General Book Thread

[bob]

Does it get better though, cause the first one was just a load of nonsense that didn't go anywhere...

[jayseven]

Hell yes it gets better -- The Drawing Of The Three is a great book (it's the 2nd book in teh series) as it introduces two more characters and blends the 'two worlds', and expands the vision beyond the limited scope of the one-character first book. The third book (The Waste lands) builds on it really well too, showing the importance of each main character. Books 4 and 5 are a bit weak, but mainly because book 4 doesn't conclude well and people expected more -- but 6 and 7 are quicker paced and... well by then you're invested.

 

The Dark Tower series is a great 'easy read' when considered that it was out and written before a lot of modern TV series that have fed off of it. If it was written today it would perhaps be more approachable, but the series is worth sticking with -- and wraps up really well compared to other series!

[bob]

OK cool. The first few books are quite cheap anyway, so once I've read all the Gentleman Bastard series, I'll go back and try again.

 

I'd read that it was a great series, but nothing I read in The Gunslinger made me agree with that.

[Kav]

I recently read The Gunslinger by Stephen King, and it were rubbish...

 

I've been recommended the Dark Tower series, but this had put me off a little... although reading the comments on volume 2 I think I'll still give it a go.

 

I picked those up because the protagonist is called Pug. They're pretty good! There's a new one out soon right?

 

I know he's written many more books that are set in the same universe as the Riftwar Saga but I don't know if there's going to be a 4th book extending the saga itself. One of my workmates has read all Feist's books so he'd know but he's not in for me to ask.

[bob]

I know he's written many more books that are set in the same universe as the Riftwar Saga but I don't know if there's going to be a 4th book extending the saga itself. One of my workmates has read all Feist's books so he'd know but he's not in for me to ask.

 

Ah it might be one of the other ones that I've seen then. Definitely remember seeing another one which I didn't recognise, and assumed it was book 4...

[Pancake]

Did you read Dr. Sleep? It may be a sequel to The Shining but its got a different feel entirely. Well worth a read. :awesome:

 

I'll buy it if they publish it with a different cover. That cat... i can't even.

[Retro_Link]

I'll buy it if they publish it with a different cover. That cat... i can't even.

 

[Pancake]

[bob]

What if the book is about a smokey cat, huh guys? I think you are too quick to presume.

[Pancake]

And that is the only thing on this earth that could justify that cover.

[darksnowman]

Dr. Sleep isn't really about the cat. :P Its about Danny Torrance as an adult and isn't really like The Shining at all. A great read but different.

 

So you'll read The Drawing of the Three, Bob? Good man. (I had a feeling jayseven would back me up.) First time I read The Gunslinger I couldn't get into it but it all clicks with TDotT and then The Waste Lands.

 

Anyone for Mr. Mercedes?

[danielodom]

Have anyone started A Song of Ice and Fire ??

[dwarf]

Goddamnit, I had forgotten just how great Stranger in a Strange Land is! Currently reading it a second time, and goddamn. Top 5 sci-fi ever, no doubt. Heinlein is such a great author. Both this and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress should be mandatory reading for any sci-fi fan!

 

I actually only started this today, Kindle tells me I'm 10% through it. Disappointed if I'm honest - the dialogue/characters are really poor and the political stuff comes across as facile. Has pacing issues as well. Not my cup of tea bro, sorry, can't see myself persevering.

 

Downloaded The Wasp Factory afterwards, about a quarter of the way in. Not really much of a spoiler ahead, but one line killed me - basically there's this boy who's ever so slightly fucked in the head and he kills his cousin by hiding a snake in his prosthetic leg (he also blows up rabbits and finishes them off with a flamethrower):

 

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall [...] Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.

 

Deliciously dark.

 

///

 

Also finished Middlemarch (George Eliot) recently. Supposedly the best English novel and I can understand why it has achieved that status, even if I didn't fall in love with it myself. Was written in the late 19th century and my preconception of it was that it would be a typical stodgy marriage plot written by a demure woman, but how cripplingly wrong I was. The writing is loaded with irony throughout, subtle humour abound, and you really root for the characters to be successful, and Eliot also rather comically tells you off for judging the more latently flawed characters. She also deals in metafiction, illuminating her own novelistic processes with tidy metaphors whilst also criticising her own and others' writing. It's a fucking massive novel because it tackles a shit ton, a whole web of provincial life - the interconnectedness of people's lives and the damage and hopes born from each other's actions.

 

It can be a bit too dense at times, due in part to being ludicrously well-researched and having a tendency to proselytise. Eliot pretty much crams the book with as many sententious remarks as possible and there's a little too much in the way of thoughts and feelings, but admittedly some of them are very beautiful and a great deal of it is done with a wry grin. The novel can be forgiven for the over-egging because it's so obvious that it's a life's work, and desperately wants to cover everything.

 

Meta:

 

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?

 

Wisdom that reminds me of Clive James:

 

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

 

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

 

Below is an example of the subtle humour and characterization/subtext which I would've missed had I not been privy to a close reading of this section in a seminar. Also a good example of 'free indirect discourse' (to get all pretentious for a moment) whereby the narrator's voice and character's voice converge in a way that doesn't entirely belong to either. It isn't a direct quotation, but it isn't simply the narrator speaking either, it's a sort of middle-ground indicative of internal thought. Not that this is a novel (excuse the pun) technique - the novel as a medium needed it to progress from a contrived epistolary form, and wasn't available to Shakespeare at the time but has been used by pretty much every author (and even us mere mortals probably, without knowing it) since Jane Austen nailed it - but Eliot's use of the form is especially brilliant. That said, the form has evolved, thankfully. Would elaborate but I'd either be repeating common knowledge or be irritating users by sounding like a student who isn't as wise as he purports to be (which is true), depending on who's reading.

 

As to the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage.

 

The thoughts of Sir James Chettam, who tries to woo Dorothea Brooke. He believes that her 'religious' zeal and apathy towards his advances is all just a haughty show of purity and that these can be 'fucked out' - to use my aged tutor's words - with a good shag after marriage. This sort of detail is easily skimmed over, and it can be found throughout all 700 pages or so of Middlemarch. Hopefully that gives a flavour of Eliot's staggering talent and intelligence.

 

I'll spoiler these closing lines of the novel, which are gorgeous:

 

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

 

Edited June 27, 2014 by dwarf

[The Bard]

Just finished reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel and it's crazy how much of a contrast it is to his later work. The authorial voice is so much stronger, and the ideas aren't as implicit, but he flat out uses the protagonists as tools for direct commentary on pretty much everything he wants to talk about. Which was great, it gave it a sort of oratory and rhetorical feel in parts whereas I didn't feel that for example, Gatsby, or Tender is the Night had that about them.

 

Also started reading an anthology of Lovecraft stories. Got through Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu was great, short, engaging investigative horror fiction. I didn't expect the beauty of expression that it has in parts. Mountains of Madness is probably the most frustrating thing I've ever read in my life though. Full to the brim with unnecessary background technical information about Pleistocene rock formations, geology, evolutionary biology etc. There one section that's literally an exposition about how drill bits work. It took some patience to get through, because instead of being explanatory either contextually or explicitly, it just threw out these terms and expected you to have an encyclopaedia at hand. I suspect it was there more to make the reader think "gee isn't he a clever fucker," than anything else. Except in reality she's thinking "why do I need to know about drill bits in a story about tentacled space monsters?"

 

Either way, the ideas are incredible. The horror doesn't come from the unknown, but from the unknowable; the idea that there are things lurking in the universe that our senses can't...well, make sense of, or understand, whether that's because they're dimensionally composed in a way that's alien to us, or have an evolutionary history that's completely separate from our own. Need to read more, but I'm going to have to be wise about what I select since Cthulhu was great, but Mountains of Madness was only tolerable for the last third (which is where it got pretty good).

[Kav]

Well I'll finally be making a start on the Game of Thrones books... I'm a little late to the party but I'm looking forward to digging in!

[Blade]

Well I'll finally be making a start on the Game of Thrones books... I'm a little late to the party but I'm looking forward to digging in!

 

I watched the first series for Sean Bean alone, obviously

[Kav]

I watched the first series for Sean Bean alone, obviously

 

Haha, standard. I've seen the first series and a couple episodes of the second but stopped as I was gripped by other things more... Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy and Line of Duty.

Jon has read the books and watched the programme too and said he'd recommend me read the books before carrying on with the programme.

[drahkon]

I just finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

 

Great plot twists and amazingly written. I loved it. : peace:

[The Bard]

Reading Book IV of Paradise Lost again, just gotten to the part where Satan's having an emo tantrum and trying to decide whether he should just squash the beef with god, but eventually is like "that shit be unseemly yo, time to go fuck up Adam and the rib lady."

 

Definitely getting the vibe that Milton wasn't so much into the whole eden/god/Jesus thing because the descriptions of verdure and sumptuous landscapes just comes off as limp compared to the absolutely explosive and evocative descriptions of Hell and Satan.

 

I mean, compare probably the best lines written in the English language:

 

"Him the almighty power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms"

 

with

 

"Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,

A sylvian scene, and as the ranks ascend,

Shade above shade, a woody theater

Of stateliest view."

 

A bit perfunctory. Not really feeling it are you Milton?

[dwarf]

The bit where he jumps the open gate out of defiance is lol.

 

Edit:

 

Also, I think there are sections in the other books which disprove that example. Not that I can remember/be bothered to find the perfect one.

 

In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life

Began to bloom, but soon for mans offence

To Heav'n remov'd where first it grew, there grows,

And flours aloft shading the Fount of Life,

And where the river of Bliss through midst of Heavn

Rowls o're Elisian Flours her Amber stream;

With these that never fade the Spirits elect

Bind thir resplendent locks inwreath'd with beams,

Now in loose Garlands thick thrown off, the bright

Pavement that like a Sea of Jasper shon

Impurpl'd with Celestial Roses smil'd.

Then Crown'd again thir gold'n Harps they took,

Harps ever tun'd, that glittering by thir side

Like Quivers hung, and with Præamble sweet

Of charming symphonie they introduce

Thir sacred Song, and waken raptures high

Edited July 4, 2014 by dwarf

[The Bard]

The bit where he jumps the open gate out of defiance is lol.

 

If it was open that's an example of me just not fully getting Milton's verbiage. The exact lines are:

 

"One gate there only was...

Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt,

At one slight bound high overleaped."

 

Satan's so metal. Paradise Lost needs to be turned into a black metal album vocalised by Christopher Lee.

 

Edit: That's a pretty good example, and obviously it's Milton so there are obviously going to be examples of amazing verse in every context, I was just saying that the genuinely stunning passages occur more in the dark, fiery and baleful places. The rhythm of the meter in the first and second book just tends to be so much more imperial and full of syllabic stress in quick sequence, which I personally prefer to the mellifluous flow of the passage you quoted above.

Edited July 4, 2014 by The Bard

[dwarf]

Yeah, he gets all Yoda on you sometimes because he tries to compete with epics in other languages which are, apparently (& understandably), much more romantic and pleasing on the ear. I can only enjoy Paradise Lost in small doses, otherwise it does become a splurge of verbiage. If you isolate the odd passage and read it closely though, including the Master Chief jump, it does click. Like with all 'great' poets there are way too many references and allusions to other works though.

 

Eliot is a prick when it comes to that, and it's his earlier work I enjoy because it doesn't get bogged down in those pretensions.

 

Preludes is enjoyable (this being part 1 of 4)

 

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

 

And then the lighting of the lamps.

[The Bard]

Yeah, he gets all Yoda on you sometimes because he tries to compete with epics in other languages which are, apparently (& understandably), much more romantic and pleasing on the ear. I can only enjoy Paradise Lost in small doses, otherwise it does become a splurge of verbiage. If you isolate the odd passage and read it closely though, including the Master Chief jump, it does click. Like with all 'great' poets there are way too many references and allusions to other works though.

 

Eliot is a prick when it comes to that, and it's his earlier work I enjoy because it doesn't get bogged down in those pretensions.

 

Preludes is enjoyable (this being part 1 of 4)

 

The first time I read Lost I looked into the allusions but now I tend to glaze over them to get back to the imagery which clicks with me more immediately in this than in pretty much all other epics. I don't really have the patience for proper close reading these days.

 

Aye on the Eliot, Prufrock is one of my all time faves, and Wasteland makes me want to kill myself. It's not even the language that's tough to grasp, it's that he references all these events and cultural artefacts in the most arcane way possible, and attempting to be a conscientious lit grad was the only thing that pulled me through it.

 

It's almost how Continental Philosophy is, full of these abstruse shibboleths only put there to disguise the fact that nothing is actually being talked about or examined.

[dwarf]

Word, motherfucker. Word.

[jayseven]

When I read (some) of Paradise Lost I always felt that the impetus behind the terse verse was to not try to assume what the will and/or word of God was. Figuring the importance of the church, it would be far more detrimental to pretend to ventriloquise (is that a word?) the intentions of a supreme being than to try and humanise a fallen angel. It would be far more offensive for Milton to presume God's actions than it would to assume that Satan would be a narcissistic renegade. The human voice is far more suited to satan than to god in this respect, simply because humans have experience at being devlish but no true understanding of what it would be like to be God.

 

In this respect I play down the stupid theories that Milton considers Satan to be the hero of the story. I think it's very much modern ideas of story applied retroactively to deem Satan 'the man' because he has more lines.

 

I think that I've lost touch with my university teachings so much, and so utterly embraced my life on the fence, that I am unable to objectively provide an opinion on the matter. But I do think that the prevailing ideas (when I studied the text) are more leaning towards the want of modern interpretation to be meaningful rather than the actual meaning to be accurately interpreted.

 

Does that make sense? It doesn't seem to make sense. Summary; Paradise Lost is not about how cool Satan is, but more about how indescribably God is. Heaven Forbid we try and justify what God does! Is what I think. I think.

 

EDIT: Damn I'm definitely drunk. Sorry!