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Ben Mines

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    Tolstoy

    in General Fiction

    Posted · Edited by Ben Mines

    I've finished War & Peace now. I'm not sure it makes sense to do a "review", as the book has surely been reviewed more times than it needs to have been.

     

    Anyway, my thoughts are that as a historical family romance romp kind of thing, it was fantastic. As a description of wars and battle scenes, it was also fantastic. It may be one of the best novels ever written. But it is deeply, deeply flawed.

     

    There are too many pages discussing the flow of history, discussing how events happen without the control of people. The whole of Epilogue 2 is redundant and incredibly dull, too, being full of only this stuff.

     

    Tolstoy needs to discuss his views on history a bit, as he tries to explain how the war of 1812 flowed, how the French won almost every battle yet lost the war, how the inaction of the Russians led to the greatest success. He wants to explain how "Great Men" don't change wars and history, that the flow of human history will happen irrespective of Great Men. A view with which I strongly differ.

     

    But Tolstoy appears to be trying to contrast that with the love and happinness you can make in your own life, and to those closest to you. He's talking about the contrast between how you achieve personal redemption, and why that is what you should focus on rather than focussing on the bigger stage where neither you nor anyone else will genuinely change anything.

     

    So the discussions on the nature of history are clearly relevent to the book, but they are just too long winded (and, to my mind, wrong).

     

    The other thing that drags, for me, is a typical tendency in Victorian novels for the characters to spend too long on introspection, and have moments of epiphane when they suddenly change their entire outlook on life; to me neither of these things seems particularly realistic, although perhaps that's because of my modern sensitivities.

     

    But, these criticisms aside, it's still a wonderful book once you battle past the swarms of characters and determine who is who. Something that's pretty inevitable in a 1400 page novel.

     

    I agree that the Epilogue drags. Tolstoy simply spatchcocks a lumpy lecture on historical determinism onto the novel. A similar point was already made subtly through the poetry and narrative drama of the novel, and the Epilogue does nothing but belabor, and exaggerate, the point. It's kind of like seeing a superb film, after which the director appears on screen to deliver a boring lecture about what he was trying to say with that film. And if a work of art is successful (which War and Peace emphatically is), then the explanatory lecture is unnecessary.

     

    But for those of you that haven't read War and Peace, don't be disheartened. The philosophical lecture contained in the Epilogue is only fifty-odd pages long. Putting aside its length, the novel itself is very approachable and surprisingly readable.

    Tolstoy

    in General Fiction

    Posted

    War and Peace sat on the shelf for about two years. I own an old, shabby copy of Constance Garnett's questionable translation which I have only just found the courage to read. Today I'm at page 571 and am completely enthralled. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It's superb.

    Franz Kafka

    in General Fiction

    Posted

    Some people find reading Kafka unbearably depressing. Others claim it's a hoot. Still others see meaningful spiritual implications in his work. Probably, his work is all of these things and more.

     

    The first time I read The Trial and The Castle I got a queasy, helpless feeling in my stomach, like descending in a fast elevator. However, Borges claims the form of Zeno's famous paradox, "is precisely that of The Castle" and that "the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkaesque characters in literature," which I think is a good way of looking at Kafka's work: as presenting abstract, metaphysical and spiritual problems, rather than being stories of nightmarish hopelessness.

    Are you a Book Nazi?

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

    I think there's also two ways to use the term. If used in political context, it's immediately more serious and it gets the connotation of Nazi Germany. But if used in a completely different surroundings, like books or Christmas, it's simply a term to describe extreme hard-core strictness and "my way, or highway" -attitude. So the context matters, and changes the connotation. (see? more coffee and I start using the big words! *laughs*)

     

    Big words? Where?

    Reading Quirks!

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

    I'm not sure if this is a quirk or not but i just cannot ever read the same book twice even if i have really enjoyed it.

     

    Have you ever tried rereading a book? For me the pleasures of rereading are greater than the surprises of a first read.

    Reading Quirks!

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Ben Mines

    8. No book must EVER be thrown out. If it is no longer needed, a new home must be found for it either by selling, swapping or donating it to charity.

     

    I agree, but go further: No book must ever be thrown out, swapped, or donated to charity.

     

    In his prologue to Edward Gibbon, Borges cites "Pliny's tolerant maxim": "There is no book so bad it does not contain something good."

     

    That is my experience.

     

    And though it's not strictly related to reading, inveterate book-hoarding is one of my quirks. I really, really hate lending.

    20 Books Everyone Should Read!

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

    Here is my humble submission. After 1, which tops the list, 2-20 are in no particular order:

     

    1. Ulysses, Joyce

    2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce

    3. Moby Dick, Melville

    4. Metamorphosis, Kafka

    5. Collected Fictions, Borges

    6. Gulliver's Travels, Swift

    7. The Name of the Rose, Eco

    8. Don Quixote, Cervantes

    9. Pale Fire, Nabokov

    10. Nineteen-Eight-Four, Orwell

    11. Brave New World, Huxley

    12. Hamlet, Shakespeare

    13. The Man Without Qualities, Musil

    14. Heart of Darkness, Conrad

    15. The Captive Mind, Milosz

    16. The Complete Short Stories, Hemingway

    17. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais

    18. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner

    19. Wuthering Heights, Bronte

    20. Frankenstein, Shelley

    Reading Pace

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

     

    Given that something like Ulysses is implicitly carefully written, I said exactly what you did, if you had bothered to read it/pay attention. :D

     

    Oh the irony!

     

    To be honest, though, I wasn't trying to single you out as a careless reader. I just used your numbers out of laziness to make a point.

     

    Anyone who knocks off Ulysses in 3-4 days is missing something, so the whole question of reading pace depends on the book.

    Reading Pace

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

    The idea of a set reading pace presupposes all books are uniform, but there are many variables. The complexity of the plot, the difficulty of the prose, the reader's interest. A previous poster said it takes them 3-4 days to read 450-600 pages. That seems about right for a book like The Da Vinci Code; but if the book is Ulysses, she has surely missed the many rewards of a careful reading of that text.

     

    However, make allowances for the above, and I try to average 50 pages a day.

    Reading Plays

    in Poetry, Plays & Short Stories

    Posted

    And plays, of course, aren't written to be read. So it's entirely reasonable to not bother reading them.

     

    I'm not so sure about that. For example, there is some debate about whether Shakespeare wrote King Lear to be performed or read, due both to its unusual length, as well as the stage effects it required which were nearly impossible to produce in the theatres of his time.

     

    Regardless of Shakespeare's intentions, however, you should not dismiss reading any play because a play is written to be performed. Returning to King Lear, Bradley, the distinguished scholar of Shakespeare, called it Shakespeare's "greatest achievement" but "not his best play" (italics mine), implying that, for him, the reading experience was superior to the performance. And Keats was so moved by reading it that he wrote, "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" (1818).

    Which Endings Have Really Disappointed you? *SPOILER ALERT!*

    in General Book Discussions

    Posted

    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows... So much crammed in and badly explained in that last novel :D I enjoyed it, the atmosphere and general plot but it left me with a disbelieving feeling: I found too many things dodgy (I know, it is a fantasy novel, but the previous parts were so well structured, explained, thought out...)!

     

    Major spoilers! Do not highlight if you havent read the book!

     

    the location of the last horcrux: come on this is a pice of Voldermort's soul we're talking about! He wasnt going to just dump it in a room full of junk even if it was in Hogwarts, the hallows which were just too much on top of the horcruxes, the way Harry got control of the elder wand... Plus I was disapointed that Ginny played neary no part after her character was built up during the whole series.

     

    I haven't read the book, but the location you describe reminds me of the ingenious hiding place of The Purloined Letter in a story by Poe. In the story, a house has been thoroughly ransacked for an incriminating letter. It turns out that the letter has been purposely crumpled and is sitting right under everyone's nose. The hiding place, "by din't of being excessively obvious," was overlooked by all but Detective Dupin.

     

    Dupin explains the subtle psychology of such hiding places with an analogy to a game of maps:

     

    There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon

    a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—

    the name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon

    the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the

    game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them

    the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such

    words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to

    the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards

    of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively

    obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous

    with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to

    pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively

    and too palpably self-evident.

     

    —The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe (1801-1849)

     

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