What Are You Reading Now.

I have ordered The Divine Comedy by Dante Algheri, all 900 pages and it's going to be a ride. Wanna come along? Maybe just start with classics in general, like old greek epics.

 

People must be sick of me mentioning him... even I'm getting sick of it, but if you haven't tried William Carlos Williams, I'd say give him a go.

 

E.A. Houseman, Lewis Carrol ("The Hunting of the Snark" is a great masterpiece), Byron, Emily Dickinson, Conrad Aiken, Ernest Dowson. There are many others of course.

Edit; I like epigrams, too. "Stand close around ye Stygian set..." and so on. There are some sonnets that are very wonderful: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." "I met a traveler from an antique land..." "When I have fears that I may cease to be..." etc. etc. etc. etc. Memorize five of them and then appear many times smarter as you quote them at every opportunity.

T.S. Eliot is also very good. Alec Guinness has many recordings of Eliot on YouTube.

 

I have read bits of The Divine Comedy. Epic poems are fascinating to me but I'm not certain I have ever finished one. I remember Beowulf and Oedipus Rex from high school but I'm pretty sure I did everything I could to NOT read in high school. I might be interested in picking it back up if I had someone to discuss it with but I'm in the middle of a cross-country move right now so the majority of my books are packed up, including that one, so I might need a raincheck for a couple of weeks.

I will certainly check him out. Thank you.

I remember picking up The Waste Land at a Barnes and Noble once and, like most Barnes and Noble shoppers, I found a chair to read it instead of buying it. I couldn't get through it to be honest but this was a couple of years ago. Perhaps another go is worthwhile. I appreciate the other recommendations.

 

Confessions of a Mask. Chapter 2 is 66 pages ... tomorrow.

A Farewell to Arms is forgettable. It has two good passages, maybe more if I had paid more attention.

 

Just finished Red Rising by Pierce Brown, and very good it was too. You could describe it as grown up YA, it feels like it wants to burst out of that genre and beat it to death. It is quite blood thirsty, in a good way. Trouble is there are already 5 in the series and I'm not sure he has finished yet. Trust me to pick up yet another good series.
Anyway, I do have the next two books in the First Law trilogy so Before They Are Hanged is my next, well maybe my next.

 

Yeah, it seemed like YA in description only. Sure, the protagonists were like 15, but they mostly had young adult backgrounds and experiences. Like working in mines and having been married for several years. It was almost like when it was shopped out, the publishers were like, "It's good, but we really don't have a market for New Adult bildungsromans," so they chopped 10 years off their collective ages to make it fit into the YA genre. I really enjoyed it, though, even if I found the Roman imagery a little heavy handed. Have yet to read the other two, though, even though I'm pretty sure I have them on my shelf somewhere.

 

Yeah, you're right, the Roman imagery was pretty strong. Not sure why he went in that direction, other than it was on mars. It would have been interesting to hear him trying to pitch the idea to his agent and seeing his face. It isn't a clear cut genre; but well written and different and will definitely give the others a go at some point, although I don't have them at present.

 

I am reading a Scanner Darkly. This is my first novel by PKD after having read the short stories Minority Report and Paycheck. I am having trouble with PKD's prose style. It just doesn't engage me. I think there's a lack of reflection and insight. Sure, there's a lot of cool things happening and the premise is great. Maybe the problem is me, I don't know. It feels a bit scattershot and all over the place. Ill-disciplined. I know that helps create the druggy atmosphere of the whole thing and that might be the appeal for some people. I want to like this more than I can say I do at this point.

 

I've always put him in the same category as Lovecraft. They were both amazing conceptualists but I never really enjoy reading the works themselves.

 

I think he's hit or miss. I thoroughly enjoy every other one I read.

 

PKD suffered from mental issues, and I suspect that accounts for some of his choices as well as certain quirks of his style.

 

I never really had a problem with Lovecraft's prose. I never thought it was great, exactly, but it was functional. If there was anything that made him difficult to read, for me at least, it was the overt, old school racism. Not really something I noticed with PKD.

 

I think most of his mental issues were drug induced. That doesn't make them any less real, of course. I heard that was what happened to Robert Sheckley's work too, drugs on the brain. His books got so bad.

 

Drugs would make sense since obviously a huge component was paranoia (also a huge component in many of his stories).

 

Toward the end, he even went a little L. Ron Hubbard. He had religious visions and wrote about them. I haven't read those yet. They're supposed to be some of his best work though, and in his defense, he was quite open about the fact that he had no way of knowing whether he received divine revelation or burnout hallucinations. That's pretty damned rational, considering most people with religious visions are 100% sure what they saw was real.

 

At least that was honest of him. I read Do Androids Dream once and enjoyed it, haven't read much of his other stuff, have to make a note about that.

 

In a way I find the overt racism easier to deal with. You really never have to parse things out when the author is screaming them at the top of his lungs rather than dog-whistling.

 

If you are still looking for suggestions and you want something a bit different you might want to try John Agard. He is about as far away from Classic American poets as you can get. Personally I like variety and he definitely provides that. You can actually listen to some of his poems here https://poetryarchive.org/poet/john-agard/ I recommend listening to 'Checking Out me History' - behind the phonetic simplicity are some more complex questions/ideas

 

Finished this one and is now looking for what next to read.

 

For some reason, I never finished the third book years ago, so I reread the whole trilogy recently. So good.

 

His Dark Materials impacted me strongly. I remember being very hopeful when the Golden Compass movie was announced, but the result was less than inspiring.

 

I think the book The Razor's Edge and the Bill Murray adaptation of the same name actually compliment each other well, each filling in details the other left out.