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Originally posted by l�cid Orson Scott Card not that i have anything to compare his writing to. i just like Ender's Game.

Too bad he's an ultra-religious douche.

I think Ray Bradbury has excellent style, although I tend to prefer more "hard" sci-fi. I think Arthur C. Clarke is a good middle ground (for me).

I can't say I enjoy reading Derrida. In fact, if I hadn't had lecturers explain what he meant, I probably still wouldn't have a fucking clue how deconstruction works.

Foucault, however, I found pretty insightful. "Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison" is a very interesting and accurate explanation of how law, control and surveillence work in society. It makes 1984 seem like the paper-thin pop theory it actually is.

I have a "clue" how deconstruction works in the sense that I have read summaries of deconstructive ideas and figures by people who know a lot more about them than I probably ever will. But if you gave me an actual example of a "deconstruction" of a work, I doubt I could get much out of it, and never did when I tried to read Derrida's takes on Levi-Strauss, Marx, or whomever.

I've seen that Foucault book recommended before and will have a look at it.

Man, I need to get more into literature.

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Originally posted by enydo Man, I need to get more into literature.

Why do you say that?

Because I have no idea about 80% of what you guys are discussing, and reading is cool!

quote:

Originally posted by enydo Man, I need to get more into literature.

Nerd! *punch*

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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I agree, which was the reason for my clarification. See, I've read Nietzsche and Heidegger (who is also a big slog) and still haven't find Foucault or Derrida very worthwhile. Maybe you can direct me to something of theirs that you find insightful?

God, I bloody hate Nietzsche's style. As for Martin, I once read a book in which Heidegger talked about language with a Japanese scholar, and it was so appalling I flung my photocopies across the room - I like his ideas when they're not even wrong, but it was so egregious I couldn't go any further.

As for Foucault, I started reading a book of his but the reading was so sluggish I eventually put it down (I'm building up the courage to read it again). And, as for Derrida, he's fun as hell! And by fun, I mean random and nonsensical: If old age had not failed to kill De Saussure, I'm sure Derrida would eventually do that

Edit: I've got some Merleau-Ponty in my reading list. Ever read anything written by him, Brian?

Try Ursula le Guin.

The Lathe of Heaven was amazing. Definitely recommend it.

quote:

Originally posted by enydo Man, I need to get more into literature.

Most of the time I read literature, I regret it. Dostoevsky is one of the very few authors that don't make me feel like I'm wasting my time. Kafka is sort of amusing too. I think I only read Siddharta (by Hesse) and 1984 (by Orwells) because I wanted to understand why it is that Hesse got a bloody nobel prize and Orwells is so famous.

But, to no avail. I think I now know what it feels like to be a crack whore trying to get pumped up with coffee... or something

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Originally posted by Lira But, to no avail. I think I now know what it feels like to be a crack whore trying to get pumped up with coffee... or something

You're Doing It Wrong.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J You're Doing It Wrong.

Actually, I already gave up on that. I now only read literature by people whose ideas I know are interesting beforehand (such as Kafka, Dosto, Sartre, and others). If a book is not written by philosophers or scientists (I still want to read B. F. Skinner's novel), then I am definitely going to approach it with caution.

quote:

Originally posted by Lira I now only read literature by people whose ideas I know are interesting beforehand (such as Kafka, Dosto, Sartre, and others). If a book is not written by philosophers or scientists (I still want to read B. F. Skinner's novel), then I am definitely going to approach it with caution.

It's kind of limiting to approach literature as a philosopher all the time...

orson scott card's enders game is awesome, was mentioned above but i'll second...

no idea about the dude personally since someone said he's a religious nut.. i don't think it comes across in the book...

awesome sci fi

Ender's Shadow was more interesting, imo.

The story is enjoyable, though the writing is not so great.

By far my top picks from the classics :

Two thin gs i'd recommend

Author: Stanislav Lem


Books: The Chronicles of Amber

at the end of ender's game you find out that the practice sessions were ender directing actual battles, and they destroy the insect's homeworld, only for the queen ant to enter ender's mind and say sorry

quote:

Originally posted by woscar Philip K. Dick?

Can't recommend him enough. Schizophrenic genius madman.

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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles It's kind of limiting to approach literature as a philosopher all the time...

I know but, if I don't enjoy the rest, why insist?

People are just recommending their favourite SF now, aren't they? Hardly any of what's been mentioned is well written. Typical TA.

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Originally posted by Lira I know but, if I don't enjoy the rest, why insist?

Who's "insisting?"

It just seems like philosophically oriented people sometimes have a narrow idea about what fiction is "for," like there has to be some kind of "argument" or "philosophical conclusion" in there for it to be worth the read, or else they have to justify their reading of it with some kind of intellectual superstructure about "social critique" as with Kafka. If that's what fiction is for, why not just read bullet-point summaries of the "ideas" each work contains and save the time?

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but that seems like the way you're approaching novels. :-P

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Who's "insisting?" It just seems like philosophically oriented people sometimes have a narrow idea about what fiction is "for," like there has to some kind of "argument" or "philosophical conclusion" in there for it to be worth the read, or else they have to justify their reading of it with some kind of intellectual superstructure about "social critique" as with with Kafka. If that's what fiction is for, why not just read bullet-point summaries of the "ideas" each work contains and save the time? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but that seems like the way you're approaching novels. :-P

Exactly why I said he's doing it wrong. People who think literature has no worth, or is "masturbatory" if it doesn't contain some philosophical conclusion or statement on the human condition do not understand the joy of text.

quote:

Originally posted by Aaron C. By far my top picks from the classics :

Maybe not the most well written but definitely one of the most influential sci-fi novels.

I was actually thinking about re-reading it last night...

But yea, Akira, Evangelion, V (TV series), Independence Day, and a shload of other movies, anime, and tv series have drawn from this in some form or another.

The reason Nabokov hated Dostoevsky so much was that he thought D. was a mediocre artist elevated because people thought his ideas were profound.

quote:

Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why? Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

You may want to take Nabokov with a grain of salt, though. He was massively arrogant and dismissed a lot of writers that are both popularly revered and central to many curricula:

quote:

Interviewer: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad "writers of books for boys"? Nabokov: That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story, "The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried. What did you read when you were a boy? Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry-- English, Russian and French-- than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several-- Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke-- have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

quote:

Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad. Well, I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions-- romantic in the large sense-- of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of ail, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream-- "ca fait rever" as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books". That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses,Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

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