I am a high schooler and I tried reading Samuel Butler's Iliad by myself and I found it extremely hard to understand. I had a basic idea on what was going on, but lacked understanding of detail. Is it supposed to be this hard?
@Gallifreyan We've never had a clear consensus on English-related tags. We have consensus to use language-based tags (not country-based tags) for French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, ... literature, but English-language literature has always been a bit unclear.
If we had a single english-literature tag, it'd be easily the most popular tag on the site; I think it's OK not to have that tag, since English is the primary language of SE anyway.
We could split it into multiple tags like american-literature and australian-literature and so on, but that could get difficult since some English-language literature doesn't come from primarily English-speaking countries.
And of course we'd run into the same issues that led us to decide on language-based over country-based in general.
What about American Gods, for instance? Written by an Englishman living in America, set in America, covering a lot about American culture, but from the point of view of said Englishman, possibly published in Britain? (or maybe both simultaneously?)
I'd be fine with not having any English-related tags, neither an all-encompassing english-literature nor things like american-literature. But it needs a meta discussion.
Damn it. Read "Murder Mysteries" (the comic by P. Craig Russell based on the short story by Neil Gaiman). Was going to ask a question, but found the answer on his forum, and another reading confirmed it. And almost made me look silly.
Only 6 days left on the @goodreads giveaway for the book @ZachWeiner and I wrote! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34490192-soonish?from_search=true https://t.co/aTwi53VnzE
In chapter 2 of Season of Mists, Lucifer says the following to Morpheus, when trying to explain his burden of ruling Hell:
I cannot say I see Lucifer's point here. In some of the further stories it is shown that Morpheus has lot of work in The Dreaming, and that it doesn't seem to be easy to r...
This question is best answered using a technique called close reading. What is close reading, and why is it important? Close reading isn't a hard concept to understand. It simply means reading something closely, i.e. paying careful attention to every word in a passage, and seeing how the exact wo...
@Hamlet I don't know. They're at ~25% now on SFF, if I'm not mistaken. In our case, some ~15 per cent will be noticeable. Not that we can do anything about it, except asking questions other than story-ID.
In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges, and since the list of suggestions has a clear winner as June nears its end, it's time to announce the next topic challenge! Throughout July 2017, our topic challenge, proposed by Torisuda, will be
I Am a Cat, by Natsume Sōseki.
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@Hamlet Further to my comment - there are 6 books and a pile of short stories. I've gone through 3 of the books and all teh free short stories that are online so far, so there's not a lot left before I've scooped up all the available info. So I mean yeah, people can totally add stuff, but this is a relatively limited body of work.
user15026
Not sure community wiki is super needed. I read fast so I should have it sorted out sooner rather than later. And it's been a fun excuse to read some of my favourite books again, paying a bit more attention!
In about 1998, I found a used paperback that I liked, but gave the book away and can no longer remember the author's name. The book was remarkable in that it used only lowercase letters throughout. The one story I remember clearly is that she would find abandoned, broken-down cars on the side o...