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

[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 ♥

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I actually read Dune for my 11th grade English Honors class. That helped a lot-- we talked about it for over 2 weeks, with big diagrams of political relationships and symbolism and roles... it really helped because we analyzed the hell out of that book. I enjoyed it more than I would possibly have otherwise, because hard-core sci fi isn't really my thing (and Dune is Hard Core. Hardest Core.) I haven't read it since then and I didn't own it, so I thought 50c was worth a reread.

The guy at the desk said Ivanhoe was a lot like Robin Hood. :D I'm looking forward to it. I showed it to my mom and she read the back and laughed and said, "Okay. Yeah." I read it and thought "This is so cheesy! I can read it with dramatic voices and amuse myself to bits!"