#I'm not sure if I have it in me to read THAT. James Joyce Ulysses I mean.

[breitzbachbea]

Very sweet and at the same time horny idea for a little SicIre Drabble.

I've forgotten which Martial poem it was, but the one where he basically tells his lover that he doesn't want a prude and there's a mention of Odysseus & Penelope (among other couples) and how she kept her hand in that spot (I assume his dick) even when he slept. I thought about SicIre getting more and more intimate in the bedroom and one night Michele asks if they want to spoon. And if Harry wants to be the little spoon. And when the answer to both is yes, Michele slips his arm around him and cuddles up to him before he gently puts his hand on his cock and recites that line of poetry.

[shut-up-danny-kun]

While reading this post, keep in mind that OP has not seen the TOS movies, only the show.

Logically (!) I know Kirk and Spock are workaholics, and in an ideal universe they would keep working for Starfleet 'till they drop dead. But sometimes I want them to settle down and have kids, because imagine what a fascinating (!) parenting dynamic that would be.

We know from the way he treats his crew that Jim would be an amazing dad. He's gentle and patient, but not too permissive, he never abuses his power, knows how to to balance reason and emotion...just perfect. Really, there's nothing else to say.

Spock though... His extremely high contempt for logic combined with trauma from discrimination and (maybe, I'm not actually sure) genuine trouble with empathy would make him an extremely strict parent. He'd probably want to develop that kid's cognitive functions every second they're not asleep. No frivolous activites. No unhealthy food. Stop crying, control yourself! And consider the unimaginably high standarts the kid of the youngest starship captain ever and one of the greatest scientists of an entire planet would have to live up to! If Jim wasn't there, Spock would raise a genius scientist...but traumatise them along the way.

And on top of that mess, Jim and Spock are some of the smartest people out there. So their home life would look something like this:

Kiddo: can I go outside and help my friends build a motorbike?

Jim: of course honey ☺️ remember to distribute the weight evenly across the axis...

Spock: FROM THE REGULARITY OF YOUR TYPING I HAVE CONCLUDED YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED SOLVING YOUR ASSIGNED THERMODYNAMICS PROBLEMS. You will not go outside until that is done and you have read 37% of Ulysses by James Joyce.

Jim wouldn't let Spock overwork the kid, of course, but I highly doubt Spock would change his ways quite so fast. They'd probably have huge fights about it. And Spock would soften up as he grew older, but he'd still seem cold compared to Jim.

And that makes me wonder...would that kid come to resent Spock? Would Spock become to his child what Sarek had been to him - harsh, demanding and distant? Would they wonder what Jim loves him for?

I'd like to think Spock would get over his upbringing and become more open-minded. Maybe he'd still lack that parental intuition and Jim would be better at understanding the kid's emotional needs, but he'd try his best to make them happy. He'd still push to make them as smart as possible, though. They'd probably beat Jim's record for the youngest captain 🤣

[ailichi]

reading since around august (selected)

Antigone, Jean Anouilh - French play based on the ancient Greek play by Sophocles, from 1944. loved it. I always love Anouilh's stuff.

Coal Dark Mornings, Brett Anderson - first autobiography of Brett Anderson, taking you up to the time when he formed Suede. I think you could read this even if you weren't into his music, it's well-written and gives a very good description of the time and place he grew up in while still being very quick to read.

The Coffee-House of Surat, Leo Tolstoy - short story by Tolstoy because I guess I'm trying to 100% his work.

Prophet Song, Paul Lynch - it's alright! it gets better and better very steadily as it goes along; I liked it much more on page 250 than on page 150, that kind of book. it seems to be out on the display tables of bookshops across Europe - not sure it's that much of a sensation really. but it takes like 2 days to read, not a waste of time.

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, Neil Strauss - I read most of these interviews and they're good but the book exists to record the Liam Gallagher one for me.

Getting High: The Adventures of Oasis, Paolo Hewitt - it's good!! I think I already posted a quick review but if you're a fan and want to read One book about Oasis, it's the perfect choice.

Shout!: The Beatles, Their Life and Times, Philip Norman - dear Lord, is this comprehensive. and it continues after 1970 - post-Beatles stuff is like half the book. I did enjoy it, but especially the first few hundred pages (yes), where he talks about each member before they joined, the other people in that Merseyside scene, etc.

Supersonic: The Uncut Interviews, Simon Halfton - interesting to see how they edited the band interviews for the documentary.

Remembering, Sinéad O’Connor - she can really write, wow. obviously parts of this book are very heavy, and it did make me cry. I'm glad I read it though.

Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy* - I'd read this before and apparently forgotten large swathes of it. it's fine, nothing crazy good, very much hampered by the noble-Oriental thing he's got going on. every day I realise I am the world's most unenthusiastic Tolstoy fan. like I'll read it but Jesus Christ.

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony DNF - if this is the intellectual standard expected of US undergrads, that's shocking. forget student debt cancellation, they should be giving them money back with interest. lmfao

Ulysses, James Joyce - it's Ulysses, it's great. but there were bits I subjectively didn't like (predictably, the grimy sex scenes, all that tackle). um. a masterpiece, clever, etc., didn't exactly have me weeping. it IS brilliant and very enjoyable to read on a pure prose level.

Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll? John Robb - good interviews :)

Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu - been reading this on and off since the translation came out in 2022. interestingly weird until it's weirdly not interesting. probably excellent for someone, but not for me. which was really disappointing, because I was excited for it.

Regenade, Mark E. Smith - absolute masterclass of an "autobiography". I loved it. is there a lot of 'information' about his life story? of course not. can you necessarily believe that things happened as he writes? not really. (but then, the way the story is told is telling in itself). starts in media res. essentially the only story he tells from his childhood is Japanese Prison Camp, and yk? I'm pretty sure we used to play something like that too. obviously the whole book is hysterically witty. so good at having opinions, it's outrageous. made me laugh at jokes at the expense of Noel Gallagher, so it really is that charming as a book (don’t even think those anecdotes happened. like. at all. except maybe the one about him sneaking a look at his shirts in a hotel room. lol). "charming" in the slightly sinister fairy-tale sense. MES o7

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you consider some of the best funny works of literature? (Not necessarily “funniest”, but best works that are funny); your canon of humour

My favorite style of humor—and humor seems more personal as well as more culture- and time-bound than seriousness—is arch and dry wit. I prefer this to a zany, slapstick, or gross-out style. Thus for humor if not for other artistic virtues I prefer Austen and Wilde to Dickens, for example, Emma and The Importance of Being Earnest for preference. Ulysses is the encyclopedia of every kind of humor as it is of every other kind of thing, and the funniest parts of Ulysses are the funniest parts of any novel ever written. Beckett, as Joyce's devoted student, and perhaps a disguised descendant of Wilde too, is hilarious in his plays' bleak repartee, though he might lean too hard on the scatology. Works before the 19th century are perhaps too distant from us to be funny, exactly. The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Candide, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones all seem somehow too cruel, as Nabokov observed of DQ, to the modern sensibility. The deadpan irony in Dante's contrapasso is somehow funnier than all of those, somehow more forgiving in its cruelty. Shakespeare may be funnier to us in the tragedies, where the jokes flash like lightning in the darkness. Is anything funnier than the cosmic joke of Hamlet? Whereas I can't share the worship of Falstaff. Tristram Shandy is closer to us, but strained, over-familiar, like a beer-swilling uncle clapping you between the shoulders; I feel the same about the humor in Moby-Dick; both of those books are grab-bags of dick jokes. Henry James is funnier than he gets credit for being, especially in dialogue. To return to the 20th century, the aforementioned Nabokov is obviously funny; I like him better the subtler he is, as when Humbert describes Charlotte Haze descending the stairs and enumerates her features as they become visible to him "in order," from her feet up—as if any other order were possible! Pynchon? Too stoner for me; I prefer his elegiasm, though The Crying of Lot 49 always makes me laugh with its zaniness so adjacent to tristesse. Gore Vidal's critical essays might offer the acutest wit of the 20th century. Roth is funnier the further he gets from sex, ironically, and Operation Shylock is immensely funny at micro and macro scales, the height of die-laughing political comedy. Humor being, as I've said, personal and local, I have described DeLillo's White Noise as the funniest novel I've ever read, and I stand by that, even if the world it affectionately mocks is no longer quite ours, and even if I am affected in this instance by some latent Italian-American consciousness and its dry skepticism.

(I see from the inadvertent psychoanalysis in the above free association that there are two kinds of humor: one moves toward the body and its grosser functions as a source of laughter and the other moves away to higher levels of abstraction upon the world. I obviously prefer the latter, humor as high-minded irony, as pointed wit, a defense against sensation. The unruly body, the "lower bodily stratum" as I think Bakhtin called it in his study of Rabelais, whom I still need to read, is likelier to show up in my constellation of taste as a source of anxiety, tragedy, or, at its best, forbidden or abashed and therefore serious eros. Which self-analysis I'm sure a reading of my archly witty novels—they've been described as body horror—will bear out. Those who have scrutinized my sensibility as "very Catholic" will have something to say about this, given Catholicism's intensely abstract, paradoxical, and therefore inherently witty theology, based in its turn upon an equally intense and deadly serious affective veneration of the wounded corpus. Why else find Dante funnier than Boccaccio?)

[icarus-suraki]

Book asks: 8, 15, 42, 46, and/or 48

8) What is your favorite opening line? "A screaming comes across the sky" is iconic. The typesetting for "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..." is iconic (in my edition of Ulysses especially because the S takes up the entire page, as it should). "See the child" is magnificent. But I really think the opening line of 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Yeah, I'll play the 100 Years of Solitude drinking game (take a shot every time someone is named Aureliano) but I really love that novel and I really love that opening line.

15) What makes you close a book and walk away forever? Really cringy, weird, awkward phrases. Let me give you an example or two:

I tried, I really tried, to read the first Elric of Melniboné book (Michael Moorcock) but I got to this one line where the main character and his lover ride out to a cave on a beach whereupon "they tethered their steeds." I was just so done at that point. I tried, but I just couldn't do it.

Likewise! I was working at a Barnes & Noble starting around Thanksgiving 2004 (baby's first full-time job after undergrad) and that was the era of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. We sold so many copies of Holy Blood Holy Grail--shit was so cash. So it seemed like it would behoove me, professionally, to read The Da Vinci Code. Once again, I tried. Oh my God, did I try. I even got ahold of a super fun illustrated edition with pictures in the margins like some kind of weird Eyewitness Book but for Paris and Jesus conspiracies. So I started reading and I got into the first chapter and it…wasn't great, but I was going to do my best because it would benefit me professionally. And then I got this one line--this is 20 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday--about the male protagonist which described him as having "a thicket of dark brown hair." And I close the book and I never looked back. It was just Too Much.

42) Do you read one book at a time, or several at once? Generally speaking, I'll read one at a time. I might fool around with another book or two, but I usually read one at a time, though not fixedly. I tend to get hooked on one book and not want to read others. It's not a conscious decision.

46) Who is your favorite author? This is tough because it has changed through the years. In high school it was mostly Ray Bradbury, and I like to joke that Fahrenheit 451 got me into college and I wept openly at my library job when he died. But J. D. Salinger started edging in there in high school after my mom gave me her copy of The Catcher in the Rye. By college it was J. D. Salinger, up to and including my senior project, but James Joyce was swiftly encroaching on his territory (a teacher got me to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I was doomed). By college graduation it was definitely James Joyce, and he hung around through a decidedly disastrous trip through Europe until I got back to the States and started reading Haruki Murakami (in translation) and Murakami was moving up in the ranks. And then plucked up the courage to read Gravity's Rainbow (I bought it with my own money from that same B&N) and I think it was a tie between James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. I finally started reading Cormac McCarthy when I was in graduate school and Blood Meridian made me want to fucking bite things it's so good.

And this isn't getting into all my favorites as a kid (Roald Dahl, Norton Juster, Susan Cooper, among others) nor any of the poets I obsessed over in college lmao.

Right now I'm honestly not sure. I don't know that I have One Favorite Author. There are a lot that I really like. There are a lot that I'll read when they have something new published. I've been reading a lot of Japanese authors in translation. I wish there was more a works-in-translation market here in the states. Anyway, If someone mentions a book that's "really fucked up" or "weird" or "too hard to really read," I will seek that out. I love fucked up books. I love "transgressive literature." And if something wins the Booker Prize, I also will probably love it.

48) What line has stuck with you for years? "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

Happy Bloomsday. This line is from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are outside pissing in Bloom's back garden and they look up and witness the night sky. And that is a pale description of the scene, but you understand.

Like, I'm not into tattoos. But if I were to get a tattoo? It might be this line. (And/or the Doodles Family from Finnegans Wake and/or a Muted Posthorn. My mother would kill me and then disown me lmao.)

[twosides--samecoin]

also, unsure if you ever read pokemon fic, but if you appreciate music informing the reader of a character's personality and diegetic music, you may enjoy "make you suffer" by girllikesubstance on ao3. i certainly did! it's written like an action movie but with solid characterization; i literally cannot recommend the author's work enough.

Oh, I have not, thank you for the recommendation!

"Diegetic music", for anyone who's never heard of it, refers to any in-universe music or lyric that is interacted with or acknowledged by the characters. The musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is entirely diegetic music, performed by the characters; however the intro theme of that show is not.

I consider music a main character in the fic. It started with choosing song titles for chapters and the fic title, then it snowballed into, "How do I indicate to the reader Music Is Happening in a natural way that doesn't always need me introducing, like, 'a guitar rang out/a solemn voice sang', etc?" How do you solve the characters hearing what the reader can only, well, read? Sure, I have some playlists on Spotify to follow along, but as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message". It must be clear in the writing that music is playing. A new voice has entered the room.

One of my favourite novels is Ulysses by James Joyce. He had a masterful talent for cacophony and onomatopoeia. Several threads of conversations and voices and thoughts all happening at you on one page. And he just goes for it.

I chose to solve the problem by having my own style guide. Lyrics just happen as though they're a person speaking, they're just italicized to indicate it's a recording. Here's an excerpt of one of the most successful examples of diegetic music I have written in the fic, from the chapter Thunder Road.

The radio DJ’s voice interrupted the silence. “Hi, it’s Delia, we got the weather monitor fixed. It’s only a few degrees below freezing tonight and I’m not in a sour mood anymore, so.. Here’s a favorite, for my favorite. Here’s Thunder Road.”  Olivia’s eyes widened as harmonica and piano played together. She turned towards the radio. “Are you serious right now?”  “What?” RJ asked.  "..The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways. Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays.." Jack smiled. He knew what this song was about and wondered just how well she knew it. He caught Olivia’s eye as she turned away from the radio. RJ saw Jack’s shit-eating grin and knew it meant he figured something out with her. A smile that could mean he was having fun, or he could checkmate you.  The same glance Olivia and Jack shared about him earlier. "..Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, 'Hey that's me and I want you only,' Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again.." “I- what, why are you looking at me like that-”  “Good song, huh?” he responded, smiling at her. "..Don't run back inside, darling, you know just what I'm here for.." RJ didn’t quite understand what Jack was getting at. The radio was low enough that he could hear the music, but the lyrics were harder to hear from across the room.  “Bruce fan?” Jack asked her. “Yeah, um.. I like him.” Jack’s heart melted. “My wife, Nora, was a huge fan. We have the first seven albums on one holotape,”  “Wait, no way-”  "..So you're scared, and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore.." “Yeah, way. How many Bruce albums you got in this vault, huh?”  “I don’t,” Olivia told him, looking almost apologetic. “I only get to hear Bruce when he’s on the radio.” 

[mistydeyes]

MW2 Pairing Please !!

Pronouns: she/her 👄

Appearance: medium length thick black hair, dark brown eyes, dark tan skin, thick black brows, and long eyelashes. A bit below average height and slightly chubby. I have resting b!tch face unfortunately.

Personality: I’m not a silly person but I’m not very goofy either. I have a good sense of humor (sometimes dry) but I don’t joke around ALL the time. I can be a bit hardheaded and I’m brutally honest. I don’t like bs and I will call someone out on it. That being said, I try to be as kind as I can and am never rude to those who don’t deserve it.

Things I Like to Do: I like to read (obviously), sometimes write, and I edit a lot. I also like to binge shows on my free time and I like to do my own research on things. Call me crazy, but I also like doing schoolwork.

Job/Interests/Education: I currently work as a Dietary Aide at a Health and Rehabilitation center but I studied and worked in Bio-Manufacturing and am currently furthering my education in Criminology and plan to do that full time once I’m done with schooling.

Thank you !!

John Price

How you met: Civilian You sat peacefully in the small cafe, letting the drumming of the London rainfall set the mood for your book. You should've been studying, many study guides for your criminology course sitting in front of you, but something about Ulysses by James Joyce irked you. The massive book had taken you months to read- let alone understand. As you flipped another page, you could feel someone's eyes on you. You looked up and locked eyes with a man who looked drenched from the rain. "Sorry for staring, sweetheart, just love that book," he replied, giving you a charming smile which made his tired eyes light up. "I just started it but it's a little dense" you responded honestly. "James Joyce is known for that, the Irish man had a way with words." he said and gave you a small shrug with his strong shoulders. "I'll gladly pay for your tea if you can give me a plot summary," you offered and showed that the seat across from you was empty. That day, the man who later said his name was John, provided you with an in depth explanation as well as some recommendations for better reading material.

A peek into your relationship: As you opened your eyes, you realized today was the day John was returning from the states. He never shared the details of his travels but always made sure to arrive home on time. You were many years into dating, engaged for 2. You hurried to the kitchen to await his arrival, making sure to place your engagement ring on your finger and place a kettle on the stove. You tapped your fingers anxiously listening to the whistle of the kettle and awaiting the sound of the door opening. Soon your heart soared as you heard him entering. You quickly ran to greet him and placed many kisses on his cold face. "I'm happy to be home, love" he whispered, embracing you tightly and lifting you in his arms. "I'm happy to have you here," you responded as he carried you to the kitchen, "I finally finished that damn book and I have to say, your explanation was far more interesting." He laughed heartily, happy to be home with his bookworm of a fiancee.

[salt-cedar]

This post is so hard to format that it pissed me off and I'm gonna do comments

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (pretty sure I did but I have no memory of it)

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (who did read this? do you even know how many books are there?)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (the hobbit the hobbit the hobbit the hobbit)

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye (I've started it, like, 5 times, and every time when I reach the similar points I just kind of drift off and "forget" to read further)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (of fucking course it's here)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (OF FUCKING COURSE it's there GODDAMNIT) (fun fact: that is actually Dostoyevsky's weakest book. You will get much better Dostoyevsky experience if you pick The Idiot, The Demons or The Brothers Karamazov)

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (ahh)

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (that I definitely remember reading but no idea what was it about)

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (i regret it okay)

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (omg yess. the book is trashy but at 12 it ignited my interested in analytical study of religion and it burns ever since)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (who else came here after the film? I did)

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (lol majored in it)

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I remember reading a review afterwards that said that this book lacked male perspective and men here play the second role that usually women occupy in stories like it's a bad thing. I was a teen and even then thought: yeah so?)

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (why would anyone...)

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce (no one has read Ulysses, period. If you say you did, you're lying)

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola (I've read a bunch of Zola between 12 and 14 for some reason)

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel (the only one of this list that I didn't read but kind of want to)

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (that's not a one book)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (I had once started it while recovering from an operation in my teens and didn't manage and I don't regret it)

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (funny story is that I had accidentally started reading from the second tome and didn't realize it for far too long even though I was extremely confused)

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

[jnwakeling]

of mice and men 1980

Essential point and crux of the matter is "Tulliver and Gulliver" wordplay on the one hand and "Gulliver and Seagull" wordplay on the other

Ref. George Eliot, Jonathan Swift and Richard Bach

. . .

Hi I forgot to ask you are you still reading Middle March?

Hi, I've put it on the back burner for the moment. I'm about a third of the way through and look forward to finishing for sure

For George Bernard "sure"

Shaw?

Correct. just a play on words

George Eliot, middlemarch

. . .

George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. ~Wikipedia

A polemicist is someone who is skilled at arguing very strongly for or against a belief or opinion.

. . .

H.E. Bates and W.B. Yeats. The never ending story James Joyce and Ulysses S. Grant…

Silas Marner by George Eliot and My Uncle Silas by H.E. Bates fyi Mana Pools… Something I never knew till now.

. . .

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day Darling Buds of May?

Middlemarch and Tolkien's Middle-earth (Lord of the Rings)… Stuck in the Middle With You (song) by Stealers Wheel from Reservoir Dogs Soundtrack…

The Ides of March Julius Caesar.

. . .

We've come a long way Tom and Maggie Tulliver

Of Mice and Men, of Tulliver and Gulliver, of Seagulls and Gulliver's

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965 movie)

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

. . .

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, first published 1970 (without day of publication). I was born ten years later. It was republished in OCTOBER 2014 by the way, 1989 by Taylor Swift (27th October 2014)

. . .

Clue: seagulls on album cover of 1989 (Taylor's Version) - out on Friday!

Tay was born Dec 13th 1989 - she's ten years younger than me less a few weeks (I was born Jan 6th 1980)

Coincidence or synchronicity?

Stanley and Livingstone Africa? Seagulls in Zimbabwe?

Blank Space by Taylor Swift! 🦤

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

Some remarkable information came through Taylor and her calendar:

112 days from September 11th 2001 is Tuesday January 1st 2002

Via Taylor Swift's use of 112 days

Remember have to account for leap years on that theory

And 9/11 was a Tuesday as well

. . .

112 days from Saturday October 7th 2023 is Saturday January 27th 2024

January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day (on same date every year)

. . .

112 days from Sunday January 6th 1980 (my date of birth) is Sunday April 27th 1980

April 27th is Freedom Day in South Africa (on same date every year)

. . .

112 days from Wednesday December 13th 2023 (Taylor's 34th Birthday) is Wednesday April 3rd 2024

There's no major calendar event on 3rd of April but it is National Walking Day (US). And December 13th is National Violin Day (US)

Long Walk to Freedom?

. . .

112 days before Wednesday December 13th 2023 is Wednesday August 23rd 2023

August 23rd 2023 is marked by Zimbabwe Elections

📆

. . .

Number of days between January 6th 1980 and October 7th 2023

15,980 days

Just have to know where to look folks!

Bit of a wait for that info?

☮️

[weaselandfriends]

What are your favorite books, and which books do you feel have been the most influential on your work? Do you read much non-fiction?

I watched all of School Days because of you. What do you like about it? How ironic is your enjoyment?

I am loving CQ thus far.

When I was very young, the books I read and reread again and again and which certainly had some formative impact on me as a writer were Loser by Jerry Spinelli and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, but I think the most clearly influential books on my writing today are Franz Kafka's novels, The Castle and The Trial, as well as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I first read all three of these novels as a teenager and they really unlocked the world of literature for me. All three depict ordinary landscapes as surreal nightmares, the way I would go on to depict the locations in Modern Cannibals and Cockatiel x Chameleon. Another work I read as a teen and which surely influenced me was King Lear by William Shakespeare. I've always been a fan of the bleak and tragic.

Other favorite literary works of mine include (in no particular order):

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Ulysses by James Joyce

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grendel by John Gardner

Paradise Lost by John Milton

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

As you can see, my reading is on the European and especially Anglo-centric side, which is probably to be expected given I primarily speak English myself. I'm always reading new stuff and try to branch out into time periods and locations outside of Western canon, especially given I've read most of the Western canon by now anyway.

I'm not a large reader of nonfiction. Fiction has always been my passion, since I was very young.

As for School Days, I want to stress that my enjoyment of it is in no way ironic. People ask me this all the time, but I legitimately just think School Days is excellent on its own merits. School Days is a detailed, complex psychological drama in which characters are pushed or push themselves into increasingly uglier directions based on initially small flaws or miscommunications that they are unable to overcome or grapple with. There's very little fat or filler in School Days, it is a lean work in which nearly every conversation has some kind of psychological subtext or is deepened by its context, and the pacing consistently pushes the story toward its explosive, tragic end. I recently watched Breaking Bad (also excellent) and found it similar in how an initially neutral or merely flawed protagonist gradually devolves into outright villainy on account of those flaws; other comparable works would be Nightcrawler, Taxi Driver, the aforementioned Wide Sargasso Sea, or Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

I think the overwhelming backlash about School Days is a byproduct of the Western anime culture back when it aired in 2007. This was just about when the internet was coming to prominence and Western viewers were able to access seasonal anime for the first time via fan subs and dubs; before this, anime watching in the West was either hack-n-slash dubs of kid's shows like Sailor Moon or Pokemon or isolated to a few select (and often Western-influenced) shows like Cowboy Bebop on late-night programs such as Adult Swim. Because of this, the Western anime community was fairly embryonic in 2007, comprised mainly of younger people, and almost entirely male. I don't think this audience collectively had the patience and comprehension skills to appreciate a dialogue-based psychological drama, and especially not one primarily concerned with digging into and exposing what we might nowadays call "toxic masculinity."

2007 was a year where "There are no women on the internet" was taken as an absolute truth, a pre-GamerGate era before even tepid incipient criticisms of sexism in gaming were being made by the likes of Extra Credits or Anita Sarkeesian. School Days, depicting a seeming everyman whose casual objectification of women transforms him into a callous monster, was simply not something this anime community was ready for. And so it was raked over the coals, memed on, and generally held up as "one of the worst anime ever made" (around the same time the anime community thought mind-boggling dreck like Elfen Lied was "mature" art). You would see School Days on Worst Anime of All Time lists right next to Mars of Destruction. I think even if you're only lukewarm on School Days you can see how that level of excoriation is utterly unwarranted.

The community, and the internet in general, and popular media criticism, has changed a lot since then, and I think the current zeitgeist is one that would be far more willing to accept School Days and realize its virtues, but its reputation precedes it and few are willing to watch "The Room of anime" with any amount of good faith. Certainly not enough good faith to pick up on its subtle and psychological writing. I think it's no longer as frequently held up as one of the worst anime of all time, but it's still generally despised (usually by people who haven't even seen it).

So, that's why I do my part to try and change the perspective on School Days.

[vagueandominousvibes]

A couple of days ago, in a seminar on Franz Kafka, our lecturer said something that stuck with me: "We didn't have a choice in being born, so we have to learn to deal with the world"

Seeing the world in its current state, our lecturer's words don't seem all that optimistic. And yet I found them oddly comforting

I've thought about it, and I think this is why I found them so comforting:

My parents chose to have a child, and that child turned out to be me

They decided to shelter me, to make sure I didn't have to deal with the world — with politics, with activist movements, with everything that requires critical thinking — they were always supposed to be my wall of defence, and chew and digest the world for me

As a young adult, I've struggled to deal with the world. I hide. I'm scared and anxious and terrified of making mistakes and disappointing the people around me

I don't know how to "deal with the world"

But if this is something that can be learned — a skill, like knitting or drawing or skiing — then there's still hope

There's still a chance for me to learn — to write that book, to open that online bookshop, to get that apartment with that little kitchen and those green plants, to get that Norwegian Forest Cat and that Bernese Mountain Dog, to learn to bake red velvet cake, to make my own holiday traditions closer aligned with my own beliefs and values, to host exchange students, to create a home where nobody has to hide parts of themselves for fear of losing love and respect

There's still a chance for me to build a life I love

.

Kafka's The Trial is a pre-existential text. There's many ways to read it, but I'd like to emphasise this: the topic of change and resultant confusion

Most readings assume that Josef K, the protagonist, is in the right, and that the society around him is in the wrong — that Josef K is an anchor point of normalcy in a text of absurdity

But an existential reading does away with this assumption. An existential reading focuses on the difference — on Josef K's confusion, on his refusing to understand the people around him, on his refusing to accept the social laws

My partner suggested this could be read as neurodivergence, and I did also consider it. However, while it would be immensely meaningful to neurodivergent people to have that kind of representation, I'm hesitant to apply such a reading for two reasons:

I don't know enough about Kafka as a person, or his other works, to write that analysis;

and it would limit the understanding we gain of general life in Kafka's time period, if we assume that Josef K's confusion only represents neurodivergent confusion (I'm saying this as someone who's probably also somewhere on the scale of neurodivergence)

What we do know, is that Kafka was writing into the modernist tradition, in the early 20th century, between WWI and WWII. Modernist literature is confusing. It's absurd. Just look at James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, or Samuel Beckett's plays. Kafka might not be writing stream-of-consciousness, but he's still firmly grounded in Josef K's experience of reality, and that reality is as confusing and absurd as Joyce and Woolf's texts sometimes are

It's generally accepted that this is a reflection of the political and economical changes in the early 20th century. The world was changing quickly and radically from what it had been in the late 19th century. Social structures and social laws had to change to accommodate the new normalcy that was emerging, and to those who were used to what was before, this may very well have been a challenge. They may very well have been confused and refused to accept or understand that the world worked differently to how they had been told it would

.

I've seen people jokingly (and not so jokingly) compare 2016 and onwards to the early 20th century, but I don't think it's too far off

If we understand Kafka's time period to be one of quick and radical change, and of confusion, then I think we see some of that in our own time — at least for those of us in our mid-twenties or older. We were born into a world that promised us something different, and now we have to learn to deal with what we actually got

It's not necessarily pleasant. It's not necessarily straight-forward. Like Josef K struggles to accept the world around him, we might struggle to accept the world around us. Maybe "accept" isn't the right word in this context, because there are things we shouldn't have to accept. But acceptance of the situation as it is is the first step towards healing. When we know what we're dealing with, we can make the changes we want and need

And maybe that's the key to The Trial, to a world in upheaval: to learn to deal with the world, to get where we want, we have to first accept that this is how it is right now

[journalxxx]

Very interesting chain of replies on this post. I’m not an artist, and admittedly I am woefully ignorant about art as a subject in general, so forgive me if stray from (what I think was) a conversation mostly about visual art to the topic of writing, with which I am... at least marginally more familiar with. I must say that the claim of “effort as the highest form of what art is worth” seems especially puzzling to me. I was always under the impression that the whole point of art was individuality and its expression, so that bit about “we as a collective are making it” also puzzles me to an extent. Anyway, ‘laziness’ is something that really can’t be understood or even guessed when simply looking at most works, unless you have additional or insider information on the process that lead to its creation. For example, personally I have no taste for poetry, prose is where I’m at. Mostly because I like reading long, expansive, engrossing things, and a lot of poetry (especially modern) tends to be on the brief side, too brief to properly engage me. But I would never say poetry is inherently inferior to prose for a simple matter of word count (translatable to effort, because surely it takes more effort to write more words than to write less, on a logical level). That would imply that, I don’t know, Proust’s work is inherently more valuable than Wordsworth’s, which... seems an odd comparison to make to begin with. But effort isn’t only visible in terms of skills or quantity. We can hardly have any notion of how much invisible, mental pondering went into penning those short, seemingly easy-going and carefree lines about daffodils. For all we know, the author might have spent a whole year of sleepless nights revising and reconsidering every goddamn word over and over so that it would fit his personal sense of beauty and style, while someone like James Joyce might be an absolutely verbose beast of a genius novelist who wrote the Ulysses down in one go without even bothering rereading or going through a second draft (we have evidence that proves the contrary, but lacking that knowledge, wouldn’t anyone be tempted to think so at least once or twice, when wading through some of those bizarre streams of consciousness? XD)

So yeah, my point is that laziness is something that we often just assume and project onto a piece, rather than a hard fact. I know it’s hard to adjust to the notion that canned poop, slashed canvasses and single dots of paint might even remotely compare to the Sistine Chapel, but what can you do? I really have no way of knowing for sure, I’m no telepath. And let's not forget that, when it comes down to "art as an expression of the self", soooo much of classic, bona-fide art was done on commission or for purposes other than pure self-expression, such as religious celebration or specifically to pander to influential people. By my definition, one could make the provoking argument that modern artists are much more 'artists' than a Michelangelo or a Leonardo da Vinci, simply because patronage is a rarer phenomenon nowadays (I think. Again, please point out any blunders I might make on the topic, I really know very little about it). But my other point is that trying to apply the concept of 'worth' to the concept of 'art' seems inherently contradictory. Art is almost antithetic to the concept of value or worth, it is presumably entirely disjointed by it, and made primarily to satisfy a personal crave, be it a crave for creation, for communication, for visibility, and also money of course, everybody's gotta eat. But I think we can all agree that the money part isn't really a factor in defining what art is and isn’t (which I have no clue, and therefore I'm not going there).

And on another topic, the topic of certain kinds of art being perceived as superior (so more worthy) than others, I also agree entirely with Blade. Why, I would assume you would too, being a fanfiction writer like myself. We both know that writing fanfiction is infinitely easier than writing original work. Why? Because 1) we don’t have to bother with nasty things like worldbuilding, backstories, establishing characters and such. That stuff takes a lot of time and thinking and imagination and revising and researching and sheer effort, and we all merrily nab it from our original work of preference and cheekily build onto that. That's a lot of work we skip right there. And 2) it is extremely easy for readers to engage emotionally with our characters... because they're not ours, they're canon's, and if a reader went through all the trouble of opening AO3, it's likely because they're already emotionally engaged with the original material and its characters. Again, a huge hurdle off our backs, not having to get people hooked on strangers. So, all this being said: fanfiction takes considerably less effort to make than original works. Is it therefore less valuable? Is it less artistic? Tough questions. I often wonder about that myself, and I haven't found my answer yet, sorry :P Besides, the "effort=worth" seems especially questionable when applied to art because it very easily lends itself to even more questionable extrapolations. How often have you seen people make the argument that digital art is inherently inferior to traditional art because it's too easy, "There's no undo button in real life", and therefore it's a lot (too) easier to revise and correct on tablets? Personally, I've seen that quite a lot, and I'm not even involved in art talks. And what about different media altogether? Are sculptors inherently more valuable as artists than writers, because they toil away at hard, physical raw material instead of using pen and paper? I wouldn't even dare to compare the effort and precision it takes to hammer and chisel a block of marble for three hours, to me lazying around at my desk and merrily bashing my keyboard for the same amount of time. Does that mean that my, uh, 'artistic endeavors' will always be considered less valuable than any given sculpture or wood carving and such? And... I occasionally speak with a few artist friends here and there, and especially the animators constantly report a rampant problem of crunch time and irrealistic schedules pushed since the very days of their art college by people (and a seemingly different breed of professors than the ones you mentioned) claiming that "You must suffer for your art!". Which is not the same point you were trying to make, for sure, but... well, there is a certain undercurrent of "You're lazy if your struggles don't show" to both these statements. A dangerously close one, if I may, to be especially wary of. Again, I agree with Blade here, my idea that art is mostly about self-expression comes with the implication that self-expression, no matter the struggles it faces (or doesn’t face!) during the creative process, comes with a certain degree of enjoyment, which is also the whole reason why one 'does art' in the first place (unless it's almost or exclusively for money. Again, like many of the greatest classic artists often did). Since this is my basic assumption, it seems counterintuitive to me that one should be deemed less of an artist simply because his enjoyment wasn't 'dampened' enough by a sufficient amount of difficulty, that doesn't seem to have any bearing on the self-expression thing. Heck, if one manages to express an idea they have, and do it easily, and even get paid handsomely for it... shit, lucky devil, I wish they were me! It does create some envy, not gonna lie. And there's nothing wrong with that, I think, envy is such a human and widespread feeling, it is a natural part of all of us (me included, more often than I'd care to admit :P). But... that ain't a good reason to try to devalue others' work as a point of principle, no?

I’m not gonna sit here and say that modern art is soulless and cheap as I know much of it contains thoughtful social commentary etc etc

but you will never convince me it’s good

if my toddler can do it I don’t think it should be worth $100,000 or more and sit in a grand museum

you can fight me on this. I encourage it. I will, however, never be changing my mind