KEV67

I have not read any Faulkner. I hear he's good, but I have concluded I do not like stream of consciousness books. I can put up with a bit of free indirect discourse. Is there a book of his you could recommend so I could tick him off the list?

I just posted it as seafaring books before. I like seafaring books. If they have a failing is that they tend to be a bit female light. Moby Dick is the best.

Oops, I see I have posted this thread before.

I have read: Moby Dick (Herman Melville) The Master and Commander series 1..20 (Patrick O' Brian) The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad) The Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) The N****r of Narcissus (Joseph Conrad) HMS Ulysses (Alistair MacLean) The Horatio Hornblower series 1..6 (C.S. Forester) The Sea Wolf (Jack London) Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe) I still have a few Hornblower books to read. So far I think Moby Dick's the best. Are there any other good ones?

One of my favourite books ever is Winged Victory by V.M. Yates. It is mainly about an RFC Sopwith Camel pilot. He is having a hard time keeping it together as his friends keep getting killed. What makes it different was that the author was an RFC pilot, although the book was written in the 1930's.

I suppose I have a bit but not much. Thinking of Dune, that is science fiction because it has space travel, cultures devoted to industry, carefully designed desert suits, and alien lifeforms. OTOH, the giant worms could be dragons, the Bene Genesset sisterhood could be witches instead of experts in body control, and so on. It is difficult to call it fantasy, but it is not exactly science. I have not read it, but Never Let Me Go by Kasuo Ishiguro is often described as science fiction, because of the clones. However, it is not what you think of as science fiction. I wondered whether Ian McEwan's book Solar could be described as science fiction because its science is quite strong. When watching Star Trek and its various iterations and series like it, I remember that Gene Roddenberry was supposed to have sold the concept to the TV channel as like Horatio Hornblower in space. I have read some Hornblower books, and it struck me that Hornblower's captaining of his ship was much better described than anything a captain of a starship might do. How a sailing ship reacts to different weather and geography is well understood. The technology is understood. In space that all has to be invented and laws of physics distorted so as to make it dramatic. Space travel would probably be very boring. What form would space combat take? For example, in on Hornblower book, Hornblower's ship was being chased by a larger French ship which was making up distance because it was less effected by rough seas. Just as the French ship was about to overtake, Hornblower feinted to tack to starboard, but then doubled back to port, which was made quicker by moving all the cannons to one side of the ship. Writing something like that set in space would just seem very contrived.

Alright, because you say so, I'll give him a go.

I read one of her books, Broken Ground. She seems to be an equal opportunities crime writer. The goodies may be male or female; so might the baddies, whether they be the right side of the law or not. Unfortunately she's an SNP supporter so I won't read any more of her stuff.

I would like to like science fiction more. 1984 and Brave New World can both be classified as science fiction and they are both superb. They are both classic dystopias too. If the function of SF is to extrapolate current sociological fears then perhaps it does not matter if the science is credible. After all, if you need a PhD in quantum gravity from the Max Planck Institute to assess the plausibility of the science, that makes for a small readership, and maybe it's missing the point anyway. Another good SF book I read was Flowers for Algernon. It was about this educationally subnormal man who given some treatment to improve his intelligence. It was a bit pedagogical, but a good book. I have read some of Kurt Vonnegut's books. I found them political. In Cat's Cradle a scientist discovers another state of water, i.e. not ice, water, water vapour, but something else. It ends badly. Slaughterhouse Five was even more political. Despite the aliens and the time travel, it was not really scientific at all. I have read all four of H.G. Wells's Victorian science fiction books. The Time Machine was an extrapolation of contemporary scientific thinking and social fears. The War of the Worlds was about invasion. War with Germany was in the air. The Island of Doctor Moreau was about playing God and the division between humans and animals, if there was one. I don't know where that came from. The Invisible Man was about a mad scientist whose experiments got out of control. Think Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Think Frankenstein. I have been watching Nerd Cookies on YouTube and her analyses of Dune are incredible. Frank Herbert's world building is amazing, but it is not really scientific. I have watched other YouTube analyses of Lord of the Rings, and they are equally amazing analyses of the world building, but LotR does not pretend to be scientific. So over all it is a genre I don't know what to make of.

Watched the Pasolini film. If the book is like the film then it's pretty horrible.

I have started reading War and Peace. It's the greatest novel in the world by reputation, or maybe Ulysses is, but I read that last year and did not understand it. I was rather surprised to find so much French in War and Peace. The translators have translated all the Russian, but not the French (well, they have, but as footnotes). I understand most of it, so all those evening school courses were not in vain. Ulysses had quotes from Latin, Italian, French, and a sentence in Irish. I had particular difficulty with the Latin.

I've updated my preferences: 1) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 2) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 3) Moby Dick by Herman Melville I wanted to pick The Adventures of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Richard Fielding at 3, but in honesty I had difficulty in picking between Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick for 2.

Interesting. Elizabeth Gaskell got in a bit of hot water, because in her biography of Charlotte Brontë, she repeated her criticisms of the school on which Lowood School was based (Cowen Bridge). When Jane Eyre came out former pupils quickly recognised the school and some of the staff. One of the problems was that the school was located in an unhealthy place. Another problem was the cook was very bad. IIRC, the reverend at the school wrote a defence, and I think his son-in-law did too. Jane Eyre contained a feminist outburst at one point. She complained about the lack of opportunities for women. I wonder if that had an effect.

I disagree with you there. I found War of the Worlds strangely dull. I preferred the concept album. Still, there must be about a 100 alien invasion films that are basically the War of the Worlds. The Time Machine was written ten years before Albert Einstein published his theory on special relativity. So the idea of time being a dimension in space must have been gaining traction. People were still absorbing Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and how that applied to humans, eugenics and such like. I read a book by Jack London called The People of the Abyss written about 1902, which was a bit of reportage on the East End of London. He said people looked misshapen and threatening, owing to the poverty, malnourishment, pollution and disease no doubt. I think middle class Londoners were trying not to think about them. So if you think science fiction is interesting when it is really about commenting on what is worrying contemporary society, then it is a very interesting book. And it's short.

I was thinking more along the lines of improving welfare for orphans, reducing legal corruption, reducing institutional bureaucracy, improving factory conditions, improving education. He usually criticised some area of society in his books. As he was so popular, I wondered whether he had any effect.

Not a bad list. I have read fifty of them. Better than the BBC Culture top 100 British novels if you ask me.

I have often wondered how much Charles Dickens' books influenced society. Robert Tressel's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was credited with winning the 1945 general election for Labour. 1984 by George Orwell must have been very influential.

In some books the authors inserts phrases from foreign languages. French, Spanish, German, Italian and Latin phrases are the most frequent I suppose. Personally, I did not mind when it was French or German as I could have a stab at translating those. I did not like Latin phrases so much. I rarely understood those, which annoyed me as I attended Latin classes for three years at school.

Why are there so few westerns in bookshops these days? The only ones I generally see are True Grit by Charles Portis, the Lonesome Dove series by Larry McMurtry, and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It is odd, because it used to be such a popular genre. I think maybe Hollywood killed it. My theory is that when anyone wrote a good western it was immediately turned into a film, so everyone remembers the film but not the book.

Yes, you also have to read the Odyssey, and another book that explains what Ulysses is all about and why it's so good,

I have read one book by Stuart MacBride. It was good, as opposed to bad or mediocre. I liked the local radio DJ bits and the idiot white rapper. It was entertaining, but it was silly. The young police detective in question: on Tuesday he failed to save a suspect's life, his girlfriend broke up with him, and he discovered his mother's dismembered head in a plastic bag. You think that would be a bad day, but that was only Tuesday. Wait until you read what happened on Thursday.

Indeed, just don't ask me what happened or what it's about. TBF, I did like some bits in it, such as the pub scenes, and the brothel scenes, and Leopold Bloom breaking into his own home.

When reading a long classic, say Bleak House, I just try to read a chapter a day. Some of these books have 70 chapters or more. I think The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling had well over 100 chapters but they were quite short, so I might have read two chapters a day for that one. That means some books take me a couple of months to get through, but I usually read several books concurrently. I have recently bought Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. It is huge. I also want to read War and Peace this year. So I doubt I will get to many other classics this year. I read Ulysses by James Joyce last year, which was a real struggle. Not only was it very long, not only did I not understand most of it, not only was I bored by some of the bits I did understand, but the chapters were long. I just read ten pages a day, stopping on the first full stop on the tenth page.

It was a great book. Whoever did the translation for my copy did a great job. I enjoyed the wit and intelligence in the conversations. The plot is over the top. I wondered at one point, maybe more than one point, where it was going and whether a plot hole had opened up. Maybe it was not a plot hole or maybe it was a plot hole but was noticed and patched up. Edmond Dante served revenge on everyone who betrayed him in a way that suited the form of their betrayal, but he was very severe. It started off slow, but it picked up speed in the second half, particularly after the count arrived in Paris.

When I read it I thought, 'This woman thinks deep. I don't think I've thought about anything as deeply in my whole life.' Compared to hers, my thoughts are like a budgerigar chirping, 'Who's a pretty boy' to its owner. Pretty grim read though. A friend gave me a poster of the film as a bit of a joke, as my name is Kevin. Some of my friends seemed to think this was hilarious. I've never seen the film, but it's supposed to be good. The bit that interests me the most it that it says it contains sexualised nudity.