The Reading Room

> News has just come in that Professor Quentin Grub, the Blackpool psychologist who specialises in reading between the lines, has just been run over by a tram.

Ongoing topic challenges: sign language literature (until the end of February) and Arthur Koestler (until the end of March).

@Tsundoku To kill a French vampire, you need to drive a baguette through its heart. Sounds easy, but the process is painstaking.

‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake. The group in Venice, California, started the difficult James Joyce book in 1995. They reached its final page in October

@shirish It somewhat depends on which aspects of the Inheritance cycle you most enjoyed.

> Poetry can help people cope with loneliness or isolation. Reading, writing and sharing poetry can help people cope with loneliness or isolation and reduce feelings of anxiety and depression, a new study shows. eurekalert.org/news-releases/1007071

Happy 2nd birthday, Literature SE!

Congratulations to our three pro tempore moderators, Mithrandir, Hamlet, and Emrakul!

@CowperKettle When my friend was trying to decide whether to name her son Tobias, she kept pondering: Toby or not Toby.

Happy 6th birthday to Literature SE!

Would somebody please vote on some topic challenge suggestions? There's currently a fourteen-way tie (!) between answers on a score of 3, and we should announce the Nov-Dec topic soon.

@Randal'Thor Hope it's a reasonable answer.

@Bookworm Look upon the HNQ, ye mighty, and despair :-P

Congrats @alexg on 1k rep!

I've posted a proposal (actually re-posted an old proposal of @Tsundoku with a slight modification) about renaming our language tags. Please check it out and vote/comment. If this gets enough support, we can rename the tags using mod tools without needing to edit hundreds of posts.

@bobble Please don't.

I failed so many maths tests I can't even count.

Ongoing topic challenges: Nazi Holocaust literature (until the end of December) and Min Jin Lee (until the end of January).

This is a great chance to demonstrate how, when brought together by a shared interest, you can collaborate and treat each other with respect.

The "melted ice cream" question asks for the meaning of a metaphor and would be a good question for literature.se. But the "from the night" question is borderline: the OP seems to be asking an English usage question prompted by the song, or using the song primarily as an example

@Randal'Thor I don't think formatting of citations is a good fit for literature.se — it's a matter of following technical documentation (in this case, the MLA Style Manual). Best asked at academia.se: they have a citation-style tag with over 450 questions.

I'm not sure we should be adding misprint to questions where the answer is "it's a misprint", @GarethRees. Tags are generally about the question, not the answer (see the way we tag ID questions, for instance).

@Bookworm as for me, yes, since the prof has told us in lecture that he thinks Paradise Lost is the best work in the whole literature class series curriculum, and that it will be heavily represented on the final...

I think the urge towards canon-formation is a natural one. In real life, one is constantly facing the problem of figuring out what is really the case from a collection of texts. This is vital because there really are underlying facts of the matter. So it is not surprising that people slide (deliberately and playfully in some cases, unconsciously in others) into applying the same approach to fictional texts, where there are no underlying facts.

We need a user on this site with the handle @Jorkemo

Amusing article by Elif Batuman in the Guardian about the experience of trying in vain to get a language model to emit facts (when of course it is designed only to emit language)

Please nominate some excellent Q&A from 2022!

Some good recent answers from Clara Diaz Sanchez, a newish user here but a veteran at scifi.se.

Congratulations to Annie Ernaux for being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I've been familiar with the author's name for a long time but haven't read any of her works. To be honest, I had no idea she was still alive. Ernaux was born in 1940.

I also recommend Lorenzo Valla's Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine (1440).

If you like the genre of epic demolitions of conventional wisdom, another example is Richard Bentley's A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris (1699) which convincingly demonstrated that said epistles are forgeries or fictions.

"Adam & Eve: first ones to ignore Apple terms & conditions" (Twitter)

@bobble Thank you for your continued care for the site, to the extent of listing moderation activities you wanted to do when possible, even while on strike.

Yay, I finally found a copy of a book that I was looking for (mentioned earlier in this chatroom). Jules Verne, L'île mystérieuse, translation by Majtényi Zoltán, 1980 non-censored edition, titled A rejtelmes sziget.

@bobble I guess I'm just not getting an answer

Can someone give me a tl;dr on the strike status? I did sign up to the Slack community but the signal-to-noise ratio there is pretty poor. I'm itching to answer some questions here, and not being able to upvote helpful answers on StackOverflow is bothering me too. (I'm doing some new-to-me coding stuff and SO has been very helpful)

what ... happened in here

@AncientSwordRage Are mods here not proactive in closing off-topic questions? Or is that left to the community?

Arrogant as it is, I can't resist stopping by to say ... I have a book out in a couple of weeks :) haynes.com/en-gb/tabletop-gaming-manual

Three cheers for @Gallifreyan, carrying the site all alone for many months!

Congrats to @Tsundoku and @Randal'Thor for becoming Literature Stack Exchanges next two Pro Tempore Moderators!

Ongoing topic challenges: Robert Louis Stevenson (until the end of the month, after which you'll have to find his treasure island on your own) and Ales Adamovich (until the end of July).

Ongoing topic challenges: Isabelle Eberhardt and Ukrainian literature.

Flower symbolism is a tricky subject to get reliable information about. There are a lot of popular books on the "language of flowers", where the authors have gathered, magpie-like, all the examples they can find, without regard to source or time or place. This is all very well if you are sending a bouquet to your aunt, but in a literary case, we need specificity as to time and place.

I had no intention of contributing to you having a terrible state of mind, and you shouldn't delete and answer because I suggested a different approach to backing it up. To reiterate, I haven't. and won't downvote yor answer.

Answering here has also gotten me more used to looking things up online and structuring an argument in a way most natural for its flow, instead of forcing every thought into the arbitrary framework of a 5-paragraph essay.

Ongoing topic challenges: George Büchner and Isabelle Eberhardt, incidentally two authors who died before the age of 28.