Books Part V, featuring Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew

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It went really well yesterday! :) I was interviewed by four people at once, including the library director, but they were all really nice. They actually gave me a spelling test (I don't know how well I did because I was nervous), a test on arranging things in alphabetical order, and a test in which I had to arrange a shelf of books according to the Dewey Decimal System. :ohmy: I was afraid of that, but they said I did excellent. I think they were basically making sure that I'm not a total moron. Most of the questions they asked me had to do with my customer service and computer skills.
 
I've finished Ulysses. A masterpiece. Very difficult and at times almost unbearably frustrating, but all in all a very rewarding experience. The experiments with prose are just stunning. The influence that some of those chapters had on literature and cinema is enormous. Films just popped into my head while reading, thinking that filmmakers like Fassbinder (the epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz is very similar to the Circe chapter) and Linklater (Slacker is basically a rip-off of The Wandering Rocks chapter) must have read this religiously. The humour really started to work for me about one-third in since I started at that point to accustom to the style. It's a hilarious book. But in fact, behind all the irony and parody and mockery, there are some really beautifully written, poignant passages. Bloom is a fantastic character.

Everybody who is into literature should try and finish this. It is worth it.
 
I've finished Ulysses. A masterpiece. Very difficult and at times almost unbearably frustrating, but all in all a very rewarding experience. The experiments with prose are just stunning. The influence that some of those chapters had on literature and cinema is enormous. Films just popped into my head while reading, thinking that filmmakers like Fassbinder (the epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz is very similar to the Circe chapter) and Linklater (Slacker is basically a rip-off of The Wandering Rocks chapter) must have read this religiously. The humour really started to work for me about one-third in since I started at that point to accustom to the style. It's a hilarious book. But in fact, behind all the irony and parody and mockery, there are some really beautifully written, poignant passages. Bloom is a fantastic character.

Everybody who is into literature should try and finish this. It is worth it.

:up:
 
Meanwhile, I started with The Brothers Karamazov. Very excited about it. It's been about ten years since I've read Crime and Punishment and five years from The Idiot. It's always a good thing to come back to Dostoevsky. And after Ulysses, I think I need a break from English.

Who am I kidding? I still have to finish The Crying of Lot 49 and I've just bought Dubliners and read the first story on the way home.
 
Dubliners :drool:
Dostoevsky :drool:

One of these days I really do need to read crime & punishment in its entirety. It sucks that I'm going to have to read it in English now though.
 
The only Joyce I've read is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the only Dostoyevsky I've read is Notes from Underground. Didn't particularly enjoy either. I suppose that's not sufficient reason to give up on either author though.
 
I liked both of those, but they're hardly either's best work.

And I still think John Huston's The Dead is the best literature-to-movie movie ever.
 
I'm looking forward to The Dead. I haven't read Portrait of the Artist, but it focuses on Dedalus who is probably my least favourite character in Ulysses. He's a fully fledged character, but his antics can get very tiresome. The Shakespeare chapter is easily my least favourite one.
 

LOL! I hope they let me have a sword if I get the job. :wink:

I finished Ender's Game today. It's actually pretty tragic the way they mess up the kid and trick him into being a killer. I didn't quite get the ending, about how the aliens were reading his mind. That was a little vague, and then suddenly he started a religion, too. It was still a really good story and I see why it's so well-liked among sci-fi fans. It's an interesting contradiction to have someone skilled at warfare who doesn't really want to kill anyone, but gets forced into it because they're useful to someone's cause.
 
Nearly finished with Jacob De Zoet, now. Took me a little longer than I'd've liked, with starting new jobs and what not. Anyways, it's fantastic. I don't know if I'd say I like it more than Cloud Atlas, but I will say that Mitchell is outstanding at writing scenes and moments that absolutely wrap you up in everything that's happening in the book and sucking you right in.

He did the same thing with the last letter of Frobisher's, but I think the way the last chapter of the 2nd part of De Zoet ends may have been some of the best writing I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

Probably going to finish the book tonight, if not tomorrow. Then I'll try to get back to House of Leaves, if I can find it in all of these boxes.
 
Checked out the only three volumes of The Sandman they had at the library: Preludes and Nocturnes, A Game Of You, and Endless Nights.

Also checked out King's Pet Sematary and a book about the 70s UK punk scene that had a cool looking cover.
 
So...I finished De Zoet, and right up until the last chapter or so, I was going to give it a 4.5/5.0, but then I just...did not care for the way it ended...at all. I finished it right before I went to bed and I've been digesting it all day and the more I think about it, the more miserable I get.
 
Have you guys discussed Lovecraft? Haven't read any of his shit but just had a friend tell me that some of his stories are pretty damned scary.

On a horror fiction kick lately.
 
I have a collection of his work, but have only read two stories. Both were very unsettling, though, fwiw.

Cthulhu :love:
 
I've bitten off more than I can chew, I think.

Currently I have the aforementioned Sandman volumes, the A Song Of Ice And Fire books that I bought, and I also just picked up The Stand, 'Salem's Lot, and The Gunslinger to go along with Pet Sematary just so I can be inundated with King.

I have no fucking clue what to focus on. I want to read all of this stuff, but I feel like just picking apart each of the books a few chapters at a time and moving on to another one, and then coming back, etc. Probably a terrible way to read, but I'm just sort of in one of those moods.

Read the prologue to 'Salem's Lot just now and it seems pretty cool. I'm about nine chapters into Pet Sematary and it's cool, too. The Stand almost seems TOO big to tackle right now.

Luckily, The Sandman volumes are very very quick reads.
 
I have voiced this opinion before, but I'm going to throw it out there again. I would never recommend anyone read the full version of The Stand. It was abridged for a reason, and the "full" version is super disjointed because of the newly written material that King added decades later. He isn't the same author he was then, and it just shakes up the story. That's just my opinion, of course, but, there you have it.

'Salem's Lot is a very enjoyable and "easy" read. I think I blew through that one in a couple of days.

If you're going to read The Gunslinger, just realize that there are 6 progressively longer novels that follow it and, you being you, you'd likely find A Song of Ice and Fire a more rewarding journey. That's probably my favorite book series, so I'm, of course, going to champion it.
 
Okay, I'm going to share this, because book nerds and/or Cori gossip hounds might dig it.

I had been dating a guy for a short while, and I just called it off. I was disappointed that I didn't get to meet his mom, because his mom is Annie Fucking Proulx. She just recently moved to the area from Wyoming.

Oh well.
 
Have you guys discussed Lovecraft? Haven't read any of his shit but just had a friend tell me that some of his stories are pretty damned scary.

On a horror fiction kick lately.

I'm a big Lovecraft fan, actually. If you have a Kindle (or the Kindle app), there are some enormous compilations of his stories / novels for a few next to nothing. Here's a great one that's $1:

Amazon.com: The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror in One Volume (Halcyon Classics) eBook: H.P. Lovecraft: Kindle Store

Guillermo del Torro has been wanting/trying to make a film of At The Mountains of Madness (for which I bought the above $1 compilation a number of years back) for quite some time, which would be incredible.

I have a collection of his work, but have only read two stories. Both were very unsettling, though, fwiw.

Cthulhu :love:

Read more.
 
I don't have a kindle. I like to hold real paper books.

These are the two Lovecraft books I checked out from the library. They were the only two Lovecraft books available to check out at the branch I go to:

The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: H.P. Lovecraft: 9780739489017: Amazon.com: Books

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America): H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub: 9781931082723: Amazon.com: Books

Are these cool? Haven't even looked at the contents very closely, although I think that one of them contains At The Mountains Of Madness.
 
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