I've been off a certain ADHD medication for three weeks and it's absolutely ruining my life :^) I really wanted to spend time reading and working on my story this summer but it's so hard to make it happen when I have the attention span of a goldfish
I’ve been reading Fables recently. It’s a comic that mostly follows Bigby Wolf (the big bad wolf) and Snow White (his love interest), but also follows dozens of other mythical characters, fables, and fairytale characters, as they attempt to live in a secret street in New York. Meanwhile, The Adversary, the emperor of the Homelands (a mythical realm where all the fables come from and settled into Earth as refugees after the emperor conquered their countries), attempts to invade the town. Not suitable for kids so don’t read if you’re under 18 🤧🤧🤧🤧🤧 but I thoroughly recommend it. Attempted to read Don Quixote but I can’t focus on so many words on a page anymore for some reason. Also read the Satanic Bible but can’t recommend that here for obvious reasons uno... I did think it was A great piece of philosophy though.
No reason you couldn't start a thread in the controversial section, though, if you wanted to discuss it further. I've read portions, and it is a fascinating look into religion and the human nature. Those sections that I read didn't even really hinge on the existence of any sort of "Satan" whatsoever, instead directly taking advantage of the theory that successful religions are driven more by ritual, spectacle, and show than they are by the actual spiritual belief (as anyone who has sat through a dragging Catholic mass with all its chanting and tradition can attest). Really more a book about the psychology of religion than any religion itself, in my opinion.
Dresden Files, Peace Talks comes out in less than a week. I re-read the entire series in preparation. I am so ready for a new Dresden book! fangirl SQUEEEEEE! <3
Milo really really wants to read that! He absolutely loves THG and he's made me watch all four movies with him (I reread the series last summer and understood way more than i did when I was in 7th grade. Loved it)
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Gene...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=9Q9CM63YF1KVVCRNHSVC
I finished yet another book I'd been reading for a while! I bought this one back in 2018, in Amsterdam. It is called Winnie-the-Pooh, and it was written by A. A. Milne. You probably know it. It's very good, though. I read the last chapter yesterday evening, and that disappointed me a little, as it seemed the weakest of all 10 chapters. I should get the sequel, if I recall correctly that has a more satisfying ending. Recently I read on Wikipedia that Christopher Robin Milne did not appreciate his identity being used in the books. That's interesting, I hope he didn't have a bad youth.
I read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It may be his most famous work, but I hadn't read it yet. It's good, as far as I can tell. I had to go slowly sometimes in order to not miss the meaning of things. I did feel like it was a bit 'sappy', as Americans might say. However, interestingly, the line that I found the sappiest of all, "and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die", was added during the printing process, according to Wikipedia. The source however is a book that I do not have access to, and I was not able to find mention of this anywhere else on the web! If someone does know or can find more about it, let me know, it seems interesting.
I finished Karel ende Elegast yesterday. This is a Dutch poem that was written around 1270. The origins of the story are disputed. I knew the story already, which made it a lot easier to follow the text, even though I did get lost occasionally. Moreover, the edition that I have (I found it at the train station a while ago) includes notes to clarify unusual words or expressions. I was sometimes confused about the choice of notes, though. Several times there were words of which I had no idea what they might mean, even in context, and they were not noted, and other times there was a verse which to me was perfectly evident, and the notes included a full translation of it. What surprised me while reading is that the story is actually quite fun. There are quite some humorous passages and lines, which I, for some reason, was not expecting. It also had several intense or exciting passages, which were of course made a bit less intense by the fact that I had to read very slowly, and look at the notes now and then, in order to be able to follow. But this is a great story! Very well written. It must have been very enjoyable to hear this recited in contemporary language, rather than reading it 750 years later. But it was actually a fun challenge. It's interesting to see how much the Dutch language has changed!
Meanwhile, I've been reading like a freakin monster the past three days. Still don't have my laptop and I won't get it until next week maybe. There was a series that I read most of but gave up on the third book soon after starting it because I just wasn't interested in it anymore, but lately I've been thinking about it and knew that it was driving me nuts for not having actually finished it. Therefore, I've been reading 100-200 pages of it for the past three days (it's a thicc boi) and hopefully I can finish it before school starts this coming Monday.
I've been seeing how much Egg has been reading and it's really making me want to push myself to get back into it. ADHD makes it real tricky and I've honestly been afraid to try, but I might just jump in and try. After all, Egg did gift me The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Good luck. It's fine if you get distracted now and then. And if you really can't concentrate on a given day, just go do something else instead. You don't have to be reading, but it is good to try to develop your skills.
I read Alleen op de wereld, translated by August Willemsen at the end of the previous century. The original novel is called Sans famille, written by Hector Malot in 1878, and I previously read part of an English translation called Nobody's Boy. I thought I had read about half of the latter, 7 years ago. However, I had read it as an iBook, so I wasn't sure exactly how much I had read of it, as it was not very apparent how far I was into the book. It turned out I had only read about 1/8th of it. I loved it, though! The translation is very good, and it is currently the only full translation into Dutch. All earlier and later translations have been edited down to be shorter, as for a book written for the youth, it is very long, at 500 pages. This translation does not seem to be targeted at the youth anyway, as it uses long sentences and uncommon words. Which I loved. I thought Sans famille was one of the most famous young adult novels, but three of the five people I told to that I was reading it seemed not to know it. So maybe I am mistaken. I really enjoyed it, though. It is a very exciting and varied book. I might buy the book later (I borrowed it from the library), so that I can reread it and score a soundtrack for it. That sounds like a fun idea! There are a few things that I did not appreciate and/or not understand, though. And I would like to discuss those, if possible! But if you have not read the novel yet, I would recommend to do that first. This book is great fun! Many people report having cried while reading it, and it is sad, but in my opinion it is well doable. I'll see if I can find info about English translations, online! ... No, sorry. I hope there is one! Does anyone here know? I can imagine the novel being even less popular in the USA than in the Netherlands, because there were probably American writers of young adult/youth literature too? Not too sure, actually. Anyway, here goes! The book has some nice surprises here and there, but it also has some parts that feel too predictable. The only one that I really dislike is that when Rémi is stuck in the mine, help eventually reaches them from both sides at once. I was expecting that to happen, but hoping it wouldn't, as it seems extremely unlikely that two independent tasks that both take over two weeks would finish at precisely the same time. When Rémi is at the lawyer's office, he asks them if he has a father. This makes sense, as Barberin was never kind to him and Vitalis, who probably was the biggest father figure to him, died. However, at the end, when it turns out he in fact does not have a father, not a word is spent on it. Why does he not explain in the last chapter what happened to his father? What was the plot of the Driscolls and James Milligan? Specifically, why was Rémi looked for? Did James somehow get to know that it was Rémi that was on the Swan? That seems very unlikely. And even then, what's the merit in bringing them back to the Driscolls? Wouldn't that increase the likelihood of Rémi finding out the truth? I was disappointed that this motivational question was not answered. If you have any insights into or comments on these matters, or have other things you want to talk about concerning the novel, please do share.
Have been doing a lot of web-reading these days. One I absolutely must recommend is "The House Witch" It strikes a lot of the same chords for me as "The Last Dragonlord" (my all-time favorite novel) - fun, believable characters, magic, political intrigue, and a well-developed world that's shown in small bites, rather than info-dumped on the reader. Also, the author is an absolute gem of a human being. Have had the pleasure of speaking with them several times via their Discord, and I'm continually impressed by how... wholesome they are. Currently ongoing, ch42 is posted and publicly available (up to ch48 available through their Patreon).
I'm planning on FINALLY reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes! ADHD is very unkind, but I'm finally getting back onto medication. Fingers crossed that it'll help me focus and get back into something I thoroughly enjoy! I'll have to keep y'all updated on my thoughts of the book.
There’s an Orwell quote I had to use in a debate with someone the other day over the importance of free school meals, and why people living in poverty are more likely to turn to substance abuse and other forms of addiction. That quote is from ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’, a book on Orwell’s investigations into the bleak living conditions of people living across Northern England, and his own middle-class upbringing and why he believed in socialism - but the working class were averse to it, despite being the ones who most benefited from it. The book documents the living conditions of two old people who own a shop and a hostel; a group of miners and the conditions that they live in and work in; the high unemployment rate in Northern England and how the Government covers up the actual statistic with fluff; as well as the disgusting state of housing and the shortage of it across Northern England; and how bleak and depressing Northern towns and cities are. After this exploration into the working class of Northern England, Orwell explains that the working class would benefit from socialist policies, but they reject it. It genuinely shocked me that every point he makes in this book still rings true today (besides the bit about the miners, but that’s because the mining industry collapsed in the 1980s and is gone forever, plus his hatred of machine worship). All of it can be applied to the modern day. The book was published in 1938, the issues were addressed by the Governments of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and now we’re right back to where the book began. His criticisms of how the upper class go about convincing the working class to back the cause also STILL ring true to this day. I‘m not done with it, but I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in class psychology, class rivalry/class war, and anyone interested in how poverty works in developed nations. Speaking as a working class socialist-anarchist who lives in Northern England, it’s a fantastic exploration into how our minds work... even if I’m very much more convinced by Orwell’s cause than the people in the book are.
That sounds like an interesting read... I might just add that book to the pile of works I want to go through in the future... Speaking of that pile, there is a novel that I recently finished... Anna Karenina by Count Leon Tolstoy (1878) It's a bit shorter than his more famous War and Peace, but it's still quite the read (864 pages instead of 1225) Many critics have argued that it is one of the best books ever written, and I think that, on some level, I can agree with that, which is interesting because it fails on all the modern criteria on what a good book is. It does not have a clear plot, a lot of threads just end somewhere, to be never picked up again. Characters come and go, sometimes to be never referenced again. But, with that, it's a lot like life. Not everything makes sense, you don't know what is going to happen, and surely not everyone you meet turns out to be important later on. At some point people will just die, and, at another, you will just die, and then that's it. There is probably not a moral to it all, and any structure will be made up when you start telling your story to others. That's all there is to it. This novel succeeds at portraying exactly that meaninglessness, exactly that struggle to make sense of the world. And, it's beautiful.
I love this. That doesn't mean it's a good book to read, though, of course. Maybe the contrary: if the book is meant for recreation rather than education, it would be nicer if it was not so much like life. I've thought before: if life was a video game, I would almost certainly not find it worth it to invest time in. Maybe I'd watch a walkthrough on YouTube or sporadically watch someone play it on Twitch, but playing it myself the amount of effort put into it would not be in balance with the amount of satisfaction or enjoyment got out of it.
