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Kolinahr

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Posts posted by Kolinahr

  1.  I going to deliberately ignore allegorical books like CS Lewis Narnia books - I assume most people would know about those beforehand.

     

     

     

    I have to disagree with that, if only because these are children's books and most kids don't have the framework in place to see the allegory. I loved Lewis's writing as a child and a young adult, but recently ended up watching Prince Caspian with some Arab people, and it was truly a terrible experience. Because they didn't have any background on the books or movies, they didn't seem aware they were being insulted every ten seconds, but Hollywood definitely made sure to cast ethnically this time (funny how they can manage to do that when putting people in a negative light, but when someone complains about a white-washed lead, suddenly there just "aren't enough ethnic actors") and I really wanted to just bury my head in the sand in mortification because all of the messages about race and religion were embarrassingly heavy handed. And don't even get me started on The Horse and His Boy... 

  2. When I first read Half Blood Prince, I was completely electrified by it. It is my favourite HP novel by far because it gave us so many answers about the past of many of the characters, and then it had that, at the time, completely shocking ending. I like the dark ones, though. :)

  3. I can see how not everyone would like WoT, I'm sorry you didn't like the later books. Brandon Sanderson is one of my favourite authors (as well as Robert Jordan), I discovered him through reading the WoT books, but I can see his writing is not for everyone. We all like different things, so :).

     

    I think with both Jordan and Sandersen I'm in the awkward position of liking their ideas better than their executions. Jordan was a fantastic world builder who suffered a bit in the self-control department. I often felt that he enjoyed the world creation more than he really liked to craft stories, while Sandersen has some very clever ideas and does seem to enjoy completing plots, but lacks a certain finesse in the novel medium.

     

    Actually, I attended a lecture he lead this past year at the Emirates book festival in Dubai, and found him to be an excellent speaker who really knows how to sell his ideas. I decided to read his original books after that, but found myself curiously less satisfied than I was just listening to him talking about them. Stylistically I think that he functions better as a performative teller of tales than as a novelist, but that is where the path to success is now, so...*shrugs*

  4. WoT used to be one of my favourite series, but like many people, I became extremely frustrated with the bloated writing of the later books. Sandersen did rein it back in a lot in his contributions, but I have some issues with his writing style (his excessively casual tone can be very distracting, for one thing), so on the whole I really like books 1-5, and not much after. 

  5. Currently having electronics-related reading issues! I have been stuck on the same book for weeks now, almost unheard of for me, simply because I can't be bothered to open my tablet. There are some other issues to blame, perhaps, such as the fact that I've recently become something of a news hound and a lot of my free time is being consumed with videos about American elections and racial violence, Syria, climate change, science, etc, but I do feel if I had more paper books available to me right now that I wouldn't be quite so distracted, if you can call it that. 

  6. Three African American men have been shot and killed by police over the course of a week, on the East coast, Midwest and West coast.

     

    Really terrible what is happening between with the police and the black community. Like many people across the world, I have been watching the story develop with hopes of some profound change coming out of the horrors. We shall see. 

  7. Wow, that's a pretty big difference. It does make some sense though, since you're living in an oil country and I'm living quite some distance away.

     

    I remember living in Europe and being totally blown away by how expensive petrol was compared to Canada (where I'm from originally). But the countries are much smaller and it's infinitely easier to set up an efficient public transportation system. People are therefore far less physically and psychologically dependent on their cars, which I find to be the healthier option. UAE doesn't have much of a train or tram system either, despite being a small country, but it's also a very young country, with an almost entirely brand new infrastructure, and I know that there are some transit projects in the works. 

  8. I never encountered this series as a child, nor have yet to read it as an adult, though I might now, but have been mostly aware of it because Magneto is reading it in prison in the original X-Men films! I remember reading or hearing somewhere that it is supposed to have been the first book the character read in English, and actually, because I've moved around a fair bit, reading children's books in a second or third language, as an adult, has often been the case for me too. It's not at all the same as reading children's classics as a child, but it does convey something of the same sense of limited understanding simply due to the hazy nature of one's linguistic absorption during the middle stages of language learning!

  9. I'm amazed as well. I calculated that with 1L costing €1.60 here (1L = 0.26 gallon), it would cost €6.15 here for one gallon, or with the current exchange rate $6.86.

     

    I still feel bad for you that prices have risen so much compared with what you're used to, though :(.

     

    It's 1.64 UAE Dirhams here per litre, which is actually 0.45 American dollars, and shockingly cheap, but this is an oil country. Still a bit shocked, though, as I've never done the math before.

  10.  Last night it was $1.89 a gallon. This morning it was $2.00. It cost me $35 to fill up my tank when usually it only costs about $25. 

     

    I'm sympathetic to your situation, but also astounded by how cheap your fuel is there! (It's very cheap here, too, but most places I have been too are far, far more expensive).

  11. Yes I agree that can be distracting and irritating.  I read a book by a left wing comedian- Marcus somebody- and I couldn't finish it because it was just very political and forever bashing the politicians he didn't like. I also don't like book themes that are Christian allegories.  One I read recently was GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. This started off so well and was really funny but I didn't like the  preachy message in the ending. 

     

    This reminds me of the Russian novels I was discussing a couple of weeks ago. A lot of them have heavy political messages that have been diluted by the passage of time. Some people complain it makes the books nonsensical, but I wonder if it might not make them a lot more tolerable, as well.

  12. This sounds really excellent and I have to check it out. The effects of technology on the brain and socialisation is one of my favourite topics, and a few months ago in Dubai I heard a terrific lecture from British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield about this very topic, with particular focus on the effects of social media and the way it distorts our perceptions and psychological development. There are some very scary implications in a lot of this recent research. 

  13. I'd love to have seen what Oscar Wilde would make of today's celebrity culture and yes, social media, I think he would have loved it (and probably loathed it too).

     

    It does seem that Wilde had a very conflicted relationship with his own aesthetic philosophy of art and beauty for their own sakes, utterly divorced from moral considerations. I used to think that he meant it completely ironically, but have since read too many expository quotes indicating otherwise. However, the heavy irony in his dramas, as well as the very clearly critical message in Picture also indicate a significant measure of disapproval for the self-indulgent aesthetics of popular society and culture. An ambivalent man in many things, was Mr. Wilde. 

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