BookJumper

You use words like 'oxymoronic' in everyday conversation. The BookJumper approves !

Shall be on a few buses today so hopefully I can progress with Alphabet of Thorn; the past week's been mayhem and no reading whatsoever has been achieved .

I'm in but no can do for starting so early - the copy I read at 14 was lent to me you see; I have tried reading other translations since and it all felt wrong, so in order to do this I'd need to get me a Garzanti edition of Les Mis; very earliest I could get one of those would be mid-to-end Feb, when my dad should be coming up to London and may bear gifts from the homeland .

Oh so tempted... you guys are bad for me.

Also, what Kreader said.

I think there's a lot of beauty in the human race, though a lot of it lies hidden, afraid of stigma and ridicule. Beautiful, for instance, is the human imagination - the very definition of which is the ability to envision worlds of possibility. Not to explore those worlds would constitute the rejection of something that makes life worth living, and the human race worth saving. ETA: <--- proud treehugger.

Les Miserabl

*yay* for you liking Byron so far - *is pleased*!

I'm personally not a fan of pidgeonholing literature into neat little boxes. There are substantial areas of overlap among Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror - and why shouldn't there be? It's all Speculative Fiction, after all. I've heard it said that Science Fiction is more sensible than Fantasy, for instance, because it has a link to reality - science - that Fantasy lacks; which is clearly nonsense. What makes Science Fiction interesting is the opportunity to explore human nature and behaviour in an unfamiliar setting; how is Fantasy any different? All good Speculative Fiction (for there is a lot of faff out there, as there is within any genre) does a lot for the human spirit: it feeds the imagination. Is there a greater gift? I don't think so.

May I ask what you thought of The Scarlet Pimpernel? It's been on my wishlist for a while. Hats off and a handshake to you for planning to re-read Les Mis - it's high time I did the same methinks, after all it's been a decade... goodness.

The quote is not from Alternative Shakespeares, but from my scathing review of the same - AS is the first in a series of three books presenting the toppermost theorists giving us their feminist/marxist/etc. take of Shakespeare; I am proud to say I didn't get past the introduction of volume 1 before tossing it in a corner. Definitely agree with the close reading vs. theory position you outline; if you want to find meaning in a text, look at the words it is made out of. And the context it came out of, obviously - though I don't subscribe to the view that a text is nothing more than the sum of its historical background, New Historicism seems to me the only critical movement which will speak some sense on occasion. Are you entangled in academia yourself?

... no . Admittedly, this wasn't a popular position with a few of my professors these past four years yet, I always stood my ground: two English degrees later, I'm still a stern un-believer in sweeping literary theories. IMHO, theory tends to make little sense as it often tries to map modern concepts onto old(er) texts - a case in point being all those tiresome Oedipal readings of Hamlet. Freud was inspired by Hamlet when developing his theory, therefore how can the latter form the basis for a text written four hundred years ago? The anachronism does my head in.* And I quote, if I may, from my own review for Alternative Shakespeares: ... since the advent of literary theory, notions of the author as a once living, feeling being seem to have become risible, which I find sad and rather unjust. It doesn't help that most theory I have encountered is so far fetched I've read science fiction more plausible, not to mention inscrutably written. If I can read Shakespeare more or less with no need for a dictionary why should I require one to decipher Shakespeare criticism? * it is worthwile to note that while Laurence Olivier's Hamlet was directed and acted under the impression that Freud got it right, Sir Larry eventually saw the error of both their ways and retracted the position that the myth of Oedipus was all there was to the Prince of Denmark.

While I understand where you're coming from as far as wanting to avoid books-by-numbers, I think that putting back titles in such an a priori way might entail a risk of missing out on actually good books which happen to contain vampires or haunted locations. No ?

I've read 12: Slaughterhouse 5 1984 The Iliad The Odissey The Master and Margarita The Metamorphosis The Divine Comedy Animal Farm Frankenstein Hamlet Treasure Island Fear and Trembling And big chunks of another 6: The Prince The Republic Leviathan Paradise Lost All Quiet on the Western Front The Bible how manly am I?!

Glad you're enjoying Wicked Muggle, it was easily my best book of 2008. Sorry you weren't that keen on Anansi Boys Cookie - what didn't you like about it? I loved it so much I re-read the first half hot on the heels of the end!

Oh, poets are still very much out there; the problem is as follows: Not much new poetry is published nowadays, because publishers are afraid it won't sell as much as fiction ---> what poetry does get published has a smallish run, and is therefore quite expensive ---> the buying public is put off by the price tag ---> which leads publishers to believe there's no market for poetry.

I had to read The Blind Assassin for my BA but ended up putting it down at around page 50; not my kind of thing at all.

I hope you enjoy The Book of Flying, Lit_Driven_Girl - it's a novel I tend to recommend a lot, quite simply because the disproportion between its worth and the knowledge of its existence is enormous. More people need exposing to it I feel, so I'm glad I've tickled your interest.

Stardust is a bit of a special case, though - Neil Gaiman wrote the script for the film, chopping and adding bits for the screen, so this is not like King's The Shining vs. Kubrick's The Shining; rather, it's two different facets of Gaiman's vision.

I don't know who my SS is, so unless they've been checking regularly on this here thread, I'd guess no.

Never got mine... .

Also, children themselves are the epitomy of creativity - you can't curb a child's imagination; he'll draw, paint, build, and if you don't let him, he'll do all of the above in his head. Children are natural storytellers, and therefore the natural enemies of such a state.

*yay* for Byron the poems I linked you are very typical, so if you liked those you should love the rest of his stuff. Do let us know what you think of your new acquisitions once you've absorbed them!

Ah but you see, I don't want my books battered no matter what I pay for them, that's why I browse a lot but buy little in second-hand shops. I got my refund yesterday and I knew it, they gave me it as another voucher so I had to spend it with them. I substituted a couple of the most fragile books in the original order with other titles, hopefully with that and the ice being mostly melted the next batch will arrive in better shape. @ Pablo, I'd probably faint if I ever laid eyes upon your collection. The only book on my shelf that's battered is a 1946 copy of C.E. Montague's A Writer's Notes on His Trade, but that's different - that's vintage .