Steve's Pretentious Lit. Bit

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I have 3 books sitting on the bedside table that I haven't started yet: a collection of George Orwell's essays, a biography of Brendan Behan and something by Will Self (can't remember the name of it).

Edit: 4,000 posts.
 
I was given The Great Gatsby for Christmas. I'm yet to read it though- or anything else by Scott-Fitzgerald for that matter. Obviously I'm familiar with Benjamin Button, but that's about as far as my knowledge of his work goes. Has anyone read Great Gatsby? I know it's considered his magnum opus, so I'm looking forward to starting it if I ever get the chance.
 
SmashedHombre said:
I was given The Great Gatsby for Christmas. I'm yet to read it though- or anything else by Scott-Fitzgerald for that matter. Obviously I'm familiar with Benjamin Button, but that's about as far as my knowledge of his work goes. Has anyone read Great Gatsby? I know it's considered his magnum opus, so I'm looking forward to starting it if I ever get the chance.
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I have and I quite enjoyed it. It's a very polarizing novel, especially because of the hype that surrounds it. I'm not a lit-major or anything but I can see why its so highly rated, the prose flows very freely and the characters and especially well written. The romanticism of the Jazz age is something I didn't quite get into or understand very well but even despite that I can see why people consider it to be a masterpiece. It's on my list of books that I will definitely re-read again at some point.
 
Just finished reading Brotkhers Karamazov and can I just say that my mind has been BLOWN. I'm so glad I stuck with it. I'm still digesting all the little bits and layers and intricasies but wow, I'm so glad I stuck with it ... what a rewarding reading experience.
 
How Bram Stoker's Count created the template for modern vampires:

Ruthless and horrible, Dracula is attractive because he calls on the forces of nature while defying its laws, and harks back to cliff-edge castles and mighty forests while casually using the modern urban environment as his blood-bank.
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The Many Lives of Count Dracula | Fortean Times
 
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If ever an age called for the kind of self-conscious maximalism pioneered by Wilde, Baudelaire and Huysmans, it is ours. Instead, we are beset with dreary naturalism.

A century on, though, where does the decadent novel's legacy lie? I know I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for those bejewelled, subversive, gloriously unhealthy texts. The wider culture is awash with artists inspired by them: Marc Almond, Pete Doherty, Baz Luhrman, Pedro Almodóvar and the Chapman brothers to name just a few. Casting around for an equivalent literary line of succession, however, proves more problematic...
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Where did the decadent novel go? | guardian.co.uk
 
The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions: "Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale" and "Here comes The Handmaid's Tale" have become familiar phrases. It has been expelled from high schools, and has inspired odd website blogs discussing its descriptions of the repression of women as if they were recipes. People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid's Tale tattooed on them, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" and "Are there any questions?" being the most frequent.
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Margaret Atwood: Haunted by The Handmaid's Tale | The Guardian
 
The primary texts I need to read for this semesters lit module are as follows:

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928; London: Penguin, 2006)
Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1932; London: Vintage, 1993)
Lewis Jones, Cwmardy (1937; Cardigan: University of Wales Press, 2006)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006)
John Braine, Room at the Top (1957; London: Arrow, 1989)
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (1974; London: Heinemann, 1994)
Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 1982)
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993; London: Vintage, 1994)

Just started reading Love on the Dole which is pretty interesting as it's set in 1930's Salford.
 
downxandxout said:
The primary texts I need to read for this semesters lit module are as follows:

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928; London: Penguin, 2006)
Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1932; London: Vintage, 1993)
Lewis Jones, Cwmardy (1937; Cardigan: University of Wales Press, 2006)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006)
John Braine, Room at the Top (1957; London: Arrow, 1989)
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (1974; London: Heinemann, 1994)
Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 1982)
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993; London: Vintage, 1994)

Just started reading Love on the Dole which is pretty interesting as it's set in 1930's Salford.
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Not generally a Lawrence fan, but I enjoyed that one.
 
Just some light reading for me currently;

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
Goethe, Faust I & II
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Nietzsche, Will To Power
Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation Vol. 1

Aside from the last two, I've read them all.
 
This Nietzsche fella is quite clever, he's also approaching meta-astrophysical levels.

Anyway, Middlemarch 1st? Atonement before LOTR?

LOTR at 100?

Moby Dick at second is quite cool though.
 
downxandxout said:
The primary texts I need to read for this semesters lit module are as follows:

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928; London: Penguin, 2006)
Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1932; London: Vintage, 1993)
Lewis Jones, Cwmardy (1937; Cardigan: University of Wales Press, 2006)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006)
John Braine, Room at the Top (1957; London: Arrow, 1989)
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (1974; London: Heinemann, 1994)
Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 1982)
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993; London: Vintage, 1994)

Just started reading Love on the Dole which is pretty interesting as it's set in 1930's Salford.
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Where are you reading literature mate?
 
Once upon a time, when the novel was young and self-confident, inventiveness was its raison d'etre. Telling a story was all it had to do and it celebrated being made up or, as Daniel Defoe put it, "lying like truth".

In the beginning, the novel was a transcendent genre and the artists of fiction a secular priesthood. Overcoming its bourgeois origins as entertainment for a booming middle class, the novel inspired the greatest imaginations of the day, from Dickens to Lawrence.

Not any more. Not only has it lost its mojo, it often seems to want to be something else – a travelogue, perhaps, or a psycho-history or a "meditation" on who knows what. The "baggy monster" of its 20th-century prime has become a neurasthenic wreck, prey to fears and self-loathing.
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As long as words are cool, the novel will flourish | The Observer
 
I know I went all modern (by that, I mean post 1750!) and weird in my last post but lets go back to my specialist area with some medieval literature.

I read 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and Sir Thomas Malory's 'Le Morte Darthur' last semester - really excellent literature and fantastic tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - some of the best works of the middle ages. Malory's has easier language and is more dramatic but Gawain was a simpler story (although the Middle English is very complicated in that one).
 
I studied Gawain in the first semester of my first year, I liked the bit where they rip on wirral folk.
 
Despite being Welsh, I missed out on Gawain. And I only read Wolfram and Chrétien de Troyes because I was madly in love with the whole Rennes-le-Château mystery biz. What a twit.
 
A member of my family just gave me a £50 Amazon gift card thingy, so I'm going to order a few books.

Ya'll seem to know your stuff, so any recommendations? I'm drawing a blank here for some reason.

I'm open to anything except the effeminate vampire genre.
 
Give us a clue about your interests, mate. :)
 
Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities' it's leering at me (unread) from the bookshelf.
 
Colin Wilson is interesting on Moosbrugger, mate. Y'know...back in the day when Wilson's writing & ideas seemed fresh.
 
Courtesy of Jennifer Weiner:

 
Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none to pleased about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but we'd never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act, and even more draconian legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they lose.
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Are books and the internet about to merge? | guardian.co.uk
 
SteveJ said:
Are books and the internet about to merge? | guardian.co.uk
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Absolutely they are. Tablets allow books to be far more interactive than ever before and allow the insertion of movies or sound to enhance the reader experience. The best example I've seen recently is the Scam School book (I follow the author's internet shows pretty religiously) which is kind of a textbook for fun magic and mind tricks/illusions.

Brian Brushwood - Bizarre Magic: America's #1 College Magic Show - Books

Each separate trick comes with a video showing you how it's done and audio commentary talking about context or interesting stories about how the author has used the trick before.

This is all stuff we've previously seen on web pages, and it's fantastic to see them incorporated into books. After all most of the encoding behind eBooks is based on html anyways. I'm excited for what this means for textbooks and education in general.
 
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