EPTWhat Are You Reading 2013 - Page 107
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farvacola
United States18845 Posts
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Prog455
Denmark970 Posts
On August 24 2013 07:57 dmnum wrote: Tolstoy doesn't only have War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji-Murat for example are both short and amazing. Same goes for Dostoyevsky(The Gambler, Notes From Undergound). And they're not hard to read in the slighest; they write in very simple language. Depends who you ask. In this thread where a book is dismissed as juvenile literature if it is not at university textbook level, then i guess you are right that. But if you ask regular people some of this is actually pretty heavy stuff to get through. I experienced this at first hand when a family member referred to Murakami as a difficult read. Personally i think that Notes From Underground was pretty hard to read compared to many other books. I would often time find myself reading sentences that were half a page long and with several interposed phrases. Sometimes even an interposed phrase within a parentheses. While it is obviously quite easy compared to books they'll throw after you at university, i have yet to find any work of fiction that i would consider a hard read compared to Notes From Underground, and i would be happy if you recommend some. | ||
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farvacola
United States18845 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:27 Prog455 wrote: Depends who you ask. In this thread where a book is dismissed as juvenile literature if it is not at university textbook level, then i guess you are right that. But if you ask regular people some of this is actually pretty heavy stuff to get through. I experienced this at first hand when a family member referred to Murakami as a difficult read. Personally i think that Notes From Underground was pretty hard to read compared to many other books. I would often time find myself reading sentences that were half a page long and with several interposed phrases. Sometimes even an interposed phrase within a parentheses. While it is obviously quite easy compared to books they'll throw after you at university, i have yet to find any work of fiction that i would consider a hard read compared to Notes From Underground, and i would be happy if you recommend some. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon or The Recognitions by William Gaddis ought to give you some trouble  | ||
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packrat386
United States5077 Posts
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
Ravenor Gaunt's Ghosts Horus Heresy Hitting up Dan Abnett / WH40k in a big way atm. Finished Eisenhorn.. really really fun omnibus (3books). Def check it out. | ||
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Prog455
Denmark970 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:33 farvacola wrote: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon or The Recognitions by William Gaddis ought to give you some trouble How is Inherent Vice by Pynchon? I just so happens to have that book in my bookshelf - unread that is. | ||
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packrat386
United States5077 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:36 iNcontroL wrote: Eisenhorn Ravenor Gaunt's Ghosts Horus Heresy Hitting up Dan Abnett / WH40k in a big way atm. Finished Eisenhorn.. really really fun omnibus (3books). Def check it out. Welcome to the thread. Always cool to know that celebrities read too :D | ||
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farvacola
United States18845 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:37 Prog455 wrote: How is Inherent Vice by Pynchon? I just so happens to have that book in my bookshelf - unread that is. I'd say it is definitely a worthwhile read, though a poor introduction to Pynchon as it is not very much like his other works. It's pretty much a slightly more wordy detective novel with a touch of doomsaying. Worth it for sure, but then move on to something like The Crying of Lot 49 if you really wanna get into Pynchon stylization without diving headlong into Gravity's Rainbow. | ||
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Prog455
Denmark970 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:41 farvacola wrote: I'd say it is definitely a worthwhile read, though a poor introduction to Pynchon as it is not very much like his other works. It's pretty much a slightly more wordy detective novel with a touch of doomsaying. Worth it for sure, but then move on to something like The Crying of Lot 49 if you really wanna get into Pynchon stylization without diving headlong into Gravity's Rainbow. Thank you! I'll definitely some of his works. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + Huge step down from the previous book in terms of pacing. The book is divided into three parts: i. Japan, ii. China, and iii. Russia. The Japan section dragged; I can see what she was trying to do with it -- (1) worldbuild and (2) reaffirm the changes the main char. (Laurence) has undergone throughout the course of the series through amnesia!plot -- but (1), though cool, was largely unnecessary* and (2), though it somewhat succeeded, also reinforced how much Laurence didn't change. The China and Russia sections picked up in terms of pacing though, and we got to the action fairly quickly, so I have little to complain about re: pacing for the last 2/3 of the book. One thing I have been noticing is that the characters, though they do grow and change, never steer away from their basic identity, which makes them feel static. The fourth and fifth books did wonderful things in terms of bringing Laurence to a breaking point, and you can definitely still see the repercussions running right into the sixth, seventh, and eighth books, but they haven't been as large as I'd have hoped otherwise. I'm not sure where she is going with Laurence's character; I feel as if I already know what he will do given a knotty moral problem, and that's not good for keeping a reader's interest in a character. Laurence's relationship with Tharkay is weird, but I'm not sure if that is because it's badly written, or because Tharkay is weird. Some of this has got to be Novik's fault, because she has not done a very good job in establishing and justifying the level of connection the two characters have shown in the series. Anyways, curious to see where this goes, since Tharkay's intriguing. One thing I admire Novik for is that she has multiple well-written characters who are so solidly embedded into the plot that each of them can basically have their own series, written from their POVs instead of Laurence's/Temeraire's. Can't say that for many books. *The events that happened in this section may play a role in determining the course of events in the next two or three books, but I don't think it's a good idea to split plot nuggets across different books in an ongoing series, esp. if they may not come to fruition for a while. Going to polish off Liveship series (Robin Hobb, why do you do such bad things to your characters, you have a brilliant imagination but + Show Spoiler + the Liveships being murdered dragons who still have a sense of what/who they are despite having been transformed into ships rips my heart out | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
![[image loading]](http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781468302882_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG) ![[image loading]](http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/9781559391535_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG) | ||
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dmnum
Brazil6910 Posts
On August 24 2013 08:27 Prog455 wrote: Depends who you ask. In this thread where a book is dismissed as juvenile literature if it is not at university textbook level, then i guess you are right that. But if you ask regular people some of this is actually pretty heavy stuff to get through. I experienced this at first hand when a family member referred to Murakami as a difficult read. Personally i think that Notes From Underground was pretty hard to read compared to many other books. I would often time find myself reading sentences that were half a page long and with several interposed phrases. Sometimes even an interposed phrase within a parentheses. While it is obviously quite easy compared to books they'll throw after you at university, i have yet to find any work of fiction that i would consider a hard read compared to Notes From Underground, and i would be happy if you recommend some. Notes From Underground is probably Dostoyevsky's most complex work on a reading level(maybe The Double is harder to read because it's supposed to be confusing). Tolstoy is easier than Dostoyevsky too. And there's a bunch of harder works than these Notes From Underground: Almost everything by Joyce(excluing Dubliners), Faulkner, Guimarães Rosa(brazilian writer, unfortunately most of our writers aren't read by other countries) off the top of my head. Most people have problems reading these works because they're not looking for what's contained in them. For example One Hundred Years of Solitude sells like crazy, and nobody in their right mind can call it juvenile literature. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On August 24 2013 13:11 dmnum wrote: Notes From Underground is probably Dostoyevsky's most complex work on a reading level(maybe The Double is harder to read because it's supposed to be confusing). Tolstoy is easier than Dostoyevsky too. And there's a bunch of harder works than these Notes From Underground: Almost everything by Joyce(excluing Dubliners), Faulkner, Guimarães Rosa(brazilian writer, unfortunately most of our writers aren't read by other countries) off the top of my head. Most people have problems reading these works because they're not looking for what's contained in them. For example One Hundred Years of Solitude sells like crazy, and nobody in their right mind can call it juvenile literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude sells like crazy even to non-bookish people because it's on almost every high school reading list (EDIT: okay, in the States at least) and is furthermore well-translated into a style that is very easy to read. (I can't read Spanish, so I can't speak for what it reads like in Spanish, but it's one of the most pleasurable reading experiences you can have with a translated book.) Meanwhile, when people have trouble reading Dostoevsky, it's not necessarily because "they're not looking for what's contained in them," it's because his style (when translated) is dense and very claustrophobic. The text gets in the way of the ideas. People spend so much effort trying to follow his sentences that they have little energy and patience left to muddle through what his books are actually about. | ||
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dmnum
Brazil6910 Posts
On August 24 2013 13:19 babylon wrote: One Hundred Years of Solitude sells like crazy even to non-bookish people because it's on almost every high school reading list (EDIT: okay, in the States at least) and is furthermore well-translated into a style that is very easy to read. (I can't read Spanish, so I can't speak for what it reads like in Spanish, but it's one of the most pleasurable reading experiences you can have with a translated book.) Meanwhile, when people have trouble reading Dostoevsky, it's not necessarily because "they're not looking for what's contained in them," it's because his style (when translated) is dense and very claustrophobic. The text gets in the way of the ideas. People spend so much effort trying to follow his sentences that they have little energy and patience left to muddle through what his books are actually about. Here in Brazil it's not required reading in high schools, but I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the people I know have read it. Also, I don't see how Dostoyevsky's style is dense at all. Yeah, occasionally he has the long and winding sentence, but so does Marquez. It is certainly claustrophobic though, but that's because of what he's trying to convey. And you can find "simplified" Dostoyevsky every book store. Just look for Garnett. She butchered the style to make it pleasant, but the most of the ideas are still there. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On August 24 2013 13:38 dmnum wrote: Here in Brazil it's not required reading in high schools, but I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the people I know have read it. Also, I don't see how Dostoyevsky's style is dense at all. Yeah, occasionally he has the long and winding sentence, but so does Marquez. It is certainly claustrophobic though, but that's because of what he's trying to convey. And you can find "simplified" Dostoyevsky every book store. Just look for Garnett. She butchered the style to make it pleasant, but the most of the ideas are still there. Yeah, I think Dostoevsky accomplished what he wanted to accomplish re: claustrophobia. Maybe I used the wrong word to describe his writing, but whenever I read him I feel like I'm shut up in a 2'x2' cell. It's not dense like, uh, Death of Virgil dense (where sentences go on for four pages) or even like Heart of Darkness dense (the paragraphs are the jungle), but reading him feels like suffocation. Maybe some others find him light and airy, but I think a lot of others feel the same way as I do wrt his style in combination with his subject matter, and I don't think it's surprising that people find him difficult to read because of that. (I still think he's a brilliant writer, all that said. He doesn't sacrifice story for ideas, and his books feel very organic to me, not something you can say for a lot of high lit.) Marquez feels smooth and airy, in spite of the long sentences to me, so I had 0 trouble following him, esp. since his portrayal of his subject matter is nowhere near as dark as Dostoevsky. A lot of the high schools in the States will specify which version they want people to read, and they're often the more faithful versions that aren't simplified. I haven't met a person who's read Dostoevsky and read the simplified version actually, now that I think about it ... | ||
Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21244 Posts
read what you want no one dismisses anything here idk why we had 3 pages of stupid discussion about a strawman | ||
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Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On August 24 2013 14:42 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: this obscurity/hard/easy/whatever the fuck read discussion is stupid read what you want no one dismisses anything here idk why we had 3 pages of stupid discussion about a strawman who's stopping anyone from reading? | ||
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imre
France9263 Posts
On August 24 2013 14:42 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: this obscurity/hard/easy/whatever the fuck read discussion is stupid read what you want no one dismisses anything here idk why we had 3 pages of stupid discussion about a strawman debating politely is stupid... good opinion to hear. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On August 24 2013 14:42 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: this obscurity/hard/easy/whatever the fuck read discussion is stupid read what you want no one dismisses anything here idk why we had 3 pages of stupid discussion about a strawman We're not saying you shouldn't read certain books ...? I mean, it's a pretty interesting discussion if you're at all interested in how readers receive books. | ||
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21244 Posts
it's also really stupid because "discussions" like this come up periodically in every book-related topic and it's just as inane each time it comes up as the previous 23948243 times | ||
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