21–30 of 59 posts
I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
Came across this nice quote by Kafka recently, which seems relevant: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves i…
i think everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want. what's with pretentious assholes always telling everybody what they should and shouldn't do?
edit: typo
"At times the book would wash up on the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits, inexhaustible cred to know-it-alls. I always forebore." I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
Came across this nice quote by Kafka recently, which seems relevant: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves i…
i think everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want. what's with pretentious assholes always telling everybody what they should and shouldn't do?
"Everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want" isn't that useful as an intellectual opinion. Yes, fine, but what kind of books should we want to read if we want to lead our lives the best way possible? Why read at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want. what's with pretentious assholes always telling everybody what they should and shouldn't do?
He isn't telling you what to do. He is struggling with the question of what the best way to live is, he assumes you are doing the same, and he's offering his opinion on one aspect of it. "Everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want" isn't that useful as an intellectual opinion. Yes, fine, but what kind of books should we want to read if we want to lead our lives the best way possible? Why read at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I try Ulysses again it will probably be an audiobook, I could never make any headway with it in text. I might try getting hold of Dubliners in book form.
James Norton's audio book of Ulysses is superb, he really captures the beauty of the language. I'd recommend it more as an audiobook that written, at least at first, just as I'd recommend listening to Shakespeare rather than reading the text. genius.com has an annotated Ulysses, [0] and it might be even better to listen and read at the same time. [0]: http://genius.com/albums/James-joyce/Ulysses
"At times the book would wash up on the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits, inexhaustible cred to know-it-alls. I always forebore." I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
At some point in the course of that year, my younger son and his classmates wrote poems about their parents, immortalizing their most salient aspects and traits, and in my son’s poem I am depicted, arrested for an instant in the midst of the eternity it must have seemed to him, “reading Finnegans Wake.” If in his poem he erected a kind of statue to his father, then Finnegans Wake was the pigeon that had come to roost on my hat.
“What’s it about?” the same boy asked me, not long after the omnipresent bird had first alighted on the paternal tricorne.
p.s. I didn't look at the article's author until I finished it, and I cannot believe he is the writer of something as good as "Kavalier & Clay"... Maybe Chabon wrote in an obnoxious way to mirror the obnoxiousness of FW.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want. what's with pretentious assholes always telling everybody what they should and shouldn't do?
He isn't telling you what to do. He is struggling with the question of what the best way to live is, he assumes you are doing the same, and he's offering his opinion on one aspect of it. "Everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want" isn't that useful as an intellectual opinion. Yes, fine, but what kind of books should we want to read if we want to lead our lives the best way possible? Why read at all?
Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)