ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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I've had that book sitting on my shelf for ages. Did you get a feeling that it's that kind of book that would lose something in translation?

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I suppose that would depend what it's translated into and how good the translator is. I don't think there's too much that would make it incredibly tricky, provided that it's only the English parts that are translated. The version that I read already had bits in English, French, and the Algonquin language (that last one was mostly just (but not always) names, with phoenetic guides next to them). If you're capable of reading English (which you obviously are) and can handle some Quebecois-style French, I'd try to find a copy in the original language. That said, I'd actually be really curious to hear how it stands up in your native language. Hopefully it would come across as well as it did for me.

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I fiiiinally finished Masters of Doom. I had been reading it over the course of many weeks. All in all, it was a very fun read. I kept having to remind myself that this took place not even 20 years ago and that I was actually alive while most of this went down. Really weird to read history of something and then thinking "Oh yea, I remember that". :grin:

Now I need to decide what to read next! I got lined up American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, and the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

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. . .American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. . .

Oh, American Gods, certainly.

That said, let me know what you think of Assassin's Apprentice. I read Shaman's Crossing, also by Hobb and found it. . .slow to start, and perhaps too heavy on the side of a thousand words when twenty will do (a la Jordan, in many ways) but I don't remember it well enough that I've been considering going back and reading it.

(Reading the summary of Assassin's Apprentice makes me cringe pretty hard. "Prince Chivalry" and "King Shrewd". :erm:)

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Assassin's Apprentice, and really the whole Farseer trilogy and the sequel Tawny Man trilogy, is really worth reading. The Soldier's Son trilogy you're talking about, Orvidos, really is not nearly as good. Nothing she's done is as good, in my opinion.

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I've never been able to read poetry. My mind just can't process it. I start expecting it to make sense, because I see words with meanings in sentences on paper, and then I lose grip on the rhythm and cadre. So, I find it tiresome.

I understand your problem but for me it's integral to the enjoyment of poetry: putting together the pieces of music that makes a poem enjoyable in your head to create your own meaning (naturally, the meaning you create are inferred by the circumstances of the poem but also your personal perspective).

Take, for example, Sylvia Plath's Daddy, one of my favourite poems:

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

Now several things makes this poem supreme: (I) Mere aesthetics like for example the childlike rhyme and the beautiful & haunting images (II) With some familiarity of Sylvia Plath's history (Electra complex; "daddy issues" & latent feelings of anger at her husband Ted Hughes) and the confessional nature of her work this poem becomes emotionally devastating.

Also, when I first read the poem I was paralyzed by a fascination of the atrocities of WW2 (triggered by W. G. Sebald and Bruno Schulz) and it loomed like a dark monolith on my horizon. Thus the Nazi references became even more affecting to me. I share this to show how the individual context, i.e. where you're at, affects your reading of poetry.

I sincerely hope that this changes your mind and perhaps give poetry another shot. I realize that I've been rambling, and that I haven't had my morning coffee yet so this might be a bit incoherent so don't hesitate to interrogate me.

It entirely depends. I've never made it through a book of poetry on my own, as much as I respect it. On the other hand, worked into a larger narrative, I love it. An example from the last year is when I read Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers" which alternates chapters between prose, letters, and occasional poetry that illustrates the fragile mental state of the main character. Those are incredibly powerful, full of interesting language and wordplay, and impressed me greatly. So for me, poetry is a fantastic narrative device but not something I go out of my way to read on its own.

Given that you are impressed with language and wordplay you should perhaps check out T. S. Eliot if you haven't already, he can come across as a bit high-brow (and arguably he is) but still writes some powerful words. The Hollow Men and The Waste Land are both great!

More questions: What genre or writers are most inspiring to you? Are there certain conditions that writing ("books" too weird a word to use) have to fulfill before you become interested? How do you decide what to read?

Edited by False Dmytro

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On another note, what is the consensus on poetry around here?

I'm a big fan of W.B. Yeats.

Having said that, I don't get the same buzz from reading poetry now as I used to ten years ago. It might be over-familiarity - discovering Yeats for the first time was a magical experience for me, but now there is very little of his writing that I haven't already read. Plus I just find it harder to concentrate on poetry at the moment; perhaps even on reading in general (and I have always preferred shorter verse). Hopefully that will change again in the future.

I also own books of Seamus Heaney and William Blake. Both are OK in small doses, but I've yet to find anyone who touches me like Yeats.

I have heard it said that your early twenties is the best time to discover poetry. Your brain is pretty much fully developed and you have some life experience, but you still have enough vibrancy and innocence to be carried away with it.

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I've never ever enjoyed a poem on any meaningful level. If it's funny or witty I might enjoy it, but I've never read a poem that has evoked any sort of meaningful emotional response. I wonder if this is because of some defect or undeveloped aspect of my personality – highly likely – or if it's because I've never actually set out to read poetry. I should probably get a book of poems or whatever.

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I just finished American Gods, and I enjoyed it very much. Very well written, and an interesting story which manages to sustain the whole way through.

Re. the TV series, it's certainly intriguing that they're going for 6x10. I suppose, as someone else said,

they could use the novel for the first series then spin off from there, as the set-up has pretty much not changed except for a few casualties and the war being called off. Or perhaps they could take out the con aspect and just have there be a war. Or, most riskily, have it be a war all the way through until the massive twist reveal at the end of six seasons. But there's pretty much no way they could do that these days without anyone on the internet knowing the twist from the very start - Fight Club wouldn't have surprised anyone if it had been adapted today as there are too many people who would have checked out the Wikipedia entry and shouted out spoilers everywhere they could.

The boasts about effects are a bit off-putting, though.

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I am similarly poetry stricken. I wish I could enjoy it, but I fail miserably every time I try. That Plath poem left me cold, for example. It just seemed meaningless, however evocative. In short, I think I was born without poetry appreciating equipment :(

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I wonder if poetry is something you really have to learn to understand before you can appreciate it, not unlike classical music or arthouse films or opera? How much of it is (a lack of) upbringing or understanding?

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I just finished the Starfishers trilogy by Glenn Cook. Interesting departure from his usual grim fantasy. Actually pretty good sci-fi, in fact.

As for poetry. . .to put it succinctly, keep that shit away from me. I can usually decipher poetry if the need arises, and I can typically understand what it's getting at, but I have no use for the stuff. It's typically pointless, annoyingly rhythmed (not a word, I know) and generally boring. Not for me.

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I wonder if poetry is something you really have to learn to understand before you can appreciate it, not unlike classical music or arthouse films or opera? How much of it is (a lack of) upbringing or understanding?

It's partly that, and partly general state of mind. I do think that people become receptive to poetry during different, sometimes transient, periods of their lives, dependant on all sorts of factors (my grandfather for instance, an ex biology professor, has suddenly become engrossed in it now that he's had to be less physically active following a heart attack).

It might also be a matter of finding the right poet for you; like all art the range of styles and modes is immense. Just because you dislike all the poetry you have read so far does not mean that there isn't something out there that will really connect with you.

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As for poetry … It's typically pointless …

How is poetry more pointless than any other artform, how do you measure "point" in art? While I don't have any problem with you personally not liking poetry, this remains an odious and uninformed statement.

It's partly that, and partly general state of mind. I do think that people become receptive to poetry during different, sometimes transient, periods of their lives, dependant on all sorts of factors (my grandfather for instance, an ex biology professor, has suddenly become engrossed in it now that he's had to be less physically active following a heart attack).

I'm sorry for your grandfather, I hope he is well. I'm curious to what kind of poetry he reads? Tell him to check out Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of our beloved (well…) Charles Darwin. He wrote poetry about evolution and earth with a ®evolutionary bent. I came to think of him when you mentioned that your grandfather used to be a teacher of biology.

Edited by False Dmytro

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How is poetry more pointless than any other artform, how do you measure "point" in art? While I don't have any problem with you personally not liking poetry, this remains an odious and uninformed statement.

Allow me to rephrase that. Most of what poetry discusses is pointless. As much as one of my favorite poems is interesting (Frost's Fire and Ice), there is little that it is useful for.

Then again, I suppose that's a bit of what poetry is. Aimless muse, really. And perhaps that's why I don't like it.

Yet again another discussion I will back out of.

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Allow me to rephrase that. Most of what poetry discusses is pointless. As much as one of my favorite poems is interesting (Frost's Fire and Ice), there is little that it is useful for.

Then again, I suppose that's a bit of what poetry is. Aimless muse, really. And perhaps that's why I don't like it.

Yet again another discussion I will back out of.

Frost's Fire and Ice is great, but I fail to see how this is more meaningless than philosophy or in this case, any other existential and (heh) eschatological art? It's the same thought put in different words. For example Eliot's The Hollow Men; Lawrence's Women in Love and certain fin-de-siècle thinkers all examines the effects of modernity on life but all in different words.

I disagree with you and I think you are wrong, but respect your wish not argue this further. Just think about this in the future if you ever find reading any poetry.

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If I am jaded it is only because I am tired of this shit. - Probably Marc Antony.

I'm pretty terrible at explaining what I mean, so I'll just sit in the corner and watch this discussion. Suffice to say, poetry does nothing for me.

On the other end of the spectrum (the thread title, for instance), the first book for The Elder Scrolls, The Infernal City, is incredibly terrible.

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Aww shucks. I kind of expected that though. Whenever I envisioned this book, based on the blurb, it sounded completely unlike Elder Scrolls. Which is weird because those games are filled with crazy stories you can read in books that are very fun oftentimes.

There's also a lot of bad poetry in it! It's good!

I'm reading currently, among other things, The Invention of Japan by Dutch professor Ian Burema. It's blowing my mind. It's about the century where Japan goes from feudal society to modern democracy. Most of what I knew of this was heavily tainted by NHK glorious heroes of the past with true valour and grit-series and manga. To read a more unbiased and (relatively) objective view of this period is terrific and terrifying. Japan hasn't felt this alien to me in years.

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I'd love to be able to appreciate poetry. I understand that fault lies completely with me. Maybe I've just never found the "right" poet.

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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Allow me to rephrase that. Most of what poetry discusses is pointless.

I guess that is true in a sense that all of arts and, in fact, life is ultimately pointless, which actually makes your statement completely pointless. Otherwise, I don't see your point.

Anyway, I don't normally read poetry, but can appreciate a good poem when I come across one - usually handpicked by a novelist or a director.

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I'd love to be able to appreciate poetry. I understand that fault lies completely with me. Maybe I've just never found the "right" poet for me.

Shakespeare for me - but I was eight! My granddad used to sit with me and have me understand the meanings completely. It was really great of him to do so.

This little poem - written by one Percy Shelley - impressed me a few months ago. It sets a tone in very few words, and they roll off the tongue:

A widow bird sate mourning for her Love

Upon a wintry bough;

The frozen wind crept on above,

The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare,

No flower upon the ground,

And little motion in the air

Except the mill-wheel's sound.

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See Kroms, that's my issue with poetry. "The forest was still and quiet." Welcome to that poem. Arghhhhhh.

I can now confirm two things.

1. The Infernal City is a terrible, terrible book, and why it's licensed as an Elder Scrolls title is only apparently when obvious TES things show up for five seconds. The lead character might as well be Elfy McElf the Elf and it would make no discernable difference.

2. I don't know why I read all of it.

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I had to learn that I was under no obligation to start what I finished out of some ill-conceived sense of loyalty. It's OK to put down something you don't like midway.

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I had to learn that I was under no obligation to start what I finished out of some ill-conceived sense of loyalty. It's OK to put down something you don't like midway.

I consume books like most college kids consume ramin and pizza. It's really not an issue usually, because even a bad book is something worth reading for me as a fledgling writer. If only to learn why it's so terrible.

This is the first book I've ever felt that I should really just stop reading some ways in. If I simply don't like a writers style, I typically put a book on the shelf within three to five chapters, but I kept going with The Infernal City. I really don't know why.

C'est la vie.

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