Literary Circles (original) (raw)
December 31st, 2006
| bchsbunny2005 |
10:55 pm - 94 in 06I read 94 books this year (not including re-reads), I hope to get to 100+ next year.( T h e L i s t ) |
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November 1st, 2006
| shyguyjosh |
**11:09 am - this is me keeping the community alive!**yet refusing to offer up anything of note or import... |
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June 6th, 2006
| redangelteflon |
**04:42 pm - Alice Sebold books**Hi i've recently read "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold as well as her memoir "Lucky"I really fell in love with her style of writing!!I read both books in one sitting!!can anyone recc me any books and/or authors that have the same writing styleas hersI really like the way she tells a storyit just grabs me by the first sentence that i read in the bookthank you! |
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April 20th, 2006
| lottie_doyle |
09:49 pmBecause being nice isn't always a good thing... ...apparently. Mr Nice Guy is the story of Dan Fisher, aspiring stand-up comedian and all-round good guy, who is dumped by his girlfriend Claudia for being 'too nice'. Dan is forced to reassess his life, and his long-held belief that being 'nice' was generally considered a good thing. His eccentric flatmate Giles and flamboyant boss Darren help Dan understand that what women really want is someone a bit dangerous. Someone James Dean-esque. But when Dan meets Rachel, and her arrogant, possessive boyfriend Warren, Dan starts to realise that maybe he was right all along, and there's nothing wrong with being a nice guy. Absorbing, touching, and laugh-out-loud funny, Mr Nice Guy is a romantic comedy about chivalry, friendship and love in the twenty-first century. The website is www.mrniceguy-novel.com Current Mood:  contemplative |
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April 11th, 2006
| emmyniem |
04:04 pmI must do a research paper for my honors english class. It can be on absolutly ANYTHING. Anyone have any suggestions? |
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January 13th, 2006
| blaine4evercool |
**01:34 am - Free Download of Agatha Christie e-books**After careful scrutiny and searching I have found a useful site for downloading free e-books of Harry Potter, Agatha Christie and SpidermanThe site is Afrin's Lair This is comparatively a good site and inorder to download the ebooks you have to click the Downloads and Cool Links on the left side bar!Easy download and reading.Enjoy!Current Mood:  creative |
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November 14th, 2005
| jennipoo |
**09:59 am - Let's Try This Again**Alright... I miss our little book club so I'm going to try and suggest something so we can all get reading again. If this suggestion sucks... my many apologies. What if we read books that had movies coming out in the future? For example... "The Chronicles of Narnia"?? "Memoirs of a Geisha" is also planned (although I think a lot of people have already read that, including myself), or anything else that anyone has heard of that I may be missing right now?It might be just me, but I like to read the book before I see the movie, because then I can be all high and mighty and tell people, "it's not as good as the book". (Because I am a gigantic book snob.)Anyways, I'm open to suggestions and comments on this idea.Current Mood:  bored |
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November 4th, 2005
| redangelteflon |
11:25 amI just saw the trailer for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"it looks awesome!Am I the only excited to see this?I'm such a dork! lolIt's my new LOTR lol bouncyCurrent Music: "All I Ask of You" from Phantom of the Opera |
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September 27th, 2005
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September 19th, 2005
| comicstar |
03:00 pmSo yeah, I finished The Da Vinci Code and wow, what a waste of three days' reading time. At the end I would have laughed hysterically... if I wasn't crying over my wasted time and brain power. I mean... seriously! I don't even know what happened with the whole Priory of Sion/ Leigh Teabag thing. it was all just too ridiculous for words. And oh my GOD the whole symbology thing. (Don't they call it semiotics?)  kaleidoscopeyes, you were right on the money with the passionfruit thing. I mean, he proved himself that anything can be interpreted from all that bullshit by having two interpretations of the final message. It's so ironic that he used such a vague premise considering that these people were trying to prove the fallacy of church teachings - and yet, their "proof" is just as vague and symbolic and metaphoric as religious literatures. I know he alludes to this himself but that seems to me as justification for something which cannot be justified - you can't say "everything relies on faith" and then go on to structure a plot (or what passes as one in the absence of an actual plot), conflict, resolution and climax around something which you admit is completely subjective, impossible to prove and subject to so much interpretation? And, more than anything, completely and entirely uninteresting. No one gives a shit that there is a shape of an M in the last supper. I'm looking through my venetian blinds right now and seeing shapes that resemble the letter "I". Is this some deep symbol of my over-developed ego? It's absolute bullshit. Some of it, like the fact that he's drawn Mary Magdalene into the painting, is interesting. Random shapes are not. In fact, I'd say the most interesting thing I learnt from that book is that you can find the word "sex" written in the background in a scene of The Lion King. But the real issue is - why did I have to learn anything?This really, really irks me. I hate the way things are going now; that fact is revered and fiction is considered a child's realm. I've mentioned more than once before that what makes me angrier than anything else is when a grown adult declares proudly "I don't read fiction, only non-fiction". I just can't understand it. All through history people have relied on folk-tales, legends and unsubstantiated beliefs to give their lives meaning and to explain what they otherwise could not. The author himself mentions this; that the "truth" about the bible should not be revealed because it is the faith that is important, not the factual basis or otherwise of what is being read. Who even knows what is fact or fiction? Things that were considered finite truth have been constantly disproved throughout history. Science is no more reliable than religion in explaining away the world. Fact is subjective. People argue that the Da Vinci Code is comendable because it gets people who wouldn't usually read fiction to do so. Well fine... if it actually was fiction. What that book is is a whole bunch of "factual" information tied together by an incomprehensible plot and badly imagined characters. What's the point of reading "fiction" if that is all it is? One of the greatest things about fictional prose is revelling in the power of the written word. Dan Brown does not use the English language to any aeshtetic end in this book - he employs it as a tool and destroys it, abuses it and rapes it. I mean, even the first sentence is of such a poor quality than after reading it, one does not hold much hope for the rest of the novel. It simultaneously infuriates me and gives me renewed hope to think that someone who writes like a nine year old ESL speaker actually got published - and has the best selling book... ever. Meanwhile an acquaintance of mine, Donna Mazza, worked for the best part of a decade on her manuscript, labouring over every single word, and is only just being published now. Her novel is true literature, but if you don't live in Western Australia - or even if you do - I'm almost certain you haven't heard of it. So how the hell did this crackpot get published?The world needs good fiction. More than anything, people need to understand the quality and value of fiction in its purest forms. Fiction that doesn't "change the way we see the world" or that does, but through the use of beautiful language and wonderful, three-dimensional characters that are almost - but not quite - real and fantastic - or all too real - settings and storylines. The Bell jar by Sylvia Plath, (many would argue it's practically a biography but I have done subtantial research to the contrary)A Widow for One Year by John Irving, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and every damned thing that Stephen King has ever written - particularly Hearts in Atlantis and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption". Mine obviously reflect the tastes of a young feminist would-be anthropologist but my God, there's been enough beautiful fiction written in the past decade in English for there to be something for everyone, before you even consider everything written in other languages, or everything that's been written in the past five hundred or so years. We don't need bullshit like the awful, awful waste of space that currently adorns my desk.But don't take my word for it: the most convincing piece of evidence is right there in the first pages of the book itself. Amongst four pages of "praise" for the book, one review excerpt declares it "the pulp must-read of the season". and... they're selling this in the "literature" section of Angus and Robertson? Holy shit. Any book which would declare itself proudly in its own opening pages as pulp - or, as is more likely - does not realise this to be an insult... well, it's certainly not worth my while. I only hope the rest of the world's population can think as highly of themselves as me with my over-developed ego that sees the letter I in venetian blinds...Oh and Mr Brown? I can think of something else that starts with "M". No it's not "Mary" or "Mary Magdalene" or "Mother". It's what Da Vinci would have thought of your "novel":Merde. |
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