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Post by Captain Hygiene on Oct 13, 2009 22:38:11 GMT -5
I knew my hinder would come in useful someday.
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Post by callipygias on Oct 15, 2009 15:32:20 GMT -5
#7 Absalom, Absalom! (1936) William Faulkner Most of this book is conversation between Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate, Shreve, as they piece together the rise and fall of the greatest character in American literature (says I), Thomas Sutpen. Quentin has several sources of information, including firsthand (Miss Rosa Coldfield, Sutpen's sister-in-law and fiancee), secondhand (Quentin's father, who learned about Sutpen from Quentin's grandfather, General Compson, who some say was Sutpen's only friend), and plenty of pure conjecture. Absalom is extremely difficult to follow at times, but when you get lost Faulkner's dark, beautiful prose is enough to sustain you till you either find your way or he changes scenes (or at least finally uses a proper name instead of pronoun!). It's as rewarding as anything I've read. Sutpen has boundless ambition, the innocence of a savage, and through sheer willpower wants to father a dynasty. He is like a mass of blind, simple will with a furious need to achieve. To realize his plans he has a basic equation (money, house, plantation, slaves, wife), unending energy, unwavering confidence in himself and his plan, and, most importantly, a complete inability to doubt, or for that matter to even understand himself. (If he were a baseball player he'd have been Pete Rose.) General Compson says of Sutpen, "He believed that all that was necessary was courage and shrewdness and the one he knew he had and the other he believed he could learn if it were to be taught." Everything in the book orbits the event to which the title makes reference. Betrayal of the son, murder, incest--all present. This fascinates the Northerner, Shreve. It was a perfect detail to have Quentin narrate most of Absalom with Shreve. Quentin, the many-generationed Southerner from The Sound and the Fury whose own tragic history... and future, we already know, and Shreve, who speaks for the rest of us--especially today--with his sarcastic wit and relatively valueless conception of history. Faulkner says of Shreve's interest, "This was not flippancy.... It too was just that protective coloring of levity behind which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself," in one of his rare surfacings as narrator. William Faulkner
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 15, 2009 20:51:49 GMT -5
#7 Absalom, Absalom! (1936) William Faulkner The best thing I ever wrote as an undergraduate was an analysis of the last conversation between Quentin and Shreve. There's an entire story just in the way Faulkner describes the breaths passing between them. Love that book.
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Post by callipygias on Oct 17, 2009 2:37:35 GMT -5
That is a thing I wouldn't mind reading I like it very much.
I love that last conversation -- Shreve's defenses come down and Quentin is so very brooding and dark and (inwardly) reflective. It has a good example of Shreve's importance to the modern (especially non-Southern) reader when he says, "Wait. Listen. I'm not trying to be funny.... Because it's something my people haven't got.... We don't live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves and bullets in the dining room table and such."
(Wow, that is a lot of breathing. "Snow-breathed New England," "...breathless (rather, furnace-breathed) Mississippi...night," "...darkness seemed to breathe," "...profound suspiration of the parched earth," "Now Quentin began to breathe hard again," "...there was breathing left," "They breathed in the darkness." That's just from the first two pages of the final chapter.)
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Post by callipygias on Oct 18, 2009 18:54:27 GMT -5
#6 Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut Candide Billy Pilgrim is an optimist optometrist, a time traveler, and a soldier without a gun.
... and an alien abductee "Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops."I don't know if Vonnegut's way of putting things was natural or if he worked endlessly to perfect each line, and I guess I don't care, I'm just glad he did it and kept doing it. His description of two scouts trapped behind enemy lines with the pathetic, unsoldierly Billy Pilgrim: "They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times--living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords." It would be hard to argue that Slaughterhouse is not an anti-war novel, but it surprised me the first time I heard it called that. Like the opening chapter says, you might as well be anti-glacier. It's what the book... it seems to me it's what almost all his books are about. War, evil, whatever, is inescapable. Even Slaughterhouse Five itself is part of that: it's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, and, like it or not, it's about war, and the horrors of war move us: and we love to be moved. And horrified. Kurt Vonnegut
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Post by jkazoolien on Oct 18, 2009 21:18:05 GMT -5
^I've always been more partial to Breakfast of Champions, but this book is great, too.
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Post by callipygias on Oct 20, 2009 11:13:54 GMT -5
Speaking of Vonnegut, there's a new collection of 14 short stories available as of today. Sounds like they were written a long time ago, back when Vonnegut was "starting to find his comic voice."
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Post by solgroupie on Oct 21, 2009 15:39:34 GMT -5
#5 The Third Policeman (1967) Flann O'Brien i am hijacking callie’s countdown for big number five, a bizarre story that was written in 1940, a year after at swim- two birds was published by flann o’brien, a pseudonym for irish author brian o’nolan. it was submitted to two different publishers, one, i am assuming was in ireland, and the other in america. both were rejected, and to avoid any further rejection and embarrassment over the matter, o’brien told everyone that the manuscript was lost, when it in fact, was not. it was published shortly after his death and the story has become a world of its own for generations. reading the third policeman was an experience for me - i often felt kind of swimmy and unreal when I would put the book down until the next time I could invest the time to read more - like i had been in some sort of dream that involves theories that explains how the earth is not round, but sausage shaped. how the existence of night is explained by passing black clouds. that the origin of names come from a prehistoric decoding system of grunts, and the most famous one - the “atomic theory,” which simply means constant agitation between atoms can, in time, fuse together. it’s related to bicycles in example, but then again, most everything is related to bicycles at one point in the story. it's true you will never look at them the same way after reading the third policeman. some of these theories come from the narrator’s obsession with a sort of mad scientist character, de selby - a sort of anti-einstein. throughout the book are footnotes of his theories and strange experiments that are taken from a book the narrator stole from school. the background of the narrator (who is never named) - though it is explained, still leaves the reader with a feeling of unease. you get the feeling the narrator is cut off from reality and society long before his long, most unusual journey begins. it all begins with a botched murder of an old man named mathers for his money so the narrator can publish an index on his studies of de selby, but a crooked partner complicates matters. after one of the most bizarre conversations I’ve ever read between the narrator and old man mathers, who may or may not be really dead, the narrator sets off to find a police barracks about his missing ill-gotten gain. the theories i mentioned above that do not come from de selby come from these strange and mysterious policemen, who combine magic and science in a way that is entirely possible. honestly, the things o’brien writes in this book, in their own strange way, seem totally plausible. though very funny in parts, the third policeman has this fine thread of dread that builds throughout the story - you know something big and something awful is going to happen - a truth that will be revealed - a theory that cannot be explained away. still, it’s damned funny. And the ending is worth the head scratching and weird feeling that someone slipped you a mickey when you know that isn’t possible. most importantly, follow the advice calli gave me before reading - do NOT read the forward by denis donoghue, unless you want the ending blown for you. i know for a fact that if i had known the ending, the third policeman would have been a totally different experience for me. a british sculpture titled "it's about a bicycle" that will only set you back $6,000. i stole this pic from calli, who posted it in the art appreciation gallery on the mst3k social network site. brian o'nolan/flann o'brien
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 22, 2009 20:02:56 GMT -5
#5 The Third Policeman (1967) Flann O'Brien Awesome book. _At Swim Two Birds_ is a good read, but it requires a good working knowledge of Irish history and mythology to really get a lot of what's going on. This book showed up in LOST, you know...
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Post by callipygias on Oct 22, 2009 20:15:09 GMT -5
I saw that on Wikipedia. It said sales skyrocketed. Was it part of the actual story somehow, or did a good-looking character just say he liked it?
I guess it's nothing but a good thing, but it still seems weird -- like seeing Faulkner on Oprah's Book List.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 22, 2009 20:39:56 GMT -5
I saw that on Wikipedia. It said sales skyrocketed. Was it part of the actual story somehow, or did a good-looking character just say he liked it? I guess it's nothing but a good thing, but it still seems weird -- like seeing Faulkner on Oprah's Book List. Sawyer's just reading it one point...or maybe it was just lying around. I can't remember. But its appearance even made the NYT, as I recall, back when people were wondering if LOST was the new literary TV show. And the fanboys thought it might be a clue about what was going on with the island, because of what happens at the end of the book...which I won't reveal!
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Post by solgroupie on Oct 22, 2009 21:32:32 GMT -5
is it about a bicycle?
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Oct 22, 2009 22:20:06 GMT -5
Heh. I started that book one night when I had a bad cold and was high on cold medicine. I thought it was the medicine that made the book seem so strange until I picked it up the next day.
Did you read the Dalkey Archives? Funny, but lacked the same atmosphere.
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Post by siamesesin on Oct 23, 2009 12:48:43 GMT -5
And the fanboys thought it might be a clue about what was going on with the island, because of what happens at the end of the book...which I won't reveal! Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. I like the list so far. Do go on.
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Post by callipygias on Oct 24, 2009 2:50:03 GMT -5
Honorable Mention My Antonia (1918) Willa Cather This didn't quite make my top 25, but I think I've read it more times than any book that did, strangely. My Antonia is a beautiful, simple, quietly written story of (mostly) immigrant homesteaders in Nebraska as told by Jim Burden, who is sent there to live with his grandparents after his parents die. Jim and Antonia's complex relationship is at the book's center, but Antonia is so remarkable and magnetic a person she'd probably figure as prominently in the autobiography of any character that knew her. I've read that Cather's desire was to write a book displaying a character like a flower at the center of an empty table. I can't imagine how many thousands upon thousands of writers have tried the same thing without understanding, or at least without being able to restrain themselves to the understatement necessary to accomplishing it. In Stephen Vaughn's introduction he aptly (and a little dramatically) says, "To read My Antonia is to slip through the garden gate of a fairy tale and return to the lost world of childhood." It sounds corny but it's right on, and a big part of why is Cather's obvious love for the prairie, well illustrated in this famous quote, "On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun." All this and I didn't even mention Lena Lingard, one of my favorite characters ever. Cather really seems to love the beauty of a simple, almost savage mind. Man I fell for Lena. Willa Cather
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