The Books/Reading Thread

Half way thru The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth
Started good but now it got too technical.
I don't really care about all the different drone types and what their specialty is. Not at all.
Puts weight and emphasis where it doesn't belong.
 
Einherjar86 said:
Blood Meridian is possibly my favorite 20th-century American novel.

When I say that postmodernism isn't really a "period," all I mean is that it was basically created out of necessity. The history of literary analysis caught up with itself, and we called the early twentieth century "modernism"; then, when critics realized that authors of the 1970s and '80s were doing something different, we needed something else to call it; since it was so close to us, all we could really think of was to say: "Well, it's not modernism; it must be postmodernism."

In my opinion, I don't think postmodernism describes a period but rather a specific shift in aesthetic principles and in values with which we approach literature. We can find moments of this aesthetic shift as early as the eighteenth century in Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Since the '80s, we've seen the emergence of writers that seem to revert back to the original modernist principles, albeit with new subtle differences; and we have no good label for these writers.

So, long story short, postmodernism has always seemed (to me) more like a quick fix to a conceptual problem than a legitimate historical development.

EDIT: just saw the question on Pynchon. The only thing I've read is Mason & Dixon, and it was incredibly difficult (the style and language of the novel are very particular and dense). The Crying of Lot 49 is known to be an easier work by Pynchon, far more accessible, and yet considered to be an important literary milestone. So that might be a good place to start. I still haven't read it, but it's on my shortlist.
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Ahhh, so you're saying postmodernism is not limited to a specific time and people have done it before. I agree with that, actually, I mean by definition "postmodernism" is kind of confusing. Just by its definition it would seem that many movements can arguably be considered "postmodernism" as they reinvent the standards and critique the old traditions.

Noted on Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 will go on my wanted list on amazon for sure.

Mother Eel: Thanks! Narcissus and Goldmund seems like something I'd be interested in as it sounds like a really cool concept.

Yoda: I normally can't get through a lot of Renaissance writings, unless it's a play. I loved Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, for example. However, haven't read As I Lay Dying but been meaning to.
 
Funerary_Doom said:
Ahhh, so you're saying postmodernism is not limited to a specific time and people have done it before. I agree with that, actually, I mean by definition "postmodernism" is kind of confusing. Just by its definition it would seem that many movements can arguably be considered "postmodernism" as they reinvent the standards and critique the old traditions.

Noted on Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 will go on my wanted list on amazon for sure.

Mother Eel: Thanks! Narcissus and Goldmund seems like something I'd be interested in as it sounds like a really cool concept.

Yoda: I normally can't get through a lot of Renaissance writings, unless it's a play. I loved Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, for example. However, haven't read As I Lay Dying but been meaning to.
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I'm looking forward to reading that later this semester.
 
Dickens's Bleak House is killing me. We have weekly quizzes on the reading, but there are so many fucking characters. Victorian novels are seriously gargantuan.
 
It's one of his best. I actually think that Iron Council, which is the third book in the Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station is the first), is better than Perdido Street Station. But they're both fantastic.

Give Perdido Street Station some time. I had a false start on my first effort; but once you breach the 100-page mark or so, the story really begins to take off. Be prepared though; it's a devastating narrative.

If you enjoy his fantasy fiction (of which I count the Bas-Lag trilogy a part), you might look into his other genre fiction: The City & the City is detective fiction, and Embassytown is science fiction. Both are incredible novels.
 
elric%2Bof%2Bmelnibone.jpg
 
Einherjar86 said:
It's one of his best. I actually think that Iron Council, which is the third book in the Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station is the first), is better than Perdido Street Station. But they're both fantastic.
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Interesting with Iron Council, people seem to really like it or not enjoy it. I'm in the not enjoy it camp; just couldn't get into it.

I agree you need to persist with Perdido, such a great novel, and I's rate the Scar even better.

His latest, Railsea, is also really good and a bit of a return to form - I thought Kraken and Embassytown were a bit average.

**edit** I also recently read The Martian by Andy Weir, about an astronaut stranded on Mars. Great book, strongly recommended if this sounds like your thing.
 
I liked Iron Council for its handling of political themes. It's a Marxist book in many ways, but Mièville expresses those ideas without sacrificing his aesthetic integrity and conceptual weirdness.

I actually wasn't a fan of Railsea! I love Embassytown, and I enjoyed Kraken; but I felt that the latter was Mièville just kind of goofing around, to be honest.

I totally agree with you though, it seems as though people are drawn to several different texts by him. He appeals to various audiences via the distinctions between his books.
 
But what is this "you"? As I claimed at the outset, we will never have a truly satisfying comprehensive theory of the human mind if we don't dissolve the core of the problem. If we want everything to fall into place - if we want to understand the big picture - then this is the challenge. Why is consciousness subjective? The most important question I seek to answer is why a conscious world-model almost invariably has a center: a me, an Ego, an experiencing self. What exactly is the self that has the rubber-hand illusion? What exactly is it that apparently leaves the physical body in an out-of-body experience? What exactly is it that is reading these lines right now?
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From Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel: the Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self.
 
Picked this bad boy up a few weeks back and finally cracked it open yesterday. One of the greatest comic book runs of all time ... it will always hold a special place in my heart.

[ame]http://www.amazon.com/Uncanny-X-Men-Omnibus-Volume-Printing/dp/0785185690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395262683&sr=8-1&keywords=xmen+omnibus[/ame]

XMEO.jpg

Gorgeous oversized artwork.
 
Comic fan i reckon?

yesterday i received a nice parcel containing the Deluxe Hardcover collection of the first twelve issues of the Deathblow series. Apparently he served as an example for Marcus Fenix from Gears Of War.
 
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