ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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I remember someone on Mixnmojo years ago wrote that the exact same thing happened to them...

 

I'd still read it. Anthony Burgess called Flann O'Brien a treasure.

 

(I have it and should read it, too.)

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If anyone is still wondering what to do with their free audiobook download (http://www.audiblepodcast.com/wizard), I can heartily recommend Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Jeremy Irons' narration is quite incredible.

 

(Don't worry. The pompous voice at the beginning of sample is that of a fictional publisher and not of Humbert Humbert.)

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If anyone is still wondering what to do with their free audiobook download (http://www.audiblepodcast.com/wizard), I can heartily recommend Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Jeremy Irons' narration is quite incredible.

 

(Don't worry. The pompous voice at the beginning of sample is that of a fictional publisher and not of Humbert Humbert.)

 

Wait, does Jeremy Irons read the whole thing or does he just voice Humbert Humbert? Also, this is the first time I have ever been seriously interested in an audio book.

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Irons reads the whole thing. He changes his voice a bit for Lolita's lines etc., but the way the book is written you can imagine it simply as Humbert Humbert mimicking her voice as he recounts the story. Really well adapted in my opinion.

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Aleksandr Hemon has a new collection of short stories coming out this May, here's a link to NPR's review of the collection: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174670609/hemons-the-book-of-my-lives-finding-beauty-in-sarajevos-scars?ft=1&f=1032&sc=tw&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

 

Hemon is one of my favorite modern authors; he received a MacArthur Genius Grant to write his only novel called The Lazarus Project, which explores the impact the Bosnian War has had on those who remained in Bosnia during the war and on those who emigrated. Hemon himself left Bosnia before the war even started, so a lot of his fiction deals with his memories of growing up in Bosnia, and the guilt he feels over leaving his friends and family. Cannot recommend him enough, I think a lot of people on this forum would enjoy his work.

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Hemon is one of my most favorite modern authors

 

He also does the annual Best European Fiction, which translates stories from literary cultures that we never see here in the States. It's a fascinating treat if you ever get the chance to pick one up.

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The new cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four is pretty great.

 

NineteenEighty-Four-480x781.jpg

 

That is all.

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I just read The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones and it was fantastic.  The novel, like her earlier short story collection Girl Trouble, does a great job of immersing the reader into the minds of residents in a small town after a woman goes missing.  That description sounds very "crime-y," but the book isn't remotely crime fiction - it's primarily concerned with painting a picture of daily life in the rural South across a range of characters in different positions.  The novel's strength comes from its radical empathy - this book, like Girl Trouble, is exceptionally good at getting in character's heads in a non-superficial way and making the reader feel bad for everyone.  It is not perfect in achieving this, but it succeeds more often than not.

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Can we talk about book covers a bit more? I got my partner the B&N leather bound Jane Austen collection for our anniversary. It's a very beautiful cover with just the right amount of camp whimsy.

post-26511-0-05524500-1364410855_thumb.jpeg

The whole B&N leather bound classics collection seems really thoughtfully designed.

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Nice editions are pretty hard to find outside of public domain books in English. Translated works will also have nice editions, but they're usually based on older, lower-quality translations that have gone into the public domain as well.

 

I love Harper Perennial's cute Olive Editions, but they're rare and out of print at this point, I think. Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Editions generally stay in print, and are also gorgeous. And then there are publishers that put out good-looking books across the board, like McSweeney's (and in my opinion, NYRB Classics).

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Neil Gaiman always has beautiful special editions. I just can't justify spending over £100 on a book. His paperbacks look great as well, in the UK they all use the same metallic text on a black background.

I was reminded about how gorgeous the original Hobbit design was by the recent reprint. My mum's copy always seemed like a strange, timeless thing, especially with a child's limited sense of history. Also notable for including the literary equivalent of a cloth map.

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I still want this:

000943.jpg

 

The Hobbit is my favorite book, the perfect adventure story, you can see it's sort of structure and character journey in everything from Star Wars to Avatar to etc.The original leather bound editions go for over a thousand bucks apeice today.

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Just finished reading Foucault's Pendulum and am trying to sort out my thoughts on it. Eco is not only one of the most unique writers I've read, but one of the most outright intelligent. Reading his stuff is a lesson in intellectual inferiority, but the sheer amount of detail that he puts into his novels is mesmerizing. Usually it would be a point of criticism if a book takes 400 pages to introduce its plot, but I no issue with the slow pace this book takes and was really grateful that Eco took the time to build up the history of the two men at the center of this story; it only strengthened the emotional weight of the novel's ending.

 

(Hilariously, I made the decision to watch Room 237 while I was still reading this book. The contrast between the crazy Templar conspiracy in Foucault's Pendulum and the conspiracy theories about The Shining was amazing. At one point I was fully expecting the two would intersect and was really disappointed when they didn't.)

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You can now safely skip The Prague Cemetery should you have any intention of reading it since it is for a significant part a rehash of Pendulum. Not necessarily a knock against it (it's still great Eco conspiracy writing).

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I'm kind of tempted to just read through all of Eco's writing at this point. The Island of the Day Before is only $6 on Amazon...

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I'm reading Bleak House. I haven't read much Dickens--I vaguely remember reading Great Expectations many years ago, but that's it. So far Bleak House is pretty great, despite some mind-bending gender politics. Dickens satirizes pretty much everyone, and his descriptions of Chancery practice are hilarious and are sadly still somewhat relevant. I'm surprised to find that I still have an appetite for this kind of stuffy prose. Cool book.

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Everyone who finishes Bleak House wishes they hadn't, because it's so absorbing. I should read it. Plus a million other books.

--

 

I've been reading Pride and Prejudice for two (two!) months, because I've been busy, and it's insightful. It gets better if you contextualize it, but a lot of it, the stuff about relationships and how they fit into the scheme of things, is still relevant. It's also funny, which is a plus.

 

I finished it last night. Recommended.

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You can now safely skip The Prague Cemetery should you have any intention of reading it since it is for a significant part a rehash of Pendulum. Not necessarily a knock against it (it's still great Eco conspiracy writing).

 

I disagree! To me they were pretty different angles on the notion of conspiracy. To my reading, anyway, Foucault's Pendulum was sort of about

conjuring conspiracy into existence through some kind of willful shared delusion,

while The Prague Cemetery is a more sinister tale about

the seeds of conspiracy as it exists in the real world, to the extent that it even does, born out of much more mundane actions of the moment.

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Well, sure. Prague also has the interesting insanity angle (though they share that to an extent). 

 

Prague also traces quite nicely

some of the origins of the Zionist conspiracy bullcrap that was and still is such a toxic meme that gives strength to a lot of antisemitism. The underlying motivations being greed and twisted lust are a nice comment on humanity too.

 

It's definitely a book with value, it just left me vaguely disappointed because so much of the material was a retread for me having read Pendulum probably three or four times.

 

What I should have said was probably something more like "If you want to read more Eco conspiracy writing you should pick up Prague Cemetery next" next but the internet puts me in snark mode too much. Sorry about that.

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Avoiding the Prague Cemetery spoiler tags because I do eventually want to read that book, but even if it delves into similar conspiracy theory ideas that Foucault's Pendulum handled, I won't have a huge problem. Eco is inhumanely talented at introducing historical fact (or fiction) in his novels without it feeling like a giant wikipedia info dump and I got a perverse kind of pleasure when he'd go off on an absurd historical tangent in Foucault's Pendulum (there are even a few mentions of the Prague cemetery, which made me stupidly happy), so if Prague Cemetery repeats any of that I'll be happy to read it.

 

Besides, my reading of the ending of Foucault's Pendulum is that the book was trying to make a larger point about how we create narratives about ourselves and our history, and not just explicitly about the madness of conspiracy, so (hopefully) Prague Cemetery won't feel like a retread.

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