Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 ... 8 9 [10] 11 12 ... 18

Author Topic: What book are you reading/want to read?  (Read 13649 times)

Chunes

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #135 on: June 17, 2011, 03:58:46 pm »

Currently, I am reading this:


You can post a small description if you want, but I'm not going to right now.

One of my favorites! Ray Bradbury is an excellent author. I've found no author more capable of describing the overall emotional ambiance of a setting than him.

I just finished reading Orson Card's Ender's Game, which I found to be excellent. It's that perfect breed of fiction, to me: the plot exists merely to facilitate the actually interesting stuff—quandaries of perspective and how characters approach (and deal with) them, while on the whole avoiding moralizing at all. And the few little jabs the author takes on certain issues are ones that aren't already excessively overwritten.

I'm also amazed at this author's ability to convey so much with such plain language. His way is not to paint a masterpiece of vocabulary; he's not out to make arrangements of words sound pretty. But he is a master at delaying gratification and painting a non-pretentious picture over a broader period with a series of very clear and plain strokes. And the best part of the book is that yes, it is a huge allegory if you choose to see it that way, but you don't have to to enjoy it immensely. And it's not because the plot is central; in fact, the plot is just the vehicle, but it still feels natural, not as though the plot was bolted on.

So yeah, highly recommended by me. I'm currently reading its sister novel, Ender's Shadow. I don't usually care for series; I like standalone works. But I'm making an exception in this case.

I'm also nearly done reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. It's definitely worthwhile. I only wish that more people could perceive existence as he did.
« Last Edit: June 17, 2011, 04:50:18 pm by Chunes »
Logged

Montague

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #136 on: June 17, 2011, 09:31:36 pm »

Currently, I am reading this:


You can post a small description if you want, but I'm not going to right now.

One of my favorites! Ray Bradbury is an excellent author. I've found no author more capable of describing the overall emotional ambiance of a setting than him.

I just finished reading Orson Card's Ender's Game, which I found to be excellent. It's that perfect breed of fiction, to me: the plot exists merely to facilitate the actually interesting stuff—quandaries of perspective and how characters approach (and deal with) them, while on the whole avoiding moralizing at all. And the few little jabs the author takes on certain issues are ones that aren't already excessively overwritten.

I'm also amazed at this author's ability to convey so much with such plain language. His way is not to paint a masterpiece of vocabulary; he's not out to make arrangements of words sound pretty. But he is a master at delaying gratification and painting a non-pretentious picture over a broader period with a series of very clear and plain strokes. And the best part of the book is that yes, it is a huge allegory if you choose to see it that way, but you don't have to to enjoy it immensely. And it's not because the plot is central; in fact, the plot is just the vehicle, but it still feels natural, not as though the plot was bolted on.

Fahrenheit 451 is easily one of my favorite reads. Its good. Even for classic novels, its good.

If somebody has never read this book, they will forever be a stunted, unfulfilled being, they will ponder on life, always running into holes in their thinking and become frustrated with life and be damned with every decision they make. Without it, they claw at their throats and scream to nobody in silent screams in utter confusion, as they die, due to the lack of having ever read this novel.

Well, not really. Still, its basically something everyone should read, its really pretty good.
Logged

Africa

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #137 on: June 17, 2011, 10:06:48 pm »

I read it in high school English, and as with most things in high school English, I was like "meh, this is what classics are?" And I was forever turned off to quite a few books that are apparently important classics.
Logged
Quote from: Cthulhu
It's like using hobos to fight an eating-resistant baloney epidemic.

Montague

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #138 on: June 17, 2011, 10:14:01 pm »

I read it in high school English, and as with most things in high school English, I was like "meh, this is what classics are?" And I was forever turned off to quite a few books that are apparently important classics.

Well, its because you've never read many contemporary, modern novels from living authors, to put the classics in perspective.

Sure, all books suck if you've only ever read really great literature. Try reading some Tom Clancy, by comparison, to put your frame of reference back into skew.
Logged

Willfor

  • Bay Watcher
  • The great magmaman adventurer. I do it for hugs.
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #139 on: June 17, 2011, 10:32:59 pm »

The classics are seminal pieces. They are important because they set up things that people today use in their own fiction, or convey timeless truths.

However, it is also important to note two things:

1) Just because something is a classic, does not make it good. Furthermore, even if it is good, it doesn't mean that every reader will like it.

2) Classics can come from today's literature just as easily as it can come from the past. Just because people haven't been sperging over it for over fifty years doesn't mean something is not a classic-in-the-making. It just means that the writer didn't write it 50 years ago. There was as much shit then as there is now, it just didn't have as long of a print run.
Logged
In the wells of livestock vans with shells and garden sands /
Iron mixed with oxygen as per the laws of chemistry and chance /
A shape was roughly human, it was only roughly human /
Apparition eyes / Apparition eyes / Knock, apparition, knock / Eyes, apparition eyes /

Chunes

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #140 on: June 18, 2011, 02:52:43 am »

Fahrenheit 451 is the only forced reading assignment in high school I ever liked. Grapes of Wrath? Great Gatsby? To Kill a Mockingbird? Huckleberry Finn? Animal Farm? MEH! And boy, did I like Fahrenheit 451. I did not put it down until I was done. Thanks to that assignment, I learned that there actually is a set of books out there I can get incredibly enthusiastic about.

Oh, yeah, heh.. I tried to read The Scarlet Letter. Oh, I tried.. I read like 40 pages and it was still the same fracking scene! Hawthorne had spent all those pages describing the emotional states of every character in attendance, and every detail about everything except what matters.. I couldn't go on.
« Last Edit: June 18, 2011, 02:57:17 am by Chunes »
Logged

Lord Shonus

  • Bay Watcher
  • Angle of Death
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #141 on: June 18, 2011, 07:56:06 am »

I read Farenheit 451 on my own, and still thought it barely qualified as a novel.
Logged
On Giant In the Playground and Something Awful I am Gnoman.
Man, ninja'd by a potentially inebriated Lord Shonus. I was gonna say to burn it.

Starver

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #142 on: June 18, 2011, 09:08:39 am »

Even for classic novels, its good.
Just to say that my emphasised part of this strikes dissonance.  The point is that they are classics because someone (or, rather a significant number of someones) thought them to be good.  In the future, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy might be considered 'classic' (as an example, plucked from the air) while any random book by Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (ditto, but with more conviction[1]) might not.

This does not mean that they necessarily offer themselves up to the imaginations of schoolchildren all over the landworld like they did their contemporaries and their immediate descendants, however.  This could be for many reasons...

Archaic language
I'll readily admit that I'm a Shakespeare Buff, and was introduced to his works (directly in play-form) at a very young age.  Not forced into it.  I was not, and am not, in the strata of society where "One must see Shakespeare performed at the Old Vic", or the like.  It was a happenstance thing, not (intentionally) pushed at me by my parents, and long before schoolwork involved Shakespeare.  And it was an unwatered-down Richard III performance, not aimed at children (especially not 4-5yo kids, like I was at the time).  So I reckon I picked up something of the language back then, and it's stuck.  But most people get introduced to Shakespeare in school, which leads onto the second point...

Drisabone!
"Right, you lot, take a book and pass one one!" <shuffle shuffle, murmer murmer>  "Act 1, Scene 1, you, be the PROLOGUE[2], you be FLAVIUS, you, yes, you, be MARULLUS, and you two girls giggling on the second row can be the FIRST and SECOND COMMONERs.  The rest of you will be given parts when we need them.  Now read!"  Not quite what happened to me and my class, but not far off.  For various reasons I'd not encountered Julius Caesar before, and despite still remembering the whole "Friends, Romans Countrymen" speech[3] I can't call the lessons particularly inspiring.  Of Mice And Men is (I acknowledge) an adept social commentary, but it was given to us as "work to do".  Animal Farm (and we even saw the film... the '50s animated version, not that film, though I suspect I've seen the other one, albeit without that title, since then *ahem*) was creatively taught, but I couldn't really get into the "Imagine that you're Napoleon the pig, and writing secret dossiers on the other animals..." and the muse really wasn't with me as I recall, with "Must keep an eye on Boxer" alongside some dossier entry, with just "ditto" alongside the next few...

My overwhelming memories of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe were that, at that time, our current English teacher[4] was largely absent and we had an on-again/off-again "Permanent Supply" replacement.  Who, if anything, was a little bit more old-school than the regular one, though whether through accident or design made the lessons a little bit more fun.

Left to myself, I could have demolished the reading list so quickly.  In English Lit. we were given a tabled sheet of A4 upon which to write down the books we had read.  My regular trips to the local library (having half a dozen books out at a time and very rarely not revisiting within the next week to swap some read ones for some new unread ones) meant that even though I often forgot to note everything down, I still went through a number of sheets, when classmates had (through forgetfulness or lack of material) barely accrued a few meagre lines on their first sheet, by the end of the year.  But, of course, I didn't analyse them.  Except for the couple of books (one a Foundation-series Asimov, one I think was High Crusade by Poul Anderson) that I actually wrote reviews for.  For 'book review competitions', but effectively just an ordained cross-school homework where those who didn't submit anything ended up being let off after all.

Archaic Society
I originally had this alongside the Archaic Language, but I've shifted it to allow the above to flow better (still awfully).  Let's take Charles Dickens.  Victorian Britain is a conceptual trope that pretty much is understandable by most Anglo-centric civilisations, mostly through exposure to his works in various media.  But even then the likes of Scrooge's younger days in apprenticeship doesn't ring any (Christmas) bells to a lot of people, especially school-kids, these days.  Dickens was largely (though not entirely) the person responsible for giving us the image of Christmas we often see on the front of those cards that inexplicably arrive from friends, relations and neighbours every December, and he has actually created an understanding of the era Because His Works Are Dickensian, by definition, but at the same time the modern teenager (and I'm going back at least four decades, arguably six although that's by induction and not experience) has had a completely different lifestyle from his or her 'contemporaries' in the classics.  The adults that they became (or will become) are only exposed to the clichés unless they pursue such a scholarly career as allows (and requires) them to delve into the deeper meaning.

Moral Improvements and other selective choices
Whereas a book becomes a classic because it is right for the age, in some way, or is a suitably extant example for a given purpose (I'm looking at you, Pliny Jr!), at some point between its own time and ours the hypothetical median teacher will find that the story and background of something like The Water Babies just no longer appetising to the modern reader (except, perhaps in demonstrating the state of morality tales of the 1860s).  Very much a Little Match-Girl story.  But longer.  And if you've seen the animated version of the story, there are quite a few differences that quite probably reflect modern sensibilities on the matters, as well as the 'usual' bowdlerisations made when enscripting an existing tale.


...Well, I had more points to add, but there seems no point going on, because this is becoming more of an essay than I had intended.

Essentially, "meh, this is what classics are" is most likely what's going to happen if you don't find yourself embroiled in them of your own volition (albeit that without a guiding hand, or happenstance, very little embroiling will occur).  I'm also very much in agreement with the points Willfor made, with some minor caveats (Classics will have been considered good, but need no longer be so; Classics Of Modern Times are often pronounced so as soon as they are published, as part of the advertising blurb...  they may be deserving but really need to be seen in hindsight to be assuredly so).

Also, as with everything, YMMV, even with everyone giving every book an equal chance at being properly read and understood.  Plus some tales just don't work for anyone of the day, and some just don't work once the day is past.  And you can't consider a Classic Author to be an automatic Classic creator.  Maybe there was a reason why Paris In the 20th Century was unpublished (indeed, undiscovered!) until very recently?


[1] NPI!

[2] I don't actually think there is one in JC, BICBW. :)

[3] For someone with an absolutely awful memory, it's one of the things (along with "But soft..." from R&J, naturally 2B||!2B from the Danish Play, significant swathes of Skimbleshanks The Railway Cat and (from maths, although only on a good day) more digits of Pi than most people would normally need) that I learnt by rote and still remember, several decades later.

[4] Actually, the previous titles were being studied in English Literature (a subject that I elected to take once it was available, because I was so enthusiastic about books and reading in general), but tLtW&tW was one of the books taught in plain-old English (that class being least at first mostly about (de)composition; speeling; grammar also).
Logged

Lord Shonus

  • Bay Watcher
  • Angle of Death
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #143 on: June 18, 2011, 09:13:19 am »

speeling
Please tell me this was deliberate.
Logged
On Giant In the Playground and Something Awful I am Gnoman.
Man, ninja'd by a potentially inebriated Lord Shonus. I was gonna say to burn it.

Starver

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #144 on: June 18, 2011, 02:40:21 pm »

Logged

Jacob/Lee

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #145 on: June 18, 2011, 02:53:23 pm »

Sure, all books suck if you've only ever read really great literature. Try reading some Tom Clancy, by comparison, to put your frame of reference back into skew.
Unless I'm confused about something, you're calling Tom Clancy books bad?

Greyejoy

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #146 on: June 18, 2011, 07:39:46 pm »

I am currently reading the Thousandfold Thought. Third and final book in the Prince of Nothing series. It's been an interesting read so far, but man does this author put his characters through hell even more than George R.R. Martin does.

When I finish this, I'm thinking about starting on the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Has anyone here read that?
Logged
If you had necromancy powers, this would be a pretty solid way to prank people.
A creepy old man runs up to you and suddenly the skin in your backpack tries to kill you? High Octane Nightmare Fuel much.

Starver

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #147 on: June 18, 2011, 08:57:41 pm »

Sure, all books suck if you've only ever read really great literature. Try reading some Tom Clancy, by comparison, to put your frame of reference back into skew.
Unless I'm confused about something, you're calling Tom Clancy books bad?

When I read that, I was generously thinking that the point was that Clancy was off to one side of the "Good classic literature/bad classic literature spectrum, in that it wasn't technically "classic", but could be used as a marker.  But the logic doesn't stack up right, in hindsight.

I suspect that really this is referring to any of the more recent "Tom Clancy's <Foo>" book, i.e. the Op-Centre/Netforce stuff, which probably wasn't even written by him (by any significant degree) although as I've so far resisted their 'charms' and not read any of them I'm quite possibly talking rubbish about these possibly being rubbish.
Logged

Chilton

  • Bay Watcher
  • Armok Cultist - Calligrapher
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #148 on: June 18, 2011, 11:06:58 pm »

Im stuck into Aleister Crowleys "The Book Of Lies" right now.
Then i might read some Lovecraftian stuff.
Logged
I Like To Think Of Myself As An Artist - I Create Masterpieces With My Tools Of Trade.

Lord Shonus

  • Bay Watcher
  • Angle of Death
    • View Profile
Re: What book are you reading/want to read?
« Reply #149 on: June 19, 2011, 02:11:09 am »

Sure, all books suck if you've only ever read really great literature. Try reading some Tom Clancy, by comparison, to put your frame of reference back into skew.
Unless I'm confused about something, you're calling Tom Clancy books bad?

When I read that, I was generously thinking that the point was that Clancy was off to one side of the "Good classic literature/bad classic literature spectrum, in that it wasn't technically "classic", but could be used as a marker.  But the logic doesn't stack up right, in hindsight.

I suspect that really this is referring to any of the more recent "Tom Clancy's <Foo>" book, i.e. the Op-Centre/Netforce stuff, which probably wasn't even written by him (by any significant degree) although as I've so far resisted their 'charms' and not read any of them I'm quite possibly talking rubbish about these possibly being rubbish.

Whenever a title is possessive like that, or it's BIG NAME AUTHOR with little name author, than it's preety much always a BIG NAME AUTHOR brand novel. Generally BIG NAME AUTHOR has nothing to do with it except cashing checks for use of the name.
Logged
On Giant In the Playground and Something Awful I am Gnoman.
Man, ninja'd by a potentially inebriated Lord Shonus. I was gonna say to burn it.
Pages: 1 ... 8 9 [10] 11 12 ... 18