Keyboards and novels

[timepiececlock]

Logging in from my new keyboard, whee! I like the shape of it, though the keys are a bit harder to press down than my last keyboard. And it's slightly more angled thanthat was, so I'm missing keystrokes every once in a while. Also, I keep hitting Page Down instead of End.

I also dropped by the library today to renew The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilord, which I checked out but haven't actually started yet. After all, I'm still at the last quarter of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a third of the way through Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, and about twenty pages into Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. Not to mention the twenty or twenty five fiction books I started before I went to college and still haven't completed yet, even though I'm finished.

While I was at the library I was seduced by the open sign in their used book buy-back store, where the price of one's soul is measure in amounts ranging from 25c to $3.00. For 50c each I picked up four books, and donated an extra dollar out of the guilty sensation that they probably couldn't even afford the electric and cleaning bill for this room with the meager amounts they make from it.

Based on the first sentence of the excerpt/summary on the back of each of these books, which should I start after I finish the ones I mentioned above?


"Dog of a Saxon! Take up your lance and prepare for death!"
-Ivanhoe

Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy is an epic of eighteenth-century Yorkshire life, and perhaps the most capriciously written classic of all time.
-Tristam Shandy

Selected in a readers' poll in 1975 as the greatest novel of imagination of all time, DUNE's creation of a richly detailed world utterly unlike our own is only the beginning of its achievement.
-Dune (my second reading of it, after 6 years)

Lyric and sensual, D. H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century.
-Lady Chatterly's Lover

[Poll #830936]

Edit: Not having read either, my mom votes for Tristam Shandy and my father for Ivanhoe... the first because it looks fun and the latter because "it will give you something to move happily away from with your next book."

Comments

[missmurchison.livejournal.com]

I didn't vote because I enjoyed "Tristram Shandy" most, but I'm insane.

[saxon-dogs.livejournal.com]

I've only read the beginning of Dune, couldn't sit through it (there's something wrong with me I know).
But Ivanhoe! It's a fun book. It's like all CHIVALROUS HEROES and ROBIN HOOD and jousts and Templar Knights and just good ol' cliche tale of lords and ladies.
That line, btw, is my favorite line from Ivanhoe ♥

[flickums.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Dune at the moment.

While I'm not a big fan of Frank Herbert's writing style (it's more interesting to read what he's saying rather than how he's saying it. He has a large elegant world full of characters who talk like the cast of Friends), I find the philosophy behind his books to be fascinating and at the same time also quite depressing.

[jakia.livejournal.com]

The only two I've read out of those is The Dark Tower and The Amber Spyglass. Have you read all the other books in the series? Because that's what I spent my tenth and eleventh grade year reading right there. Both are very excellent.

Can't help with the poll, though, because alas, I have not read any of them.

Have you read The Posionwood Bible? That's a surprisingly good book there, but I guess I relate to it more because I'm a preacher's daughter. I'm reading that one at the moment. (Amazingly enough there are a lot of zutara-y like quotes in there, though that may just be because I see everything in Zutara nowadays.)

jak

[authenticjoy.livejournal.com]

Ivanhoe's been on my "to read" list for far too long. This poll doubled my guilt on it. Especially since my last two books were trashy thriller novels. *is embarrassed*

Dune is a fun read and quite full of itself. It can be light reading if you want it to be, or heavy duty stuff.

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

Oh...I'm commenting on your lj. Normally I just lurk. But you mentioned books, and so I had to crawl out of the dark hole I live in to put in my 2 cents...

I seem to recall starting The Mapmakers but I think I had to return it before I could finish it, and I never got into The Dark Tower series, though some of my friends read most of it (said it got too long in the end). I need to reread His Dark Materials because it's been about five years since I read them, but I do remember being terribly disappointed with the ending of Amber Spyglass; it was like halfway through the book he realized he had a deadline and threw things together and revealed things that weren't nearly what they could have been.

And Nightwatch, simply put, is The Best Book Ever. I sincerely hope you've read all the Guards books that come before it, because otherwise it won't be nearly as enjoyable, but that book...is The Best Book Ever. I think it's really Pratchett's magnum opus, because it has every bit of the sly wit he's praised for, but also puts forwards all the points he's been trying to prove with his books and...why is this book not on my shelf? *glares at bookshelf* So, yeah. Love.

I wish I had read Dune in a class; I ended up wading through it on my own and figuring everything out for myself. Which worked, but there was a lot I skipped through (terraforming, anyone?). And the first two sequels were awful. I haven't read Ivanhoe (which is supposed to be good) or Tristam Shandy (which sounds very interesting), but in 9th grade I did get a few chapters into Lady Chatterly's Lover, at which point I put it down because even though it was in the school library, I rather thought I would die of embarrassment if anyone caught me reading it. It was very good though.

*goes to read Jane Eyre, which she somehow avoided reading throughout her high school career*

[scarlettfish.livejournal.com]

Go for Tristram Shandy! Who doesn't love complicated metatextual 18th century masterpieces? Otherwise, I'd go for Ivanhoe. Lady Chatterly's Lover, whilst fainty tilitating, is otherwise a big let-down. But then, I hate D.H. Lawrence with the fire of a thousand suns.