The Reading Room

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7:02 PM

@b_jonas I think that's one of the things that contributes to the frustration—that voting does not reward the best scholarship. (This doesn't bother me—this is not a community of literary scholars, so it is unrealistic to expect it to behave like one—but I can see how if this was your aspiration then it would be a source of woe)

@bobble Go for it! When sourcing a quote, antedatings are always worthwhile

bobble

7:16 PM

@GarethRees well, 1955 would be after both of the authors typically cited as the source

Gareth Rees

7:56 PM

@bobble But no actual sources are given, just attributions! Bare attributions are worth very little. For example this question had an attribution to Darwin, but the earliest source we could come up with was 2009.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

9:51 PM

Q: What does the "he/him" refer to in "I'll try to get him to work far out" in The Old Man and the Sea?

I began to read The Old Man and the Sea recently. I'm reading a paperback but for the question I'm using the link to Gutenberg. Soon after I started to read the book, I found I did not understand what the "him" and "He" refer to in the following dialog in which the old man and the boy were chatti...

bobble

10:04 PM

I can't re-flag this as NAA

Bookworm

10:45 PM

Q: Hidden-away man found dead, was addicted to a fancy/medical form of opioids

I read this as an English-language paperback book, bought from a discount bookstore in an Australian (likely Melbourne) shopping mall late 2019. No idea how old it was at the time. The title was bland and "literary" (as opposed to cool and spec-fic-y, the main other category of title according to...