BF2S Forums BF3s Book Club

Granted, but if I really enjoyed e-books, my shelves would probably be a lot more barren.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I just buy books, the quality of the paper is a bit disappointing these days, no plans to get an e-reader as I spend half my day speed-reading crap on a screen already.

You have to find the good publishers and try to stick with them or their imprints. Admittedly this mostly applies to classics and philosophy and most other 'high-end' books that are marketed to a discerning buyer with a hefty budget - you'll probably struggle if you're buying mass-market paperback fiction or sci-fi or something. Faber & Faber are a fantastic publisher for paper and print quality. Routledge are quite good for the scientific/philosophical textbook feel.

Jay wrote:

I have something of a book buying addiction.

aynrandroolz wrote:

And yes, the pleasure is in the words... of course. I'm not going to concern myself much over whether I get my Lermontov on a parchment scroll or downloaded straight into a retinal screen.

For good books that I'll actually reread, hardback book on my bookshelf
As decoration, as artwork, and as a practical utility.
Same for major textbooks or references (Martini's Anatomy & Physiology, dictionaries, Machinery's Handbook, etc)

For entertainment reading, an e-book on my iPad.

For large collections of reference PDFs, nothing beats an eReader or iPad for portable reference.
A 32GB iPad can store a metric shittonne of documentation.
A thousand plus books, a million plus pages - on something the size of a single thin hardback book.

Essentially, if I have to study single pages for minutes at a time (math, engineering, or some medical books), I prefer a textbook I can heft onto a table for pouring over.
If I need a million pages of reference work, and I don't know which sections I'll need while mobile - ereader.
If it's quick study material that I can absorb with a linear reading (i.e., read straight through once, like a novel) - ereader.


For some things, though, tradition demands a dogeared paperback book on the bookshelf (Frank Herbert's Dune series, anything by Heinlein or Asimov).
The medium is part of the message - the method of delivery is part of the context of the story.
To do otherwise would be akin to drinking beer from a shotglass, or scotch from a plastic cup.

Last edited by rdx-fx (2012-09-10 13:48:10)

nope, no matter what the subject, i cannot read stuff on a kindle et al. i don't know what it is, but i just don't feel like i'm reading unless i'm holding paper. it could be anything, i derive insane pleasure in reading the sunday times, and i will spend hours reading everything. give me the same thing digital, i just flick through and feel entirely 'meh' about it.

FatherTed wrote:

nope, no matter what the subject, i cannot read stuff on a kindle et al. i don't know what it is, but i just don't feel like i'm reading unless i'm holding paper. it could be anything, i derive insane pleasure in reading the sunday times, and i will spend hours reading everything. give me the same thing digital, i just flick through and feel entirely 'meh' about it.

sorry you feel that way.

for me, digital has opened a new chapter in reading - i can even create the text with a simple pdf creator. but it has allowed me to download school texts, and read them on the shitter or change from on to the other with a flick. it will also resize, highlight, or annotate for future reference.

i wish they had had them when i was in regular school . . .

I actually started using my Android to read when I couldn't possibly wait another day to read a book I wanted (Ender series amazes me. I love it), and since then, I've been using my phone to read for a while. Dim light at night, half at day and I don't get aches or anything. I use the HTC One X now, and the larger screen is definitely better than my old HTC Desire.

I do like reading a proper, printed book, but it's a lot less hassle for me to read my phone in bed, at work or whenever I have a few minutes free, etc.

In related news, I've started re-reading the Ender series. Speaker For The Dead already and loving every bit of it.

FatherTed wrote:

don't get me wrong, i don't look down on e-reader users as some kind of sub-species (most of you are, that's not the point though), it just doesn't work at all for me.

same for textbooks for me. simply cannot use textbooks on a screen, i need to be able to flick through pages quickly and easily, and as it stands that's hard on an e-book.

reading fiction is easier, but still prefer the physical copy.

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wal … 1570035172
This isn't biography but it analyzes his work and where it came from in his life. I read it at my school's library. I mentioned it in this thread before. Anyway, it covers all of his fiction. So if you could find a copy at your school's library I would suggest this.

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-09-12 19:04:54)

Macbeth wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wallace-Contemporary-American-Literature/dp/1570035172
This isn't biography but it analyzes his work and where it came from in his life. I read it at my school's library. I mentioned it in this thread before. Anyway, it covers all of his fiction. So if you could find a copy at your school's library I would suggest this.

i encountered that and read parts of it several years ago. it was actually an 'oh fuck' moment for me academically, not because of any particular apercu's pertaining to wallace's work, but because the guy's overall project is much the same sort of intellectual history i want to do my phd/dphil on (and that's a moment that turns a researcher's stomach into an aching pit). i mostly find expository monographs like that which take in an author's entire oeuvre quite... i don't know... sophomore? is that an adequate term? i like his overall thesis and abstract about post-post-modernism and the new generation of literary fiction, but i'm not crazy about that book. especially his analysis of broom of the system.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-12 20:46:21)

Finished Tales From A Thousand And One Nights on the throne earlier today. It was great bathroom material. Plenty of violence, sex, jinn and other magical creatures.

PrivateVendetta wrote:

When I said I disliked it for similar reasons, someone ripped into me for 'not getting the writing style'. Guess who.

Uzique?

The whole point of aestheticism is to be ornate, over-elaborate, fustian, decadent. It's a literary style that tries to reflect in the writing the attitudes and opulence of the content. It is all about long descriptions and passages of aesthetic beauty for aesthetic beauties' sake alone (Theophile Gautier: l'art pour l'art). There is a clear difference between 'getting it' and seeing the artistic point here, and simply not liking it as a personal preference. PV I didn't feel you understood the point of the book: you wanted it told in a simpler way, like some other (perhaps Victorian) classics you had read. The entire point of aestheticism is to tell something simple in a complex, ornate, over-wrought way. It's an artistic statement of gluttony, greed, self-indulgence, written in the artistic and social atmosphere of the fin de siecle, an end-of-the-century, end-of-times sort of atmosphere. It has classical aspirations towards the sort of literary and social decadence last seen in the mythopoeic declines of the last great Western empires: the fall of Rome likened to end-of-the-century Europe, etc. etc.

To be honest I don't rate Wilde as a writer, but I feel as though my low esteem of him comes from a wider literary understanding of the period and his artistic contemporaries. Someone dismissing him because his writing is 'pointlessly flowery' is someone who is actually just missing the whole point. I don't rate Wilde because he is in every single way an Anglophone copycat of a far superior French writer who predated (and inspired) him: Joris-Karl Huysmans. You should read À rebours if you want the definitive artistic statement of that style and period. The character Des Esseintes is pretty much the prototype taken for Dorian in Wilde's work - and is superior in every single way. Huysmans is a better 'serious' writer; Wilde is a better wit and humorist. To fault Wilde though for the style he chose to assume in DG is to level a completely misguided criticism at him.

Aestheticism is hardly my favourite style or period of literature, either, but I do see its merits. That's the difference between really 'getting' a work of art and merely having a gut-level personal reaction to it: can you see and appreciate its merits? Most people never have a relationship with a book beyond the merely personal and attitudinal. I can read a 500 page book in a style that I loathe and still accede some praise for its actual ambition and relative success(es) w/r/t that ambition. If you say that "Wilde is trying too hard" and mean it as a serious artistic criticism, one would have to say that you rather tragically and completely miss the point of aestheticism. It is not meant to be minimalist realism, a la Carver, or sardonic, dry laconisms, a la Salinger. I rather question what you were expecting when you picked up the book (and your personal reasons for doing so, if you have no time or patience for the style of aestheticism). I think a widespread problem in people that read 'the classics' just for 'the classics' sake is that they go into the endeavour with so little understanding of just what the fuck they're doing - just reading it because it has a reputation and looks like a good thing for them to read, for some reason divined from an upper power containing knowledge they are supposedly not privy to. They just waste their own time. Wilde probably deserves his place in the artistic canon, and his books are justly called 'classics' because of how they capture a time and place, and in how successfully they articulate an artistic style and idiom. They are supremely well-executed works of art, with their original goals in mind. And, in being an attentive reader and in trying to take something positive way from the whole activity of 'reading the classics' (or watching high-cinema, or going to galleries, or visiting the theatre-- whatever) you should always be assiduously careful to maintain a distinction between your personal-preferences, and your 'appreciation'. It is possible to appreciate something that strikes no sympathetic chord with your own experiences and preferences. That's what being a good reader is all about.

But mostly, I just don't know what brings an airline pilot and a military dude to want to read aestheticism at all. Would you go along to a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and spend a day looking at plaintive waterpainted women floating around in ponds, as well? I just feel like you've taken a wrong turn somewhere in your 'cultural education', for lack of a better set of directions. You are reading a small corner of literature that is well-known and esteemed amongst the educated as being ornate and flowery, descriptively beautiful and richly excessive... and then come away grumbling that it's flowery and richly excessive. It makes you look silly - quite literally misguided, having taken a wrong turn somewhere in your local bookstore. I know you may not like the sound of that, but really it's the literature equivalent of taking a mechanical engineering course and then dropping out, complaining there's too much math. You said in your critique you wanted him to describe how things were at that time, in a simpler way than the 3-way conversations he had. Why don't you pick up some classical naturalist fiction, then? The ultimate in realist portrayal. Try some Zola or some Flaubert. Try some Strindberg or Ibsen.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-16 10:04:31)