Corpsey

bandz ahoy
youre stressing out too much. if it feels like homework its a waste of time doing it. if youre consulting every footnote youre wasting youre time. the key to reading shakespeare is locating the rhythm. it often helps, i find it helps, to read aloud or subvocalise, using different voices, comedy ones are good, for each character. im not saying its always easy but it has musical qualities, and grasping that is the key to comprehension. 'locking in' to the rhythm to use a phrase used in the percussion thread. it clears up many more ambiguities than glossaries and footnotes.

Yeah, this is why seeing a Shakespeare play performed is (or can be) fun even if you haven't read the play and don't really know what they're talking about the whole time. I like to at least think I'm understanding everything I can about what I'm reading (and especially since Shakespeare's language is so often praised), but as you say I'm losing the sense of vitality and enjoyment in consulting the glossary every other line.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Also you're right about vocalising. I didn't understand the appeal of poetry much at all until I started reading it out aloud.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not just that you lose the fun, you also lose the rhythm which then makes it harder to follow so it's a vicious circle if you know what I mean. It was never easy for me either so I'm just sharing the tricks I learned really.

Craner reads it like it's a newspaper but I really had to wrestle with it
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My 'plan' was to read it through rather laboriously, working out what it all means step by step, so that I could then re-read it more fluently.

Realistically, though, this approach makes reading it even ONCE such a slog that I really can't be arsed.

I've been reading a few of the sonnets lately without any explanatory notes and have managed to figure out most of what he's talking about and loving them, to boot, so you're saying the right things here for sure.
 

jenks

thread death
Read: Teju Cole's Everyday is for the Thief; David Rose's Meridian; Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey; Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat
and am just starting: Edouard Louis' The End of Eddy and Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Re-Reading Proust - Within a Budding Grove
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Re-reading Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov. I find most fiction hard going tbh, but this is lovely - well written, unpretentious, emotionally real, great sense of place and the passing of time (the last days of the USSR) at both an individual and societal level. I should get around to reading one of her later novels, but there's something very comforting about reading a well-loved book and finding it just as captivating second time around.
 
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you

Well-known member
I read Howards End recently. I did not like it. Forster feels like a macho author (well aware of the irony of this). Each character felt flat, a person made to prove a point - not a person he empathised with. I just didn't get under the skin of his characters in the same way I do with Dickens. I never heard their voice or saw them - also, the language of HE felt more archaic than Dickens. Just felt stuffy and flat overall. I never got on with The Machine Stops for much the same reasons - great ideas but poor fiction.

I also read Cosmopolis by DeLillo. This is the third of his I'd read. White Noise blew me away but since then this, and Zero K, have really left me disappointed.

I'll probably read Argonauts by Nelson next :)
 
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"The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?"
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Finished Dan Severn's autobiography two days ago, and JG Ballard's Interviews as collected by Re:Search from the last decade today...

Inexplicable that the guy with a tendency to brutally maim and give men concussions is the one with more nuance and gentility but there you go.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I'm just finishing Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, which is fairly impressive bit of collapsing-society borderline SF, but might have been emotionally safer to read in a time when it felt a slightly thicker hair's breadth from reality.
 

bruno

est malade
i'm on a peter hopkirk binge. i found trespassers on the roof of the world in hong kong, read it in one go, then read foreign devils on the silk road which is about the 19th century extraction/pillage of the lost artefacts of the taklamakan and environs. both are terrific books for anyone with an interest in central asian history/culture. now reading the great game. you get your money's worth with hopkirk: thrilling stories, impeccable english, a better understanding of today's rivalries and none of the revisionist nonsense a modern writer would inject. as the germans would say, tip!
 

droid

Well-known member
I'm just finishing Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, which is fairly impressive bit of collapsing-society borderline SF, but might have been emotionally safer to read in a time when it felt a slightly thicker hair's breadth from reality.

Read this a few years back and think of it often. Hauntingly plausible.

Just finished Rodigan's book. Nothing spectacular but a good read. Would be a nice intro for reggae and soundclash neophytes.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Nearly finished The Golden Bough - just approaching the section that deals with the Crucifixion in terms of an established tradition of sacrificial scapegoats, which apparently caused a bit of a stir when first published.

Feel like I should tackle Graves' The White Goddess or some Joseph Campell next. All these works are referenced in the intro to the 50th anniversary edition of Dune that I got last year, along with Spengler's Decline of the West, which is surely more apposite now than ever.
 
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luka

Well-known member
There's a big difference between Campbell and graves. The graves is frankly incomprehensible. The Campbell is fairly trite although not without interest. I'd recommend a vision by yeats as a mid point
I love spengler though. Great fun.
 
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