‘I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Looking back, it's still masterful how it hangs together. As YA fiction, it has to be about blossoming sexuality. Monkey as id, relationship with animal as childhood-level affection, catholic repression in the first book (literally locking the animals away), then fighting god, overthrowing the authority figure to move into a mature understanding of love. The knife and universes as a metaphor for decision-making and branching lives (literally named Will).
Plus the ending dovetails wonderfully into the actual lived experience of the author, who spent all that time building a fantasy and has to let it go.
And I love the concept of the aliens in the last book, that use coconuts as wheels and travel on natural highways.
That's some good advice.
Perhaps you shouldn't disparage the act of loving itself (though still debatable in the cult and addiction examples), but never changing your mind about the object/person/group you loved in the first place is naive.
It is valid to bring counter-examples as part of a discussion, and I did not say otherwise. But I don't think it's "valid" to take a sentence, go off half cocked, and take it to an absurd and erroneous conclusion that contradicts the author's plain intent. If I'm highlighting a particularly valuable part of the article, I don't think I should have to quote the whole article in a comment just to prevent somebody taking it over-literally and out of context.
And I will note that what you did in rewriting the generalized statement is exactly how most people understand apparently most absolute statements. Nobody thinks that "a stitch in time saves nine" is literally asserting a precise 9x relationship between maintenance effort and waste avoided. It can be fun to be over-literal as part of making a joke, but when it is only in the service of misunderstanding the actual point, it's just tedious and annoying.
Very mild reminder on what the forum guidelines [1] have to say about this line (and only issuing the reminder because you've used it twice in succession).
Heroin don’t love you and you fucking hate it.
This book sounds interesting, brought to mind The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_...). This year I saw this book at Half Price Books and, primed by Westworld quickly bought and read it. It wasn’t good: interesting premise argued in a just so way without much substantive evidence.
> The books I am currently reading … Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh
Shahnameh had and continues to have enormous cultural influence not just in Iran but in all neighboring cultures, perhaps akin to the Bible in Western tradition. Davis’s new translation converts the couplets in prose, with some parts kept in poetic form, is highly accessible and praised (https://www.npr.org/2006/03/29/5309016/new-translation-of-pe...). I suggest complementing the reading with miniatures of key scenes you can find by googling or you may forego a full translation and go with the abridged but fantastically illustrated book by Hamid Rahmanian (https://www.amazon.com/Shahnameh-Persian-Kings-Illustrated-S...)
Seems like it is an influential (to culture) book with a great title that was really never very good.
Incidentally, a scholar of ancient Greek I consulted read it and said he was dead wrong about the evolution of emotive terminology.
Is it that they feed themselves first and only give what they don't need and that amount grows as their own income/wealth grows?
Middlemarch started serial publication in 1871. So George Elliot gets to allude to telescopic philanthropy, confident that her audience will be familiar with "the wag's definition of a philanthropist" and get her dig.
Well anyway there are lots of other good nuggets in Middlemarch, hopefully _some_ of them original.
>Generally we remove author names from titles. —dang, June 12, 2021
In this case, the content of the title gains its power from the author.
>Of course there are always exceptions.
This should be one of those exceptions and Philip Pullman's name restored to the title as originally published.
I'm simply stating what it is.
(I'm not staff, just another member.)
And I personally wouldn't have clicked through or opened the thread if Pullman's name had been in the title (I dislike him as an author and as a public opinion sharer). I found the rest of the article uninteresting and uninspiring (and the experience with MM so commonly expressed to now be mundane).
I read Justine (1st book of the Alexandria Quartet) back in my early 20s, circa 1993.
The way I found it was utterly weird. I was helping my dad sort out his old stuff my mom wanted him to throw away, mostly lots of yellow late 50s early 60s notebooks from his college. And some old English books. And Justine. My dad said he couldn't remember where he got this book, and said somebody must have given it to him back in the 60s, and he never read it.
I've never heard of it or Lawrence Durrel, but I knew about Gerald Durrel due to My Family and Other Animals which was something that recommended for kids around the early 80s, I guess, and I think I even read it when I was much younger.
I assumed Justine was a dime detective or spy novel, since I knew that's the stuff my dad likes. Or some biography. Nothing too literary for him, thank you very much. He asked if I wanted to read it or he'd throw it away. I looked at the blurb, which didn't tell me much, shrugged and said ok. I was between books. The book was a 60s printing, yellow pages, somewhat disintegrating, but all pages were intact.
So I read it. It was tough. But I persevered. And I liked it. Very much. Well, the sex scenes were kinda shocking but by that time I've read more explicit ones.
And to my surprise I discovered that the science fiction novel Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I read and re-read and re-read 7 years prior at even a more impressionable age, was very much a tribute to Justine. At least its middle part. It even includes a science-fiction in-universe pastiche of Cavafy's The City.
Icehenge and Justine remain sort of embedded in my brain. As Cavafy's "The City" in Durrel's translation (attributed to one of the fictitious characters in the novel itself) , which in my opinion is the best translation. I'm able to recite it by heart to this day, and there are days when I'm highly tempted to print it and hang above my desk at work. But I wouldn't like the questions. I think.
I've wanted for 20 years now to read the rest of the Alexandrian Quartet, but I've never gotten around to it. Swamped by school and then by work and then by family. Maybe someday. And maybe I'll be disappointed.
As for His Dark Materials. I read it too, but didn't like it, something didn't click. Except The Golden Compass which was good.
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
which Philip Pullman has described as "the best thriller I’ve ever read" and thought it was stunning in the audio version.
As an espionage chase against a (timely) Arctic landscape, with a can-do engineer/academic as hero, I reckon it will appeal to a lot of HN thriller fans.
Read the first volume and stop: he never again achieves the magisterial Armored Bears.
His angels, first conceived as cognizing architecture, devolve to petulant whiners by the end. It seems like he lost all interest after the first volume, but had contracted for a number of words to deliver, so did.
> That said I've more or less stopped reading fiction, feel like after hundreds of attempts I have yet to find anything life changing enough to be worth the investment.
This was interesting. I'm not going to argue against you stopping reading fiction because I don't see reading as a necessarily 'virtuous' activity. I think there can be value in it but there can be value in doing other things instead. I personally feel that I have come across a number of books in my time that were somewhat 'life changing' but I never read in a quest to find such books; my reading has always been done for experience/curiosity.
That's pretty rich in itself, coming from the author of "His Dark Materials," which whether you like it or not, is so metaphorically and allegorically over-rich with respect to the author's obvious angst and disdain for Catholicism specifically, and organized Christianity generally, as to be ... well, almost un-rereadable by any thoughtful person.
(For the record, I consider Lewis the better writer, but grief the “Simple Christianity” can get a bit much at times.)
My feeling is HDM is to Dune what Eragon is to Lord of the Rings. The former in these comparisons don't apply much imagination to their real-world influences.
The latter in these comparisons are still clearly inspired by real-world themes and tropes, but they're more imaginative in how they combine and diverge from their inspirations, probably owing to a richer depth of experiences and influences that the respective authors had been exposed to.
This is an interesting comparison. I have not read Eragon, but I have read reviews that say it's a transparent reskinning of Star Wars. Assuming that's true, the form of an analogy between Eragon and Lord of the Rings would be
Eragon : Lord of the Rings :: Star Wars : The Sword of Shannara
Having said that, I felt ‘the golden compass’ holds up much better than the sequels — better character development, less didactic, amazing word building.
(Edited to avoid potential spoilers)
There are some misfires. And though I assume you meant to say "world building", the word building is a particular weak point. He decided that, in an alternate history where the word for electricity derived from the Arabic word for amber rather than the Greek one, it was perfectly plausible for the modern form of an original "anbar" to be "anbar". That can't happen.
If you want to see a series of novels with strong word building, check out Katharine Kerr's Deverry series. ;D
Seriously, though, I agree, the phrasing I used was a little over-wrought itself. My apologies. My point really was that if Pullman believes that Durrell's book was "too rich" to be re-read by him, he should understand that the limitations in Durrell's work that lead him to that conclusion are over-present in his own His Dark Materials.
I visited a relative in hospital recently and found myself listening to the audio of a super-trashy TV show a patient in the next bed was watching. It was fascinating. The acting was wooden and stilted as though being read out from the page, the dialogue was so direct and explicit it was painful “You know why I hate him so much, because he cheated me out of my inheritance!”. It was almost Mexican soap opera level. And yet it was captivating, because I found myself wondering about the business model that produces such material, who the audience is, what it’s like to be an actor on a drama like that. Even if something is terrible, there’s so much to analyse to discover why it’s terrible, and why some people might like it anyway.
There are processions of angels bearing the corpse of a dead god. The alethiometer is specifically stated to function through divine grace. It's not so much a religious metaphor as an out-and-out religious story. What's not to notice?