Recent comments in /f/books

rh6078 t1_jdjfgpn wrote

Reply to comment by Nickelass069 in "The Talisman" a collaboration between giants. by i-the-muso-1968

Check out the Kingslingers podcast if you haven’t already. The set up is that one of the hosts has never read any Stephen King and the other is a massive King nerd. The hosts read a few chapters and then discuss the themes and writing. The first series focuses on the Dark Tower series and then subsequent series discuss the related books. I recently re-read the Dark Tower and it added so much to my enjoyment of the writing

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ForeverFrolicking t1_jdjf17y wrote

Reply to comment by lydiardbell in Do you ever Google terms in books that you don’t understand? by imperator-curiosa

This is my approach, as well. I can usually glean enough information from other context clues to understand what's going on without fully understanding a specific word or phrase.

I tend to look up obscure English words that I'm not familiar with, more than a word or phrase in a foreign language that I don't know simply by not being a native speaker of the language. I like learning new words that I could potentially add to my vocabulary, but I'm less enthusiastic about learning bits of a foreign language that I'll likely never encounter irl.

I'm currently re-reading the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and there's quite a bit of Swedish sprinkled throughout the story. For the most part though, they'll be businesses, streets or city districts. I don't really need to know exactly what/where "Gotgatsbacken" is to know its just a section of the city the character currently happens to be in. If it comes up more frequently, and seems to hold weight in the plot, I'll look it up.

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Jack-Campin t1_jdjedxw wrote

Reply to Do you ever Google terms in books that you don’t understand? by imperator-curiosa

Very rarely with books as I have a ridiculously huge vocabulary. Where I do find myself googling is when reading articles on the web about New Zealand today - I left decades ago and have only been back once, and the language is changing fast. It's almost turning into a creole with added Māori words for concepts about society and interpersonal relationships. I didn't need to know what "hapū", "tamariki" or "taonga" meant back in the 1970s, but I do now.

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Machiniac t1_jdjdjgy wrote

Reply to I read Finnegan's Wake so you don't have to by machobiscuit

Finnegan is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake. This is more a collage than a book. More like abstract painting than literature. Read a lot of it and understood very little and skipped to the end. Ulysses is super cool and satisfying to read but yeah agree with OP’s review, as much as one can for a book they didn’t read all of.

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KAWAWOOKIE t1_jdjcrhg wrote

Reply to I read Finnegan's Wake so you don't have to by machobiscuit

Hilarious post, thank you for the chuckle.

I have read Finnegan's Wake and find it to be an amazing book, deeply moving and insightful and a real flex of writing accomplishment. It's also very tough and I've heard folks say it takes years to read the books necessary to have the right context to read it. I generally don't like this kind of thing -- read whatever you want when you want! but it's hard to argue that most people who enjoy FW have more context and are able to enjoy the layers more fully than those with less shared literary context.

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Hour-Mission9430 t1_jdj8r90 wrote

Reply to Toxic book fans by sunforthemoon

For absolutely every topic, you will have toxic, gatekeeping fans. They're usually quite loud like that, but realistically a small percentage. Unsurprising that an interweb based work with majority online readers would have a higher percentage of exclusively interweb troll fans. I hope they didn't drag you down too much.

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