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Short Little Difficult Books

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Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#111

Post by forgetfreeman »

layer8 wrote: post #62
forgetfreeman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more a commentary on 2025 than 16 year olds I assure you. In the 90s adult relationships weren't particularly mysterious to your average 16 year old.

…or so the 16-year old still thought.

I mean you leave with whatever take suits you but don't expect buyin for some revisionist narrative that casts 90s era 16 year olds as infantilized incompetents. I'd like to point out that the majority of kids that age at that time had cars, jobs to support said, and relationships of their own of varying levels of "adult"-ness.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#112

Post by forgetfreeman »

IAmBroom wrote: post #70
forgetfreeman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more a commentary on 2025 than 16 year olds I assure you. In the 90s adult relationships weren't particularly mysterious to your average 16 year old.

So you were born circa 1979?

Close, you're late by 4 years.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#113

Post by herdrick »

pklausler wrote: post #58
idoubtit wrote: post #46

I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old form of your modern language. My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it wa…

I think that English might have fewer opportunities for this sort of thing; I found Beowulf to be surprisingly dull in the original. Greek, on the other hand, has lifetimes' worth of good stuff in its ancient forms, and can really reward the time spent in learning to read them.

You:

- can read Old English

- find Beowulf, in Old English, dull

... how did this happen? Isn't reading Beowulf a primary motivation, if not the primary motivation, for the hard work of learning Old English?

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#114

Post by viccis »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #75
viccis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always that person who needs to make a knee-jerk inferiority feeling into the author's problem. The author never made value judgments about people. In fact, he starts by pointing out that he thinks those kinds of judgments either way are silly.

The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.

Given the way he framed it, if you somehow will admit to fitting his scarecrow of a reader who considers these "fundamentally fraudulent because books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob" then I'm not sure what sympathy you are expecting here? Yes, the author laid out a comically philistine portrait of an anti-intellectual and you're like "yeah that's me I'm mad!!!", so yeah maybe think about that and why you think it's ok.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#115

Post by actionfromafar »

dbtc wrote: post #82
pklausler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that English changed as much, but I could be wrong. Shakespeare's not hard for a modern English reader, given a decent edition with vocabulary hints in the footnotes. I got through most of it as a sophomore.

Check out the spellings in the original folios though: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-fo... Our school books have all had some (very helpful) translation work applied to the original text.

Spelling fixes feels like an "allowed" cheat though IMHO. You are still with the original. Spelling wasn't very standardised and you want to get the word across. Changing word order and idioms though, then we are veering into "translation" territory.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#116

Post by actionfromafar »

herdrick wrote: post #113
pklausler wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that English might have fewer opportunities for this sort of thing; I found Beowulf to be surprisingly dull in the original. Greek, on the other hand, has lifetimes' worth of good stuff in its ancient forms, and can really reward the time spent in learning to read them.

You: - can read Old English - find Beowulf, in Old English, dull ... how did this happen? Isn't reading Beowulf a primary motivation, if not the primary motivation, for the hard work of learning Old English?

Maybe too high expectations. :-)

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#117

Post by mc3301 »

hearsathought wrote: post #49
allknowingfrog wrote: post #29

Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.

> I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth. You could read fiction for personal growth and non-fiction for fun as well.

This is mostly how I do it.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#118

Post by sam-cop-vimes »

pklausler wrote: post #107
sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I take it out and read a couple of pages each time and then put it back. Keep thinking I should buy a guide to reading this book but never got around to it.

Even a short summary of the Wake can suffice to get you started. You're never going to understand it all, and that's okay, but even a brief chat with a Wake fan can give you the basic clues of its structure and the HCE/ALP Shem/Shaun dualities. I think it's a mistake to spend time with guidebooks than with the text itself if you want to read it for pleasure as opposed to writing a thesis on it. At least, postpone the…

Thanks, this is useful!
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