What are you reading?

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by chunksmediocrites

Fabius was mentioned quite a bit- his early strategy to to starve Hannibal out by clearing the surrounding countryside of forage and then wipe out Hannibal's foragers probably would have routed Hannibal's hungry army of 30k through attrition within a few years, but the politically unpopular tactic meant hotter and more fearful heads prevailed, at least in the beginning of Hannibal's 15-year invasion.

Yup. They considered his strategy cowardly and nobody but him had the nads to shoulder that opprobrium even when they knew, as Aemilius did, that it would probably work.

The author notes the reliance in the end on the military genius of Scipio Africanus to stop Hannibal- with an army dependent and loyal to their Roman military commander, rather than Rome- would set the model that would lead to Rome's decline.

The Republic's decline. I don't think you can say Rome's decline given the duration and military/administrative successes of the Imperial era.

Anything on Quintus Fabius Maximus you would recommend?

I have yet to encounter a contemporary book written about him. On my kick I had to content myself with reading Plutarch's Life of Fabius Maximus Cuncator.

[Ymir's blood]

The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais

[Nullifidian]

I've been inspired to read this since we're dealing with Christopher Marlowe in my British literature class next week (including some of his poetry, but primarily The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus). I picked it up years ago for free when my college library was discarding it.

Incidentally, I've downloaded the LibriVox audiobook of Doctor Faustus and I'm going to listen to it tonight when I go to bed.

I also downloaded Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, beautifully read by Elizabeth Klett, one of my all-time favorite LibriVox readers, and listened to it this afternoon while I was out browsing the Timken Museum in Balboa Park.

[Nullifidian]

Thanks to the Republican sweep in the midterm elections, I've now realized that all the wisdom in the world can be coalesced into right-wing talking points. Accordingly, I've got my hands on 10 Books that Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others that Didn't Help), published by that purveyor of fine intellectual literature, Regnery Press.

I'm rather curious to see how Descartes' Discourse on Method, Hobbes' Leviathan, Mill's Utilitarianism, Machiavelli's The Prince, and Darwin's The Descent of Man contributed to the downfall of the Western World.

Ironically, the author Benjamin Wiker, when he's not employed by the Discovery Institute (natch), teaches at St. Thomas Aquinas College, which is supposed to be a Great Books university. One can only infer that their commitment is somewhat lacking when one of their professors pens a screed attacking several classics of Western philosophy.

Anyway, I shall see in time whether it's as bad as I think it's going to be, and then I'll report back. Nullifidian out.

[Gonzo]

Null you never cease to amaze me, you know. How was the Edith Warton or that Anthony Burgess book?

Today I've happily begun Fahrenheit 451

[Doctor X]

You might find This article interesting.

--J.D.

[Deadlokd]

I was sort of reading Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale and becoming mildly interested (the subject interests me, the book didn't grab me unfortunately) when I came across Evolution by Stephen Baxter at my local Salvo's Store for $2. I started that and it is good. It is the story of primate evolution from the time of dinosaurs (very early proto-primates through to modern man) as told through third person accounts of the animals that were there. I'm only a hundred pages or so in but already I've learnt some very interesting things that I did not know yesterday.

ETA: Actually, according to Wiki it goes forward 500 million years. Those leaps forward really seem to appeal to Baxter.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Doctor X

You might find This article interesting.

--J.D.

You know, I usually find cracked.com's lists more irritating than enlightening, but I'm very glad that they mentioned Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, because it's been a source of annoyance for me for many years that a socialist classic has been read as an expose of unsanitary conditions in meat-packing.

But I will say that my American Labor History class did read The Jungle correctly.

As an aside, Upton Sinclair also ran for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934, and the powers-that-be were so afraid of his candidacy that they flooded movie theatres with fake 'newsreels' featuring tramps they claimed were flooding into California to vote for Upton Sinclair (an early variant of "OMG TEH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTZ R VOTING!!!!!111!!!ONE!1") and scripted man-on-the-street interviews where interviewees would claim that they were voting for Sinclair because he'd establish Soviet-style communism in California. The propaganda did its job and the Republican Frank Merriam was elected over Sinclair by an 11-point margin (49%-38%), with the Progressive Party candidate, Raymond L. Haight, getting 13%.

It goes to show you that the Republicans perfected fake news decades before Fox.

Benjamin Wiker, whose book I've referenced above, should read the bit about Machiavelli, because his take on the book is "Ew, tyrrany!". Cracked.com misses an important element itself: it's not just political satire, but a direct challenge to the prevailing wisdom of the day. When monarchs believed that their place at the top of the political hierarchy was ordained by God, Machiavelli comes along and says, "No, THIS is how power works."

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Gonzo

Null you never cease to amaze me, you know. How was the Edith Warton or that Anthony Burgess book?

Well, thanks.

The Edith Wharton book was wonderful. Like many late 19th/early 20th century ghost and horror stories, it's not scary to many modern readers, but if you're willing to go along with the book you will find it deeply unsettling (which, paradoxically, I find more scary than something like Salem's Lot). I think the most unsettling story in the collection was "The Eyes", but you may have your own preference.

I haven't quite finished with the Burgess book, but I'm over 4/5s of the way there, so I can say that it's brilliant. As I mentioned above, it's a fictionalization of Marlowe's life and speculation about why he was murdered (hence the title). Marlowe's life offers a rich field for a novelist because he was so transgressive of his society's norms at the time, being a spy, an atheist, and a homosexual. You will have to get used to Burgess' pseudo-Elizabethan language, but it's easier than you might think.

If you think this novel might appeal to you, then you also might like his collection of short stories, The Devil's Mode Stories. Most of the stories have a literary, cultural, or historical counterpart to them. In the title story, "1889 and the Devil's Mode", Debussy visits Christina and Dante Rossetti (the poets) in London, meets with Robert Browning (who is hilariously portrayed as dribbling cake crumbs into his beard), and meets Stéphane Mallarmé, the famous French symbolist poet, which inspires Debussy to compose his "Prelude to the Afternoon of Faun". He also writes a Sherlock Holmes story with the Catalan violinist Pablo Sarasate in a major role, has Shakespeare and Cervantes meeting each other, writes a takeoff on the Flying Dutchman legend for the era of the airplane, riffs on the Faust legend, and does a literary write-up of the plot of Richard Strauss' comic opera Der Rosenkavalier.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Adam

So, I read like the first 100 pages of this, found it slow and boring, and then put it down in favor of something more exciting. I just picked it up again, starting from the beginning, and for some reason I'm liking it a lot more this time. I think maybe I had a hard time getting used to the pace of the book the first time around and, having already acclimated myself to it, was able to get past it and into the actual story on attempt number two. Seriously, the book begins with two unrelated prologues, then skips through a short opening scene on its way to a series of non-chronologically arranged flashbacks, and shortly thereafter takes a detour into a novel within a novel about William Shakespeare as a boy.

Finished this, finally. I liked it well enough that I plan to pick up the next one. There's a lot of cutesy self-referential stuff going on where the novel within a novel itself contains within it a book, which has a prologue, which of course is the first prologue to the outermost novel, and later that book within a book turns out to be an actual book within the reality of the outermost book. Or, in other words, Crowley wrote a book in which a character, Kraft, wrote a book about Doctor Dee possessing a copy of his, Kraft's book, and the book in Doctor Dee's possession is, in fact, Crowley's book, which is, therefore, about itself twice over.

The self-referential blurring of lines between reader and author and character is cute, but it's not handled as deftly as it is ,in say, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller....

On to Borges' Labyrinths.

[livius drusus]

CALVINO CREW REPRESENT

[Sonoma Bear]

Just starting to read the short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor - while still in the midst of A Mountain of Crumbs (a decidedly slow read)...

[Kashmir]

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

Pirate Sun, by Karl Schroeder

[Ensign Steve]

I finished reading Maus for school.

Now I wanna read Maus II but I don't have time because now I have to read Middle Passage.

[Watser?]

Maus is probably the best comic ever.

[Ensign Steve]

Speaking of metafiction, am I right?

Edit: or possibly meta non-fiction?

[Gonzo]

Decided to just burn a hole through F. 451 for the rebel cred.

Now biding my time on Lolita

[Doctor X]

For the what? cred?

--J.D.

P.S. Reading Let the Right One In

[SharonDee]

I just finished reading Drood by Dan Simmons, which is a fictitious account of the end of Charles Dickens's life as [not] written by contemporary author and friend, Wilkie Collins. You'd think I had learned my lesson at my aborted attempt to read his The Crook Factory but my coworker keeps saying what a great writer the guy is. So I slogged through to the bitter end but it was as annoying a read as Crook, albeit slightly more interesting.

Anyway, I'm giving Simmons (and coworker) another chance with his Hyperion series. Hopefully complete fiction without non-fiction shoved in will be more interesting.

[mulebear]

His writing style changes with every genre he tackles.

I enjoyed the Hyperion Saga, though the first 200 pages of the first book made me want to chuck it in trash. I'm glad I stuck to it as the rest of the saga is well done.

I also enjoyed The Terror. It was a very different book for him, and even though it was a slow read, I was completely captivated. The last chapter could have been left off, but I would still recommend it.

Darwin's Blade was enjoyable fluff. It was a silly suspense thriller filled with tongue-in-cheek humor. Once again his writing style is different.

[Ymir's blood]

I read a novel by Wilkie Collins (the real one) once. It illustrated a great difficulty in reading Victorian fiction, values dissonance. Not because they accepted behavior that we in more enlightened times consider abominable, but the opposite. Behavior they consider as horribly scandalous seems so... silly. The novel was The Haunted Hotel and the issue at hand was a foreign noblewoman who does pretty much nothing wrong. She is the sister of the villain of the piece but the characters freely absolve her of his crimes as she was unaware of them. (IIRC) However, at some point there were rumors that her brother wasn't actually related but *gasp* her lover instead! At no point is incest brought up - the rumor was that they weren't related and since they were traveling together then she must be a shameless hussy. One pure-as-the-driven-snow female character almost faints from being in the same room as this woman. Note that at no point is she ever shown as doing anything wrong, but is constantly described the characters as being tainted. Some felt pity more than revulsion for her reputed lack of purity.

I almost wondered if it were subtle parody, but if so then it was much too subtle for me. It made an otherwise decent mystery almost impossible to finish.

[SharonDee]

I downloaded Collins's The Woman in White from the Gutenberg Project but haven't read it yet. I mostly got it because the title kept coming up in the Simmons book. I wonder if I'll have the same problem with it as you did with your Collins book, Yb.

[Ensign Steve]

I'm going to read this one over the Thanksgiving break, and then I'm done reading for school forever.



Finally I can get back to my junk food fiction.

[Ensign Steve]

I'm going to read this one over the Thanksgiving break, and then I'm done reading for school forever.



Then finally I can get back to my junk food fiction.

[JoeP]

Unless you get into one of those time-loop things that causes you to keep posting that you're reading it ...