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Whatcha Reading?; War and Peace? Best of Jugs? I'm curious
Topic Started: Apr 26 2006, 05:09 PM (3,433 Views)
Snefaldia
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No one's hotter than Bea.
Charter Nation
By the Sword, a history of fencing, duelling, olympic champions, etc., by Richard Cohen. Cohen was five-time UK national sabre champion and Olympian. An excellent book, incredibly well-researched with firsthand accounts from fencers still alive, as well as the stories of the masters of their youth. A fascinating read.

The Five Military Classics of Ancient China. A bit more pedantic and difficult, nonetheless important for an Asianist such as myself. I haven't got far, since I started reading it at 2:00 AM when I couldn't sleep, but it's still promising.
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Gruenberg
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Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.
Hard America, Soft America by Michael Barone.
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The Evil Smurfs
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Blue Nazi Devil
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Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.
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Snefaldia
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No one's hotter than Bea.
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I finished Cohen about two weeks ago, it was engrossing and fascinating. I'd recommend it for anyone, even non-fencers. Interesting note, brought to mind by the UNOG discussion- apparently Oswald Mosley was a fencer in his youth and came back to it when he started the New Party. He wanted everyone to fence.

I set aside the Five Classics and pulled The Decameron out of the bookshelf. I haven't had much time for reading except at 1:00 AM, and the shorter stories are perfect for light reading before sleep. I read about two a night.

Does anyone else have trouble reading and making sense of anything Shakespeare? I love his sonnets, but there's always so much to analyze when you read his works. I lose focus pretty easily.

Have also been picking at The Tale of Genji. It's unabridged, so of course it's monumental and rather overblown. I'd expect nothing less of the literature of the Heian nobility. Replace the names, places, and poetry with Regency Britain and you'd have one gigantic Austen work.
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Kenny
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Shakespearean language is an acquired taste. It becomes clearer over time, but English professors' tendency to overanalyze it makes something less than an enjoyable topic of study. Sonnet #20, for example. If we could have just accepted that it was written tongue-in-cheek, it might have saved us many fruitless and frustrating hours of in-class debate over whether Shakespeare (a man who may have never existed in the first place) was a homosexual. :rolleyes:

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign, by Edward J. Larson. A fascinating look at how intraparty feuding (which thanks to the absence of primaries, and a separate vote for vice president in the Electoral College, lasted all the way to Election Day) nearly derailed Jefferson's presidential bid.
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eco
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I have this thought in my head that Shakespeare would be highly amused were he alive to discover just how much over-analytical nonsense has been written about him. I particularly enjoyed an essay proposing that Measure For Measure is an exploration of sexual sado-masochism. Mind you, there are rather a lot of spankings in the comedies...

I know little of the sonnets, but the plays are there to be seen, not read. I keep banging on about this, but let's not forget that the reason we even have the words to read is because the actors wrote them down from memory. Shakespeare doesn't appear to have been overly concerned about maintaining records of his work.

I've just started The Wind-UP Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, and I'm very impressed so far. I'm a bit of a sucker for a writer with a wistful, dreamy style.
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Gruenberg
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Quote:
 
I have this thought in my head that Shakespeare would be highly amused were he alive to discover just how much over-analytical nonsense has been written about him.

Even so, I think it'd be fair to say that if you were going to tediously overanalyse any writer's language, Shakespeare would be one of the better candidates. I like to think of him writing with a glint in his eye at the thought of someone later picking up on the intricacies of the language.

Our GCSE system (ages 14-16) is structured around the idea that less than 50% of students pass five at Grade C, and so - at the risk of sounding obscenely arrogant/snobbish - makes better students want to claw out their brains with a screwdriver by the end of 2 years. For GCSE English we studied one novel for an entire year (I refuse to ever read Dickens after this experience), followed by one play for a term, and then one book of poems for another term. That was it, for 2 years. We didn't study a Shakespeare play because the class decided it would be just as good to watch the film version instead.

But, we were allowed to do our own Shakespeare projects if we wanted, and I took on The Merchant of Venice, which I read over and over for weeks, analysing the use of the word 'blood' (which crops up about 20 times) as applied to race. I, at least, found it fascinating. And I don't think there's any way that the use of language was, in that instance, just one of those things: it had to be really crafted. This is particularly evident when you compare the Shakespeare text with another version, e.g. his Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's Troylus and Crysside. The last word of Merchant is 'ring'; the last word of Troilus is 'disease'. I'm sure there are other ones.

I agree watching Shakespeare live is wonderful, and a good production can be spell-binding. But I do find reading him fun as well.
Quote:
 
I particularly enjoyed an essay proposing that Measure For Measure is an exploration of sexual sado-masochism.

Groping for fish in very unusual rivers...
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eco
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Yeah, you're right. I think the problem is that - in my experience, at least - Shakespearean studies tend to over-emphasise the text over the performance.

The last scene in Merchant is jarringly unpleasant. Shylock hung out to dry and the supposedly likeable couples frolic around being oh-so-rude-and-clever. I wonder if Shakespeare intended it to be at least a little squirmsome. His treatment of race and religion isn't as simple and unpleasant as it's often made out to be (witness Aaron's reaction to the birth of his son in Titus).
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Gruenberg
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I found the most uneasy aspect to be the Merchant's entrance, to which the first thing Shylock says, as an aside, is, "I hate him because he is not a Jew." Which rather dampens "if you prick me..." etc.

I agree the last scene is unpleasant. Gratiano is the most delightfully appalling person, and he's essentially bragging about going off to despoil a virgin while his mate's girlfriend's father dies in the gutter. But to my mind, the end of Measure for Measure is equally unpleasant: the utterly fatuous "love her, Angelo", and Isabella's catastrophic decision to marry the Duke (the text doesn't actually specify that she agrees, but productions almost always assume she does). It's a very long way from a traditional "comedy" ending.

Anyway, today I have been reading:
- "The Forgotten Prisoners"
- an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences about cultural evolution
- Federation of American Scientist documents on MANDADs
which has made for a really fun morning.
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eco
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I've played Gratiano and he's magnificently shit. I've also played Lucio in Measure and think he's also appallingly ill-served by the ending. Measure's final scene is genuinely horrible on all counts, as you say; I can only assume this is deliberate (not for nothing is it labelled a 'problem play'; speakign of which, have you read All's Well That End's Well and, if so, do you know if it also ends uncomfortably?).
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Gruenberg
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Facetious as the question may have been, sorry for not replying. No, I don't know All's Well....

(Anyone know what unusual quality the word 'facetious' has?)

Currently reading:
Hal Varian, Intermediate Microeconomics
J. Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics
P.G.A. Howells and Keith Bain, The Economics of Money, Banking and Finance
George J. Stigler, The Theory of Price

Gave up yet again on trying to read Henry James. If I'm really going to study the US, I figure at some point I'm going to have to learn how to digest more than five pages of their greatest novelist withoutzzzzzzzzzzz

Selections from Leaves of Grass (which, fortunately, I enjoy).

Rereading Don De Lillo, Underworld. Now there's a Great American Novel.
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Allech-Atreus
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re-digesting a section in Intellectual Foundations of China dealing with Zhuangzi after a conversation I had with a friend. It's pleasant to think that the western philosophical developments of the 19th and 20th centuries were foreshadowed in Chinese history more than two thousand years ago.

Proust is becoming more wonderful as I read. Some of the longer passages tend to bore me, but the banal representation of everyday life is really captivating. His dialogues are the same sort of thing you'd hear at the next table at a restaurant, and the analysis just as cutting.
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The Palentine
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The thinking man's pervert
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Gruen
 
Gave up yet again on trying to read Henry James. If I'm really going to study the US, I figure at some point I'm going to have to learn how to digest more than five pages of their greatest novelist withoutzzzzzzzzzzz


Maybe you should try another poet(since your already reading Walt Whitman). Carl Sandberg is a good choice. Also I'd also suggest Mark twain. He may not be contemporary, but some of the foibles of Americans that he writes about in The Gilded Age , The Innocents Abroad , and Roughing It.
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eco
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Gruenberg,Jun 4 2008
01:09 PM
Facetious as the question may have been, sorry for not replying. No, I don't know All's Well....

(Anyone know what unusual quality the word 'facetious' has?)

I'd never realised: a-e-i-o-u.

Embarrassingly, I hadn't intended to be so clever. Or not clever. Or whatever.

Oops.

I'll have to go take a look; I suspect the title's a misnomer, based on the other plays written around that time.
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Jenster
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I've got some decent-looking books for my English class this summer:

A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
The Maltese Falcon by Daschell Hammett
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe


Should be a blast. :D
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