What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (9 Viewers)

[rettucs]

Everyman - really awful

thats next on my to-read list. Can't wait

 

[Scientician 0.8]

Don't worry, it'll only take you about 5 minutes, then depress you for the rest of the day. Huzzah!

 

[Lili Marlene]

I've heard bad things about that Everyman book but if you don't like it

this Everyman is pretty good, although Mankynd is a lot funnier.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

sabbath's theatre - very good
american pastoral - ecellent
the human stain - excellent
the plot against america - excellent
operation shylock - good
everyman - excellent

 

[IFF]

well if everyone else is doing their roth analysis, here's mine

the plot against america - excellent
everyman - i didn't like it
the great american novel - enjoyable
american pastoral - very good
exit ghost - reasonable
indignation - excellent

i also started "portnoy's complaint" on monday night
i choose that because i have yet to read someone who had a positive opinion of "the humbling"

 

[Lili Marlene]

post up your reading list. is it all kiddie lit?

@Shaney

Can't really put up this years reading list as it's all thesis stuff but here's what I could find of last year's primary texts/novels if you're interested. That is, if you feel like using this post as a book club.

Spoiler

Classic Fiction:

Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson's Fairy Tales

Basically as much as possible in this but, in more detail the following:

The History of the Fairchild Family - Mary Sherwood
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Water Babies - Charles Kingsley
Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie
Tom Brown's Schooldays - Thomas Hughes
Stalky and Co. - Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Books - Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories - Rudyard Kipling
Puck of Pook's Hill - Rudyard Kipling
Bevis - Richard Jefferies
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Moonfleet - J. Meade Faulkner
Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Robinson Cruesoe - Daniel Defoe
Coral Island - Robert Michael Ballantyne
The Railway Children - E. Nesbit
Children of the New Forest - Frederick Marryat

there might have been more that I can't remember and/or obviously didn't read

Irish Fiction

This tended to more deal with authors or themes than single books

Pangur Bán
Irish Myths and Legends - huge reading list on this i'm not gonna get into
Maria Edgeworth
Lady Gregory (specifically her work on folklore)
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift - including kids versions of it
Fairy Tales - Oscar Wilde
Irish Illustrators - whatever that was about I guess I wasn't paying attention
Patricia Lynch
Eilis Dillon (anything island and soda bread related)
Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer (with a passing reference to other Irish fantasy authors)
Kate Thompson
Siophán Parkinson
"Historical fiction, the Holocaust and Ireland" (including the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. This lecture mostly consisted of a Jewish Studies student tearing it apart line by line)
"Northern Ireland Troubles" fiction - most of which is awful to be honest

We also did a few films which meant we had to try and take Into the West seriously for more than 5 seconds

Fiction since 1945

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula LeGuin
Harry Potter - JK Rowling
Tom's Midnight Garden Philippa Pearce
The Fire Eaters - David Almond
Kes/Kestral for a Knave - Barry Hines
The Stone Book Quartet - Alan Garner
Lucas - Kevin Brooks
The White Darkness - Geraldine McCaughrean
Memory - Margaret Mahy
Holes - Louis Sachar
The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier
Postcards from No Man's Land - Aiden Chambers
What I Was - Meg Rosoff



Then there was also a course on picturebooks which didn't have much prescribed except maybe Where the Wild Things Are.

I also 'studied' a few 'media' things where we watched the Wizard of Oz, E.T. and generally pretended we cared.

And a massive course on poetry which started with the Romantics and worked it's way up through history. Probably the most reading i've ever done in my life.

so there you go. Writing all that made me realise how much I still have to do :\

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

The Tolkien is a bit much. Other than that I have only read The Railway Children. I think i liked it.

 

[jonah]

There's some really great stuff on that list, John. Looks enjoyable.

 

[Jim Daniels]

There's some really great stuff on that list, John. Looks enjoyable.

jonah and I is John

With a book you like, is reading it for study/ college the same experience as reading for enjoyment? Does the fact that you are studying add or subtract from the experience? Or is that the dumbest question ever?

 

[Lili Marlene]

Not at all, in my experience the only people who say it takes the 'enjoyment' out of reading already had that opinion beforehand or wanted to study books because they thought they would find some answer to what the 'secret meaning' of a book is.

The whole lit crit side is viewed with a completely different part of your brain if you will and shouldn't really affect your emotional reaction to a book. I suppose when you're doing a prescribed course where it can affect you is because you have to read so much and you might read stuff you wouldn't normally read and/or enjoy.

 

[jonah]

Not really for me either - it can definitely make the initial reading more difficult, in the sense that my motivation to pick it up and actually begin is dampened by my laziness due to having to read it for class, but once I actually begin it doesn't affect me at all. I generally enjoy the experience of reading most types of literature, too.

It does affect my reading for pleasure though because usually with the reading load I have, I can't possibly read all the other things I want to read. But you get surprised at the pleasure you can get from the course books, and generally get a lot more out of them in the end, I think.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

I only studied english for one year but i didnt enjoy it at all. I found that thinking about what i might write in essays and exams while i was reading the book did spoil it a bit. I liked philosophy though, and it was similar to english except that the books were not fiction. Having to think about essays and exams forced me not to just abandon them and so I got into reading the kind of materials that i wouldnt have bothered sticking with otherwise, and attempting to understand what the writers were actually talking about forced my mind in strange directions (although i rarely understood anything and struggled to pass the course).

 

[Jim Daniels]

@I is John and @jonah

Thanks! Good answers!

I just remember a lad in my leaving cert class telling me he was reading Pride and Prejudice even though it wasn't on the curriculum that year. He was enjoying it mainly because because he didn't have to concern himself with learning quotes or worrying about themes/ roles/ characters/ etc. We had to read Persuasion and he found the experience dreadful. Maybe that was Persuasions fault more than anything though!

 

[rettucs]

Don't worry, it'll only take you about 5 minutes, then depress you for the rest of the day. Huzzah!

pretty quick read alright. Started it this morning and finished it a couple of hours later. I liked it. A near perfect book in a lot of ways, given the subject matter being dealt with.

And I don't think I'm depressed after reading it. I think I'm grateful I'm not 70 and reckon I'll treat old people with greater respect from now on, the poor fuckers.

 

[rettucs]

ok, I've warmed somewhat to this. Should finish it in the next couple of days but its well-written and a worthwhile enough read (apart from the sex scenes which he writes horribly badly).

I did find approximately 3 spelling mistakes so far though. That does my nut.

finished this today too. Overall I think I think it excellent but thats with hindsight. I didn't enjoy parts but, having finished it and stepping back a little, I reckon its a really good book, again dealing really well with the subject matter.

Interesting too to read the amazon reviews with the hindsight of having read it. I agree with almost all of the negative comments but don't think any of them necessarily negative (if that makes any sense). For example the profanities and the casual racism are cited by naysayers, but are probably a very essential part of the book. As someone mentioned, for people not from Melbourne theres every chance that some of the colloquial nuances might be misunderstoond. No more than an Australian reading Skippy Dies I reckon.

 

[jonah]

Jim Daniels I actually really enjoyed Persuasion, though I know this is an argument separate to what we're actually talking about. I'm a bit of a girl in that I really enjoy Jane Austen, though hated 'Mansfield Park' with everything I had to offer. The others were enjoyable though I do base this on reading them when I was 11 - haven't actually revisited them at all. That could be interesting actually. I don't think Mansfield Park was meant for 11 year olds in any case.

I'm making a list of things to read for possible dissertation topics, but am still all over the shop with ideas so its not going so well. I've got about five major areas of interest, and 99% of them are completely incompatible with my overall MA title, being 'Literature and Philosophy'. I'm trying my best not to throw in the towel with Philosophy. Its weird, I find it really, really manageable, and not nearly as difficult as I'd been led to believe it would be. I just find it utterly redundant. I can't be dealing with all of this talk about 'authenticity' and 'beauty', its so not relevant to anything I give a shit about, and basically the idea of finding 'truth' goes against everything I suspect I believe in. And my tutor just keeps giving me that 'French Deconstructionist Scummer' look and asking me if I have any ethics at all. I didn't expect it to be so conservative, I guess. GIVE ME SOME CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY TEACHERS PLZ, SUSSEX.

Anyway, I'm thinking of switching to Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought. I think it might suit me better and I might have less of an urge to scream WHAT ARE YOU LIKE on a daily basis.

I is John Do you mind me asking what you're focusing your dissertation on? And is this the second year of your Part time MA?

 

[Lili Marlene]

Hello, yeah it's the second year of a part time MA. Although one of the Lecturers seemed surprised the other day that any of us also had jobs.

My dissertation is still in the preliminary states but it's sort of a experiment in scrutinising of children's literature through the, eh, lens of existentialist thought. It's something that hasn't really been done before but i'm finding a huge amount of parallels between traditional criticism on what children's lit is all about and what the existentialists thought people should do with themselves. For example a lot of existential problems can be traced back to Rousseau (who pretty much invented childhood as we know it) who was grappling with the same things they were but maybe came to slightly different conclusions*.

Anyway, i'm basically looking for a way into the argument presented by this book which people in the field tend to either ignore as it undermines everything they say or get absolutely enraptured with and won't shut up about, which doesn't lead anywhere. Plus, with existentialist thoughts finding their way into Carnegie award winning books it's about time someone actually said something about it

It's all up in the air at the moment and i'll have to cut back on a huge amount of ideas but that's roughly the direction i'm going.











*actually he'd disagree wildly, and did disagree wildly, with what people say was his conclusion but nonetheless....

 

[Moods For Mallards]

this book

Ordered. I want to do everyone else's masters.

 

[Jim Daniels]

Just read in today's Irish Times that Jane Austen was dying when writing Persuasion -she wrote to her niece saying that she would be leaving something for publication. Frank McGuinness, the playwright, describes is as "the greatest analysis of a love story between man and a woman in the English language". Sure, what would I have known at 16? Funnily enough, Don Wycherly, the actor, said in the same article that a book "is much better when you don't have to answer questions on it". He was referring to Wuthering Heights, which I have shamefully have never read.

Jim Daniels I actually really enjoyed Persuasion, though I know this is an argument separate to what we're actually talking about. I'm a bit of a girl in that I really enjoy Jane Austen, though hated 'Mansfield Park' with everything I had to offer. The others were enjoyable though I do base this on reading them when I was 11 - haven't actually revisited them at all. That could be interesting actually. I don't think Mansfield Park was meant for 11 year olds in any case.

I'm making a list of things to read for possible dissertation topics, but am still all over the shop with ideas so its not going so well. I've got about five major areas of interest, and 99% of them are completely incompatible with my overall MA title, being 'Literature and Philosophy'. I'm trying my best not to throw in the towel with Philosophy. Its weird, I find it really, really manageable, and not nearly as difficult as I'd been led to believe it would be. I just find it utterly redundant. I can't be dealing with all of this talk about 'authenticity' and 'beauty', its so not relevant to anything I give a shit about, and basically the idea of finding 'truth' goes against everything I suspect I believe in. And my tutor just keeps giving me that 'French Deconstructionist Scummer' look and asking me if I have any ethics at all. I didn't expect it to be so conservative, I guess. GIVE ME SOME CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY TEACHERS PLZ, SUSSEX.

Anyway, I'm thinking of switching to Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought. I think it might suit me better and I might have less of an urge to scream WHAT ARE YOU LIKE on a daily basis.

I is John Do you mind me asking what you're focusing your dissertation on? And is this the second year of your Part time MA?

 

[Scientician 0.8]

I quite enjoyed the forensic analysis our English teacher did of the Mayor Of Casterbridge when we were studying it at LC. I'd say at college level it's a different kettle of grenades.