I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[peacocks]

X Post- Captain, I could see this being someone's favorite book.  It becomes very comfortable and you start to kind of live in it.  Also the theme of recognition is really well thought out and is applied to almost everything.  I gossip about the characters and situations to the friend who let me borrow it (he hasn't read it yet) like they were real mutual  friends.  I have a copy of Agape Agape that I plan on reading when I finish this.  It is much much shorter.

[mixed cats]

I've also decided to read one of the (very short) stories in Calvino's Cosmicomics each night before going to sleep. One story, not more, not less. Seems like a good way of forcing myself to keep up the habit of reading some fiction, which I'm always in danger of neglecting otherwise.

This is a great idea. I did something similar on my train commute with that book. It was enough to read one story - it took up as much time as I could give to reading on the train without getting motion sickness. Then I could stop and pretend to sleep and think about geological time.

[Good Intentions]

I also started reading my boyfriend's copy of Through the Looking Glass while we were at his parents' place a few weeks ago, but didn't have time to finish it, nor space in the hand-luggage to take it with us. Now he bought me a volume of Lewis Carroll's complete, illustrated works! So I can pick up again where I left off.

He did you a huge favour. I got a hard-cover illustrated copy of both the Alice stories at a flea market once, and it's one of my most-read books.

[alex]

Yes, I am certainly grateful!

[RavingLunatic]

I read Alice for a children's lit class I took a few years back and really enjoyed it. At the time I remember thinking I need to read more of Carroll's stuff. After about 10 days of being in an awful mood and unable to read much at all, I'm feeling great and am trying to make the most of it. After finishing up a couple books I'd started I may check out something of Carroll's for my fiction reading. I'm not sure though, as I've been meaning to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for a long time now too.

[Good Intentions]

Try this piece of Carroll's one, out of the premier philosophy journal out of the day:
http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html

Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.
"So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing couldn't be done?"
"It can be done," said Achilles. "It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances were constantly diminishing; and so --"
"But if they had been constantly increasing?" the Tortoise interrupted "How then?"
"Then I shouldn't be here," Achilles modestly replied; "and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!"
"You flatter me -- flatten, I mean" said the Tortoise; "for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?"
"Very much indeed!" said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. "Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn't invented yet!"
"That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!" the Tortoise murmured dreamily. "You admire Euclid?"
"Passionately! So far, at least, as one can admire a treatise that won't he published for some centuries to come!"
"Well, now, let's take a little bit of the argument in that First Proposition -- just two steps, and the conclusion drawn from them. Kindly enter them in your notebook. And in order to refer to them conveniently, let's call them A, B, and Z: --
(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.
(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.
(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.
Readers of Euclid will grant, I suppose, that Z follows logically from A and B, so that any one who accepts A and B as true, must accept Z as true?"
"Undoubtedly! The youngest child in a High School -- as soon as High Schools are invented, which will not be till some two thousand years later -- will grant that."
"And if some reader had not yet accepted A and B as true, he might still accept the sequence as a valid one, I suppose?"
"No doubt such a reader might exist. He might say 'I accept as true the Hypothetical Proposition that, if A and B be true, Z must be true; but, I don't accept A and B as true.' Such a reader would do wisely in abandoning Euclid, and taking to football."

And it goes on, to show a rather important point in logic.

[davy]

I finished Fiskadoro last night. I've always admired Denis Johnson, but over the course of the past year, he has absolutely become one of my favorites. His O. Henry Prize winning novella Train Dreams is next on the list.

But right now I'm just getting started with Jacob Slichter's So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life. Slichter was the drummer of Semisonic.

[RavingLunatic]

Try this piece of Carroll's one, out of the premier philosophy journal out of the day:
http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html

Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back....

And it goes on, to show a rather important point in logic.

Ha, that's great. Dude has the rare gift of making you laugh and think hard about something at the same time.

[Greg Nog]

Anyway!  Just started The Hunger Games!

I'm listening to this audio book right now--started it during the drive down to the coast last weekend with my dad. I guess I like it--it's pretty brutal and suspenseful and all, but it's not particularly well-written, even for a YA novel. Or at least that's the way it comes off in the audio version. It's a peculiar listening experience because the prose is so elementary and yet kids are getting slaughtered and shit.

The writing's a bit stiff and mild, yeah, but I kinda like the style; it feels like it's being written by a teenage girl in a post-apocalypse America.  Though it mainly makes me miss Riddley Walker.

[davy]

I finished it last night. I don't know, man, I want to like it, and in general, I think I do. But it's been a real trial to suspend my disbelief. I just don't feel like the actions of the characters are at all in line with their circumstances. As bizarre as it sounds, I don't think Collins gives her own story enough weight. These are kids. And pretty much all of them are going to be murdered. And they know it. And yet, they're all like "Dang."

Collins just isn't up to it. Few would be. Cormac McCarthy, maybe.

[hannah]

I never finished The Sot-Weed Factor. Oh, well. But I have read some excellent books this summer:

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (excellent indeed).
Rebecca West's Fountain Overflows (not totally excellent, but decent).
Jude the Obscure (most excellent).

And now I am reading a book in translation! Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way, to be precise.

[jm]

oh hannah let me know what you think of it!  Because I think that translation is tight.

[hannah]

I'm loving it so far. It's so weirdly Lydia Davis, too... and yet... not.

[coldforge]

I joined this website, Readernaut. Readernaut.com. I think it's basically like goodreads except with an emphasis on making notes as you go along and writing down quotes from individual pages rather than rating the books when you're done with them.

[davy]

That sounds like a lot of work.

[Ignatius]

That's my ideal reading method, but I don't know that I'd care to take the time to look through anyone else's notes and I'm sure no one would gain much by reading mine.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I am roughly ten pages from the end of Emily Gould's memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever.

It is pretty terrible.

[coldforge]

That sounds like a lot of work.

Which part? I think the value in writing down quotes that you like from books is somewhat self-evident and predates any website.

[Thermofusion]

And the Heart Says Whatever.

I like it when books blatantly show their hand via their title. If I saw that in a store, I'd instantly translate it as: This Book Is Unreadable

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

It's a Stevie Nicks lyric!

[Thermofusion]

I don't like Stevie Nicks either

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I love her, the times I have been carried into bliss by "Storms" or "Silver Springs" are countless, etc. This memoir does not stand up well to that reputation, though. Gould's prose is bland and rife with cliches and I am most captured by it when I am trying to puzzle out a misplaced modifier.

There are a few things I like about it, though. To wit: how the memoir spends most of its pages sketching the space around her "big" life events; how it describes a certain New York without the gross nostalgic film.

[davy]

That sounds like a lot of work.

Which part? I think the value in writing down quotes that you like from books is somewhat self-evident and predates any website.

Less "difficult" than "disciplined," I guess. I can definitely see the value, don't get me wrong. I generally just file my favorite quotes away and consult the text if I need to find them again. It's not a very efficient system and there is much flipping and scanning involved, but I kind of enjoy that part.

I can't imagine what it would be like to have an archive of all my favorite quotes from all the books I've read. The mere possibility of it makes me want to reread everything so I don't miss anything.

[G.C.R]

For me, I think there would be a lot of looking back on it x months later, thinking "now, why did I write that down?" which would prompt me to reread, find a whole new bunch of quotes I liked, and then repeat the cycle.

[davy]

Yeah, I guess what I really meant to say was that it would fundamentally change the way I read.