Reading thread

[noob in 89]

Wait, what's wrong with Mathew Lewis?

You're harshing my mellow, man.

 

[LonerMatt]

HOld on - I'm having one of those crises, where I can't remember if it was the Italian or the Monk is disliked. I remeber thinking one was awesome and one was awful, so Matthew Lewis might actually be great.

Oh God, what have I become?

 

[FlyingMonkey]

so, I suppose my conclusions are that, for me, the book had way too many characters, way too many narrative threads that didn't connect up well (and even when they did it was very hard to buy) and consequently I spent most of the book thinking 'dafaq did I just read?'.

Harder to follow than Dostoevsky, less rewarding. Would not re-read. YMMV.

I completly disagree, and your penultimate sentence describes many of you the novels I love most. I have read M&M many times, and it always rewards rereading.

 

[noob in 89]



HOld on - I'm having one of those crises, where I can't remember if it was the Italian or the Monk is disliked. I remeber thinking one was awesome and one was awful, so Matthew Lewis might actually be great.

Oh God, what have I become?

Ha, maybe it was The Italian. I remember The Monk could be a bit of a slog at times (expected given its age) but was genuinely odd and funny and heretical and phantasmagorical enough, I thought, to be of suitable fun and interest.

ALTHOUGH -- at the end of the day, people really should be reading Maldoror first. Random shout out for Lautreamont, one of the best writers, ever.

 

[LonerMatt]

I completly disagree, and your penultimate sentence describes many of you the novels I love most. I have read M&M many times, and it always rewards rereading.

Eh. More for you then.

I generally really enjoy Russian novels, but M&M just wasn't doing anything great for me.

 

[FlyingMonkey]

Eh. More for you then.

I generally really enjoy Russian novels, but M&M just wasn't doing anything great for me.

If you haven't read it, I recommend Moscow Stations by Venedict Erofeev... like a modern Gogol, it's very depressing but quite short. Also Yuri Buida's The Zero Train. Both not widely known in the west but worth looking up.

 

[noob in 89]

I know I'm probably overposting here, but do you have a preferred translation for that Erofeev? It is both weirdly hard to find and at the same time has at least three or more translations, all with different titles, and even the author's name (Erofeev, Yerofeev, etc. I remember one looked like a completely different name).

The two I have are titled Moscow to the End of the Line and Moscow Circles. Someone recommended this author, but I've sort of been waiting for the best version...

I see the one titled Moscow Stations is $190 on Amazon.

 

[LonerMatt]

THanks for the recs FM will check that **** out.

 

[Jbravo]

Master and Margarita is inexplicably good. Probably a lot has been lost in translation. Bulgakov, at least to me, is one of the most re-readable authors. On par with Zoshchenko. But Zoshchenko is absolutely untranslatable.

@FlyingMonkey you find Gogol depressive? Please elaborate.

 

[brightorangetrousers]

M&M is incredible. One of the few books on my shelf that seems to exist within its own genre.

I have the Glenny translation. Very readable, though apparently has a bunch of mistakes.

 

[brightorangetrousers]

Also: the cat is SO cool.

 

[Jbravo]

Yea, the cat is incredible. Bulgakov was a master (no pun intended) of imagery.

 

[brightorangetrousers]

Bonus M&M illustration by Irina Shipovskaia:

 

[noob in 89]

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

It was the hunter's first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a river gleaming at the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it would bring tears to his eyes if he looked long enough.

Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport—streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down.

He walked into the airport, past the banks of monitors. Already he felt as if he'd lost something, some beautiful perspective, some lovely dream fallen away. He had come to Chicago to see his wife, whom he had not seen in twenty years. She was there to perform her magic for a higher-up at the state university. Even universities, apparently, were interested in what she could do. Outside the terminal the sky was thick and gray and hurried by wind. Snow was coming. A woman from the university met him and escorted him to her Jeep. He kept his gaze out the window.

They were in the car for forty-five minutes, passing first the tall, lighted architecture of downtown, then naked suburban oaks, heaps of ploughed snow, gas stations, power towers, and telephone wires. The woman said, "So you regularly attend your wife's performances?"

"No," he said. "Never before."

Read The Hunter's Wife, by Anthony Doerr at The Atlantic

The Shell Collector is probably one of the best collections of the last decade, each story fully beautiful, and fully realized in a way most stories aren't. Doerr weaves nature, travel, telepathy, grief, and loss into brief and wonderful tapestries, purpled up with the just the right amount of dazzling prose. I noticed his story posted here. If you haven't read it, there's like a 90% you'll enjoy it.

​

 

[LonerMatt]

blah blah blah, MM, blah blah blah, boring masterpiece, blah blah blah, next we'll be saying David Coperfield isn't boring as ****, blah blah blah, FM probably enjoyed reading Dead Souls, blah blah blah.

Review: Fade to Black

One of the greatest things about my jbo is it gives me an excuse to read books like this, and reminds me of how I've grown sine I was 14. It's broadly a fantasy/SF for teens, and it's pretty entertaining, but definitely immature. The narrative follows Rojan, a PI who works in Mahala - a city built between two mountains that relies on its ingenuity to thrive. The city invented something akin to electricity using magic - pain magic (that is magic that comes from the users, or other people's pain), but that got out of hand. Luckily a religious theocracy took over. Rojan ends up embroiled in events .. saves the day. Predictable, slightly enjoyable, not outstanding.

It's book like this that remind me I should, at times, have aspirations other than 'reading', like 'reading stuff that's not retelling the same old story'. This is perhaps a bit too critical, after all it was paced well, didn't drag on and had some interesting and unusual elements, but the predictability of the story didn't drive any plot twists, and the interesting parts of the world created were abandoned in pursuit of a story that's been told better, numerous times before, I felt let down, really.