From the Notes on the Text of my Everyman edition:
There are thousands of differences between the serial and the book. Many are petty, but many are substantial and extensive… The most obvious difference is that, for the book version, Conrad greatly expanded the final sequence, describing Nostromo’s relationship with Giselle Viola. It is generally the case that Conrad seized many opportunities to expand the material of Part III…
Apparently there were a lot of cuts to the first part, which they speculate was to accommodate the above-mentioned expansions to the final part. I definitely felt that the final section with Nostromo and Giselle felt somehow different (more theatrical?) than what came before.
I found 2312 had a really fascinating premise and some of the coolest descriptions of non-FTL technology: the spun-up asteroid habitats, the Mercury track-city, all the terraforming stuff (also seen in the Mars trilogy). I confess liking a couple of aspects of characters: the slow, pedantic scientist who mulls a lot over the pseudo-iterative - basically, habits or patterns he appreciates falling into - jibes with how I think. But the rest of the characterization and even the main plot basically slides off my mind.
Maybe the memorability of a narrative is an especially subjective way to judge a text, but I think 2312 is in a weird place in Robinson’s oeuvre: earlier texts like the Mars trilogy are certainly steeped in things Robinson loves (terraforming, yes, but also the geopolitics of exploitation, weaponized capitalism, and ultimately Swiss government) but scaffolded on enough characterization to make it work; much more recent texts either go all-in on the info-dump with narrative style (2140, which is virtually a primer on ecological economics, with characters feeling like functions of that angle) or make the turn toward narrative a major part of the plot (Aurora and Red Moon have more distinct characters but both hinge in part on nascent artificial intelligences developing the ability to discern unexpected narratives from data and act upon them). 2312 feels like it’s doing both the turgid exposition and the narrative emerges from the noise approach, but neither is as cleanly executed.
I distinctly remember the Mercury track city concept, but I can’t remember if that same concept is alluded to at some point in the Mars trilogy (and was then later expanded on in 2312 I suppose), or if I just read about it while reading the Mars trilogy, perhaps while looking into other books by Stanley-Robinson.
i can’t think of many notable examples off top, but my gut says this used to be fairly common and has likely stopped not only because serialization isn’t a thing anymore but also because the nature of publishing and writing has changed due to the literary professional complex of editors, agents, and workshops.
kinda to @wickedcestus ‘s point, i think many writers, both new and old, end up doing this inadvertently by writing the same book over and over in a different guise. they ruminate on their themes, in other words. one of my favs, javier marias, basically wrote the same book 17 times. maybe the same could be said about sebald?
anyway, i think i’m gonna read some john donne next.
I just finished reading The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin last night. It was the first of her books I’ve read and I quite enjoyed it. The whole time while I was reading I couldn’t stop thinking about how a lot of the ideas about gender and sex that are just now being discussed by a broader part of society are already quite old. (The book was published in 1969) I never really explicitly thought about that before.
I read in the afterword that Le Guin was criticized by feminists at the time for using “he” as a gender neutral pronound for the ambisexual Gethenians. Le Guin later said she “couldn’t help but feel that justice was on their side”. She was however of the opinion that “they” was too confusing as a gender neutral pronoun.
That whole anecdote is really wild to me, simply because it happened so long ago. I first learned that “they” could be used as a gender neutral pronoun ca. 2008/2009 and remember that I thought that that was really neat. Back then I wasn’t really aware of the fact that some people don’t identify as either of the binary genders and just thought that it was really useful for situations in which you simply don’t know and don’t want to assume (like e.g. online with ambiguous user names etc.). In German there wasn’t anything like that at the time - at least nothing that came even close to how established “they” seemed to be in English. And there still isn’t today. At least in the pronouns department. The past couple of years there has been a really heated debate about introducing new ways of making German more inclusive in that regard and it’s not been a good time. It’s basically impossible to talk about without stepping on someones toes. People are really polarized and it’s just astonishing to me that this discussion is already so old and made seemingly so little progress.
In general I feel like the book had a lot of interesting ideas and was great at creating a real sense of place without being needlessly worldbuilderly like some sci-fi and fantasy books tend to be.
I’m really interested in reading her earthsea books next.
would have thought German would have an easier time with neutral pronouns because I though there already was one, but then again I dont know what I’m talking about.
I can see how that can be confusing! We actually only have a neutral article, not a neutral pronoun.
For articles we have der / die / das which is the (masculine / feminine / neuter) but for pronouns we really only have er / sie which is he / she. There are some proposals for adding a gender-neutral pronoun like dey, similar to they in English but those haven’t caught on yet. Though awareness is rising, which also is the reason why people are currently so up in arms about the topic.
One major problem, however, isn’t even the question of pronouns since that would mean “simply” adding a word. What gets people really angry about the whole topic is pluralization:
In German (and other gendered languages like French/Spanish if I remember correctly) when you refer to a group of people you generally use the plural of the male form of that verb. For example if you were talking about a group of pilots, which includes both men and women you would say “die Piloten” (male plural). If the group was exclusively female pilots you would say “die Pilotinnen” (female plural). So if even one man joins a group of women the entire group would then be referred to by the male plural form.
The criticism is that this effectively erases women from public perception especially for male-dominated professions like police officers, pilots, doctors etc. Some people started just explicitly mentioning both “die Pilotinnen und Piloten” to be inclusive but this still is only inclusive for binary genders so people started proposing adding special characters to include also non-binary people: “die Pilot*innen”. The * would then be pronounced as a glottal stop, a short pause in the middle of the word.
And, oh boy, did that make people mad. A lot of people didn’t like how this looked and how it sounded. Also a large part of people felt like the younger generation and left-leaning politicians were policing the language. From there the whole discussion went in a completely non-productive direction.
It’s not an easy discussion to have because people on both sides can be quite closed-minded and don’t want to find any middle-ground. It’s complicated! But currently there is an increase in research about the topic, that tries to add some facts to the discussion because a lot of it is currently purely emotional.
I don’t know if I’ve posted this here or not, but I was thinking a lot about Katt Williams and the amount of books he claimed to have read as a child, and I’ve given myself the Katt Williams reading challenge.
My goal is to read 3,000 books within four years, but be very liberal with the definition of book. For instance, the novel Dune is comprised of three books. The Lord of the Rings is six. I’m also counting a single comic book as one book, so when I finish reading Robert Kirkman’s Invincible series, I’ll have read 144 books.
The Diary of Anne Frank. Does that count? IIRC, Anne was writing her first diary, then when she learned of the BBC wanting personal accounts of the war, she began revising her work. Then after the war, when her father found the different diaries, he sort of married them together. Scholars call the versions A, B, and C.
Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was originally a short story (still found in middle school textbooks) that was rewritten into novel form. There are quite a few changes there.
Again, regarding revisions: The first 38 books in the Hardy Boys series. Some books are so different from their revised versions, that the only thing recognizable are the titles.
I read that the books were rewritten to remove ethnic stereotypes, but I’d also read that the publishers of 1959 wanted the series to be formulaic, and thought the kids of the 50s were too stupid to be able to comprehend anything other than a cookie cutter approach to serial novels.
Holy library cards Batman, that’s a lot of books. Your definition of book is quite nice though. A few years back I decided to re-read the entire Animorphs series, and just that series on its own basically got me up to 60 books in a month since I was reading about 3 books a day. (I had a lot of spare time and a voracious appetite for reading.) Good luck on your challenge!
Finished Emperors of the Deep and…it really was a heavy lean toward how destructive humans are toward sharks, but it also detoured into talking about modern slavery and trafficking on the high seas as it relates to commercial fishing. It almost makes the shark facts feel a bit secondary to the whole thing. Pretty decent, though I found fault with some things throughout and wish there had been more about sharks themselves.
Currently reading Her Body and Other Parties because…I don’t know how I acquired it, but I did, despite it being pretty far outside my normal reading wheelhouse. I like it so far! It’s short stories with a lot of gristle to them, so I spend a long while chewing on them, especially right at the end. “Eight Bites” in particular absolutely knocked the wind out of me. I’m about 2/3 done.
I like her! I’m not the most knowledgeable on Munro, but I’ve read two of hers. Runaway is pretty great, especially the story “Powers” which is either one of the “most” Munro stories she’s ever written or her biggest departure, depending on how you look at it. Neat! Runaway also has a three-story run of “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” which Almodovár adapted into his movie Julieta. I haven’t seen it but I love Almodovár and am interested to see what he did with her work so I hope to watch it soon. Dear Life, her last collection, is the first one I read. It’s alright. The stories kinda feel a little too same-y for me (a bit of a Goldilocks problem I have with a lot of short story collections). Munro kinda reminds me of some other writers like Ferrante and Murakami (maybe even Nancy Meyers the film director if we extrapolate a bit) where there is a very consistent visual language - Ferrante is always gonna find a way to work in dolls or beaches or adultery; Murakami is gonna write about cats and boobs; Munro loves gravel and trains and lakes. I kinda love when authors have a sort of signature like that but it also can work against them in some cases.
Also, I seem to have chosen the exact wrong time to start Less Than Zero:
i have been burned out on political theory since about 2021 or so, and last year made the mistake of diving back in with the jakarta method, which is an important but brutal read
mariame kaba’s “let this radicalize you” helped ease me back in, it’s a fantastic text for organizers & the like
all this to say i finally picked up my copy of fanon’s “wretched of the earth” again and i love that my bookmark back then was a stimulus check, haha
