by james joyce
THE BELL JAR by sylvia plath

Of the books listed, I've read these. Not really a fan of most of them, to be honest, although I did like Dubliners, especially the last story "The Dead" - which, btw, was adapted into a film by John Huston and released in 1987. I think it was his last movie. It's good, imo! Wait, why am I talking about movies?

Anyway, sorry if the following comments are negative cos I don't mean any offense:

If you want to read Hemingway, I'd honestly recommend reading The Old Man and the Sea instead, which is my favorite (plus it's short). For Whom The Bell Tolls isn't bad, but it's a bit tedious, and Hemingway can't write female characters worth shit. If you want to read a great book about the Spanish Civil War, check out George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

I disliked Infinite Jest because it felt like DFW wrote down every thought that went through his head for a period of several years and entangled them all into a bloated, broken narrative. Reading it is like having access to DFW's inner monologue and it's never-ending. DFW is also clearly depressed, so it's a really sad book; basically 1200 pages of hurt. Which is fine, but I couldn't get into it, although I'll admit it has several great characters and several great moments. You just have to slog through a lot of tedium to get to those moments. I like his non-fiction essays a lot more than his fiction.

The Fall by Camus isn't bad but I prefer The Stranger, which packs a bigger punch and has, imo, a more appealing and dreamlike narrative. The Fall is essentially one long philosophical conversation.

It's been a while since I read The Bell Jar (read it in high school) but I remember it being downbeat and not amounting to much. It seems to have this reputation for having great insight into the mind of a depressed girl but I didn't find it all that affecting.

If you want some stuff that's short and sweet here's a few novellas/short story compilations I like:
Candide by Voltaire
Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar
Tenth of December by George Saunders
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Amulet by Robert Bolano

ShogunRua
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Re: Reading

Post by ShogunRua »

paulofilmo wrote:Here's a list I'm interested in. Thoughts on these are most welcome:

TROPIC OF CANCER by henry miller


Bizarre and unique, but frankly, not that good. Not particularly transgressive by modern standards, either.

paulofilmo wrote:DUBLINERS by james joyce


Not a fan of Joyce overall, but this is my favorite among his works, if only because it's the most coherent.

lisa-
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Re: Reading

Post by lisa- »

i haven't read much and haven't read any of those, although INFINITE JEST sounds amazing. it's probably my favourite book title of all time, so i hope it's good.

but if anyone's interested, here's basically a complete list of all the "critically acclaimed" "best books ever" that i've read.

i thought these were good:

- blindness (josé saramago)
- the crying of lot 49 (thomas pynchon)
- the metamorphosis (franz kafka)
- the stranger (albert camus)

these are okay or decent:

- 1984 (george orwell)
- 2001: a space odyssey (isaac asimov)
- brave new world (aldous huxley)
- the chrysalids (john wyndham)
- do androids dream of electric sheep? (philip k dick)
- fahrenheight 451 (ray bradbury)
- we (yevgeni zamyatin)

i didn't like these:

- animal farm (george orwell)
- anthem (ayn rand)
- the great gatsby (scott fitzgerald)
- island (aldous huxley)
- it can't happen here (sinclair lewis)
- lord of the flies (william golding)
- the time machine (hg wells)
- war of the worlds (hg wells)

paulofilmo
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…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Post by paulofilmo »

This is great - thank you all!

I've started reading Hard To Be a God, and I'm struggling a bit as my mind zones-out and I have to re-read sections in order to understand what's going on. I remember this not happening with Crime and Punishment, and Woolf's The Waves (which was sort of a meditation to read). Oh, and Ham on Rye, but I feel I should stay away from CB, like I should stay away from crack and dehumanising porn.

Anyway, sorry if the following comments are negative cos I don't mean any offense:


no, no. I had invested almost nothing in that bunch. I picked them out via quotes which I quite liked. A spring-board for literary shenanigans.

I've found a copy of Impressions of Africa (roussel), but intend to try The Old Man and the Sea and The Crying of Lot 49 (lisa -- I've read 1+ book from each of your designations, and I would put them in the same positions. So might use them if I like the Pynchon)(Infinite Jest comes from Hamlet. I play a computer game with a latinate jackal. He says "Alas" when he loses, I say "poor yorick" because I am pretentious.).

I haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five. I see it everywhere.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iBZ ... 22&f=false

However, it might be too heavy to begin here.

----

Thanks again, you sexy fucks.
Last edited by paulofilmo on Tue Oct 27, 2015 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Stewball
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Re: Reading

Post by Stewball »

I get 98% of my fiction from movies, so I thought I'd throw in a very momentous non-fiction book: Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles by Ruth Kastner (2015). If you aren't into this stuff, it'll be a guaranteed sleep aid. But I think this is a scientific breakthrough of cosmological proportions, equivalent with, and the next step beyond, Einstein's relativity--and which Ironically deals with an area of physics that had Einstein completely frustrated. It builds on a theory first suggested by Richard Feynman (the greatest physicist in the second half if not the whole 20th Century), and initially codified by UoW physicist, John Cramer in the 1980s--and which physicists have been trying to ignore ever since.

FYI, FWIW, Just sayin', etc.

MacSwell
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Re: Reading

Post by MacSwell »

lisa- wrote:- 2001: a space odyssey (isaac asimov)


That was Arthur C. Clarke, not Asimov.

karamazov.
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Re: Reading

Post by karamazov. »

paulofilmo wrote:So, tell me what you recommend.

I suspect you may enjoy Salinger's "Franny and Zooey."
btw, if you use goodreads, there's a criticker group on there.

paulofilmo wrote:Do you even like to read?

Some favorites, if you're interested:
[spoiler]Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, W.S. Burroughs, Andrea Dworkin, Baldwin, Genet, Rabelais, Melville, Dante, Marx/Engels, Adorno, W.E.B. du Bois, Hegel, Woolf, Pound, Whitman, J.G. Ballard, Pynchon, P.B. Shelley, Hesse, Kafka, George Eliot, Mishima, Nabokov, Luxemburg, Lao Tzu, Schopenhauer, Salinger's F&Z, Philip K. Dick's "VALIS," Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," C.L.R. James' "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution."[/spoiler]

kyvetti
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Re: Reading

Post by kyvetti »

paulofilmo wrote:A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima


I've read these two. Lermontov is nice, maybe considered a bit second-string for Russian classics, I suspect partly because it doesn't go for scope or universality, it is more a cynical look to its own time (The title is ironic, and of course maybe one can notice a bit of applicability in other times too...). Worth a try definitely.

For Mishima I'd rather recommend Temple of the Golden Pavilion, After the Banquet or The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Confessions of a Mask is to be read if you eventually want to understand Mishima the person better but he has better books.

lisa-
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Re: Reading

Post by lisa- »

Maaxwell wrote:
lisa- wrote:- 2001: a space odyssey (isaac asimov)


That was Arthur C. Clarke, not Asimov.


well, yes it was.

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