Got this for my birthday and was checking out the comments.
I’m ready for this shit.
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So this is how I find out
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his goodreads is full of YA, memoirs by ex-navy seals and jackass cast members, freakanomics and malcolm gladwell, then this
only 4 stars?
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Two bullets with two distinct messages engraved on them: RICH DAD…POOR DAD
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Good (Post must be at least 5 characters)
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I just finished reading Cynthia Rimsky’s Clara y confusa, one of the winners of this year’s Herralde award. If I’m not mistaken, this is only the second time a chilean author gets it, after Bolaño for The Savage Detectives.
The novel is a lot of fun, it has a paranoid vibe similar to Pynchon but in a lighter way and a sense of humor from tragedy that I think only writers from this side of the world truly capture. The main story is about the generational sequence of corruption of a plumbers union, but it’s also about art, romance and the things we chose to celebrate. I can’t wait for it to get translated.
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going to check that one out thanks for the writeup!
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Got a copy of The Complete Plays of Sarah Kane been awhile since I’ve read them, and with the exception of Blasted, Cleansed, and 44.8 Psychosis I don’t have the strongest memory of the rest of the work (not that there’s a lot in total, unfortunately). Then because I invoked Lamborghini a little while ago I think I’ll try to tackle El fiord but idk it looks difficult although it’s not super long so what the heck
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I actually read up on Blasted when you mentioned it cuz I didn’t catch the reference. Definitely has piqued my interest.
Turn
HARD booksintentional prose intoEASY bookssoulless wikipedia summaries.
Whenever I imagine a person being genuinely excited about such an ad, I get a little sad.
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fully cringing at “maximize your reading potential” there. feels perfectly squeezed out of a marketing-talk tube.
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digest and easy reader editions have been around forever but I suppose the question here is how accurately the “a.i.” is going to summarize the text. I’m guessing there’s no Magibook editor checking this because that would defeat the whole point of “a.i.” Anyway the website has a security warning so I can’t look into it further
Really feels to me like the “I skip the cutscenes” of book reading.
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Seeing a lot of brokeasses not on their grindset in the thread this morning
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to be fair to Magibook.ai they are pitching to people who are bad at reading that what to read good books. The sincerity and effectiveness is TBD but that’s a reasonable goal
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That recent thread of conversation over in It’s That GOT-damned-Y Time of the Year Once Again: The Forum Community GOTY Thread 2024 reminds me how much books are also about, as yeso put it,
I think the true strength of videogames is in the way they present place, atmosphere, duration, and a combination of visual, text, music, etc.
Edit that a bit and that describes one of the key points of attraction for books. It’s the texture, emphasis on text, that draws me to reading. It’s the way things go described or undescribed, the elaborateness or sparseness of description, the building and unbuilding of threads, and the feeling of potential consequence even at the level of word and phrase.
Atmosphere for a book doesn’t mean the same thing as a video game, but it aligns with things like tone, voice, and all the potential ways texts make literal meanings and figurative associations. Narrative and other elements matter too, but it’s the capacity to mull over and move through language that distinguishes the literary text as we discuss it from, say, the Wikipedia version of the text.
I am fine with the concept of a gloss. Breaking a text down can be an invaluable exercise, and I see nothing inherently wrong with reading others’ glosses. Heck, sometimes it offers scaffolding to get into the experience. (Compare: changing difficulties in a game.) What I react to instead is, first, the veer away from curiosity in the framing of hard as something to avoid and easy as something to enjoy. Sometimes we can read things without knowing everything that’s going on, and that’s OK.
More broadly, the use-case of a tool like this is most likely for students wanting to get by in a class they don’t particularly care about. The ad is a symptom of the way that plot knowledge is often incentivized over close textual engagement in class assessments, which in turn is a symptom of universities giving literature instructors massive courses (100+ students with TAs) and high schools giving teachers too much other stuff to do. I’d wager there isn’t a large audience going, “I would read The Great Gatsby but it’s too hard,” but there is an audience going, “If I have to read The Great Gatsby, I want it to be as painless as possible.” 30 years ago, they bought Cliff Notes; today, they might use this.
The rhetorical challenge is to get students who have been steeped in that environment to value reading. Can I convince them that “maximize your reading potential” and “avoid difficult language” are at odds with one another? Can I convince them of the value of the text? Can we start to talk about reading as an art, rather than a fifth-choice medium to slog through?
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yeah, well-said. as much as i love and respect “the written word” i am more pessimistic than ever of its “market value” and “relevance” in the years ahead
Look I guess I just identify with a Jude The Obscure kind of guy (the access to education part, none of that cousin stuff) and think of someone earnestly wanting to get into challenging reading and this is an on-ramp. Maybe being too sentimental idk
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