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

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Shit! I can't sleep. I wish I still owned a copy of war and peace, that book would put me to sleep in a heartbeat. Or I could just hit myself in the head and knock myself out with it, that would be less painful.
 
I'm reading The Iliad, but I haven't gotten very far. I'm having trouble getting into it, and I think it might be the translation I'm reading. It seems really dumbed-down and unpoetic. I thought that would make it a faster read, but it actually made it less interesting.
 
One weird side effect of reading Cloud Atlas is to have M83's Outro constantly in my head.
 
I'm reading The Iliad, but I haven't gotten very far. I'm having trouble getting into it, and I think it might be the translation I'm reading. It seems really dumbed-down and unpoetic. I thought that would make it a faster read, but it actually made it less interesting.

Which translation are you reading, out of curiousity?
 
Which translation are you reading, out of curiousity?

It's the Signet Classics edition:

The Iliad (Signet Classics): Homer, W. H. D. Rouse, Seth L. Schein: 9780451530691: Amazon.com: Books

I have a small collection of Signet Classics and bought The Iliad and The Odyssey a while back since I had a gift card and thought they would look nice on my shelf.

I also have an old copy of The Odyssey that the library in my high school was giving away because no one was reading it, and it's a lot better. (I also got a collection of Leo Tolstoy's short stories that looked like it had never even been opened.) It says that it was translated by George Herbert Palmer and was published in 1962. It's been about seven years since I've read it, but I remember really liking it. I was hoping to find the same balance of epicness and modernized language in this edition of The Iliad.
 
Just finished the great Tolstoy short story the Death of Ivan Ilyich. This was the best representation of what it's like to face death without actually having to experience death. It basically asks the questions many people would ask when facing their own demise. Despite the heavy subject matter it's very readable. I couldn't put it down until I finished it. The depiction of certain family members being irritated by the inconvenience dying brings was accurate, funny at times, and cruelly sad at other points. Some people just don't care or would rather pretend everything will be okay. It's also a reminder to live life with meaning.
 
It's almost the only Tolstoy I wouldn't like to throw into a volcano with Mumford and Sons.
 
Just finished the great Tolstoy short story the Death of Ivan Ilyich. This was the best representation of what it's like to face death without actually having to experience death. It basically asks the questions many people would ask when facing their own demise. Despite the heavy subject matter it's very readable. I couldn't put it down until I finished it. The depiction of certain family members being irritated by the inconvenience dying brings was accurate, funny at times, and cruelly sad at other points. Some people just don't care or would rather pretend everything will be okay. It's also a reminder to live life with meaning.

:hmm: I think that one is in my Tolstoy book. It creeped me out a little. There was also one called "Family Happiness" that made me want to stay single forever. I think it was about a girl who regrets getting married as soon as the wedding was over, or at least I think that's what it was about (it's been a long time). :scratch:
 
:hmm: I think that one is in my Tolstoy book. It creeped me out a little. There was also one called "Family Happiness" that made me want to stay single forever. I think it was about a girl who regrets getting married as soon as the wedding was over, or at least I think that's what it was about (it's been a long time). :scratch:

Yeah and the Ivan Ilyich story has another example of a destructive torturous marriage already.

From some of the negative reviews I'll probably hate Anna Karenina.
 
Tolstoy seemed to like writing about marriage gone bad. I remember one story about a guy who was convinced that his wife was cheating on him, so when he found her at home talking to another man, he stabbed her. It described what it felt like to stab someone wearing a corset, and the guy didn't go to prison because he was a "wronged husband," so it was OK for him to kill his wife. It was kinda disturbing. I don't remember what that one was called, though.
 
I didn't like War and Peace at all. I think he's a great writer but a lot of what he does is create setups with no payoffs. Characters seem to disappear or plot strands are left unexplained. Then when this happens during long books it becomes too easy to put it down and almost impossible to pick it up again. Short stories from Tolstoy so far are more rewarding to me.
 
How was Suttree?

So far I've read Blood Meridian and The Road from McCarthy. Blood Meridian is easily one of my favourite books with some of the best final chapters ever, although it was a fucking nightmare to read as far as language is concerned.
 
Good god, McCarthy must be a bitch for a non-native speaker...he's bad enough for native speakers. But, so epic.

Suttree was probably his most comical book....definitely broader in scope character-wise......it's semi auto biographical from what I have heard.

I enjoyed it, but, it's not in the same class as the Border Trilogy or Blood Meridian.....Blood Meridian is one of my all time favorites, so brutal.
 
Good god, McCarthy must be a bitch for a non-native speaker...he's bad enough for native speakers. But, so epic.

I spent more time on the dictionary than on the book itself. :wink:

But it was worth it. The pay-off alone made it worthwhile. It took months and months to get there, but I don't regret one second of it.

So you'd recommend me the Border Trilogy, eh? Is it as difficult to read as Blood Meridian was?
 
I recommend every book the man has written. I don't recall any of those three books being harder or easier to read than Blood Meridian.

I think that for Suttree I used the dictionary more times than I had the past year for every book I read combined.
 
My mother keeps recommending his books, I'm okay with needing a dictionary. My vocabulary had suffered at the hands (ears?) of my Neanderthal coworkers who say things like "hey, let's get us some Taco Bell, them crunchy beef burritos are dope." The only thing I'm wary of is other languages being thrown in. Am I going to need a Spanish dictionary as well? Are we talking Eliot/Pound imagist nonsense, or diversions I can essentially figure out from context? Or is that sort of thing so minimal it doesn't even warrant a concern?
 
Blood Meridian does feature some minimal amount of Spanish. A lot of things can be taken out of context, but I did get lost a couple of times for pages, having no idea where the plot went. But it is one of the best books that I've ever read, featuring one of the most memorable villains in literature and it's definitely worth the trouble.

Although, I'd recommend The Road as an introduction to McCarthy's work. It's much easier to read than Blood Meridian, not to mention it's a great, powerful book as well.
 
The Road and No Country For Old Men are still the only two I've read. I own and have been meaning to read Blood Meridian for years. Hopefully will get to it relatively soon.
 
The Way to the Western Sea, by David Lavender

Another Lewis and Clark book. I need to take a break from these; four out of the last five or six books I've read have been Lewis and Clark books. Sheesh.

I liked this one. Once I got used to Lavender's crotchetiness, I liked it a lot. He treats L&c like men, incredibly brave, stout-hearted, smart, talented, and somewhat lucky, men. He argues with his sources, jumps to conclusions, and tells a good story. It's a straight-ahead, non-specialty narrative to the trip, so it would be a good book to read to get an overview of the story.
 
SOON I WILL BE READING A LEWIS AND CLARK BOOK MARTHA.

As for Cormac, kids, to me, the best place to start at the beginning....I've read everything he's written but wish I'd have read the in order, because even for a giant like him, there's room for growth and it shows as you go along. No Country and The Road are great books so starting there could never be wrong....but my advice would begin at the beginning.

Mofo, read Blood Meridian.
 
I got a question for everyone: is it imperative for you to like the main character in order to enjoy a book?

I saw this essay on HuffPo about how readers today seem to want to relate to the main character.

And so we return to the question of whether fictional protagonists need to be relatable in order for readers to enjoy ourselves. If relatable merely means likable, then I think the answer is no: many classic fictional heroes and heroines, including Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Rodion Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, are not particularly likable. But if we expand our definition of "relatable" to mean psychologically plausible, then I think the answer is yes. We may not always like, or even approve of, fictional protagonists like selfish Catherine and obsessive Raskolnikov. But I think we have much to gain from learning to recognize reflections of ourselves in them, even -- or perhaps especially -- when we want to deny any resemblances. There are, of course, many other good reasons to read literature: for entertainment, for instruction, for inspiration. But from the 18th century onward, novels have shown themselves to be remarkably effective, durable technologies for encouraging us to extend our understanding to others, no matter how different or unlikable they might initially appear. And if that isn't a good reason to pick up a good book, then I don't know what is.

Evan Gottlieb: Do We Need to Identify With a Protagonist to Enjoy a Novel?

I'm the kind of reader who needs a "psychologically plausible" character than someone who I would want in my everyday life. I have considered putting down books because of characters I didn't like, but there were other reasons to continue reading besides them. There's more to a book rather than the main character, to me at least.

So, what's everyone's criteria?
 
For me I don't have to like the character but if the author is forcefully trying to get me to like an unlikeable character then I have to put the book down and start enjoying my life. War and Peace was an example where I couldn't get into any of the characters or their situations after 600 pages and was glad to just let go of it despite it's stature as one of the greatest novels.

If the author is creating an unlikeable character to show a lesson or moral or some kind of insight (Crime and Punishment/Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/Notes from the underground) I will really enjoy it.
 
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