Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[Masada]

I started using a kindle because it's cheap. And now I'm too lazy to crack open a real book.

Are you suggesting it is a better Poland than Poland itself?

Poland is Israel.

*gets in bomb shelter*

 

[Takhisis]

I tend to re-donate rather than selling them, with the logic that there's a pressure on charity bookshops to stock bad books, because people donate the books that they don't want to have any more, but it's only because people donate the sort of books that I like that I find said shops so good. The difficult thing, though, is finding the ones that I want to get rid of: I'm still of the school which keeps most books because I might want them again - I even sometimes end up in discussions on CFC and have to go to my bookshelf to find the perfect passage which just occurred to me.

Oh, yes, of course. Why do you think I don't make space for the uni books?

Are you suggesting it is a better Poland than Poland itself?

Poland is Israel.

*gets in bomb shelter*

Well, 'ruso' is slang here for Poles, Ukrainians… and Jews. Few ethnic-Russian subjects of the tsars actually came over from the Empire.

And wasn't Israel started as a consequence of events that happened in Poland?

 

[Mouthwash]

And wasn't Israel started as a consequence of events that happened in Poland?

Actually, no.

Don't make me join Masada in that shelter.

 

[Takhisis]

Anyway, after dealing with Salvo Montalbano's life history I have now resumed reading The Rise of the Greeks by Michael Grant.

How many people do you think can fit in a shelter? You can't all come into the pervert bunker. Do you have an extra spot?

 

[Flying Pig]

I usually like Michael Grant, but was bitterly disappointed by his Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, which was far too short to do the subject justice and was primarily a dry, factual review composed of quotations from antiquated history books - a good four times as much of that as anything Grant actually wrote.

 

[Takhisis]

I haven't got there yet. I still have to finish reading Gibbon's work on the Romans though. It never ends! And it's so pompous! But I can't not finish it.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I'm slowly trying reading Dracula. The copy I have has a dictionary of old words at the back, but every word that I didn't know for some reason wasn't in this dictionary.

 

[Traitorfish]

I've heard it's very heavy going!

 

[Borachio]

Is it? I didn't find it hard at all. Mind you, I have read a lot of Shakespeare, so Bram Stoker might be nothing at all in comparison.

edit: but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, so I've taken a cursory look at it again.
http://bramstoker.org/pdf/novels/05dracula.pdf

I honestly can't see anything difficult here.

*shrug* It's just a gothic novel, imo. Quite a good one, iirc. Still, you know... gothic novels.

Isn't it all just a sexual allegory?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

The other day I stumbled upon the entire works of Franz Kafka for less than one Euro on Amazon. Read about 10% so far. One short story and part of a novel of his. What I like is that you never know what happens next because after a couple of pages of making sense there seems to always come some bizarre twist which makes no sense and makes the characters seem unstable and quit crazy, all while no one except the reader seems to take any notice of it. In the short story I made an effort to make sense of it anyway. And that actually turned out to be very rewarding. It helped me to reach some kind of awareness and sensibility for one aspect of the mindless jumble which our minds can be. Another time I just shrugged it off and moved on.
The writing style is at times a bit cumbersome. A lot of long sentences and sometimes I have to reread them to understand what I just read because only after having read the whole sentence am I making sense of its structure. But on the other hand it also is somehow a easy-going read. Perhaps that is so because it all revolves around the inner impressions and wishes and struggles of the main character and those are pretty much just plainly stated. Even in conversations. It is uncanny in what detail the characters will discuss the intricacies of their motivations and thoughts with each other, even regarding seemingly very trivial things. Like pouring out the entire history of the last half hour of your thought process was just the polite thing to do.
Though that is not to say that there wasn't also some nice picturesque language, because there is.

 

[Lillefix]

Is it? I didn't find it hard at all. Mind you, I have read a lot of Shakespeare, so Bram Stoker might be nothing at all in comparison.

edit: but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, so I've taken a cursory look at it again.
http://bramstoker.org/pdf/novels/05dracula.pdf

I honestly can't see anything difficult here.

*shrug* It's just a gothic novel, imo. Quite a good one, iirc. Still, you know... gothic novels.

Isn't it all just a sexual allegory?

The first I found when I looked at the PDF was

E's got mindin' the animiles so long that blest if he ain't like a old wolf 'isself! But there ain't no 'arm in 'im.

 

[Flying Pig]

That's not too bad if you're actually British, I don't think - 'he's been looking after the animals for so long that I swear he's like an old wolf himself - but he's harmless'.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

The first sentence I could also understand, even though it required a bit of focus on my end. But >'arm in 'im< baffled me. Are those apostrophes always just placeholders for the letter H? Except when at the end of the word, in which case they perhaps always are placeholders for the latter G?

 

[Flying Pig]

Usually, yes - if you drop an initial letter in English, it's nearly always H.

 

[Arakhor]

Yes. Dropping one's aitches is a popular eye-dialect for Cockneys and other urban poor. Just say them without the aitches, as even the initial aspiration which the apostrophes would imply aren't really necessary.

If you're a Yorkshire lad, however, it's t' this and t' that and t' the other thing too.

 

[Flying Pig]

That's Lancashire; Yorkshiremen actually swallow the t', so 'there's trouble u(glottal stop) mill'

 

[Arakhor]

I'll take your word for it. I've always been terrible at accents.

 

[Kyriakos]

I was told that a recent book (novel) about demons, is also linking them to probability theory and quantum physics, and the bookshop keeper who is reading it claims it is very good. Might have a look, although i don't read novels nowdays..

 

[Terxpahseyton]

You are a writer who doesn't read novels?

 

[Kyriakos]

You are a writer who doesn't read novels?

Yes, cause i am lazy?

I read short stories, though. Sorry