Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Feminist Party. This year I have read and will read women's writing that we had available only online (blinking screens)--that which we still had. This year I have started to read reprints, new editions/copies of these works. I have read Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists edited by Melinda Finberg and have borrowed from library Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. I am glad to have lived to see the day. In time feminists will find the books they want to read in the format of their choice.

The Globe Theater. You Tube video Presentation is everything.

Someone on Twitter mentioned the cool idea of devoting January 2021 to Japanese literature. For me, challenge reads take first priority, but I will for sure be killing two birds with one stone by slipping in Ōe's 'A Personal Matter' during the month itself. Starting either 'The Tale of the Heike' or Mishima's 'The Sea of Fertility' would also be possible, but with Richardson's 'Pilgrimage' already a commitment during the first few months of 2021, I don't want to overburden myself.

Anyone else interested?

This is such a nice idea!
Though I'm thinking it would make even more sense in combination with more such themes following.

Personally, I fear I'm just to slow to keep up, though. I would love to come back to your idea some time in the future when I know I have all the reading time due to such a theme .

I'm now up to 16 avatar photos. Each one denotes both something i like in some way and also my current mood usually based on my current reading.
I've had to add a new picture for Tense due to We Have Always Lived in the Castle ;) .

Wreaked 1872, thank you for the humor😂

Nice avatar collection :)
It feels a bit like you're using morse to tell us about your reading experience - but without knowing the avatar code or forgetting to check the corresponding book, the message will be undecipherable ...
Actually pretty cool.
I admit I never realized from the threads that your avatar use is systematic :D

Lilly wrote: "Nice avatar collection :)
It feels a bit like you're using morse to tell us about your reading experience - but without knowing the avatar code or forgetting to check the corresponding book, the m..."

Yeah it gets increasingly messy because i'm always reading 2 to 3 books at a time :P .
I just had Bogart for sometime because i like Bogart, then it suddenly occurred to me i could show off different things i like while also conveying some other impressions.
Its gotten very hieroglyphic by this point :lol .

Wreade1872 wrote: "Its gotten very hieroglyphic by this point :lol ."

Well ... supposing that a system being close to illegible is a prerequisite to make it fascinating ... :P
I like your system. It's quite personal, detailed, and only those truly interested will gain full insight from it ...

I did something similar for a while, several years ago, though not as detailed as your system, and not online. People who were interested could read my dispositional mood of the day by my necklace - faith, reckless, fate, ... indicators like this. There were three different necklaces and two possible combinations of two of them: a golden heart locket, a silver cross, and a silver axe with two blades (the moon shaped version from Crete). But as the necklaces had more than one meaning, the system was a bit ambivalent and depended on interpretation ...

Some of my GR friends are reading books detailing how to read literature, novels, poetry like a professor, books.

Some of my GR friends are reading Virginia Woolf.

So I wonder if they might be interested in this article.

Woolf comments that before judging a book; try writing yourself. I got what was probably a quarter of the way through writing a story and I found, especially, the demands of plotting the narrative were extremely difficult; but, more importantly, I wasn’t interested in that side of the process. Under the influence of George Eliot, at the time, I was more interested in the writing developing a philosophical depth ... which it never did😜.

I wasn’t disappointed with the process; it was enjoyable, but a dead end. It gave me a different perspective on the books that I read; having tried it myself. By contrast, it’s not as if you can watch movies having tried to direct yourself, but you can, anyone can, try to write. As Alan Moore said, if you write something then you are a writer! In that sense ones connection to the art and the process can be very close.

Cynda wrote: "Some of my GR friends are reading books detailing how to read literature, movels, poetry like a professor, books.

Some of my GR friends are reading Virginia Woolf.

So I wonder if they might be in..."

So interesting, Cynda. Thanks! Whether we write or not, I liked the idea of hanging back and trying to become the author. It's fun sometimes to just pull back a little from our reaction and wonder what the vision was. I also loved this about reading:
“'There is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love,’ and we cannot silence him,' she explains. What we can do is read so much and so widely that our critical “demon” develops good taste."

And a late happy birthday (yesterday) to Virginia Woolf!

That love/hate "demon" can be tamed. The wide reading I do tames it within me. I get so busy learning that when I don't like something I am able to say to self and in reviews that I just don't know enough about the type of writing--genre, time period, topic--to judge it. And then I can continue to learn in my meandering way.

That taming/influencing can go both ways. Just as studying literature and writing yourself will influence our viewpoint on books, the study of literature from an external perspective also influences and developes our writing skills ... I realized this during my university courses ... We can only appreciate things like technique, style, and references if we know about them, but likewise you need to study culture first to put it into reference ...
What I mean is this: Writing up a story for a friend is easy enough, but experimenting with genre and style, as many now canonical writers did in their time, is harder. And although writing in itself comes easily to many writers (so called talent), we should especially appreciate all the effort of researching, collecting, etc. that goes into a book beyond the text production itself.

Lily, you have some valid points. In the suggestions provided by Virginia Woolf, she seems to be asking readers to ne gentler in their assessments. The fact that most readers to do not have the background that you describe means most of us when we would try and would find that we can't. And perhaps we would be kinder to writers when reviewing books.

I think VW got her feelings snagged 🙁

I hope you enjoyed the article.

Yes, the article is a nice starting point to approach and reflect on this topic, thank you, Cynda.

I think the reason why Woolf's essay is so 'unconclusive' might be that there are so many different types of books. Apparently, she considers the type of book that cannot fully be understood by everybody, but then she also mentions that reading should be enjoyed first of all. What of those books offering social criticism, that cannot wholely be enjoyed? Although I have not read the original essay, I get the feeling that Woolf might be considering different types of books and address them in different parts of her essay. (Thus the seeming contradictions and no final conclusion on just one way.)

As for our lack of context knowledge that we might need to completely understand and appreciate a strongly intertextual or culture referencing book: I think even when we cannot understand all the references we can appreciate them as the writer makes their existence known to us.
Take Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde for example. On the surface this is an exciting fantasy novel - unfortunately not enough appreciated, probably due to the unfortunate title coincidence. But if you look closer, you see a highly complicated structure of interwoven cultural and intertextual references - it is actually brilliant. I would say that I am well versed in literature and I grew up with classical arts and music. Yet I did not get all the references. Or some took a bit of thought to unravel, let me give you an example: In the book everyone can see only one color dominantly and their surnames are derived from that, while the lower class consists of those who cannot see enough color at all and their surnames are 'Grey'. The joke about a photographer called Dorian (Grey) is pretty obvious, most people should get that. But as the characters in question are only addressed by their first names, it took me a while to understand that every Grey character is a hint to someone connected to or out of literature - like Jane Grey or Zane Grey. I think Dorian was really meant to be the key for the reader to unravel that private joke of character naming, even if they don't recognize the other names straight away.
Personally, I highly appreciated Fforde's masterly references to art, literature, or culture in general - even though I was unable to understand or notice them all. Just knowing he put them all there made me awed.
I think cleverly written books playing with the reader's background knowledge can be appreciated on a number of different levels and by all kinds of readers. And to know that some jokes are passing you bye can even be a motivation to puzzles them out, relying on the clues left by the writer ...
I think we need only a certain basic knowledge of culture to appreciate such writing, but not all the writer's knowledge that went into it. But of course, that is only my own opinion, and someone else may of course be annoyed by such hidden and cryptic clues ...

I have a question for all my reading friends. Have you ever read anything by Selina Montgomery? — AKA Stacey Abrams — yes, the political dynamo that has been working to register voters in Georgia. I find this fascinating that she has written so many books.

I am just wondering what her books might be like. Did you like reading her books? Which did you enjoy best? How would you characterize her fiction? Her writing style?

Rest in power, and in peace, Nawal El Saadawi.

On April 20, some eighty years after it was first written, Library of America will release Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, a previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by one of the most influential African American writers of the last century.

https://loa.org/news-and-views/1827-l...

So i'm reading a Mary Poppins book last night and one of the kids has a tootchache and they do that old thing of wrapping a towel/scarf or something around his head.

As kismet so happens i currently have an annoying low grade tootchache of my own and don't like to take painkillers unless i absolutely have too so i thought why not?
Tied a long-sleeved t-shirt round my head and it worked, kept the throbbing to quite a minimum!

I slept (slightyl hot and uncomfortable) like that all night :lol .
Thanks Mary Poppins! :P

Wreade1872 wrote: "So i'm reading a Mary Poppins book last night and one of the kids has a tootchache and they do that old thing of wrapping a towel/scarf or something around his head.

As kismet so happens i curren..."

That is so cool! Love the old fashioned remedies. I have trouble sleeping during Spring allergy season. The old fashioned remedy of using lots of pillows and sleeping more upright did the trick for me!

I was saddened to hear of the death of Eric Carle. I often read his books to my kindergarten students :'(

Oh, that´s so sad! I loved The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which I read with my girls several times!

Pretty good sale for NYRB Classics going on right now, if anyone's into those sorts of classics.

As not everyone here is American, it´s the New York Review Books, obviously a cheap(?) edition of Classics. Here´s the website link:
https://www.nyrb.com/collections/clas...

Just thought i'd share some artists i've found over the last while, mostly while looking for desktop wallpapers :) .

Aimee Stewart https://aimeestewart.com/home


Matthew Inman https://theoatmeal.com/


Shaun Tan https://www.shauntan.net/


and my latest find, the artist likes red a lot :)
Daena Key https://www.deviantart.com/dae-k/gall...

Aubrey wrote: "Pretty good sale for NYRB Classics going on right now, if anyone's into those sorts of classics."

Sweet! Thank you! Too good an opportunity to pass up! =D

Erin wrote: "Aubrey wrote: "Pretty good sale for NYRB Classics going on right now, if anyone's into those sorts of classics."

Sweet! Thank you! Too good an opportunity to pass up! =D

[bookcover:Love in a Fall..."

Cheers, Erin! You grabbed a good bunch there, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on them. Here's what I ended up grabbing for myself:

Aubrey wrote: "Erin wrote: "Aubrey wrote: "Pretty good sale for NYRB Classics going on right now, if anyone's into those sorts of classics."

Sweet! Thank you! Too good an opportunity to pass up! =D

is on my TBR list and I’ll be interested to read what you think of these, especially Last Words from Montmartre. :)

Ugh! stupid beta, I hate it. But there's no point opting out cause they'll definitely be switching to this one regardless of any negative feeback, because it looks like the amazon pages.

Wreade1872 wrote: "Ugh! stupid beta, I hate it. But there's no point opting out cause they'll definitely be switching to this one regardless of any negative feeback, because it looks like the amazon pages."

Not a fan of Amazon pages. It irritates me that you have to scroll halfway down the page, past all the ads and crap, in order to read a description of the book.

Hey thats weird that new beta page design went away again even though i didn't hit the opt out button. Just for a few hours everything looked like amazon then poof back to normal :| :) .

Anyone else being forced to complete CAPTCHA's in order to write book reviews and add editions?

I have not had to in order to write a review, but I have not tried to add an edition. I tried to edit a comment that had a link to a map from another website, and a comment box popped and said that links to other websites are not allowed for security reasons. That's new to me.

Laurie wrote: "I have not had to in order to write a review, but I have not tried to add an edition. I tried to edit a comment that had a link to a map from another website, and a comment box popped and said that..."

I don't know what changed between me publishing my 1008th review yesterday and my 1009th today, but it's idiotically tedious, to say the least.

Noooo! GR upgrades are the worst.

Katy wrote: "Noooo! GR upgrades are the worst."

Aren’t they just? It made me sign in today, but at least it didn’t make me go through two dozen “pages” of captcha hell like the last time it did that. 😐

I have to deal with CAPTCHA. I am okay as long as either I have to check the box to verify I am not some bot or have to check off all boxes of a pic that contain this or that element (traffic light, bus, stop sign). I cannot much deal with the replicate these letters/numbers.

I notice that get more of these CAPTCHAs when I write multiple reviews in a day, when I record numerous quotes in a day.

Also I think some writers of books require CAPTCHA check all the time/periodically.

Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century: https://blog.archive.org/2021/07/14/f...

The captcha thing seems to be intermittent. I once got it multiple times in a day just to submit comments/reviews but then it went away. GR did make a change that you can't put hyperlinks to outside sites. It's not a big problem, you just have to put in the actual url, rather than click here. People were using that method to get us to click through to unwanted sites/spam/inappropriate content.

Lena wrote: "Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century: https://blog.archive.org/2021/07/14/f..."

Cool, I will share this with my GR Readers' Review classics group!

I’m new to this group (and Good Reads in general) so this is just to say hi and hope you find my posts interesting! Look forward to getting involved in the group reads when I can too :)

Welcome to the group, Eleanor. Looking forward to discussing books with you.

Welcome Eleanor!

welcome!

Thanks for the welcome messages!

Anyone elses GR loading realllyyyyyy slowly?

Edit: never mind think its just me... time to switch browsers again.

Wreade1872 wrote: "Anyone elses GR loading realllyyyyyy slowly?

Edit: never mind think its just me... time to switch browsers again."

It was slow yesterday. Slower than usual.

RJ - Slayer of Trolls wrote: "It was slow yesterday. Slower than usual."

Yeah.. irs a bit better now seems its only partially a problem
on my end.

So now the choice is between being forced to get group private messages and being forced to get private messages from absolutely everyone? Brilliant. Goes right in line with GRAmazon's steady erosion of boundaries on this site.