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Social What are you currently reading?

hydroazuanacaine said:
i recently embarked on a j.d. salinger spree. so i’ve been hearing lots about seymour and his end. just read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” weird, but i think it came first. must have been way different reading it without the weight of all the surrounding follow up stories. would its starkness be as impactful or more so if the reader didn’t know.

did salinger already have this whole character, family, and world fleshed out in his head? maybe it’s his family.

or maybe it didn’t come first. fuck knows what order i’m reading these in.

The Wayward Bus was bland, Chemically. genre? americana.
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Only ever read the obvious, "Catcher In the Rye". Are his other books related?
 
in theme and motif. he’s got lots of short stories and novellas. many of them have to do with this one family, the glass family. i just finished Catcher in the Rye this morning, and i didn’t catch any allusions suggesting the glass and caulfield families co-exist. they are similar.

i highly recommend learning about the glass family. through reading his short stories and novellas. don’t read anything about them online. it’s fun to learn about them from different angles through the stories. without question a source of inspiration for wes anderson.

even in Bottle Rocket and Catcher in the Rye, grace is clearly inspired by phoebe.
 
cduggles said:
This is a little embarrassing, but I’m doing some complicated work so I’m doing relaxed reading, which for me is rereading sci-fi. I’ve got Hyperion by Simmons, Burning Chrome by Gibson and Stranger in a Strange Land.
I’m looking forward to reading The Left Hand of Darkness again.
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Nothing embarrassing there! Relaxed reading is the best kind! Who wants to read something that gets you stressed?
 
hydroazuanacaine said:
in theme and motif. he’s got lots of short stories and novellas. many of them have to do with this one family, the glass family. i just finished Catcher in the Rye this morning, and i didn’t catch any allusions suggesting the glass and caulfield families co-exist. they are similar.

i highly recommend learning about the glass family. through reading his short stories and novellas. don’t read anything about them online. it’s fun to learn about them from different angles through the stories. without question a source of inspiration for wes anderson.

even in Bottle Rocket and Catcher in the Rye, grace is clearly inspired by phoebe.
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Have you read franny and zooey? Smart women -- who are always crazy (in the event youre a woman) -- seem to identify with zooey strongly (though i also indentify with zooey, so perhaps its simply "smart people"). I suppose in a sense Zooey is the female in this case.

www.academia.edu

Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey
www.academia.edu www.academia.edu

Ive read everything of Salinger (what little he wrote, so this is no feat) even the excessive "Seymour, an Introduction". I like the glass family very much and identify with certain things at certain times though im not suggest i share their brilliance necessarily. And you are correct there is not a single allusion (however vague) to the Glass family in Catcher in the Rye (however I think the character of Phoebe Caufield has some sort of spiritual connection to the glass kids).

Nabokov is the name of the game, though some of it is tedious (and unrewardingly so, such as Bend Sinister, which i actually enjoyed).

Currently im reading two books (this is usually my approach in case i tire of one): The Winter of our Discontent (the only novel of Steinbecks that ive never read) and In Search of Lost Time (Proust, this is my attempt at reading the longest novel ever written, to my knowledge).

The Winter of Our Discontent is ok (no Steinbeck is that great but I still enjoy it) and In Search of Lost Time, which i'd rate as very good.
 
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negrogesic said:
Have you read franny and zooey? Smart women -- who are always crazy (in the event youre a woman) -- seem to identify with zooey strongly (though i also indentify with zooey, so perhaps its simply "smart people"). I suppose in a sense Zooey is the female in this case.

www.academia.edu

Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey
www.academia.edu www.academia.edu

Ive read everything of Salinger (what little he wrote, so this is no feat) even the excessive "Seymour, an Introduction". I like the glass family very much and identify with certain things at certain times though im not suggest i share their brilliance necessarily. And you are correct there is not a single allusion (however vague) to the Glass family in Catcher in the Rye (however I think the character of Phoebe Caufield has some sort of spiritual connection to the glass kids).

Nabokov is the name of the game, though some of it is tedious (and unrewardingly so, such as Bend Sinister, which i actually enjoyed).

Currently im reading two books (this is usually my approach in case i tire of one): The Winter of our Discontent (the only novel of Steinbecks that ive never read) and In Search of Lost Time (Proust, this is my attempt at reading the longest novel ever written, to my knowledge).

The Winter of Our Discontent is ok (no Steinbeck is that great but I still enjoy it) and In Search of Lost Time, which i'd rate as very good.
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i like “Franny” and “Zooey.” prefer the latter, though they certainly compliment one another. apparently to the extent that they could be slapped together and called a novel. i relate to holden more than any of the glass family.

i’ve finished chain reading all published and collected salinger. last night i read “A Girl I Knew” (a forebearer of Catcher in the Rye) in a text file and tonight i’m reading an unbearable scan of “Hapworth, 16 1924” (a bizarro addition to the glass family pieces) from The New Yorker digital archives. after that i’m not sure where to go. The Complete Uncollected Stories of course, but triple digits for a bootleg collection seems steep and reading it all on my computer screen would be unpleasant. there are a few sites offering it as a kindle file, but they seem like malware or phishing traps.

why is zooey the female in this case?

ChemicallyEnhanced said:
Yeah. Requiem is one of my favourite movies (mostly Sara's storyline as I have an extremely similar addiction origins story) so I read the book for more...whatever there was more of lol.
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word. i strongly prefer Last Exit to Brooklyn. i read it before reading Requiem for a Dream. i've noticed a strong correlation between my preference for authors' and directors' works and the order in which i encounter them. Requiem for a Dream is one of the few examples where i think the movie is not only a better movie than the book is a book, but the movie is actually a better telling of a story than the book. which is rare, because feature length film is an inferior storytelling format. don't get me wrong, aronofsky put mustard on a hotdog made by selby jr. a hotdog with mustard is better than one without.
 
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hydroazuanacaine said:
oh man, cduggles reads genre! that’s cool. i want to re-read some books. when i was really into film, i re-watched movies dozens of times. but i’ve never been a big re-reader. except Lolita. i gotta re-read that from time to time to stay sharp. motherfuckers out here saying The Price of Salt is a happy ending.
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That’s interesting that you apply this to film but not books.

I love to watch and read things again and again. 🙂

Do you read books one at a time or simultaneously?

Sci-fi is how I unwind.

ChemicallyEnhanced said:
Nothing embarrassing there! Relaxed reading is the best kind! Who wants to read something that gets you stressed?
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I don’t want to, but right now I’m reading a book written by an engineer. The math is fine but the text flow doesn’t exist, nor does the concept of paragraphs seem to exist. It’s brutal.
 
Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than the simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring—gliding through his mind.

he should have held anaesthesia’s hand tighter.
 
hydroazuanacaine said:
picked it up today. the librarian was giving little commentary on each book as she scanned. said, “ooh, now we’re getting spooky” about this one.



edit:

in my head, frank was played by kevin spacey.
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If my librarian did that I'd check out all hard-core extreme fetish porn.
 
hydroazuanacaine said:
i barely got my self-consciousness down to the point where i can borrow the titles i actually want without sweating. i’m definitely guilty of grabbing extra books to dilute one that i’m ashamed about.
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Why would you be ashamed about a book? (Unless you're reading Twilight in which case FOR SHAME!!)
 
hydroazuanacaine said:
damn, 4.2k pages. still into it?
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Wow and I though Stephen King's Dark Tower series was long (actually it might be longer: around 4.6k I think).

Is it any good? I read the synopsis on amazon but sounds a bit pretentious for me. I usually hate 20th century novels the critics all LOVE. Charles Dickins is the worst author I've ever read. Definitely not a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Actually I can't think of any of the "greatest" classic novels I like.
What other are there?
I do really like some "modern classics".
I enjoyed (let me think): Last Exit to Brooklyn, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...that's all I can think of actually.
 
ChemicallyEnhanced said:
Why would you be ashamed about a book? (Unless you're reading Twilight in which case FOR SHAME!!)
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as inconceivable to me that someone is not. i’m ashamed of everything. especially choice in books. grocery store, pharmacy, library. anything that reveals me is cause for sweat under the collar. getting better about it as i get older. bringing one of the ferrante novels or Claudine at School to the checkout desk is still trying.

comes with catholic blood, i’ve heard.
 
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