The Reading Room

9:54 AM

Was going to ask why Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman hate Best of Queen albums. Found the answer myself.

10:06 AM

Damn it, Internet made asking good unanswered questions here so much harder.

Oh, wait...

10:17 AM

Here's a conundrum: I wanted to ask whether "Murder Mysteries" was intended as a part of The Sandman mythos. It's obvious from the story (the tone, the characters, the moral) that this is the case, yet I couldn't dig up a confirmation from Neil Gaiman. Should I still ask?

Hehe :D

10:56 AM

@Hamlet I'd like to read up some more about close reading and then decide whether or not to edit it myself. Wikipedia, for instance, doesn't say close reading necessarily has to be on a word-by-word level. I don't know yet whether sentence-by-sentence can be small-scale enough to count as close reading by some people's definition, or whether you're just being pedantic :-)

@Hamlet Eh. They're not doing us any harm, and still being drowned out by non-ID questions. Wouldn't your time be better spent on providing great Q&A (setting a good example and educating those who don't know as many literary techniques as you do) rather than worrying and complaining about a small class of questions that you don't like?

@Mithrandir So do I, but if one person upvotes and another downvotes, the question is still eligible for Tumbleweed.

@Mithrandir Is it legit (i.e. not breaking copyright or anything)? If so, feel free to edit it into my TC announcement on meta.

@Randal'Thor Not if it's been commented on :)

@Randal'Thor @Hamlet Don't worry, you sillies - I will rather drown this site in a flurry of Sandman questions than see it be overtaken by story-identification :)

Is Sandman going to become the new 1984? :-/

@Randal'Thor Isn't it in the public domain?

@Mithrandir The book is. The translation has its own copyright.

@Mithrandir The original text is, but apparently translations can be copyrighted.

11:03 AM

For that matter, I'm not even sure about copyright laws in Japan and whether the original can be considered in public domain, but whatever.

@Randal'Thor But it already is, with 18 questions, and 17 questions, respectively. Right now it's tied with Sherlock Holmes, but I'm working on fixing that.

@Gallifreyan Bah.

I just got like the complete Sherlock Holmes set (not quite all), so there might be some more SH questions ;)

So much to read, so little time
And Doctor Who is yet not viewed
Sadness.

@Gallifreyan OMG, watch it.

The latest episode was an absolute stunner.

Got maths and physics exams next Saturday.

11:13 AM

I kept on saying "oh my god" during it as I realised how things were going to unfold - so much that I felt like Steelerfan :-P

BESW

As always, I reserve judgement on the first half of a Moffat two-parter until I see how he pays off what he promises.

Agreed.

The monks three-parter was great up until the stupid climax in the third episode.

BESW

11:37 AM

James Gurney's book review of Lessons in Masterful Portrait Drawing: A Classical Approach to Drawing the Head by Mau-Kun Yim.

12:06 PM

@Community Dammit, stop deleting this question!

@Randal'Thor again?

@Mithrandir Danke.

That's the third time I've undeleted it.

Also, I don't understand why that question is so downvoted.

Could we get a sense of why this question is being downvoted? For reference, here is the most recent meta post on reading order questions. I personally haven't voted either way on this question yet, and I would like to get a sense of why the community is voting the way it is. — Hamlet ♦ Feb 25 at 0:40

12:08 PM

Other reading-order questions haven't been so poorly received.

If a couple more people upvote it, it'll stop getting roombaed so easily.

Emrakul hasn't spoken to us in a while :(

I've been thinking that too!

I haven't see them around much either, although they were talking in the mod room yesterday

I hope their departure from Puzzling wasn't a first step towards their departure from the whole of SE.

And maybe someone ought to pin a message announcing our next challenge here as well.

Q: Who was Long John Silver based on?

12:19 PM

Darn, not even pingable in here or tSL.

July's topic challenge will be the Japanese classic I Am a Cat. Get your copy ready - the challenge starts on 1 July!

> feline transmogrification

That's a great phrase, since "moggy" is a colloquial word for a cat.

Bookworm

12:48 PM

In his little-known preface to Treasure Island (which I discovered while answering this question), Robert Louis Stevenson wrote rather persuasively on the possibilities for how a fictional character might be inspired, whether by a stranger encountered once or by a good old friend: And then I ...

Q: Why does Lucifer mention Raguel and Sandalphon as possible rebels among the angelic host?

@Bookworm While answering my own question, I inspired myself to ask a new question :-P

3 hours later…

Feeds

3:35 PM

Can you help us out? Who was the inspiration for Long John Silver in #TreasureIsland? #Literature https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2808/481

Tweeted by StackLiterature on June 25, 2017 at 3:04 PM

Bookworm

3:49 PM

In chapter two of Season of Mists, Lucifer mentions the angels Raguel and Sandalphon as angels who could rebel [against God]: Why those two angels?

comics neil-gaiman the-sandman

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor hmm, let me take a look at the wikipedia article

> In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text.

(that was very first paragraph).

Hamlet

4:13 PM

I'm not being pedantic. Try looking at the poem "Naming of Parts" sentence by sentence. Then try word by word. There's a huge difference.

@Randal'Thor "I don't know yet whether sentence-by-sentence can be small-scale enough to count as close reading by some people's definition", well, it counts as close reading under your definition :) Do you trust your definition? Do you trust my definition? There aren't too many good articles about close reading on the internet. I can pull up some definitions from books, would you trust those?

4 hours later…

7:58 PM

Gah, @Shokhet, you've gotten "The Sound of Silence" so irrevocably earwormed into my head that I'm going to have to ask a question about it.

@Mithrandir Ask 80 so I can get a Taxonomist for the tag.