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

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

The Dark Tower is very, very good. I've been a loyal fan of the whole series; and it's in my top 4 favorites list. His imagination is just... it's amazing. Even today I can't look at a beach without imagining a free-standing door on the sand.

My favorite of the books are probably 3 and 5, though I haven't finished the 7th/final one yet, so I can't say definitively. I have a tiny bit of hero-worship for Stephen King, as a writer.

I've kind of neutral about the His Dark Materials series. I went a long time between Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, and I got Amber Spyglass about a week after finishing The Subtle Knife. It's an interesting world he's created, and his writing is fairly decent, so I'm interested in the final outcome. I am holding off judging it until the end, though, where I can look at it in its entirety.


Nigh watch - Oh man, I thought that was the first book! Damn. Oh well, I'm only about 20 pages into it. I can stop and read the others first. I always need to read books in order.

I would probably have made it thorugh Dune without class, but I don't think I'd have understood and appreciated all the layers-- the political complexities, the symbolism, the messaiah story tradition. Breaking it down helped considerably in my overall appreciation of it.

I disliked Jane Eyre. I'm told there are people out there who loved it. ::shrug:: Maybe I'll read it in ten years and my opinion will have changed, but as it was I found the characterizations of the men and women to be somewhat insulting. Not as insulting and offensive as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but still very annoying.

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

If I can overcome my inherent suspiscion of Stephen King...*doesn't like horror books*

For your personal reference, the Guards books in order: Guards, Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay (how'd I miss that one?), Jingo, The Fifth Elephant,, Nightwatch, and most recently Thud! (which I haven't gotten to, but promises to be good). It also helps if you read Thief of Time (well, Nightwatch draws a little bit from every single one of the Discworld books...ToT isn't necessary, just recommended.)

(on a completely different note, I just discovered on Wikipedia that Pratchett holds the record for most shoplifted books. Figures.)

Tess of the D'Urbervilles! In 9th grade I decided on my own I needed to read 1 Shakespeare play and 1 classic. I read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (and totally lost track of what was happening around the play-within-a-play bit) and Tess. On my own. With absolutely no idea of what was supposed to be going on. -_-

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

The Dark Tower books aren't horror. There's some elements of horror that creep in around the edges, more or less in different books, but it's a dark fantasy. A post-apocalyptic and urban fantasy, with a heavy dash of Western. It can be very weird-- the first and the last books are the weirdest-- but it's great. It's quite different from most of his books, and it's basically his personal multi-book quest epic, something he's been writing for over 15 years in some form or another. And King said the entire story started from this poem by Robert Browning. Excerpt:

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”

I've read Thief of Time, but none of the others you listed there.

I read Tess in high school, either Honors or AP English, Idon't remember, and it was touted as a book about a strong female character. And while I did appreciate the fact that someone from that time period even bothered to write with a sympathetic female protagonist (rare), her characterization, her choices and the logic of her choices, and the characterizations of the men around her were atrocious to me. Partially because of the attitudes of the period, but also because it was presented to me as a love story where I was supposed to want Tess and Angel (that's his name?) to be together, when all I wanted was for him to join the other major male character and both of them to ride off a cliff and die. And Tess could go be a schoolteacher or something and possibly swear off all men, if the one she loved was supposed to be an example of what every woman desires.

But then again, my memory of the book is fuzzy, as I blocked a lot of it from my mind.

I watched A Midsummer Night's Dream professionally performed in my 9th grade year and then read it in 10th grade. It can be confusing on your own, but if you see it live first it's a LOT easier to understand when you read it. Which isn't true for every Shakespeare play; sometimes it's more confusing on stage.