[Literature] Currently Reading (discussion)

[caragnafog dog]

I have an Everyman's Library edition of Moby-Dick and the hardware is stellar as usual, great binding and nice paper. No notes though, for which some people might find Norton helpful. For my part I didn't find annotations all that necessary, but some secondary literature on it would be nice, and that Norton provides in abundance.

[Blue Monday]

The Return of the King so far; Éowyn › Arwen.

[Gob Hobblin]

At the urging of my wife, I have finally given up on my insistence in avoiding the Harry Potter series and started it. As she predicted, I love it very much. J.K. Rowling's wordplay, characters, and imagery keep sucking me in.

[Blue Monday]

Well, finished The Return of the King today, thus also concluding my read-through of all the core Middle-earth works which I began roughly around the start of last year with The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. I really wish I could find the words to describe both the sheer majesty and profound sadness of Tolkein's fantasy universe. A sadness in that ever since the time when Fëanor forges the Silmarils (possibly even before stemming from the hubris of the Valar) basically everything is set on a path of perpetual decline, and there's kind of beauty in that. Every moment, place and person has their time in the sun, then passes. Cherish it because it won't last long. It's in this same vein we see the value of the lives of men in comparison to the unending ones of the elves.

Tolkein weaves this mortal plight/passion across his books touching on themes and subjects like alienation, desire, suffering, pride, the sea, nature and the world beyond immediate reality (Aman in this instance perhaps) - forging his mythology from the ground up with wholly crafted languages and tropes from ancient religion and folklore - the Lord of the Rings is eternally more than the sum of its parts. Nothing like it had come before. Nothing like it shall come again.

Personally I found in Tolkein's poem The Sea-Bell the perfect epilogue as well: http://www.freewebs.com/memoirsoftheshire/theseabell.htm

[Stryker]

I've been reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I just came across a line that went as follows

"'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the D.H.C. 'All's well with the world.'"

I find how awfully close that is to Nerv's motto to be quite odd.

[Mr. Tines]

Anno quoted directly from Pippa Passes; Huxley tweaked to fit.

[caragnafog dog]

Pippa Passes

browning is dope bruh

[Atropos]

I finished The Brothers Karamazov the other day. While I respect it, I'm not sure if I like Dostoevsky's style of storytelling. Having characters just say how they feel seems awkward, and, to my 21st-century eyes, more difficult than simply relaying such thoughts as internal dialogue—but that, of course, is the product of later literary movements.

I'm looking for stuff to read, now. I was thinking of checking out Kazuo Ishiguro's stuff; I already own The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, so I suppose I'll start with those.

[chee]

Somewhere, way out there in the dark jungles of the humanities, is a lonely otaku posthumanist drawing a Ray Kurzweil X Donna Haraway hentai.

[Atropos]

Finished reading Lolita today.

I wonder about the language Nabokov uses—is that how he normally writes, or is he affecting this florid prose because it suits Humbert's character? It certainly seems that everything is filtered through Humbert's view, but not to the extent of outright lying: he transcribes Dolores's actions accurately, but he provides interpretations and motives for those actions that are probably far from the truth.

The ending  SPOILER: Show

Also, I kind of love how Nabokov kills off Dolores in the prologue, but we don't realize it's her until almost the very end—which, by the way, was utterly bizarre. I'm sorry, after three hundred pages of psychological drama, why did we turn into I Spit On Your Grave in the second-to-last chapter? It bugged me until I realized that it showed just how far gone Humbert is by the story's end.

[outsane_geek]

I went to start the fourth book in the Temeraire series, only to discover that it had been so long since I read books 1-3 that I had forgotten most of the details. So, it looks like I'm going to rereading them this week.

On a related note, my dad's new book is out, and I'm trying to decide whether I should read it. I want to be supportive, but I'm not a big western fan.

[Blue Monday]

Good shit so far...

[Ray]

As with Madoka Magica, God help us all.

[Blue Monday]

Eww, why'd you get the one with the gummy TV cover?

[Ray]

Never judge a book by it's cover. . .

[Tankred]

Eww, why'd you get the one with the gummy TV cover?

The TV covers for ASoIaF are pretty bad, I'm not on about the pictures though, they make my skin crawl when I touch them, they wrap that shit in some kind of film.

[Chuckman]

They automagically put the TV covers on the e-book editions, sadly.

I need to pick up paperbacks of the ASOIAF books. I'm in the midst of a very intensive re-read. Pulling apart the books has become something of a hobby of mine of late.

[Blue Monday]

Finished up The Drowned World. Truly top-notch piece of speculative fantasy. Not only did Ballard have me enthralled with the setting, tone and atmosphere but the whole concept of people mentally regressing was simply fascinating; the environment becoming a second Triassic period a catalyst for an individual's plunge back to into the archaeopsychic past. This fall through the ages - the lagooned cities acting as time machines - linked to the evolutionary path down the human spinal cord, tapping into forgotten epochs of instinctual memory. Really trippy stuff. Sure, Ballard's characterisation and dialogue becomes secondary to the setting and the ideas, but who cares, this only helps to serve as a mirror to the reader to help inject their own unconscious journey and meaning into the story.

This is a book that's going to haunt me for some time, I reckon.

[Shinoyami65]

My copy of MZD's The Fifty-Year Sword finally showed up

One thing you wouldn't know from images of the book: the dust jacket is riddled with tiny perfect little holes, as if a miniature gunman used it for target practice. Or like several tiny little worms or threads burst out of it without disturbing the hard cover beneath.

I've seen people get this in a nice little protective case, but my bookstore unfortunately didn't supply such a luxury.

Where House of Leaves used colour to show different subject matter, here different-coloured quotation marks are used to show different speakers. Except that what one speaker is saying may be finished by another, there are lots of non-existent words and amalgamations, and some phrases have no quotation marks at all. It's confusing but strangely gripping; it's a bit difficult to visualise scene and place but it does make the reader want to keep reading.

Where House of Leaves was almost satirical in its use of the essay format, this novel rambles on in a weird train-of-thought way like speech; it's vaguely confusing but is comparable to some of the more confusing extracts from House of Leaves like the Truant sections or Navidson's letter to Karen before the end. The story-within-a-story device is also used, although to what effect I haven't ventured far enough to see.

The format, of course, and the art (thread art in this case) are something of another order entirely.

[Blue Monday]

I did The Fifty-Year Sword in one sitting. You get used to the presentation and format after 15 minutes or so I found. What I liked most about it was the imagery, i.e. the ending in the snow and the Man with No Arms to name only a couple examples. It's a quaint ergodic exercise, better than Only Revolutions, but nothing on the scale of House of Leaves.

By the way, MZD has a new book out in a few months time; The Familiar. I'm pretty excited as it's his first proper novel length work since HOL, and from what I can gather it's about cats in some way, too.