Never any end to Paris

I'm on a constant binge of 'The Norton Anthology of Poetry'

Border County

and 'The Faerie Queen'

The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher

So I just finished reading Divergent... in French. Yup. The things I have to do for French class. XD

I bought The Prince of Thorns at Barnes and Noble the other day. 

Pretty good so far

The new Drizzt book. Homecoming, I think it is called.

I am also reading Queen of Thorns, by Dave Gross. A novel set in the pathfinder universe.

So for Lit I've basically read 7 books in two months.

Robinson Crusoe
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Swiss Family Robinson
King Solomon's Mines
Thirty Nine Steps
Poor Things
Jekyll and Hyde.

So what I've noticed is a lot of these "classics" are shit.

Absolutely fucking awful.

And by a lot I mean Robinson and Robinson. ESPECIALLY The Swiss Family one.

Just... no.

No.

The fact that this is a popular Disney film makes me pray for humanity. Unless Disney made it awesome like it makes other stuff awesome.

Crusoe... okay, fair enough. It was the first ever book released in English and gave all the Middle Class something to do. The glaring issue with it was its excruciating detail on the most superfluous of tasks (like thirty pages of him going from A to B and back to A) as well as a severe lack of any inner conflict.

But Crusoe is saved by what inner conflict there is (like the footprint incident and his battle with his belief in God) and basically the racist shit he does which offers a fascinating window into the 1700s White Man Supremacist ideology.

Its depth really simply is a reflection of its time. I was discussing with a friend of mine who argued that the excruciating detail reflects the monotony of being in the island.

I call it bullshit.

It would reflect the monotony if indeed Crusoe referred to it more and described what he was doing less. Mary Shelley managed to capture Victor's 7 year chase after his creation perfectly in just a few short pages.

But her prose is beautiful whilst Defoe didn't do much for me.

Still I gotta give him props for not repeating the word 'I' so many times in a first person narrative.

Swiss Family Robinson is written by a fucking Pastor.

That's all you need to know.

20K Leagues is a step forward in the right direction, so is King Solomon's Mines and Thirty Nine steps. You can see how literature is evolving beyond dry prose, telling not showing and other archaic techniques that's rightly shunned by any writer with an ounce of sense today.

And they're supposed to be this way for the course, btw.

Poor Things was absolutely fucking fantastic though and Jekyll and Hyde is great. Both of them a veritable mine of depth and meaning.

From all of these I recommend Poor Things the most. It's truly one of the most bizarre books I've read in a long time. Deliberately taking from Gothic fiction, from Frankenstein to Dracula as well as being written very unconventionally with opposing narratives, illustrations and even a section written entirely in verse.

11/10 material, a must read.

Right now I'm reading Madame Bovary and Carol for the Romance Strand of my Popular Fiction course.

Another novel with the driest prose and out-dated literary techniques -.- I mean, it jumps from one narrator to another without any sort of seamless transition so the introduction kind of leaves you confused.

So I'm sticking with an audiobook on this one.

I really can not deal with any more of this tasteless exposition, prose etc...

Carol's nice tho'

1950s stuff and about a homosexual relationship too. I just find it weird that so far she's accepted herself as being homosexual really easily.

As in there's no real mention that she's gay.

I mean, even today people have a hard time coming out. Just imaging in the 1950s when this stigma was far more intense and the consequences far more severe.

But none of them other than Poor Things and Jekyll and Hyde have really impressed me that much.

They're a'ight I guess.

Captain Nemo is fucking awesome tho'

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Fanfic. I'm not actually a big Potterhead (or whatever it is the fandom gets called) and never read more than the mandatory first three books in school, though I have been dragged into most of the movies as accessory. Nevertheless, this fic is highly enjoyable so far. The first two chapters alone are hilarious.

Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes is an extraordinarily ambitious book. He proposes a new way of thinking about what he sees as the fundamental moral problem of our time: Our moral instincts have evolved in such a way that they are very good at dealing with conflicts within social groups, but terrible at dealing with intra-group conflicts. The results: Ethnically motivated violence, racism, war, etc. Greene proposes that this problem can only be resolved by appeal to a common moral currency, and that this common currency is best provided by the much-maligned philosophy of utilitarianism. Drawing a wide array of research in social psychology as well as his own fMRI research, Greene argues that the standard criticisms of utilitarianism can be exposed as symptoms of various cognitive biases and heuristics that should not be trusted in dealing with issues of inter-group morality. I'm initially sympathetic to what he's doing here, having read a number of his other papers on these topics, but I've only just gotten started on the book itself, so we'll see what happens.

So uhh... yeah, 90 pages in Twilight.

To be honest, I went in with no expectations. No, that's a lie. I went in expecting total mediocrity.

I'm sure there's a internet law out there which dictates that popularity can in some way, damage a piece of literature/fiction's reputation through various variables.

Like something that's popular and mediocre is seen as terrible where as something that's popular and good is seen as overrated.

Obviously I felt Twilight belonged to the former.

Which so far... it sort of does?

So here's the thing. Stephanie Meyre needs to read more. A lot more. She needs to read Shakespeare, classics, contemporaries, Harry Potter and Poor Things. Her prose is shameful, absolutely disgusting. How did this thing get published without some serious editing, (and if it did, then so god help me there's something seriously wrong in the publishing industry) I have no idea.

This stuff reads like bad fan fiction. Those awkward jumps between formal and informal language, that terrible habit of tell/don't show and that clunky dialogue wraps everything up into one big mess. But I can overlook this. I've read some good Light Novels that were, unfortunately, poorly translated. It's funny how an American novel sort of mimics that, but okay, cool, whatever.

So what's underneath that?

Now 90 pages is far too short time to be judging anything, but since everyone I trust knows this is a bad read, I'm already jumping to conclusions.

Cos you see, Steph has some pretty cool things being set up here. Any good writer worth his/her weight can make anything work. Gray can parody notions of Victorian Society and subvert Gothic Literature, Oda can repeat a formula for every arc and still create an original story, Martin married fantasy and history perfectly and Harry Potter is British Naruto.

So when you bring up something that could have been about... I don't know... adolescence, maturity, desire, forbidden love etc... you can batch up something that's AT LEAST a solid romance novel, nothing 'literary,' but good nonetheless which might have developed further.

And you have all the set pieces for it too!

Bella is immature, she complains over nothing, has a fear of blood (pretty symbolic if you ask me,) socially awkward because of her immaturity and to top it all of, she's legal! (Sex and sexual desire is a complex subject and brings forward many possible explorations of the human condition. So I'm only half joking here.)

So yeah, isn't this blank slate of a character almost perfect to toy around with?

Aaaaaand then you have Edward.

So fine, he's sort of like Peter Pan at the moment, but that's okay, this offers a chance to carry those same themes from the tale into this. And to be fair, there *is* a semblance of chemistry between them. Now I'm not saying this is Spice and Wolf/Geralt and Yeneffer chemistry. Not in the slightest, however I don't roll my eyes at their conversations. Progress!

Still... 90 pages in and I haven't gotten too much into their relationship yet, but I can tell why this is popular for young girls. Stephanie is playing on a ton of fantasies here, it's pretty evident with the way Edward just suddenly takes an interest in Bella with no prompting what's so ever. He's also the most gorgeous thing in the planet (Bella's gotta remind us of this y'know, just in case we forget,) smooth to a point of being cheesy and nobody seems to care when he's being an ass.

He's flawless!

Which is a bad thing.

But oh well.

Right now I'm giving it a 4/10.

5 being my 'average' score which should equate to uhh... Not sure really, not read many books that aren't awesome. Books are a big investment.

Ain't got time for shit.