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Post by Flatypus on Sept 3, 2009 19:51:25 GMT
If you say you do not and will not read something, there are presumably reasons for that and the usual one is a dislike of what you expect to find there or at least total lack of interest in it. Which is exactly what I said about Dickens but when I said it, everybody has to have a fit while when Sinistral does, I'm not allowed to even draw the obvious conclusion that she won't read it for exactly the same reason. No it's NOT what you said. You said " Of all of them, I loath Christmas Tale and Pickwick Papers above just about anything ever written" You didn't say I have no intention of reading it or that you didn't expect to like it or that you had a total lack of interest. You made it sound like you'd read it - and that's what we're trying to make you understand. That's right. Where apart from your own fantasy does that imply I'd read them? Are they stories so little known that I could not possibly know anything about them unless I had read them? I loathe the characters in Pickwick and I hate the eternal Chris-Kringle over-sentimentalised reworkings of Scrooge. Do I need to spell every single word out to deny you or Jean an excuse to fabricate things that are never there? In point of fact, I think Dickens himself had a low opinion of Christmas Carol. |
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Post by riotgrrl on Sept 3, 2009 19:56:39 GMT
Oh shut up and talk about books. Everyone.
Thanks.
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Post by Flatypus on Sept 3, 2009 19:57:27 GMT
Flatypus, I do wish you would disabuse yourself of the belief that people take against you because you are so lovely and gentle and not a big macho thug.Lovely you may be IRL, but I am afraid your messageboard behaviour does tend towards the thuggish. Say it loud enough and you'll make it true as usual, ay Jean? Everybody else will notice that it is nearly always after Jean has butted in with some response that I have said entirely misrepresents what I said, or she claims to be responding to conclusions she has drawn that were never in original, that things get nasty when I stand up to say that I never posted any such thing and even with it staring them in the face, people prefer to tell me what Jean has decided I said and refuse to accept what I say it was. Why would anybody post something and then deny it? Isn't it more likely that they would stand by what they post? So why is it that I so often find myself having to point out that my posts are being lied about? |
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Post by riotgrrl on Sept 3, 2009 19:59:37 GMT
Am I somehow failing to make myself clear here?
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Post by Flatypus on Sept 3, 2009 20:07:11 GMT
I can't stick Graham Greene either. OK. I've read one book; but his fans will recite bits from his other books - "He wasn't carrion yet" - that seem to me vapid, and the kind of thing a 14-year-old would think of as deep, only because it's so negative. Greene seems to me to be the kind of writer who confuses unrelenting pessimism with seriousness of purpose. I don't get him at all. I do not regard 'redemption' as a specifically Roman Catholic phenomenon, I think his characters come across often as confused when they are supposed to be indifferent and I find him formulaic. Its interesting that you find him pessimistic because his whole outlook is supposed to have been guided by the view that eventually even the worst or most disillusioned can atone for everything by an act of commitment and often of sacrifice. (actually, Dickens comes back to mind in Tale of Two Cities - that is very Greenesque). I happen to regard that view as garbage. |
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Post by motorist on Sept 3, 2009 20:11:46 GMT
Am I somehow failing to make myself clear here? Yes, you should drop that English accent ;D |
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Post by trubble on Sept 3, 2009 20:15:57 GMT
I think we should have a Stub Crouch bookclub with monthly assignments.  |
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luc
Fluffy!
Posts: 41 
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Post by luc on Sept 3, 2009 20:27:54 GMT
I've read 5 out of those 7, have not read Lady Chatterley's Lover and War and Peace. I found P&P utterly boring though and, more than that, a big disappointment given the fanfare it received from so many people who recommended it to me. However I will compile a list of books (off the top of my head) I heartily recommend which may or may not be to your taste!: Roadside Picnic - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka Norwegian Wood - Haruki(?) Murakami  Philip K Dick Has anyone ever read a book, come back to it later only to find they hated it? I re-read a few Douglas Coupland books I had in storage only to find them utterly turgid compared to when I read them when I was twenty or so. |
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Post by jean on Sept 3, 2009 20:49:16 GMT
I loved Tolkein when I read him at 17 - I was totally absorbed in the fantasy and read it very fast, intending to go back and read it more slowly later on, but I never did so I never found out if I'd have been disappointed.
Gollum in the film was all I could have wished.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Sept 3, 2009 20:59:24 GMT
I enjoyed that (the book, I didn't think much of the film)
AH
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Post by motorist on Sept 3, 2009 20:59:59 GMT
koirani söi mun kotitehtäväni
Just practicing "My dog ate my homework" in Finnish in anticipation of the assignments ;D
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Post by Flatypus on Sept 4, 2009 0:24:37 GMT
I've never seen the appeal of Philip K Dick. Dick is all I can see of him. The only one that I think is by him that impressed me was The Man in High Castle where a man in the central neutral part of America under German control in the East and Japanese in the West is writing a novel that people take for insight into a real alternate universe where the Axis lost the war - but this alternate is not our world either, is one of the British Empire triumphant and the USA to Britain roughly as British suibservience to the USA in our world. I would recommend Ursula K Le Guin's novels and most especially that replaced Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (about the only Heinlein I have time for) Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars trilogy' and since he wrote those, The years of Rice and Salt, the world after the Black Death destroys Europe and China and Islam become the dominant powers until Japan, India and the Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) replace them in the '20th' century (of course he is using the Muslim calendar since Christians are as rare as Sikhs today), so 1400s.
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Post by everso on Sept 4, 2009 7:46:27 GMT
Am I somehow failing to make myself clear here? She'll be aiming the chalk at us soon. Best stop. ;D |
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Post by aubrey on Sept 4, 2009 9:29:15 GMT
Dick wrote very quickly and had no time to rewrite - always starting the next one - he was a professional writer, not an academic who did it part time and could spend 10 years over one novel, like most people who write literature these days.
So, he can be clumsy, with sometimes hackneyed plots and resolutions (but - Christ - Academic Fiction is not strong on plots, is it? Doesn't even bother most of the time. Just an old bloke wandering about and grumbling about not being able to get it up these days, most of it. Yes, Roth, I mean you); but he does things that no one else manages even today, and he can be amazing. Also very funny.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Sept 4, 2009 10:33:06 GMT
Am I somehow failing to make myself clear here? She'll be aiming the chalk at us soon. Best stop. ;D Chalk? This is RG we are talking about here, it will be the heavy wooden board duster...launched with devastating accuracy! AH |
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Post by riotgrrl on Sept 4, 2009 10:38:39 GMT
She'll be aiming the chalk at us soon. Best stop. ;D Chalk? This is RG we are talking about here, it will be the heavy wooden board duster...launched with devastating accuracy! AH Dusters? Chalk? Are you all on crack? If people don't behave themselves I'll blow them up. |
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luc
Fluffy!
Posts: 41
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Post by luc on Sept 4, 2009 18:07:08 GMT
Dick wrote very quickly and had no time to rewrite - always starting the next one - he was a professional writer, not an academic who did it part time and could spend 10 years over one novel, like most people who write literature these days. So, he can be clumsy, with sometimes hackneyed plots and resolutions (but - Christ - Academic Fiction is not strong on plots, is it? Doesn't even bother most of the time. Just an old bloke wandering about and grumbling about not being able to get it up these days, most of it. Yes, Roth, I mean you); but he does things that no one else manages even today, and he can be amazing. Also very funny. I think that is a fair assessment, I understand that Dick's writing has its drawbacks, but for some reason I find his novels heartfelt and often quite moving despite their "pulp" style. In other news I bought a nice hardback copy of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" today - I'm enjoying it so far (I've only read the "Dorian" adaptation by Will Self). |
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Post by housesparrow on Sept 4, 2009 18:19:49 GMT
Has anyone ever read a book, come back to it later only to find they hated it? Yes,that is why I seldom re-read a book I enjoyed the first time. On the other hand, the re-reading of a book I abandoned in my youth can give a pleasant surprise! It never worked with Virgin ia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" though. Or as byatt's "Possession." At least I got through Lighthouse, which I neve managed with Possession. |
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Post by everso on Sept 4, 2009 18:26:41 GMT
Like Housey, I seldom re-read a book. However... Books I have re-read several times: The Pickwick Papers ;D Three Men in a Boat ;D ;D Gone with the Wind Billy Liar (oh, Keith Waterhouse died today   ) |
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luc
Fluffy!
Posts: 41
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Post by luc on Sept 4, 2009 18:30:21 GMT
Has anyone ever read a book, come back to it later only to find they hated it? Yes,that is why I seldom re-read a book I enjoyed the first time. On the other hand, the re-reading of a book I abandoned in my youth can give a pleasant surprise! It never worked with Virgin ia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" though. Or as byatt's "Possession." At least I got through Lighthouse, which I neve managed with Possession. I wish I could do the same! I endlessly go back to books I enjoy. It's probably habit from when I was a child and only able to afford one book a month from the used bookstore (my £1 a week allowance didn't stretch to a new book) - I remember the bus fare to town took me two weeks or so to save up for, on top of the cost of the books. Since it would cost me a bus fare to go to the library (our travelling library was full of shite), I felt that at least I should get my very own book for the cost of the fare. Strange to think of it now where I buy maybe 5 or 6 books a month. |
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