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

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I'm amused that it's taking Ashley so long to finish A Tale of Two Cities as well. I had to read Dombey and Son for class and knocked it out in a month (it was OK, sloppy ending and some terribly unbalanced characterizations but I largely enjoyed it). Reading Middlemarch currently for the same course.
 
I don't really know why I'm progressing so slowly, except that in the midst of reading it I lost one job and started another, so I've been busy.

This is the first of his books I've read. When I read another, it'll be Great Expectations.
 
I read Great Expectations a couple of years ago (after faking my way through it in 9th grade). I was really into the first half or so, and then some switch got flicked and I hated everyone in it and couldn't wait for it to be over.

I've been reading a lot as usual, but am bummed to be stuck in a string of books that I haven't liked all that much.

Hopefully this one will break my streak; I'm almost done with it.

A Long Way From Verona by Jane Gardam. About a smart, quirky 13-year old girl in England during WWII. It's delightful.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Way-Vero...038888&sr=8-1&keywords=a+long+way+from+verona
 
Great Expectations is one of my favorite movies from when I was younger, but I can only remember so much of the plot, now, making it prime reading material.
 
OK, I finished it.

Good Lord, that ending. There is nothing like experiencing it in context. That was a really marvelous book.

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Still reading 2666 in Spanish, which is a bit of a challenge.

I'm in the middle of Part 4 now. But I can say right now it's one of the most original, haunting, bizarre and darkly funny novels I've read. Truly unique stuff.
 
lazarus said:
Yeah, one of the better endings in literature.
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Every time I've seen the ending quoted, it's been pure cheese, but that was perfect.

I kinda figured out how it was going to end about halfway through, thanks to a lifetime of spoilers, but it ended up much better than I ever would have expected.
 
I'm enjoying Middlemarch well enough, but I have one criticism:

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It's a fairly superficial issue, but there are some exhausting paragraphs of exposition in this thing.
 
LemonMelon said:
I get paid to read unreleased books in need of serious polishing, plus I'm in grad school, so I don't read much for fun anymore. If I had the spare time, I would be in here daily.
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I wish I could get paid to read books. :( It's probably not as fun as I imagine it is, but still...

A Farewell to Arms is pretty boring. I feel like I'm reading a day-to-day diary of someone who isn't that interesting. Go to war, get blown up, go to the hospital, become an alcoholic, impregnate a nurse, go back to the war. Was this book so bad in its time that it was considered groundbreaking? Come on, Hemingway.


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Finished Brave New World. Never need to listen to another Muse album now.


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bono_212 said:
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is fantastic.
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YES! I've read several of his I liked a lot. There's a second Vietnam-themed book ... something about a lake? In the Lake of the Woods, maybe? That one was excellent as well.
 
Recently finished Norwegian Wood, my first Murakami novel, and it's probably the best thing I've read this year. Truly beautiful.

I'm now reading The Virgin Suicides, which I'm enjoying (although the first person plural narrator is too distracting at times; one of the reasons why I didn't like Then We Came to the End). Eugenides is a wonderful writer. Middlesex is a favorite of mine.

I'm also doing some reading about cooking. Ruhlman's Soul of a Chef was rather interesting (he's one of my favorite food writers now). I just got A Return to Cooking, which doubles as a food memories book and cookbook, but quite interesting.
 
I don't mind first person singular at all. I think you can do incredible things with it - Humbert Humbert's voice is what makes Lolita such a fantastic novel. But for first person plural, I think you lose a lot of those benefits; it's almost impossible to have a distinctive voice (which is kind of the point, the narrator becomes a Greek chorus). Anyways, it's very distracting.
 
First person plural sounds awful. Can't think of anything I've ever read in that voice.

It's really not fair comparing anyone to Nabokov.
 
My first two novels were in third-person omniscient, but I'm working in first person singular for my third and am enjoying it. Whether or not anyone else would is the issue. There are unique pitfalls to this style that I'm working hard to avoid.
 
IWasBored said:
First person plural sounds awful. Can't think of anything I've ever read in that voice.

It's really not fair comparing anyone to Nabokov.
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I only know of any other than these two I mentioned. There's a Faulkner short story, A Rose for Emily, written in first person plural as well.

And fair enough. That's probably the most distinctive voice in literature.
 
lazarus said:
That's an odd generalization. Many fantastic novels written in that format.
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Did I need to say in terms of books I've read and liked? There are a) tons of books that are written in the first person that I've never read and b) tons of books that are fantastic that I've also never read.

It's probably equally weird if I start talking shit about use of dialect or made up languages (a clockwork orange, I'm looking at you) as being along those same lines. Even some generally regarded as great novels do that nonsense, and unless it's trainspotting, it almost universally annoys the fuck out of me.
 
I haven't read A Clockwork Orange, but Alex in the film actually uses Slavic words (mostly Russian ones) which is very amusing.
 
I don't think there's a way to explain why it drove me crazy that makes sense. And I especially don't think I'm going to be able to explain it to a guy who speaks a bunch of languages. We're so shitty here with languages other than English, and I'm a special kind of retarded when it comes to studying other languages. Like when I thought it would be interesting to take this Finnish class in college, and the professor kept getting annoyed because I would leave out any articles or present tense verb "to be," and I'd be wrong and terrible at translating stuff. He thought I was an idiot because those words were there in English, why wouldn't I put them in the Finnish version of the same sentence? And my answer was because if I was translating it to Russian, they wouldn't exist. And for some reason I've been conditioned that translate something from English to...means Russian. I got stuck on that apparently. I'm not sure it makes sense to anyone (myself included). It's stupid, but I kept doing it because I'm an idiot.

I think it would have given me less of a headache if the Russian-borrowed words had just been written in Cyrillic. Then I might not have gotten hung up on them. Or I might have, because they're not all strictly Russian words. But I swear every time I saw "horrorshow" I wanted to kill something. I probably would have hated the book less if Burgess had just co-opted French to create Alex's slang. Because then I would have just had to rely on context and not be weird about it.
 
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