"Knock knock."
Posted on 02/03/2014 2:13:32 PM PST by jocon307
Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Now just a dang minute. Milton never told a single knock-knock joke in his life. How can you take a literary figure seriously who’s never told a knock-knock joke? And don’t ever START me on his opinion of the Three Stooges. Poor guy never had a chance at serious culture is what I think.
10. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand: Love it. Read it three time, listened to it several more. NO MATTER HOW MUCH I LIKE THE REST OF THE BOOK..”THAT PART” always makes me glassy eyed. I always hurry through it.
9. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin: Never read it. Why should I? I am willing to bet it is a boring as all get out.
8. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo and A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: I have read A Tale of Two Cities multiple times and listened several more. I love it. The entire thing.
7. 1984, George Orwell: Read this between five and ten times and have listened to it multiple times. Scary book. Brilliant.
6. Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville: I have tried multiple times, but can’t get through it.
5. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith: Made myself get through it. The overall message is good.
4. Moby Dick, Herman Melville: I love this book. I first read it at age seven. Much of it went over my head, but I have read and re-read it many times.
3. The Art of War, Sun Tzu: Bah. I’ve tried. Boring as hell.
2. The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli: Still trying this one.
1. Ulysses, James Joyce: Not even interested. This is really funny, too, because of my ignorance of what it really was. I had read the Odyssey, and couldn’t believe I enjoyed it so much. I felt much the way about the Odyssey that William F. Buckley felt about Moby Dick. It was fantastic, and I thought, “why had so many teachers made this stuff sound like torture to read?” I felt cheated to have been scared away from it! So I thought (in my literature-istic ignorance) that Ulysses would be really good. I very nearly barfed. I thought “What is this CRAP? What kind of poseur even reads this stuff and treats it like a work of art?” Not my cup of tea...
Gravity’s Rainbow better be good, I just spent ten bucks downloading it from Amazon. I love science fiction and I have never heard of it before. It doesn’t make the top 100 in any of the lists I’ve read.
Indeed.
Atlas Shrugged would have been much better if Ayn Rand had trimmed down the preaching.
The story and the dystopian situations in the book conveyed the idea perfectly without it!
My favorite scene is near the very beginning, when the train won’t move because the switch on a red light has frozen in the “ON” position. Although there is nothing wrong with either the train or the track, everything stops because NOBODY will take responsibility or think “Outside the Box” to get things done. It is SO typical of today’s world!
JMO, of course! ;-)
Hahahahaha! Me too! Hell, I can't even get through the audiobook!
"Knock knock."
I have never been much of a reader. I do like adventure stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scot.
One thing which caught my attention is in just about all of Stevenson’s novels, the idea of good and evil in the same person is present. For example “long John Silver”.
One of my favorites is “Quetnin Durward”. I sometimes think I am the only person who has read it.
I read 10, 7, 6, 4, and 2.
I was a die-hard Richard Lattimore fan (one of my Greek profs was a friend of his) but my daughter read it in the Fagles translation and I've decided I like it. Lattimore is all about preserving the form, Fagles gets the meaning into modern English. Two very different choices.
I went through a Walter Scott phase as a pre-teen. The novels, not the poetry. I never could hack the poetry.
If you like RLS I'm sure you've read "Kidnapped" (Alan Breck is another one of your good/evil characters, though more good I think) but have you read the sequel ("David Balfour" in America, "Catriona" in Britain). A political thriller with asides into Scots folklore. The Lord Advocate Prestongrange is the good/evil character there (Sim Fraser and his mirror image Tod Lapraik being 100 percent evil!) "He was kind to me as any father, yet I ever thought him as false as a cracked bell."
LOL!! That is a great description!
How true! I love the book for its message, and I did enjoy the flow, but only because I put myself in the time the book was actually written and read it that way. When I read it now, I have to take it in the way I take in an older movie that I really like, but since times have changed, the movie can't stand on its own anymore. It is that way with Rand's style.
I admit that what I find hilarious about Rand's prose is the contest they have where people have to write something really silly in her style...OMG! It is difficult to read her work the same way after that.
That said, she was a visionary in what she portrayed in her book.
It is the one by E.V. Rieu, whoever that is.
Heh, that sounds derogatory, but I guess I mean it more towards myself...I have no idea which ones are good or bad.
I had to go find my dog-eared copy...it has tape holding the paperback cover on, and there is a card I must have used as a bookmark: “Things Newlyweds Need”
“I first read [Moby Dick] at age seven.”
Woah, that’s impressive!
I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and the first three books of The Wealth of Nations.
This is a wonderful thread!
I am enjoying it SO much! :-)
***I wrote a book report on Moby Dick from the Classics comic book version of Melville’s story.****
I found it to be an easy read. I’ve read it twice. Whenever someone says they have read it I ask a simple question to see if they did or didn’t.
What was Ahab’s artificial leg made of when he was killed?
or
What did Ahab give the blacksmith to make into a harpoon?
I never had any familiarity with anything Dickens except for “A Christmas Carol” well into my forties.
Then I read “A Tale of Two Cities”, and was struck by how much I enjoyed it. I immediately went out and read “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Bleak House”, “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Oliver Twist”.
Heh, I understood why people thought he was such a great writer. The only problem was, the more of him I read, the more alike all the books sound, in much the same way all of Tom Clancy’s books begin to meld into one another.
It's good - very clear, but not entirely accurate.
And that other translation is Richmond, not Richard, Lattimore.
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