[December] What are you reading?

[Agamon]

Tertiary: Jeanne D'Arc, Her Life and Death
After participating in an edition war thread (honestly, I tried not too) where, of all things, Joan of Arc came up, I decided to learn a little bit more about her. This is an old book written in the late 19th century, so I'm hoping there's been been no major scholarship invalidating major aspects of this book.

Something not dark and vile came of an edition war? Will wonders never cease?

 

[Mark CMG]

Great Expectations
I read the book high school and loved it. I've never read it since, but I still tell people It's my favorite book. Recently, I decided to see if that's still true.

That's my favorite Dickens.

Jeanne D'Arc, Her Life and Death
After participating in an edition war thread (honestly, I tried not to) where, of all things, Joan of Arc came up, I decided to learn a little bit more about her. This is an old book written in the late 19th century, so I'm hoping there's been been no major scholarship invalidating major aspects of this book.

Her beatification and subsequent canonization by the Catholic Church came about in the early 20th Century which might alter the ways in which one might approach scholarship on the subject. And, of course, Women's Studies and literary criticism has greatly changed beginning in the late Seventies and would include a great deal of new thinking on the subject of Joan of Arc. You might want to cast about for something written since the 1980s that focuses on her and her place in history to read as a follow up.

 

[Shag]

At work book: Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nothing at all like the movie Lawrence of Arabia But an interesting historical read.

At home book: Complete Ghost stories of MR James. Continuing in my exploration of early 20th century weird fiction of authors who either influenced or were influenced by HP Lovecraft.

I've read some amazing stuff lately in this 'exploration' its mostly all short stories, so perfect for before bed.

 

[Starman]

You might want to check the last chapter in the book and ensure you've got a printing with all of the chapters in it. The book was written with three main parts, each with seven chapters, but the original US edition left off Part Three, Chapter Seven - and that's the version of the book that Anthony Burgess based his movie on. There's another chapter that happens after the events of the movie that puts a whole different spin on the story.

Johnathan

I knew about that chapter and made sure to get a copy with it. I just finished it and here's the review I posted on Goodreads (with some spoilers).

[sblock]I struggled with this book and nearly gave it two stars. Some spoilers follow.

We'll start with the good. The philosophical questions raised by Burgess are fascinating and relevant, maybe even more so 40 years after it was published. The question of how to handle violent individuals and whether or not it is okay to deprive a person of free will in order to make society safer is a question we need to ask ourselves. Burgess does a fantastic job of raising the question and making the reader uncomfortable coming down too forcefully on either side.

Now, the not so good. First, the language, the slang. Burgess says in his introduction (to my edition) that it was "meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography." It muffled it all right because there is so much of it that it takes you out of the story. The slang forces you to constantly stop and think about what you are reading. A good story should immerse you in the story without constantly jarring you out of it. That doesn't mean it shouldn't challenge you, but Burgess' slang serves to act more as a tripwire. Burgess also claims that "[p]eople preferred the film because they are scared, rightly, of language." That's . More on the film in a bit, but the fact is that I love language and within two pages of his book was just frustrated with the slang.

Second, the controversial final chapter. This chapter was not in the original version published in America and is not used at all in Kubrick's film. Burgess makes a decent argument for it in his introduction. The problem is less, I think, his basis for it than its execution. He claims in his intro that real people, real characters, change. I don't think anyone will argue this. However, Alex, the main character, changes so abruptly in the final chapter that it is as jarring as his overabundance of slang. Burgess wants his characters to be real, but then has a person who is a violent sociopath wake up one day essentially saying he's getting out of the rape and violence business because he's getting older and it's boring. He's eighteen! It's an optimistic cop-out. I knew basically what happened in this chapter before I ever read the book, but I thought that Alex was older. I just don't think you can say you want realistic characters and then have a character decide overnight at the age of eighteen not to be a violent sociopath.

Those two big drawbacks were nearly enough for me to drop the book down to just two stars, especially when put up against Stanley Kubrick's film. If I was grading the movie on this scale I would probably give it five stars. It does a brilliant job of playing with the themes of Burgess' novel while avoiding the thick as molasses slang, though it does have some, and it completely drops the ending. That certainly makes it a more pessimistic story, but one that I think is more satisfying. I think it's one of the rare cases of the movie being better than the book and I would probably recommend to most people that they watch it instead of reading the book. As long as they had a strong stomach that is. It is not for the faint of heart.[/sblock]

 

[Agamon]

I've jumped into an Amber pbp game that's starting up, and I haven't played or read either the game or the books in almost 20 years, so I've currently started a re-read of both The Chronicles of Amber and the Amber Diceless RPG.

 

[SkyCAM]

Noam Chomsky - Media Control if consciously able to and His Dark Materials from Philip Pullman before going to bed.

 

[Starman]

I've got a thing for the Devil so I'm reading Sympathy for the Devil, a collection of short stories about said character edited by Tim Pratt.

 

[Elodan]

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Complete-Novels-Stories/dp/0553212419/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324242257&sr=1-6"]Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol 1[/ame] by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Loved the Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch series (and House) and decided to finally read the source material.

 

[Tamlyn]

Also reading TH Lains D&D series starting with "The Savage Caves" though neither of the books should take long.

This whole collection is sitting on my shelf begging to be re-read. Some were ok, some... less so. IIRC Savage Caves was one of the better ones and set up characterizations that were further explored in some of the later books. What did you think of it?

 

[Richards]

That's not surprising, given that "T. H. Lain" was a shared pseudonym and the series was written by a handful of different authors. (As I recall, the thinking was they wanted all of the books to be next to each other on the bookstore shelves, rather than separated by different authors' last names.)

Johnathan