The Reading Room

Congrats Pro-Tems!

Let our definition of literature grow meta decision by meta decision and not force it into one giant post about what constitutes literature.

The question sparked a debate, it didn't just get immediately deleted, so it was worth to post.

Happy first birthday to Literature.SE! Today marks the day that Literature.SE began private beta. Yearling badges will soon be awarded to those who joined on the first day :)

@verbose that used to be a meaning of "too broad", before they changed it to be only "multiple questions"

@verbose I'm here, but Jane Austen is unfamiliar to me.

@verbose yes, I'm not one for avoiding spoilers. I like being able to catch foreshadowing

@bobble Yeah, the general principle is to use those general tags for short works only. I removed the novel tag.

Word of the day: tsundoku

By my calculation, Doug should re-enter the Stack Exchange orbit in December 2024. Perhaps we can ask Doug3 to sort his mess out.

@bobble ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

The other thing that I meant to say yesterday is that there's a risk of creating a divide where there ought to be common ground. I see in yesterday's chat two principles that are both important: Literature.se ought to be a space where people don't have to deal with answers minimizing or defending rape; but it also ought to be a space where people are free to write about all aspects of literature

@verbose Here's Milton's reference in the 1625 edition of Purchas His Pilgrimes. Confusingly there are multiple page 35s in this volume! (Purchas could not have been Shakespeare's source as it appeared too late to influence The Tempest; but much of the same material had previously appeared in Richard Willes’ 1577 The History of Travel in the West and East Indies.)

@verbose I'd like to help, but my attention span is - hey, look at that tree.

Slavery and the First Folio

@Randal'Thor it might do better than some we've had

@GarethRees @Mithical @Tsundoku Following yesterday's conversation about the misprint tag, I suggest the following attempted compromise plan: we keep the tag but apply it to posts where the question suggests a misprint may be involved, regardless of whether it really is or not. That way, the tag does provide a list of relevant questions, although it won't be precisely the list of actual misprint issues, and we keep the principle of tagging according to questions not answers.

I bought an audiobook and am listening to it!

@Randal'Thor If the goal is two-fold: (1) Help the OP get better and (2) Improve the quality of questions on this site / make a question ore interesting, I can totally get behind that— iff the editor leaves comments explaining why the edits were necessary / are an improvement. Otherwise we have drive-by posters and drive-by editors.

@bobble I'm surprised you were in last place too. I wouldn't conclude it means people don't want you to mod. I think those of us who hang out on the site and in chat more or less regularly see all the work that you put in, but those who visit only occasionally might not see that, and probably base their votes on rep.

"There's no need to force "rules discussions" where there is no actual problem. Folks are more than willing to point out problems where they show up in actual practice, so tackle the problems when/if they become prominent in actual use" - from said answer

I called y'all jerks because you were going out of your way to ignore each other. I could've found a more nuanced way of saying that if I'd had the time, but I didn't AND YOU ALL NEED TO STOP GOING OUT OF YOUR WAY TO ANNOY EACH OTHER.

Books across borders: people across the world coming together to rebuild a bombed bookshop

I would promote voting in the election except I suspect everyone here already has

The gold tag badge that the system recommends to me is also a meaning tag badge, but I'm actually hunting for the william-shakespeare tag badge. That would be the first gold tag badge for an author on this site 😎 Still 85 answers to go 🥵

The Arthur Koestler reading challenge generated only six questions, but five of them received at least one answer and three of them became HNQ. These are rather high ratios.

Every book that you're not enjoying is too long

Before that, most of the classical music I had heard was from the 18th and 19th centuries, so The Rite of Spring really blew my socks off.

Ongoing topic challenges: Hayy ibn Yaqdhan / Philosophus Autodidactus and Abdulrazak Gurnah.

It's really nice to have this place to pose literature questions to. In previous lit classes I would have queries about the text but felt awkward asking the teacher, and anyhow they weren't always available. Here I can ask on my own time and people answer on their own time.

Looks like we'll have a pretty good election!

By the way, here is the page where I keep my own statistics of the reading challenges.

@GarethRees Gareth, you walk on water. How on earth did you find in the space of an hour a reference to Bede that explained this idea, when none of the other commentators over seven centuries gave as watertight a source? And as always, your answer is a model of clarity and lucidity. You should teach a masterclass on "how to write good LitSE answers."

Hence my suggested close reason of "This question is purely about the meaning of an English word or phrase, and literary context does not help to answer it".

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/… tells details about the database schema, which is the same as used on SEDE ( data.stackexchange.com ), only SEDE is updated more frequently

Pose (or vote on) questions to candidates in the upcoming mod election.

@verbose How about here ;-)

Would it be productive to have a discussion here about the recent proposal on meta to close the identification-request questions? I don't want to be the sower of discord, but on the other hand maybe discussion can help us find common ground...

Some good answers from new user Kiteration

@Alex If an undergraduate thesis counts, yes: Pale Fire Upon the Page: the book as object, mutilation, and the transformative touch of the reader. One of the footnotes references Was Nabokov's Pale Fire intended to be read non-linearly, i.e. jumping to each line reference?.

@MattThrower Not all HNQs have benefited low-quality answers but the algorithm's bias against questions that require extensive research is something I have previously mentioned on Meta.

So, I'm looking for a specific book in an online (German) bookshop and I find one by "Robert Black". I click on the author's name because I want to see if they sell other books by him. That gives me a list of books by ... Robert Schwarz. Because Schwarz is German for Black. Impeccable logic.

@Tsundoku Lemon flavour? The packages should be stocking-shaped with a cross-garter pattern.

Books are my favourite handheld devices :-)

Updated table of reading challenges.

Happy Twelfth Night, everybody! Don't forget to put on your cross-gartered yellow stockings! And enjoy your twelve drummers drumming, your twenty-two pipers piping, your thirty-three lords a-leaping, etc.