The Reading Room

12:02 AM

@Hamlet Coming back to your idea about renaming [symbolism] and [meaning] to [symbol-analysis] and [quote-analysis] ... I think we need to find something better for [meaning]. There are a lot of questions which are about analysing a single quote in a way that's more than just its immediate meaning. Including a lot of symbolism/symbol-analysis questions, for that matter.

user61230

12:47 AM

I'm going to float a question. I don't know how well it's going to be received... but, I don't actually care, I think. It's a practical problem I'm currently facing.

Catija

@Zyera ?

user61230

0

Q: Before reading "A Grain of Wheat," what historical facts and cultural context is directly relevant to know?

I'm looking to read A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. However, I'm very unfamiliar with the history and culture of Kenya, to the point where I know practically nothing about it. The history of Kenya is long and complicated, and the culture of Kenya is, well, a culture. Absorbing the entir...

Catija

Seems like an interesting question... Sort of similar to the "Do I have to watch the prequels before watching sequels" sort of questions...

user61230

I think it's a really important question, too. It's easy to miss points in books like these just for want of context.

user61230

If I can get an answer that says, "you should know [X] before you read this," it could easily clarify a whole lot.

Catija

12:57 AM

Sure. There are lots of books that could benefit from some context... how much different is reading Dune now rather than 30-40 years ago when Arabic names were much less common knowledge?

Bookworm

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Q: Before reading "A Grain of Wheat," what historical facts and cultural context is directly relevant to know?

I'm looking to read A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. However, I'm very unfamiliar with the history and culture of Kenya, to the point where I know practically nothing about it. The history of Kenya is long and complicated, and the culture of Kenya is, well, a culture. Absorbing the entir...

historical-context a-grain-of-wheat ngugi-wa-thiongo cultural-context

Catija

@Bookworm Late to the party...

BESW

@Catija Hmm. I thought Dune's weird conceptions about Arabic culture were misguided when I read it 14 years ago. I wonder what I'd think today.

user61230

@Catija @BESW I'd be very curious to know how my own perceptions have changed, as well.

Catija

I'm not old enough (I think) to have read it at a time where the story would be comprehensible and knowledge of Arabic culture would have been pretty unlikely.

That could be an interesting question, though... How has the populace's interpretation of Dune changed with the mainstream status of Arabic culture?

BESW

1:07 AM

Yeah, my awareness of the inspiring culture was definitely unusually high --although still very incomplete-- at the time of reading.

And, well. It didn't feel like a very respectful book from that perspective. Very "noble savage."

user61230

5:31 AM

Kitchen vocab for A Grain of Wheat:

sufuria - flat-bottomed, deep, handle-less pot
djembe - drum
jembe - hoe
panga - broad, flat, hooked knife, used as a farm tool (secondarily, as a weapon)
shamba - plot of land/farm
rika - a generational group in Gikuyu society, w/ implications I don't yet understand (hard to find information about online, too)

Bookworm

9:09 AM

0

Q: What "unspeakable conclusion" was Amira's father about to reach?

The short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron", winner of the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, may be read in full here. I just read it last night, and a single passage confused me, in the story of how Amira came to be on her glass hill: The king’s daughter read an unspeakable conclusion in...

short-stories meaning amal-elmohtar

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera That's an excellent question, and quite possibly vital to a proper appreciation of the book for most people. Why would it be anything but well received?

@Zyera I wonder if there's a way to turn this list (or a comprehensive version of it, if that's only from the opening chapters) into a Q&A on the main site. It's a useful resource for someone reading the book.

We're definitely getting much better at attracting traffic to this site, not just from active users on active questions. Not long ago I was nowhere near Notable Question badges on any of my questions, and now I've got two windfalls just recently. (The first of those three came from an HNQ, but the other two are old questions which must have been accumulating a lot of views over time.)

Mithrandir

1:35 PM

The Tolkien Ensemble

The Tolkien Ensemble (founded in 1995) is a Danish ensemble which aims to create "the world's first complete musical interpretation of the poems and songs from The Lord of the Rings". They published four CDs from 1997 to 2005, in which all the poems and songs of The Lord of the Rings are set to music. The project was approved by both the Tolkien family and HarperCollins Publishers. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark gave permission to use her illustrations in the CD layout. Permanent members are Caspar Reiff and Peter Hall (composition, singing and guitar), Signe Asmussen (singing), Øyvind Ougaard ...

interesting

I can't type todya.

Bookworm

2:55 PM

0

Q: How much of the sequel to the Princess Bride was written?

As mentioned on Wikipedia, in some later editions of The Princess Bride, the first chapter of Buttercup's Baby, which Goldman said was a sequel, appears at the end. A sequel was never realized, and one might argue that he was never serious about Buttercup's Baby, though my impression from an in...

the-princess-bride william-goldman

Rand al'Thor

5:27 PM

@Mithrandir Neither can I - Todya is a hard language to type, because of the alphabet.

Bookworm

5:52 PM

0

Q: To what extent did Defoe attempt to apply formal realism in Robinson Crusoe?

I recently finished writing a paper on Robinson Crusoe for my English class on the rise of the novel. We had read the novel concurrently with excerpts from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, in which he argued that the works of Defoe, Richardson (we then read Pamela) and Fielding - which Watt cate...

history-of-literature robinson-cursoe daniel-defoe realism

HDE 226868

@Bookworm 7 months is too long for me to have been away from Lit!

Rand al'Thor

Yay, @HDE is back!

HDE 226868

@Randal'Thor At least until we finish the novels this semester. :-)

Now I just have to find a question or two to answer. . .

Rand al'Thor

You need to make that push to become a Trusted User here :-)

HDE 226868

What do I need? 700 rep?

(700 more rep, that is.)

Rand al'Thor

5:59 PM

626, to be precise.

HDE 226868

Not undoable.

Rand al'Thor

@HDE226868 There's a couple of Sherlock Holmes questions from a few months ago - both answered, but you might be able to add more.

(Not sure if that's really a big interest for you, but it's your top tag.)

Mithrandir

I got too annoyed at the editors of my copy to continue reading, unfortunately.

HDE 226868

Reaches for his anthology

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Not reading abridged versions again, are you?

Mithrandir

6:09 PM

@Randal'Thor nope.

Just a copy that was not edited well.

Rand al'Thor

Did you get yourself an unabridged version of the Poe stories, btw?

Mithrandir

Yup.

Rand al'Thor

If not, you can always read them online - I think they're old enough to be out of copyright.

Oh good.

Mithrandir

I don't know exactly where it is at the moment but I expect it's less than three feet away from me.

Rand al'Thor

800-page PDF of Poe's complete works

reminder that we have a meta post for these links

Mithrandir

6:12 PM

About Holmes: The " goes BEFORE the he said, people!

Not "Blah, blah blah blah he said"

And please. Be consistent in using British or American styles.

I can read one or the other. But at least please be consistent.

Rand al'Thor

Urgh.

Where did you get this copy?

Sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect from a crappy online translation, but this isn't even translated!

Mithrandir

I got it off of someone who was getting rid of a lot of books, along with a bunch of other novels and four bookcases.

Ummmm ISBN 978-1-4351-4457-6

HDE 226868

@Randal'Thor Out of the questions that I haven't answered so far, I think the best I could do would be to supplement your answer here by arguing that Holmes refers to other antagonists - Charles Augustus Milverton, John Clay, maybe even Colonel Moran - in similar enough language. He's also clearly had encounters with them before. Had Doyle wanted, he plausibly could have turned one of them into a Moriarty of sorts.

Hamlet

6:31 PM

@HDE226868 have you at all thought about taking the tools of lit criticism and applying them to scientific writing?

Since I know you're into physics and it seems like you're studying literature at some capacity in college

0

Q: To what extent was literary criticism being applied to scientific works at the time Darwin's Plots was written?

I'm reading Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. This book is essentially a work of literary criticism of Darwin's theory of evolution. It traces the Darwin's literary influences as well as Darwin's impact on literature. It ...

literary-criticism charles-darwin

Mithrandir

6:44 PM

This is a slightly disturbing but very interesting answer literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3925/…

HDE 226868

7:02 PM

@Randal'Thor: literature.stackexchange.com/a/3931/71 might interest you.

@Hamlet No, I haven't. That's an interesting thought.

Hamlet

2

A: What "unspeakable conclusion" was Amira's father about to reach?

Expanding from my comment. Warning for disturbing themes and also a lot of links to fairy tales. "Seasons of Glass and Iron" pulls from several fairy tales. It looks to me that variations on The Princess on the Glass Hill, The Enchanted Pig, and The Black Bull of Norroway are most prominent--how...

This community seems to do a reasonable job of answering questions related to gender, so the logical conclusion in my mind is to ask more of these questions

BESW

9:46 PM

Ever wondered what the world of tomorrow is going to be like? @ZachWeiner and @FuSchmu give us a snapshot: http://po.st/ReadSoonish https://t.co/eivXhdjexE

Tweeted by PenguinUKBooks on October 18, 2017 at 7:54 PM

Thread:

When we praise a fantasy novel, we usually praise worldbuilding, magic systems, etc. without realizing that relationships are why those work

Tweeted by SamSykesSwears on October 17, 2017 at 7:30 PM in reply to SamSykesSwears

Rand al'Thor

11:17 PM

@HDE226868 I upvoted, but also left a couple of comments ~~picking holes in your argument~~ playing devil's advocate :-)

@Hamlet I have another question about that particular story, but need to figure out how to phrase it without offending/alienating people.

BESW

Don't piss off your publisher.

Tweeted by AcademiaObscura on October 18, 2017 at 7:50 AM

Good night. Shout out to the kids trying to read what they love after bedtime. With the homework still undone. I see you. I am you.

Tweeted by Lin_Manuel on October 18, 2017 at 4:44 AM

HDE 226868

11:42 PM

@Randal'Thor And I have responded. :-) I might edit some of that in if I can make it coherent.

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