962 replies to this topic

[brvheart]

Spademan, on Saturday, July 18th, 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

It was "on order" at all three places I checked this week. I'll pick it up next week.

Do people actually buy books somewhere other than online still? It's like $12 at amazon.

[Spademan]

brvheart, on Saturday, July 18th, 2009, 10:14 PM, said:

Do people actually buy books somewhere other than online still? It's like $12 at amazon.

I have this terrible habit of occasionally going outside.

[BigDMcGee]

Spademan, on Sunday, July 19th, 2009, 1:53 AM, said:

I have this terrible habit of occasionally going outside.

I mean, online is convenient at all, but I love being able to browse a good book store. I hope amazon crushes Barnes and noble, but leaves the little bookstores alive. Wishful thinking, I know.

[Dirtydutch]

I'm with you here, unsurprisingly. I shop on Amazon generally speaking, but I have a bit of a thing for the small, romantic book store, and like to physically browse. Amazon has really killed my need for large chains, but I buy little enough these days that out of impatient and impulsiveness, I probably buy about 15-30% from B&M.

[Spademan]

Yes, what you both are saying was my point.I just said it badassly.Badassly is not a word.Deal with it.

[Southern Buddhist]

Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage.It's a short book, only a couple hundred pages, and it's part of the "Eminent Lives" series asking well-known writers to write bios of other well-known people. For a real biography of Shakespeare, read Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: A Life or Park Honan's biography, both of which are cited frequently by scholars. But Bryson's is a breezy, witty skim through Shakespeare's life that nonetheless manages to pack in nearly every bit of major information about the man.Besides being humorous, he's also so pithy that his little book has done a far better job than serious scholars with some issues. For instance, larger biographies have spent chapters on the importance of the Folio and the many unknown Elizabethan plays, but only Bryson says plainly,

Quote

Of the approximately three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from the time of Shakespeare's birth to the closure of the theatres by Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80 percent are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare's time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself.

[Italics mine]But my favorite bit was when he, in one short sentence, utterly demolishes the claims that the Earl of Oxford actually wrote the plays. He notes that the Earl died in 1604, when several of the plays had not yet been written, and indeed could not have been written, because they allude to events that happened later (i.e., the 1605 Gunpowder Plot is alluded to in Macbeth, and a 1609 shipwreck in The Tempest).

Quote

The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death (and the death of his front man) and left a stock of works sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that is genius!

[Graydon]

A Wolf at the Table...did the author really ever have a chance to grow up normal?

[brvheart]

brvheart, on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009, 12:00 AM, said:

You're welcome... everyone.http://www.harpers.o...-01-0007859.pdf

So awesome. My pastor read part of this during his sermon. If your pastor isn't a fan of David Foster Wallace, you're going to the wrong church.

[dapokerbum]

Emergency by Neil Strauss

[Southern Buddhist]

I know I'm on permanent Shakespeare kick, but...Has anyone else here read Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars?I'm just finishing it, and feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, there's a lot of really good stuff -- I've flagged about 30 pages to take notes from for my next book (or paper), which will be about Hamlet.On the other hand, I'm feeling -- at page 450 -- that it could have been much shorter; that he was so passionate (wrong, but passionate) about The Merchant of Venice that he totally threw scholarship out the window; and that even though I can usually knock off a 500-page book in no more than two days, I keep having to put this one aside after 100 pages or so because I'm just exhausted by it. It feels like I've been screamed at for two hours every time I read it.Because he and I share a weird fascination with both Shakespeare and Hitler, I sure hope his Explaining Hitler is better. But it's earlier, so I fear it won't be.

[Southern Buddhist]

Graydon, on Monday, July 20th, 2009, 9:07 PM, said:

A Wolf at the Table...did the author really ever have a chance to grow up normal?

I haven't read Augusten Burroughs, but I have read his brother's book about having Asperger's Syndrome, Look Me in the Eye by John Robison. Same family through a very different lens. Very interesting.

[Southern Buddhist]

brvheart, on Monday, July 20th, 2009, 10:43 PM, said:

So awesome. My pastor read part of this during his sermon. If your pastor isn't a fan of David Foster Wallace, you're going to the wrong church.

RIP, DFW. Having been on cruises and also having suffered a similar kind of existential depression, I wonder reading this how anyone could ever have imagined he would live to see 50.

[LongLiveYorke]

I'm just starting The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner.

[BigDMcGee]

Southern Buddhist, on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009, 12:16 AM, said:

RIP, DFW. Having been on cruises and also having suffered a similar kind of existential depression, I wonder reading this how anyone could ever have imagined he would live to see 50.

My fantasy basketball team was named the USS Nadir as tribute

[LongLiveYorke]

Dirtydutch, on Saturday, July 18th, 2009, 7:40 PM, said:

Joyce is rad, but pretty tough, at least for me.

Yeah, I find him difficult as well and have to reread parts a lot. He's very subtle and can flow gradually from place to place and through time a bit, so you have to really pay attention to keep up. But he's a really beautiful writer.

Dirtydutch, on Saturday, July 18th, 2009, 7:40 PM, said:

I obviously think you you also read Gravity's Rainbow, which I used to pimp on an Infinate Jest level but is probably a lot less accessible than IJ.

Yeah, I'm a bit intimidated by Gravity's Rainbow, I'm not going to lie.

[SuitedAces21]

1000 Days to the Bar: But the Practice of Law Begins NowITS A REAL PAGE-TURNER.

[LongLiveYorke]

SuitedAces21, on Saturday, July 25th, 2009, 9:30 PM, said:

1000 Days to the Bar: But the Practice of Law Begins NowITS A REAL PAGE-TURNER.

Still better than Ayn Rand.

[Dirtydutch]

LongLiveYorke, on Saturday, July 25th, 2009, 6:06 PM, said:

Yeah, I'm a bit intimidated by Gravity's Rainbow, I'm not going to lie.

I had basically no idea what I was getting into when I started that. I kept reading references to him in descriptions of my favorite characteristics of my favorite authors, and just grabbed it one day. I read it a lot. It's amazingly dense, and I'm sure I don't understand 70% of why it's awesome. But it's just the best.

[Speed Limit]

Sun In A Bottle- Charles Seife

[LadyGhey]

Hi.Recently read:Mother Night by KVCannery Row by SteinbeckNever Let Me Go by Kazio Kazsruohusodhfouwbnfuo (forgotten his name)The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey NiffeneggerCurrently reading: Hocus Pocus by KVMessages from the Falklands by Hugh/David Tinker