Originally posted by french frank
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What are you reading now?
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Originally posted by waldo View PostLooks like you have the basis for a new kind of literary criticism.
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Originally posted by Rjw View PostThe Rotter's Club. jonathan Coe
Re reading, as his new book Middle England is out soon!
This is so funny, i e it makes you smile, to someone of my age. 66¡
Is there a van der graaf generator thread?
I think you DO need to have a knowledge of the period and the music of that period to get maximum value from it.
Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson ('Like A Fiery Elephant') is highly recommended by me! :)
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Originally posted by Conchis View PostKarl Ole Knausgard - The End
This is (guess what?) the final volume in the My Struggle series and I am finding it as baffling to assess as the other volumes. It's very readable and the author has some arresting insights into the business of daily life but one can't help thinking literally anyone with an average command of their own language (and the available time) could have turned out this massive series of books. To call him the 'Norwegian Proust' as some critics (who almost certainly have never actually read Proust) have is deeply insulting to the French original. Proust's novel (and it IS a novel) is about the only book you'll ever read that will change your life (and for the better). Knausgaard has basically constructed a shopping list of his thoughts and feelings - there is a lack of art to his work's construction and you can't stifle the feeling that he's basically just shoving down the first thing that comes into his head. And it's NOT a novel, as Knausgard has not even bothered to disguise the personalities he is writing about - the upshot of his fun and games being his uncle threatening to sue him for defaming the family name and his second wife leaving him because he's so horribly self-absorbed (though the latter detail isn't covered in the book).
My Struggle is basically a guilty pleasure - a junk read for the beach, which your John Grisham-reading neighbour in the next lounger might mistake as 'highbrow'. Artistically, it's a pile of fetid crap.
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Originally posted by Rjw View PostThe Rotter's Club. jonathan Coe
Re reading, as his new book Middle England is out soon!
This is so funny, i e it makes you smile, to someone of my age. 66¡
Is there a van der graaf generator thread?
There is no VDG thread - you could always start one up!
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Originally posted by muzzer View PostI picked up one of the earlier volumes and swiftly put it back after a few sentences. I can only envy the author his sheer chutzpah. I’m not sure a culture that gives credence to this sort of stuff is in good health at all.
....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....bong ching
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Richard Tarleton
Originally posted by eighthobstruction View Post....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....
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....a lovely little book that I absolutely loved and wished that it was llonger was Patrick Kavanagh : Tarry Flynn.
....reread The Slave: Isaac Bashevis Singer....as very good as I remembered it....
....and about 20 other books from various rec's that were pretty dire....disappointing year of reading....bong ching
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Originally posted by Richard Tarleton View PostI do recommend Bryan Magee's summary in "Wagner and Philosophy"
Current reading: Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, but concerned not only to present it in a way that's accessible to a layperson but to emphasise its potential poetic aspects. Sometimes I despair at some "popular science" authors' reticence (no doubt heavily encouraged by their editors) to go anywhere near the actual mathematics that they're doing in their research because I really want to get more to grips with that stuff without being at the level required to get through a university textbook on the subject, but I'm inclined to forgive Rovelli because he expects readers to engage with it in a deeper philosophical way.
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Originally posted by muzzer View PostI picked up one of the earlier volumes and swiftly put it back after a few sentences. I can only envy the author his sheer chutzpah. I’m not sure a culture that gives credence to this sort of stuff is in good health at all.
He is very readable, in a facile way but that's one of the issues I have with him. Proust makes big demands on the reader from the start, and his scrutiny not just of 'Marcel' but of all the other characters is penetrating and comprehensive. Knausgard can only look into himself and what he finds there is sheer banality. No insights: no discoveries. You and your twenty best friends could have written My Struggle, but only Proust could have written A La Recherche.....
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Originally posted by eighthobstruction View Post....had enough 2 thirds through first volume....guessed [right] that it would not get any better....no matter if anything 'interesting' happened....
....readers may also be glad to hear that I have given up on Thus Spoke Zarathrusta after 6 months of occasional attempting....
Read Birth Of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (and, maybe, Ecce Homo) first - they're short books but they take a while to read.
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Originally posted by ConchisIt's his most famous book but, amongst Nietzsche scholars, it's not highly rated.
Read Birth Of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals (and, maybe, Ecce Homo) first - they're short books but they take a while to read.
About Nietzsche more generally.........Much of what he wrote was a reaction to the work of previous philosophers. His "attack" on these is conducted by means of witty aphorisms, ironic quips, muttered asides and so forth. He does not spell out his arguments and often doesn't even specify just who he is responding to. Sometimes, he gives his philosophical "enemies" offensive nicknames........Unless you have actually studied these other philosophers or are at least passingly familiar with the history of Western philosophy, you are inevitably going to be in the dark for much of the time. When I was at university (I studied philosophy and later taught it for a while), we were more or less discouraged from reading him on the ground that there wouldn't really be much point until we had first covered everyone else! That isn't to say that you can't get something valuable from him; only that you must adjust your expectations accordingly. Some areas will require specialist knowledge; others won't (such as his attack on Christianity or his views on Women).
He is, by the way, a very very funny writer and, for my money, the greatest non-fiction prose-writer of all time.
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