Kepler
Cornell Big Red
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Another Book Thread
- Thread starter jen
- Start date
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
I was a bum in San Francisco but once managed
to go to a symphony concert along with the well-dressed people
and the music was good but something about the
audience was not
and something about the orchestra
and the conductor was
not,
although the building was fine and the
acoustics perfect
I preferred to listen to the music alone
on my radio
and afterwards I did go back to my room and I
turned on the radio but
then there was a pounding on the wall:
“SHUT THAT GOD-DAMNED THING OFF!”
there was a soldier in the next room
living with his wife
and he would soon be going over there to protect
me from Hitler so
I snapped the radio off and then heard his
wife say, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
and the soldier said, “F-CK THAT GUY!”
which I thought was a very nice thing for him
to tell his wife to do.
of course,
she never did.
anyhow, I never went to another live concert
and that night I listened to the radio very
quietly, my ear pressed to the
speaker.
war has its price and peace never lasts and
millions of young men everywhere would die
and as I listened to classical music I heard them making love, desperately and
mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms,
Mozart, through crescendo and climax,
and through the shared
wall of our darkness.
-- Charles Bukowski
to go to a symphony concert along with the well-dressed people
and the music was good but something about the
audience was not
and something about the orchestra
and the conductor was
not,
although the building was fine and the
acoustics perfect
I preferred to listen to the music alone
on my radio
and afterwards I did go back to my room and I
turned on the radio but
then there was a pounding on the wall:
“SHUT THAT GOD-DAMNED THING OFF!”
there was a soldier in the next room
living with his wife
and he would soon be going over there to protect
me from Hitler so
I snapped the radio off and then heard his
wife say, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
and the soldier said, “F-CK THAT GUY!”
which I thought was a very nice thing for him
to tell his wife to do.
of course,
she never did.
anyhow, I never went to another live concert
and that night I listened to the radio very
quietly, my ear pressed to the
speaker.
war has its price and peace never lasts and
millions of young men everywhere would die
and as I listened to classical music I heard them making love, desperately and
mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms,
Mozart, through crescendo and climax,
and through the shared
wall of our darkness.
-- Charles Bukowski
Bronco
Onondaga United IV.6
I started to reread A Game of Thrones and it makes me remember how many characters the show combined, deleted, or changed. I wanted to reread the entire written series, but I'm not sure I can knowing that it isn't finished, and how bitter of a taste the HBO series end left me. So for those that have read it, would you reread it?
First Time Long Time
Rebuilding
I've reread and relistened to it multiple times. But then again the ending of the series didn't leave me a bitter anything. I just view it as a different way to tell the story.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
Nah, Vladimir Harkonnen dies in the first book.
ScoobyDoo
NPC
Not my favorite character. He's Trump but better looking.
Reading Doctorow’s “The March,” a fictional account of Sherman’s campaign to Savannah and northward. It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, and I forgot how gifted a writer he is. There so much music, art, literature, and other means of expression out there to make our lives a little less dreadful.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
I've tried to get into him in the past but was not patient enough. What is your favorite book by him?
wolverineTrumpet
not particularly bad
Finally read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Listened to a bit more than half of it on audiobook in my car, then when I got home from work Friday, I didn't want to wait for my commute to listen again. Knowing I had a paperback of it, I found it and read the last 250 pages.
Now my husband wants to watch the movie with me, and I just know it won't be as good. So much had to have been cut. How do you take a 16 hour audiobook and make a 2.5 hour movie? I liked the slow build in the book where it felt like 2 very different stories and I was waiting to see how they would intertwine.
Listened to a bit more than half of it on audiobook in my car, then when I got home from work Friday, I didn't want to wait for my commute to listen again. Knowing I had a paperback of it, I found it and read the last 250 pages.
Now my husband wants to watch the movie with me, and I just know it won't be as good. So much had to have been cut. How do you take a 16 hour audiobook and make a 2.5 hour movie? I liked the slow build in the book where it felt like 2 very different stories and I was waiting to see how they would intertwine.
As I said, it's been quite a long time. I know I enjoyed Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and Waterworks. I'll have to reread them, something I often do when time has passed. I recall thinking Saul Bellow and Thomas Wolfe were discovered treasure when I started to read both of them out of school as a young man who had left home (read some before that, but I was, and still am, a hayseed). They're not as easy for me to read now. The stuff that really lights your fire (Kant, Schopenhauer, et al.) I struggled with even in college. Too casual a reader and scholar to ever reach that fitness level.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
I have a very short and shallow attention span, and a very long and deep rumination span. With Schopenhauer a long passage is 10 pages, with Kant it's 3. With Hegel it's a paragraph. And then I have enough to think about for hours. I love diving but I hate swimming.
So there's almost no fiction I can read at length. Mysteries and SF are the exception, because they are constantly giving off intellectual sparks. But a drama -- guh -- it's a hard slog. Theater is different for some reason, but novels are torture and verse I'd rather play three games against the Braves with the season on the line.
From everything I have read about Doctorow I would love him. I guess Ragtime is where I will start again for the fifth time. It took me at least a half dozen tries to finally be old enough to read The Name of the Rose.
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dxmnkd316
Lucia Apologist
Ugh. The movies all completely rewrite the book or are terrible. I'm still upset about them.
The American movie of the first book was much more true to that book than the Swedish movies that covered all three books. I think the Swedish movies were afraid of the content being on the screen and people missing the point that Larrson intended. Although, the original Swedish title for the first book translates to “Men Who Hate Women,” so it would’ve been harder to miss, but I think the Swedish movies used the English titles as Larssen had died by then.
dxmnkd316
Lucia Apologist
Yeah, I just didn't feel like the Swedish movie captured that. The changed story was such a bad pivot.
dxmnkd316
Lucia Apologist
Finished Dune. The last third of that book was traveling at warp speed. I'm not sure I liked the structure and pacing to be honest. Great story. Writing was good. But like, we went from meeting Stilgar to the last scene in what felt like 100 pages of a 900-page novel.
and the amount of detail and chess pieces moving around felt so immersive in the first half only to have the second half feel like it was written by someone else. The difference between an open world game to a platformer
edit: that said. I enjoyed it overall. I think it certainly needs to be read a second time.
and the amount of detail and chess pieces moving around felt so immersive in the first half only to have the second half feel like it was written by someone else. The difference between an open world game to a platformer
edit: that said. I enjoyed it overall. I think it certainly needs to be read a second time.
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ScoobyDoo
NPC
I noticed the same thing. A lot of big events in the end were written like a history textbook instead of a novel.
I am on the 4th book right now. It's been an interesting weird ride.
dxmnkd316
Lucia Apologist
That's a great way of describing it. Very very focused. Which, maybe was inevitable to actually wrap up the story. It just felt like the half-dozen storylines collapsed violently to one in the second half.
The two or three-year gap in the middle of part 2 almost deserved a couple hundred pages on its own. I thought I had a stroke and missed something. I went back and reread the last dozen or so pages to make sure I hadn't.
Kepler
Cornell Big Red
First half of Dune is brilliant. Second half feels like it was written on a deadline. The writing quality has already sunk -- I guess whoever wrote the first half for him had other projects.
This is true of a lot of epics. The first half of War & Peace is perfect and believe it or not is terse. The second half feels like Tolstoy was getting paid by the word.
This is true of a lot of epics. The first half of War & Peace is perfect and believe it or not is terse. The second half feels like Tolstoy was getting paid by the word.
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