The Reading Room

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Rand al'Thor

8:24 AM

@verbose After community closure of the first two blog-post questions, I took that as a mandate to close the other two.

@Randal'Thor ya..so what if i have an interpretation question about a text that does not exactly fall into the catetory of literature..now what? that's not a language question nor a literature question. where should that go? — user211842 7 mins ago

^ a fair question, but I think the answer's got to be "not every question on every topic has a home on Stack Exchange"?

I hope we don't end up driving this new user away - they're clearly putting a lot of thought into their questions, the first one about the fictional AI was well-received, and even the others could have been interesting questions if they were about something more on-topic.

Bookworm

9:06 AM

Q: Identify a children's picture book

I would have read the book around 2000 to 2005. I have very faint memories of it so these details may be wildly off: Portrait orientation, at least 6 inches by 9 inches or so. Illustrations were colored line drawings, realistic proportions. There was at least some small element of interactivity -...

identification-request

2 hours later…

Bookworm

11:21 AM

Q: As an 80’s child in the UK, my school book review was ‘Wateship Down’ and I expected an A. I was given a B+ wih the feedback “You missed the point”

I loved the book and bought the VHS with my Saturday job money, I watched the film dozens of times as a 15 year old and read the book 3 times. As a teen, I was keen to get the best educational grades and worked really hard on my English Literature essay, with quotes and character breakdowns. Gene...

plot-element richard-adams watership-down

Tsundoku

12:00 PM

TIL Philip Larkin was not only a poet but also a "selfie pioneer".

2 hours later…

Bookworm

1:35 PM

Q: Your mother wouldn’t allow "it."

https://vivfortoday.com/relationships/dear-mom/ "I so wish that you had left me a letter. I put myself in your shoes and imagined writing a love letter to Anna, so that if she, like me, ever had to look into the corners of her mind for memories of her mother, she would have no doubt that I had re...

meaning

Rand al'Thor

2:18 PM

@Tsundoku As someone who uses LaTeX on a daily basis, I'd rather say a double hyphen is a mathematician's en dash and a triple hyphen is a mathematician's em dash ;-)

bobble

2:49 PM

I've been sharing my reactions to books in a different group of online friends, which means I actually have the raw material for a few short reviews. Would you like me to add some to the Lit SE blog thing?

Rand al'Thor

@bobble Yes please!

bobble

3:43 PM

I warn you they're all spec fic of some sort or another. Even the one book that was essentially fanfiction of The Scarlet Letter, it was time-travel fanfic. The weirdest time-travel.

Not, like, a good weird. The mechanism was the MC holding her copy of The Scarlet Letter and then wishing really hard to go there.

Tsundoku

4:07 PM

@Randal'Thor As some who learnt to type on a typewriter (because computers cost an arm and a leg at the time), I can tell you I have never used a triple hyphen. At least not on a typewriter ;-)

In SE's markdown, a triple hyphen followed by a line break results in a horizontal ruler.

6 hours later…

Tsundoku

10:32 PM

Kamel Daoud, against whom an Algerian imam pronounced a fatwa in 2014, has won the Prix Goncourt for his novel Houris.

@bobble Well, if you don't post a review of that novel, I'll post a review of a Reacher novel :-P

verbose

11:12 PM

@Bookworm Millpond in the HNQ

Bookworm

Q: Why the son's wheat?

In Gabriela Mistral's poem La mujer fuerte, the third stanza is as follows: Segar te vi en enero los trigos de tu hijo, y sin comprender tuve en ti los ojos fijos, agrandados al par de maravilla y llanto. The not entirely accurate translation on LyricsTranslate.com [*] renders this stanza as fo...