The Reading Room

« first day (2488 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2458 days later) »

Librarian

06:46

Q: Announcing the June 2018 topic challenge: Their Eyes Were Watching God

In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges, and since the list of suggestions has a single highest-voted entry at the end of May, it's time to announce the next topic challenge! Throughout June 2018, our topic challenge, proposed by Hamlet/user111, will be Their Eyes Were ...

7 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

14:03

@Shokhet I quite enjoyed the Animorphs books, but I don't think they were quite as good as that article is making out.

@BESW's not pingable? :-(

Words Without Borders: "promot[ing] cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature."

I was thinking surely this must have been linked here before, but I couldn't find it in the transcript.

Bookworm

14:32

Q: What connects the strangeness of the people and the magic of the bathroom?

I was just reading Turkish Short Stories from the October 2017 issue of Worlds Without Borders. In particular, the story "The Little Bathroom" by Sine Ergün (published freely online, and translated into English by Ayça Türkoğlu, so you can read it in full at the linked page). The story begins by...

short-stories turkish-literature sine-ergun

2 hours later…

Bookworm

16:33

Q: Joyce, Nora Barnacle and Papishee

On page 75 of A Reader's Guide to Finnegan Wake, in analysis of the line "to league his lot, palm and patte, with a papishee [62.9]", Tindall links "papishee" with both ALP and Nora, but without any justification. A quick google reveals that this link is now well repeated, without any further jus...

james-joyce finnegans-wake

5 hours later…

Bookworm

21:07

Q: Was the Eatonville of "Their Eyes Were Watching God" modeled exactly on the real town of the same name or simply inspired by it?

According to Wikipedia: The all-black Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God is based on the all-black town of the same name in which Hurston grew up. The town's weekly announced in 1889, "Colored People of the United States: Solve the great race problem by securing a home in Eatonville, ...

zora-neale-hurston their-eyes-were-watching-god

Mithrandir

> One white reviewer in 1937 praised the novel in the Saturday Review as a "rich and racy love story, if somewhat awkward," but had difficulty believing that such a town as Eatonville, "inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes," could be real.

user61230

22:05

Funny, I've been sitting on a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God for weeks. Guess it's time to read!

Rand al'Thor

@Zyerah Yay!

I was afraid this might be one of those TCs that doesn't get many questions.

Ironically, the least successful TCs seem to have been those that do best at expanding the site's cultural boundaries :-/

user61230

Go figure, people don't prefer reading intersectional works ;)

user61230

That's why they're topic challenges, though

user61230

and honestly Zora Neale Hurston isn't even very far off mainstream content

user61230

or maybe my perception of what mainstream content is has been skewed

user61230

22:11

I do wonder if it would help for us to have a way to give everyone a two-week-notice on topic challenges so we can actually get copies of these books

Rand al'Thor

Yeah, I've been thinking that too.

We used to announce the topic challenges a week or so before the start of the month, but we've been getting worse at that lately.

But would it be too confusing to have a meta about (e.g.) the July topic challenge posted halfway through June?

user61230

Yeah maybe

user61230

And a month is more than enough time. A week to get it from a library, three weeks to read it?

user61230

Plenty.

Rand al'Thor

Depends how much reading time you have.

user61230

22:14

True enough

Rand al'Thor

I have The Neverending Story in a bookcase a few feet from my bed, but still didn't manage to finish rereading it in one month.

user61230

I have a stack of books queued. Literally a stack.

user61230

I have a small bookshelf, but the front of it is "books I want to (re)read," and the back is "books I've read."

Rand al'Thor

If you read too many book recs, will the stack overflow?

(sorry, that was lame)

user61230

EYEROLL

Riker

22:19

Rand al'Thor

An easy way to widen one's cultural reading range is to look at short stories.

It's not much of a time commitment to run through, say, a few Turkish or Tunisian or Brazilian shorts.

Maybe I'll start posting more questions about things like this - either existing answerers might read the stories in order to post answers, or in order to attract new users from different cultures.

user61230

Collections of short stories are often more accessible and visible, yeah.

user61230

22:35

I think sometimes we take for granted that, while writing stories is borderline cuturally universal, the particular kind of long form we're used to is very Western.

Rand al'Thor

Mmm. I wonder what the reason might be for that.

... and whether that would make a good main-site question ...

user61230

Books have been written on that kind of thing ;)

user61230

And it depends so wildly on the culture that I think it would be hard to say

Rand al'Thor

Too broad?

Or would it be possible to write a decent executive summary?

user61230

I'd vote to hold (but I wouldn't mod-vote to hold)

user61230

22:48

I think there are more specific questions to ask under that big umbrella

user61230

The broadest question is, "why do various cultures develop their own methods of storytelling?"

user61230

You can drill down to "why did Europe develop the long-term novel?" but that's still too broad - it spans the history of writing for hundreds of years

user15026

@Zyerah same!

user61230

"What originally caused the popularization of the cheap mass market novel in Europe?" is closer, but still broad.

user61230

"What factors leading to the development of the cheap mass market novel in Europe were not present in other cultures?" is a specific enough... thesis topic.

Rand al'Thor

22:59

I'm never quite sure where to draw the line on "too broad" with these wide-ranging non-work-specific questions.

Probably it's something we as a site haven't really decided on either.

user61230

23:10

Yeah, I don't think we really have

user61230

Part of it is some line-blurring over what a reasonable answer length is

user61230

You can write pages about nearly any question that's been asked, just look at Hamlet's answers

Rand al'Thor

It might be interesting to ask the folks at Movies & TV where they draw the line. I've seen some interesting questions there about general cinematic practice which are still reasonably answerable.

(Science Fiction & Fantasy, IMHO, tends to be overly restrictive on closing non-work-specific questions as too broad.)

user61230

I think the information we get is likely to be skewed. It's hard to understate the impact of having any class of questions that can be easily answered.

user61230

Having that class makes long form seem too long by comparison.

user61230

23:14

Whereas we... don't have short form questions. At least, we don't have any that we as a community like or would want to be our core (even if individuals do like them)

Rand al'Thor

It's a good thing to have a mixture, IMO.

Some questions on meaning and story-identification, for example, (two of our top tags) can often be solved with relatively short answers.

Some of them can also be relatively easy, and a nice stepping stone for new answerers. Even if we wouldn't want them to be the core of the site.

And even if they don't make such good advertising for our site as, say, a long Gareth Rees essay.

user61230

Yeah, but you've gotta admit, they're not really the focus

Rand al'Thor

Oh, absolutely. The site would be a lot less respected if it was only story-ID and "meaning of this word" questions.

user61230

Also, those questions also get better longer answers. So we gotta be careful about "can be succinctly answered" and "the best answer is succinct"

user61230

Former is more common than the latter (both happen)

Rand al'Thor

23:28

Yeah. It's possible to go into great detail about the nuances of a particular word in context, or to describe a story in great detail making sure it matches everything in the OP (check out this guy's answers).

Interesting timing:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston & Cliffs Notes study guide #ZoraNealeHurston #TheirEyesWereWatchingGod - Free Shipping! http://ebay.com/itm/-/153044566089