The Reading Room

« first day (4314 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (337 days later) »

2:03 AM

Q: Why did Carbide say that Bela Bartok was from Vedmediv?

Carbide mentions in passing that the composer Bela Bartok "hailed from Vedmediv" (which is, of course, entirely fictional). He was actually from Nagyszentmiklós, which was then in Hungary but is now evidently in Romania. It also pointed out that He had a Hungarian name (which is a somewhat strang...

3 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

4:38 AM

@verbose Many congratulations on 20k reputation! That's a big milestone - would be the final rep-based privilege threshold if we had raised the thresholds when coming out of beta as SE sites used to do.

bobble

5:08 AM

@Bookworm still

verbose

6:03 AM

@Randal'Thor Thanks!

1 hour later…

Librarian

7:06 AM

Q: Announcing the July–August 2023 topic challenge: Jamaica Kincaid

In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the July–August 2023 topic challenge. Based on the number of votes (+4), the next topic challenge of the y...

discussion topic-challenge

4 hours later…

Peter Shor

11:14 AM

Neither the Robert Louis Stevenson nor the R.A. Lafferty challenge produced very many questions on Lit.SE. I think the problem was that their works are too straightforward, so there are no questions to ask about unexplained things in them. I don't know whether there's any good way to try to add the criterion of not being too straightforward to our choice of topic challenges, but I'm throwing out the question to see what other people think.

This is not that I'm not enjoying The Master of Ballantrae greatly; in brief, it's a case study of a truly evil man, and I think I want to ask something about Stevenson's purpose in writing it when I've finished.

Finally, let me note that his isn't actually true for the whole body of R.A. Lafferty's work — some of his novels, like Not to Mention Camels, if memory serves me right, are close to incomprehensible; but the only ones that are currently easily available are curated short stories which don't see to have too many open questions attached to them

2 hours later…

Bookworm

12:58 PM

Q: What are some sources Charlotte Brontë might have learned about physiognomy and phrenology from?

Charlotte Brontë frequently makes use of physiognomy and phrenology in describing her characters. Do we know of any sources where she might have learned about it? They would be interesting references to have on hand while reading her books. Sources that Brontë herself might have read, rather than...

character-analysis charlotte-bronte jane-eyre villette

3 hours later…

b_jonas

3:53 PM

@PeterShor but there were already ten questions tagged robert-louis-stevenson from before the challenge. literature.stackexchange.com/a/5610/139 is a very memorable answer.

2 hours later…

DLosc

5:40 PM

For what it's worth, I haven't yet managed to read anything pertaining to any topic challenge while the challenge was ongoing. I do have vague ideas of listening to something by Stevenson on Librivox... I might get around to it by September.

4 hours later…

Bookworm

9:22 PM

Q: Bibliography: Book Title (comma?) by Author's Name

I have checked CMoS, but haven't found an answer. Which one of these particular styles (with and without a comma) would be more appropriate for bibliography? Some Book, by Some Author Another Book, by Another Author or Some Book by Some Author Another Book by Another Author