[diplo]

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

I bought it when I was 16 at a local bookstore because I didn't have anything to do. Every time I got to that 200 page milestone, I stopped and started reading something else, either because I had to or because I got into a phase. And every time I got back to it, I had forgotten everything, so I restarted.

[Adilegian]

[Felix]

just finished dance dance dance; in the past five months, i've read everything murakami's ever published apart from hear the wind sing, which i'll probably still get around to importing at some point.

i thought it was fabulous. in general, i think his best body of work extends from 1985-1996: hardboiled wonderland, norwegian wood, dance dance dance, south of the border, wind-up bird.

it's.. funny to look for the same symbolism in murakami's work as in most every "meaningful" videogame i've ever played (vice versa?). i'm going to embarrass myself if i try to make any decent judgments about the postmodern japanese narrative climate or what have you, but, y'know. everybody on SB should read these books.

[CubaLibre]

Catch-22 I felt... unravelled itself, near the end. It did not feel monotonous, as though it were repeating the same joke over and over, but rather manic, as it tried to inject some kind of justification, some kind of life, into a universe that had clearly been constructed to thwart all attempts at justification and enlivening. It just didn't feel honest, that ending. Well worth reading, though, if only because it grasps the Cosmic Hilarity better than any book I've ever read. (I feel like Killer7 comes close.)

Snow Crash will be finished on the Metro ride home tonight. I feel it is unravelling, too.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[zak]

[haze]

I finished reading Taiko. it was long.

I just read Perfume by Patrick Süskind. that story was rather amazing, I couldn't put it down. I haven't seen the movie adaptation, but I definitely want to now. like Stanley Kubrick, I don't think this is filmmable. unless you made it mostly animation, I suppose. I'M SURE THE MOVIE WILL DISAPPOINT ME.

starting on Murakami's After Dark now. it is short. I wonder if it will appeal to me.

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

Sirens of Titan now. All of these Murakami recommendations keep piling up, and I DO have a copy of Hard-Boiled Wonderland lying around.

I feel that Catch-22's ending was sort of unfortunate. I like the idea that the only way to leave a world that is structured around its insanity is to pretend that you're "sane," and persevere, as the Chaplain did. I tend to like unhappy endings, and virtually every piece of media and art that I've consumed that I truly enjoy has had an unhappy ending. This one sort of bothered me. The book had a lesson to teach, but by saying that there was a way out of it, it made it seem like there needn't be a lesson taught at all, you know? It really only falls apart in its last five pages, once the Chaplain comes in with news of Orr. Until that moment, though. Fuck.

[wpham]

I felt Catch-22 was great, but mildly unreadable in some strange way. I read half of it, then put it down and finished it a couple of months later.

All this Murakami talk and people keep on pimping his novels, but I personally think his short stories are his strongest works. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is an extremely strong collection, and then there's Underground, which is an amazing piece of nonfiction.
_________________

last.fm

[Broco]

Yeah Murakami is generally so disconnected anyway that he doesn't gain that much from length. Unless you consider the disconnection itself to be a strength, as many people do with Wild Sheep Chase. But I think that's just mental jujitsu to try to explain why we persist in thinking it's so awesome despite being full of extravagant plot holes: it must be, we tell ourselves, that the plot holes themselves are somehow awesome. But I'm inclined to think it's more a question of "despite" than "because", and the short stories bear me out.

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

Well, not every work of art is enjoyable. Happiness is an incredibly difficult movie to watch. Marie Antoinette is fucking boring, and so is Shenmue. Catch-22 is definitely more enjoyable than those are, but you get my point.

[Felix]

yuck, sirens of titan.

too much vonnegut is definitely not a good thing (note: read palm sunday to remind yourself that you really still like the guy, then read welcome to the monkey house or player piano as an antidote for everything he wrote after breakfast of champions), and if sirens of titan is anything but your first experience with him, it's a bit too fiercely archetypical to like.

as for murakami, i do think short stories are playing to his strengths much more than four-hundred-plus-page novels (heaven help me if i'm ever supposed to regard one of his plots as anything more than a vehicle for the characters), but those five in particular certainly impressed upon me more strongly than a short story would, and - now that i think about it - with the exception of wind-up bird, which i'm hesitant to qualify, i think i like each one better than the last.

[CubaLibre]

Snow Crash... sigh. It was a nice try, Stephenson.

I'm going to read some back issues of The New Yorker for a while. And my new Playboy.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[rf]

I thought The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon were Stephenson's best books. The Diamond Age is technically in the same universe as Snow Crash, though that doesn't really mean much since it has a much more sober tone. In these two books he gets a great stride going, where some real feeling emerges naturally from the comic style somehow. I'd like to be able to describe this better, but I've sat at the keyboard for about ten minutes now and can't think of how. I couldn't stand his new books, though--they feel like a mimicry of his style that's built on a misunderstanding of why it works, as if the earlier stuff was just him getting lucky.

Like a lot of people, I'd recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland before any other Murakami. I actually liked it because it wasn't all that disjointed. The plot had holes and ugly aspects (like the omniscient explanatory monologue, from a professor, no less), but it was comprehensible and worthwhile. The only other novel of his I liked was The Wind-Up B. C. becaue the length actually worked for it, somehow. It's very disjointed, but being immersed in such a large expanse of disjoined elements makes them stand out less. You may think "this isn't gonna get explained" (and you'd usually be right), but you won't often think "this is the last I'll hear about this" just because the book is so long.

I've got a copy of Nabokov's Speak, Memory that someone gave me. I wonder how I'll like it--it's his autobiography. I've read Lolita and Pale Fire. I loved the former but disliked the latter because the protagonist's delusions are more about brute physical facts than how people work or his own mental capabilities and social standing.
_________________

[wpham]

[rabite gets whacked!]

More Peter Carey for me! The Tax Inspector is about an entire family of used car dealers under investigation by the title character (a pregnant single Greek in Australia), but it largely revolves around the grandmother of the family, who frequently carries explosives and oscillates between senile digressions and fierce clarity, and her grandson Benny, a 16 year old at the edge of sanity but also in a powerful rapture gained through self-actualization cassettes. Both are written pretty flawlessly, with Benny in particular conveying a charisma characters in a similar state are seldom afforded.
_________________

[mechanori]

I was discussing Catch-22 with my boss (who is a librarian), and she said, "It's a good book to read in high school."

Just about everything in that book was a mistake. The mistakes were pleasant, sure. Funny, witty, meaningful, what have you. But it feels too accidental. I mean, Jesus, there's a sequel.

I will admit that it's cute and cheeky in a macabre sort of way, and that the Snowden chapter is well-written and well-handled.

[Broco]

I've read about half of Nabokov's work, and I can say that Lolita is distinctly a level above his other work. Pale Fire -- and most of his other books, which are very cold and tend to revolve around complicated patterns, wordplay and narrative trickery -- is about on the level of Joyce, and similarly overrated by a vocal minority. Ada is passionate and filled with a vast amount of elaborate trickery but ultimately shallow and implausible. His autobiography has some great lines in it but I find it too unrevealing (as I recall it has been called the least informative autobiography ever written) and self-indulgent.

In Lolita Nabokov is both passionate and at the height of his analytical powers. The book is full of humanity (despite/because it has Nabokov's most monstrous narrator) and it is completely immune to reductionist analysis. The only real flaw with it is the unfortunate loss of narrative momentum in the second half, which probably leads a lot of people to stop reading at that point though the best is yet to come. (Nabokov very cleverly attempts to quash this particular criticism in the afterword by implying people who bring it up are shallow pornography-seekers, but don't let him get away with it!).

[taidan]

I've got a week or so after graduation to lay back and relax before I get real serious with job hunting and all the responsibilities of life. What better place to visit than the library?

Instead of getting some light fiction I picked up Ernie Pyle's War to quench my thirst for WW2 knowledge.

[Felix]

[rf]

Broco:

Interesting stuff. I've wanted to like one of Nabokov's books other than Lolita for a fairly superficial reason: Lolita is so freaking popular. Its fame has caused so many people to read / "read" it, even people who don't care much about literature, that the statement "I like Lolita" doesn't suggest as much as it should about your taste/worldview to other people. People who love, say, Shakespeare probably also have this problem, since everyone "loves" Shakespeare, even people who barely know who he is.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

[rabite gets whacked!]

[Broco]

Since we're on the topic, the saddest novel I've ever read is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

[scratchmonkey]

Martin Amis - Night Train

[Broco]

[dark steve]

[Broco]

I actually like it on its own terms, but yeah it fails completely in terms of adapting Lolita the novel. Everything is either removed or weirdly distorted and there is almost no element of the novel that it carries over accurately. The overall experience is nowhere near as sublime.

[Renfrew]

I just bought Something Happened. I read the first chapter. It seems pretty interesting so far.

[rabite gets whacked!]

[parkbench]

[Vikram Ray]

[Broco]

Again, I didn't say "bad", I said "failed". And I'm only asking for an adaptation to at least carry over some of the spirit of the thing.

Okay, for instance. The Quilty murder is arguably the high point of the film, and I love it in itself. But it distorts the book in so many ways. The fact that it's a flashback shown at the beginning means that the long mystery as to whether Quilty actually exists or is a figment of Humbert's paranoid imagination is eliminated -- along with the whole "mystery-novel" element of Lolita, with all the subtle hints as to his existence ("Qu'il t'y", the Enchanted Hunters, etc). The misleading impression that Humbert will probably end up murdering either Charlotte or Lolita (since he admits to being a murderer on the first page, but doesn't specify who) is eliminated. Quilty is no longer drug-addled, and his murder is far less prolonged and bloody. The implication that Quilty is Humbert's doppelganger no longer exists. He appears as a cheerful fellow rather than a dark shadow dogging Humbert. I could list a similar litany of serious distortions on the subject of Lolita, Charlotte, and most of all Humbert himself, whose eloquent voice completely dominates the novel while he is reduced to silence in the film.

This isn't just fan whining about certain trivial details; everything that makes Lolita Lolita is lost. What is the point of making an adaptation of a masterpiece if you are not intending to preserve anything that makes it a masterpiece, but rather recreate another, merely good film from its bare outline? That is why I say the film is a failure.

[CubaLibre]

[Broco]

Well yeah, of course, the "loyal" 1997 Lolita film, weighed down by a droning narration etc, was by all accounts (I haven't bothered seeing it personally) an even greater failure than Kubrick's. Actually I don't think it is even possible to succeed at adapting Nabokov.

[zak]

A friend gave me two books today: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler.

I'm gonna start with Auster, because I read City of Glass (the comic book) and loved it, so I'm dieing to read the other two stories in the book.
Right now I'm reading Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but I'm only twenty pages in. I read The Book of the New Sun last year, and loved Wolfe's style, so this should prove interesting.

Also, what's up with people and books anyway? I know people who keep all their books on the shelves, and don't even lend them. One of my friends keeps buying books, even though she doesn't have enough time to read them all (she works for a publishing house anyway, so her job is reading, reading, reading).
I like to lend my books to people, and sometimes don't really care if I get them back, once I've read them. And I've read everything that's on my shelves; they're all books I bought for myself (I still have an entire attic full of books at my parents' place, which I mostly haven't even touched).

So the drill goes like this: my friends give me books (sometimes I buy books I really want to read), a pile of three or four forms at my bedside, I finish them and give them back. I read mostly at night, because during the day I'm too busy writing, playing guitar, going out, or playing games, so I'm kind of a slow reader.

How do you guys go about your reading? Do you buy more books than you can read, or just one a month? Do you like to take your time reading them, or do you just skip through the pages? Do you listen to music while you're reading (I can't unless it's instrumental)?

[rf]

Re: Lolita adaptation. I haven't seen it, but I'd personally say that if you want to create something new and good from the "outline" of a book you should just throw away any pretense at adaptation. There are already enough works around that are "inspired by" others or "revisit" them without claiming to be them, even within one medium. As CubaLibre pointed out, movies have different strengths, so there's nothing plagiaristic or useless about applying those strengths to Lolita-like themes. You just shouldn't try to convince people that it's some kind of accurate version of Nabokov's work, if it isn't.

I guess, with the necessary differences between films and books, I'd be advocating against all literary adaptations, with that argument. Though things like, say, Harry Potter are different because even the fans will tell you the strength of the original isn't in its medium-specific characteristics (like prose), except perhaps its length.
_________________

[shrugtheironteacup]

zak, Gene Wolfe might be my favorite author. I'm convinced that one of his strengths lies in his ability to change his style to suit the story he's telling.

I have more books than I've read, primarily because I have a completely irrational impulse to buy buy buy books even if I have a backlog up to my knees. But I reread a lot, so I like to own what I read, and out of the 400+ books on my shelf I'm behind by maybe a dozen or so.

So I don't think I'm doing too bad.

But even w/ the backlog and a rather tight budget I still find it difficult to not accumulate more books. I read as deeply as I can, and can't have too many distractions to do so. I tend to read voraciously for a month or so, finishing off a few thousand pages, then slack and read maybe ten for the next month. I don't have any friends that offer me books, but am more than willing to loan mine out to other people.

I used to have a coworker that I loaned a lot to. I distinctly remember To The White Sea and The Book of the New Sun.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

[Capt. Caveman]

Man, The Sound And The Fury is such a downer. But a damned enjoyable downer it is. Was there any Faulkner discussion upthread? I didn't notice any. Anyway this is the first thing I've read by the guy. I hardly knew anything about him aside from the fact that he was a southerner and that my friends keep recommending him. I've been pleasantly surprised, it's like Joyce only more, eh, readable. But maybe that's because I'm an American and not Irish and Faulkner doesn't seem to be too into making obscure allusions (or if he is, I've just been far too dense to notice them).

I guess I should finally break down and read Lolita so I can understand like 80% of this thread.

ADDENDUM: Am I the only one who thinks an SB "book club" thread is a good idea?? We could do it just like game club, we all pick one book to read more or less simultaneously and then have a nice, geeky, in-depth discussion about said book...it would be more focused and less confusing than this thread (this thread is good too though).

[CubaLibre]

If you want a Faulkner mindfuck try Go Down, Moses.

I think Joe Christmas, one of the three main characters of Light in August, is one of the greatest characters in literature. The book is severely flawed, though still great.

A book club would be a pretty good idea.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.