Just started reading The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov. Rather interesting so far, as I've never read any of his works before.
Re-re-reading (as in reading it again, not a stutter) Flowers for Algernon. Can't recommend it enough to anyone that's not read it
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I'm beginning to explore more Asian literature, something I've been meaning to do for months.
Bleak House is a very good book, but it's trademark Dickens. By that I mean prepare yourself for a long-winded read
Still slogging through the audio book version of "Drood," by Dan Simmons, on the car's CD player. You'd never believe this is the same author that wrote "Hyperion". But I just got "The Brass Check, A Study of American Journalism," by Upton Sinclair. Starting it right now. The library had it in storage, that was weird. It was written in 1919 and I'm curious how relevant it is going to be to today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brass_Check
Forster's 'A Room with a View'. I'm not sure what I think of it. It's very easy to read, fairly short, nicely paced, and all well written. But the story is, to its style, comparably dull - as though it were a book made of light conversations. It's all fine prose, but with a boring subject. 'Maurice' is the far superior book from Forster.
A good start would be the four Chinese classics. Though it requires a great amount of commitment, as each book is an upward of 2500 pages long, I find them each to be some of the greatest books to be published. Unfortunately I have come to realize that no translation has done justice to the originals, like the Tale of the Heike, the Japanese war epic, they are simply not the same book when translated. Though, I would recommend not to read the Tale of The Heike at all if you aren't reading it in Japanese, as the narration is so very intertwined with the language. Should you read the four classics, there is a specific order I would recommend should you want your full enjoyment. The first that you should read should either be the worst, or, the best of them. Outlaws of the Marsh is considered to be the weakest, though it is still considered a classic for a good reason. As a warning, absolutely do not read the translation titled Water Margin. It is a poor, and on top of that, not scholarly translation. The other option you have, should you feel that perhaps 100,000 pages are too much for you, is to choose the best of them and see where you stand afterwards. The work most widely considered to be the best is that of the Hong Lou Meng, the Dream of Red Mansions. It was by far the most well-written of all of them, unfortunately, so poetic and rich that it is called one of the hardest books to translate. This meaning, it has the worst translations. Still, though the prose can be somewhat bland in the translations, and very much of the magic is lost, it is still a life-changing book to read. Written in the 1700s, actually, all throughout the 1700s, it is surprising to see a book so progressive and emotional. It is one of the first pro-women novels there are, if not the very first, and it also tackles gender identity issues. To put it simply, the book is about nothing. It is a reflection on the author's love for women, and a semi-autobiographical take of his life. It is also a meditation of Chinese family values and philosophy. It is a romance. A word of caution, again, do not read the Foly translation. It is titled Dream of Red Chamber. A good reason is that it is in truth, less than one third of the book itself. Yes, it was not actually finished, sadly, so buying it would be to do your wallet harm. The Yang translation, Dream of Red Mansions, is the most accurate, as the Hawkes translation is wrought with changes and cut content. It removes much of the Chinese culture and instead injects western ideals most uncalled for. I would not read the Hawkes translation first. The next two are interchangeable as well, Journey to the West, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I only said there should be a certain order as, you see, Outlaws of The Marsh is slightly inferior to Three Kingdoms, and should you read Three Kingdoms before, Outlaws of the Marsh will seem less grand of a book. You will be expecting to read another book as complex as Three Kingdoms, and this you will not get. The Romance of The Three Kingdoms should not, like all of the Chinese classics, be compared to other works for familiarity, as they are so starkly different from our literature. Still, should I have to compare, I would say that Three Kingdoms is that of the Chinese Moby-Dick. Three Kingdoms is a war novel, yes, but it is an allegory for the circularity of life, and an epic one at that. It is strange, as it seems to have been authored in a very similar fashion to Melville's, as very often it will cut to long sequences of pure nonfiction. The first paragraph is this: “The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity. ” I will tell you first thing that in every one of the Chinese classics there is an endurance test. Yes, in the first four or so chapters of each there will be a mass amount of name-droppings, but I assure you the entire book is not like so. Many find them rather hard to keep track of, as to the fact there are literally hundreds of central characters, none truly being the "star." Dream of Red Mansions has over three hundred main characters, and this is not the book of war we speak of. Of course, if you are only interested in that of Japanese literature, I can very surely affirm to you that Ningen Shikkaku is one of my favorites. The name in English is No Longer Human. If you wish for further recommendations, or perhaps further instruction, feel free to ask. Should you like a copy of Outlaws of The Marsh or Romance of The Three Kingdoms for your kindle, you may PM me, as I have pdf files of both.
Oh wow! I would never have expected such a lengthy, detailed, and informative response. Thanks for taking the time to write this, seriously, I really appreciate it!
I am reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, and The Sickness unto Death by Kierkegaard. Also I have tried my hand at science fiction again with Neuromancer by William Gibson. Blindness I do find interesting, but Saramago does seem to use general 'what if' situations in order to fuel his creativity. I am saying, most people I would imagine have thought of the world going blind; the loss of death as a process. These are common daydreams, and not hard to think of, and from the fact that many of his books are composed of these premises, I would say from my own opinion that he has skill but lacks creativity. If that makes any sense at all. Unto Death has ground on my patience thoroughly, but I persevere. Neuromancer reads like a crime novel, and you can guess what is afoot like a crime novel. It only makes me wish to revisit Hammett.
Well, it can be argued that all writers lack creativity because ideas are meaningless. It's the execution of the idea (i.e., how you write it) that makes a piece good or bad. Besides, Saramago isn't interested in the blindness itself but in people's reactions to it.
He has written it to make it interesting. Creativity, the word in use, was to describe his seeming lack of narrative ideas. Ideas, though as you say meaningless, can be hard to come by. The notion of any inserted item being lost on the world is not a new one. This is only my own theory that he has taken common thoughts and detailed them into grown creations. Never once did I insinuate this to be a bad thing.
2 new books today The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, and the Obelisk Trilogy (Henry Miller's Tropics books which I've always wanted to own!) I've been reading terribly slow lately, slow even by my snail-pace standards. I'm still only half way through Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. It's a good book full of wit and insight, but it's 600 pages long and books like that always take me quite a bit to read.
I'm rereading Earthly Powers now, too! I first read in in the 80s and it blew me away. Burgess had developed a casual, effortless virtuosity with language by that point in his career, and it seems to me that he was incapable of saying anything boring. That novel really sparkles!
It's an epic, no doubt about that. It's so ambitious but, at the same time, very controlled. I really admire that about Burgess...He was a writer with serious talent!
Sorry to intrude... I'm rather new here and didn't want to read through the 161 pages of previous conversation. But to answer the opening post, I'm (not) reading "The Girl Who Saved The King of Sweden" by Jonas Jonasson. I know it's all the rage right now, but when I picked it up, I didn't know it was critically acclaimed. I just thought the title was interesting and probably contained humour in it. I'm only on page 30 and I'm finding it boring. I mean, yes, it was very witty and had humour in certain points. The first 30 pages were a series of flashbacks of the protagonists and had very little momentum about what was happening in the present. These flashbacks felt like flash fiction, each with a witty ending that then explains why and how these people came into the situation that they were in. I usually love wit. Hell, I even use a lot of wit in my own writing. But the humour that this book uses is gallows humour and it didn't sit well with me. Along with the gallows humour, it also breaks the narrative from a "showing" perspective of certain scenes into a "telling" perspective. It does so rather rudely so that I'm forcibly awakened into what will happen in the end, which is that the girl will meet and save the King of Sweden. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here but I'm afraid that it's getting so annoying that I don't really want to pursue it to the end. Does anyone else feel the same?
Currently reading Osama by Chris Ryan, it's ok. Have gone trough the start of it, I think it'll get more interesting as I read on.
This is an interesting question. Some people doggedly read books right to the end even if they find them boring. Others (like me) will drop a book after a while if it's boring. I read 350 pages of Stephen King's The Stand before putting it aside, hoping it would become interesting, but it didn't. Other people keep telling me, "Finish it! It gets great later on!" Argh. I'm of the opinion that, with very rare exceptions, you're perfectly justified in dropping a book if it doesn't interest you.
I checked out a couple of books from the library. The one that I chose to read first is called Buried in a Book. The name of who it's by escapes me at the moment though.
I've always thought that A Passage to India was Forster's very best. But I haven't read Maurice. It just went on to my short list. I just started (and by that I mean, just this morning on the subway) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I find it always takes me several pages to adjust to the pace of 19th century prose, but I was perfectly comfortable by Lexington Avenue. Next on the list will be Don Quixote.
