The Reading Room

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6:06 AM

Which would you say is a pretentiously written book? I mean pretentious with language or the use of words. I find "Special topics in calamity Physics" of Marisha Pessl that fits in that description.

author-identification

8 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

2:17 PM

@BESW Hey, long time no see!

@ChristopheStrobbe It's a nice idea, but how would we actually make people aware of it? Chat regulars are pretty few in number, and I suspect so are meta regulars.

3 hours later…

Christophe Strobbe

5:21 PM

@Randal'Thor We would need to write a meta post about it and then turn that meta post into a featured item.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

7:48 PM

Q: What does collachrimation mean?

The end Thomas Nashe's novel The Unfortunate Traveller takes a very antisemitic turn when both the novel's main character (Jack Wilton) and his concubine fall into the hands of a Jew named Zadoch. Zadoch wants to sell his prisoner to another Jew, Doctor Zacharie; while Jack Wilton is being transp...

meaning the-unfortunate-traveller thomas-nashe

3 hours later…

user61230

11:13 PM

I think the better function of the reading challenge is to serve as a communal recommendations list. The time limit really hurts our ability to make good use of the challenges.

user61230

Some part of me wants to say, if we replaced the topic challenge with a process by which we select books to add to a Lit.SE Community Reading Recommendations List, we'd have a lot more success and see a lot more use.

user61230

It would probably have the same aim -- to compile a diverse and varied list of recommendations across genres, topics, themes, etc.

user61230

Actually, lemme draft this on Meta. Open to chatting here, though.

Librarian

11:59 PM

Q: Monthly Topic Challenges aren't getting much attention. How can we change them?

Monthly topic challenges on Lit.SE don't get a whole lot of attention. Christopher Strobbe rightfully points out that participation has been almost negligible in recent months. This is in spite of overall site participation on the site remaining relatively constant. One of the major difficultie...