The Reading Room

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user61230

1:40 AM

A Grain of Wheat sure is wonderfully blunt about its ideology.

user61230

> God helps those who help themselves, it is said, with fingers pointing at a self-made man who has attained wealth and position, forgetting that thousands of others labour and starve, day in, day out, without ever improving their material lot.

user61230

4:25 AM

I started A Grain of Wheat tonight, and... hey, I'm probably gonna finish it tonight, too. Definitely, definitely worth reading.

user15026

@BESW I'm reading her book The Seventh Bride right now. I will probably finish it tonight. I love her stuff.

Guardian of the lost children

5:20 AM

Q: Why are there two different versions of "Pathetic Symphony"?

I recently stumbled upon the 1948 English edition of Klaus Mann's Pathetic Symphony at my library and started reading it. This copy of the novel was shelved next to the 1935 German edition of the same. I have some basic knowledge of German, so when I put the novel back in place, I took the German...

untagged

1 hour later…

Bookworm

6:41 AM

Q: Short Horror Story in which protagonist is a monstrous freak in hiding?

I read this in a horror anthology, and thought it was called "I, Monster" but could find nothing through Google on this. Also thought it was an R Chetywnd Hays story, but again it seems invisible now. I loved this story as a teen - plot as follows (Major Spoilers) A young woman is in hiding in ...

story-identification short-stories

Bookworm

6:54 AM

Q: What does Stephen Dedalus mean: "History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”?

Source: How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008) by Thomas C. Foster. p. 247 Middle. The big, often very uncomfortable, ideas run rampant in those disquieting categories, “minority” and “postcolonial” fiction. That’s nearly inevitable. How can a novel by an African American or African Car...

ulysses

BESW

7:11 AM

@Zyera I feel that phrase usually gets read as far more materialistic than most religious contexts can really support.

user61230

7:53 AM

@BESW How do you mean?

user61230

(Also: book finished! It was very, very good and I highly recommend it.)

BESW

@Zyera It's often associated with material wealth, power, and prestige, rather than with spiritual enrichment, moral strength, or personal self-worth.

user61230

Ahh, yeah. In context, I think that's kind of the point, actually.

BESW

And, well, outside of obvious extortion like the prosperity gospel, that's not the kind of help most religions offer.

user61230

Yeah, I getcha.

Hamlet

9:07 AM

@Bookworm How to read novels like a professor seems like a life-sucking way to learn about literature

BESW

@Hamlet I'm going to assume they mean Professor McGonagall, or possibly Professor X.

Mithrandir

9:28 AM

I'd like to read a book like Professor Dumbledore.

BESW

9:50 AM

@Mithrandir I imagine it's not unlike this:

Tweeted by 380kmh on October 18, 2017 at 7:43 PM

4 hours later…

DForck42

1:45 PM

@Gallifreyan I bought a new book and started reading it

@Gallifreyan Rhett & Link's Book of Mythicality

Gallifreyan

2:21 PM

@DForck42 You are already dead to me, no need to try harder :-D

I'm on page 49 of A Grain of Wheat

I like the portrayal of Dr Lynd

DForck42

@Gallifreyan :-D

Feeds

2:52 PM

Do authors translate their works accurately? Learn about authorial intent and translation: https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3741

Tweeted by StackLiterature on October 20, 2017 at 2:08 PM

doppelgreener

@BESW it confuses me that Modern means both "the current day, right now" and "a movement that happened sometime last century or the century before, followed by the postmodern movement which is what's going on now" in multiple industries. (e.g. film, art, literature, philosophy)

well, not so much confuses me, but befuddles me. that shouldn't have been allowed to happen!

1 hour later…

Bookworm

4:02 PM

Q: What do you mean by first draft , when a authors starts writing his story?

When author is writing , when he/she knows it is his/her first draft.

writing-process

2 hours later…

user61230

5:46 PM

@Hamlet It is. Sections of it were assigned reading for me, in high school.

Librarian

6:46 PM

Q: Expand the on-topic guide

The on-topic guide includes the following items: Questions about how to interpret a specific scene, quote, theme, plot point, etc. in a work of literature. Specific questions about the publishing process, literary conventions, or tropes in literature. Story and quote identification que...

discussion feature-request scope

4 hours later…

Hamlet

10:35 PM

A: When and why did orcs go green?

I think it's likely that avoiding the perpetuation of racist stereotyping played a part in this. There's been plenty of debate as early as the first publication of the Lord of the Rings — see a citation on that on Tolkien Gateway, along with a reasonably nuanced discussion on the topic. But the ...

pleasantly surprised by this answer on SFF.

Also lol at the lack of citation to Habits of Whiteness

but that's SFF for you I guess.

Rand al'Thor

11:03 PM

@Hamlet Done.

@Zyera Any more detail on that? Was it good because of well-written characters, flowing prose, examination of Kenyan culture, ... ? (I ask because I'm trying to figure out how much I'd enjoy it and whether I'm willing to spend money on it.)

In fact, even better, want to write a one-minute review of it for the Lit.SE Tumblr feed?

Bookworm

Q: What's the significance of the stanza about V for victory in Tony Harrison's V?

I'm working through the long poem "V" by Tony Harrison (available here). The narrator is describing the graffiti scrawled by football supporters, with "V" denoting "versus", as in "Leeds V [another team]". In the middle of this, he stops to draw a contrast with a different kind of V written up in...