@“yeso”#p123035 haha I was already sold, but now I’m more sold! And thanks for pointing me toward some specific books, because I wouldn’t have known where to start with Thompson. Guy wrote a lot of books!
@“DavidNoo”#p123052 heck yeah! been on a TP kick myself the last couple of years and have really been enjoying his books. I appreciate how mostly contained each novel is and how jumping back into Discworld is possible months/years later. Are you reading in any particular order or going through all of Discworld?
@“Brett”#p123336 I love reading Terry Pratchett because it will always get me out of a reading slump. I‘ve read probably 10 or 11 of them out of order? I first read one probably in 2015 when a friend recommended and let me borrow “Lords and Ladies” and “Hogfather.” Since I started in a random spot, I’ve kind of kept it up. I read Raising Steam early on which is one of the last ones, but these books are contained so well it didn‘t really mess anything up. Since then I’ve been trying to keep on the earlier side but also jumping to different storylines. I certainly wouldn't recommend chronological order for most people because that first one is a little crusty (but still cool!) Do you have a favorite? Guards Guards is a fun one too.
Also it's fun knowing I have like 25+ books that I will almost certainly enjoy waiting for me.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nfpublishing/the-impact-of-iwata
I‘m not a Nintendo fan, I’m an Iwata fan.
I am reading and very much enjoying my first David Foster Wallace book, String Theory, his essays on tennis (which I am reading to be festive for Wimbledon). I scrolled up and saw he was discussed at length by people much more knowledgeable than I am about a month+ ago, so I don‘t really have much to offer. But my first impression of him is good. In college, I was friends with a girl who was an English major and no fewer than 22 different men told her to read Infinite Jest over the course of our four years there. Given that, I’ve always seen DFW as shorthand for a certain type of literary “bro” and that put me off of giving him a try until now
The other book I've been reading lately is _The Count of Monte Cristo_, which I have been enjoying immensely
@“Hunter”#p124289 I read String Theory around Wimbledon-time a year or two ago. I had previously read most of the essays in other collections, but it was interesting to realize that he had written about tennis enough to fill a whole (albeit relatively short) book, and that his writing about tennis allows him to touch on so many non-tennis topics. Infinite Jest, you may not be surprised to hear, actually has an awful lot of tennis in it, and some interesting stories to tell about adolescent competitive sport. If you‘re a real tennis head like myself you’ll likely get a kick out of those sections if you ever read it.
_Count of Monte Cristo_ is one of the most joyous and heart-wrenching books to read. I consider it a perfect book, and made to seem so effortless too. Almost like it wrote itself, and yet at the same time you can see the mastery in its construction. What a book!! I can't wait to read it again!
@“wickedcestus”#p124314 What's the good Count of Monte Cristo translation to read?
@“whatsarobot”#p124316 The Penguin Classics one by Robin Buss is quite good and, importantly, unabridged.
@“wickedcestus”#p124342 thanks! Good ol trustworthy Penguin.
dfw is good and is meaty enough to criticize. i went to grad school at UIUC, which is where he grew up. i lived right by the tennis courts he writes about in one of his essays and near those golden corn fields he was so fond of.
i'm reading mild vertigo by mieko kanai right now, which is pretty good! i haven't been reading as much as i'd like to however because i've been watching the shield.
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@“MoH”#p124553 i lived right by the tennis courts he writes about in one of his essays
are they as windy as he says they are? he makes playing tennis there sound insane
@“wickedcestus”#p124556 no and I wish I was joking when I say that was the first time I seriously thought that the fella might exaggerate things for literary effect
Buss/Penguin Monte Cristo also comes with a great foreword by Buss about the translation that is recommended reading after finishing the book!
on that note, how does everyone feel about forewords/afterwords?
i tend to skip them. in fact, i find myself skipping almost all criticism these days, even those ‘body of work’ overviews you’ll sometimes see in NYRB/LRB. i will still, however, read a good hatchet job.
I like to read the brief bios of the author, which sometimes provide a little historical context for the novel; in the case of a historical work, I‘ll read the first few pages of the introduction to get a feel for when/where I’m jumping into, but I generally won't read the whole thing because I get impatient to just jump into the book.
Forewords to mainstream editions of novels are way too hagiographic, and more critical introductions are best left until after finishing the novel, when you actually know what they're talking about. Penguin Classics has a bad tendency of 50-100 page introductions, which I feel is a tad ridiculous, but I suppose they're easy to skip so it's not the end of the world.
love a good Norton Critical Edition or a Cátedra, but that‘s not quite the same thing. The only really memorable introduction I can think of was Randall Jarrell’s for The Man Who Loved Children.
I do appreciate a nice collection of essays/poems where they have a paragraph or two describing what was going on in the world/ the authors life, and what they might be responding to. especially with centuries-old poems where they might be reacting to some political/literary controversy that no one remembers.
Also nice is an editorial appendix. The Northwestern-Newberry editions of Melville's works have nice historical and critical appendices at the end which talk about how the book was received at the time. I know why this isn't always done, but putting that stuff at the end, so that when you open the book the first chapter is on the first page, always feels much nicer to me than having to flip through all the supplementary stuff.
@yeso what was memorable about it? i have that book on my shelf somewhere.
@wickedcestus hagiographic is a good word to use. afterwords usually focus on aspects of novels i found negligible or highlight readings and meanings that make me feel like a dunce. at the end of the day i think i'm just a fool that likes the magic lantern of storytelling.
@“MoH”#p124614 There are so many different ways to read and appreciate novels that it‘s not surprising, when given only one or two readings, that they won’t line up with what you got out of the book. An academic will read a book differently than someone just reading for personal enjoyment, and even depending on the field/background they're coming from, will often disagree with each other. Michael Sugrue (many of whose lectures are up on Youtube) is a resource I turn to often for his lectures on philosophy, but when it comes to literature, his readings are so influenced by philosophical and historical considerations that they end up being entirely different than what I get from a novel, which is often more emotional and subjective.
I like having the historical/cultural background, but in the end, I read books in order to relate to people, and so usually the moment I stop reading an Introduction is when I feel like I have just enough context to emotionally/intellectually prepare for what's coming up, and before I get completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information.
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@“MoH”#p124614 what was memorable about it?
his righteousness in trying to save one of the best novels in the English language from obscurity