What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
@Ready Player Two: pic.twitter.com/8zsAmQaZV9
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
If a friend who never reads came to you and asked for book recommendations that'll grab them, what would you recommend? Furthermore, what makes those ideal choices for a habitual non-reader?
I'm not asking because I'm trying to convince someone to read something -- I'm just curious to see what some of the suggestions and reasoning will be.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
On the occasion of Finland's national Fairy Tale Day, Hevosenkenkä Theatre, an Espoo children's theatre has prepared a special surprise for all children who were eagerly awaiting this Finnish tradition.
Today, 18 October, the theatre will release an audio play of the story “The Bear That Wasn't” as a virtual gift to all those who were eager to visit in person but were unable due to the pandemic. The audio play is also part of the theatre's programme celebrating its own 45th anniversary.
TheMayor.eu – Anton Stoyanov – 18th October 2020
The other worlds of fairy tale – in pictures
Take a tour of the British Academy and Folio Society exhibition of fairy tale illustrations from all over the world, exploring the idea of ‘other worlds’ from China to Native America.
The Guardian – Unknown – 12th May 2015
Scandinavian Folk & Fairy Tales: Tales From Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland & Iceland
A collection of folk literature from five countries, with illustrations by native artists.
Good Reads – Claire Booss – 26th October 1988
Ten of the best fairy tales everyone should read
The best fairy tales are timeless and yet forever modern, tapping into deeply held and widely shared emotions and moral attitudes. The following constitutes not an exhaustive list of the definitive fairy tales, but rather our attempt to pick the top ten greatest fairy stories.
Interesting Literature – Dr Oliver Tearle – 10th July 2017
How and where do you like to read? Tell me all about your reading environment(s), both real and idealized. Do you sit in an arm chair with a cup of coffee and a worn paperback? Lie in bed with a cat curled up next to you in the dim glow of your ereader? Under a tree in the woods, listening to the book on your headphones? If you could find/build the perfect reading space for you, what would it look like?
And then, what about your more practical reading: on your phone on your lunch break? While waiting for your kids in the car during soccer practice? Tell me about the times you fit reading in even if it's not necessarily the full focus of the moment, or the times where you settle for a comfortable but less than ideal setup.
Include any meaningful rituals or accessories too. Do you like to put a good album on the record player to accompany you? Do you have a special bookmark that you use? Do you share your book covers on social media or livetweet each chapter? Does your favorite lamp like to look over your shoulder as you turn the pages?
Basically, tell me all about what reading looks like for you -- with enough detail so we can picture it!
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
In school we teach kids that good stories have conflict and have them fill out plot diagrams, analyzing the different parts relative to the conflict of the story.
Every time this comes up, I always wonder about its universality. As it's taught to kids, this is "how stories are" and conflict itself is considered essential to storytelling. The conventional wisdom goes that a story without conflict is "boring".
Is this the case, though? It's always felt to me like a very limited way of looking at stories -- fine for children but something that doesn't necessarily scale up past the early stages of literary analysis -- but I don't have anything to back that up. I don't have enough in my repertoire/expertise to really go beyond it, and I'm left with just a sort of empty suspicion that may or may not be justified.
I'm not looking to gain any practical skills from these recommendations (ex: not "Clean Code", "The Pragmatic Programmer"). Last year I read through the two books in Fabien Sanglard's Game Engine Black Book series and would love to get my hands on more books like them. Books that focus on history, arcane details and secrets once thought lost to time. Sadly it appears I've already worked through Sanglard's entire bibliography. But I'm sure there's more stuff out there like it.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
They can be modern or classic (or modern classic:), in any language. Preferably famous and influential authors, but hidden gems are also fine.
Also, I'd really prefer fiction, but philosophical books are all right too.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
I asked a similar question over in ~games and am interested to hear how ~books would respond to the same setup.
Here's the task: pretend you're a professor! You have to do the following:
Your class can have any focus, broad or specific: victorian literature, contemporary poetry, Shakespearean themes in non-Shakespearean works -- whatever you want! It can focus on any forms of literature and does not have to be explicitly limited to "books" if you want to look at some outside-of-the-box stuff (I once took a literature class where we read afternoon, a story, for example.)
After choosing your specific focus, choose what will be included on your syllabus as "required reading" and why you've chosen each item.
While the latest hype-trains and the guaranteed oldies give me a reading list a few thousand books long, I like to read things which are left by the wayside. This list here is a good example. The author gives a list of genre classics. Books which aren't good enough to make the top 1000 books of all time, but are classics in their own genre and influenced a lot of future authors. The Princess and the Goblin is a good example. Everyone interested in Tolkien and the Inklings has read it, as well as those who like modern fairy tales, but it doesn't crop up much in recommendations lists. These are books which aren't quite as commonly discussed, but still good and important for people interested in the genre.
So, if you have a favorite genre or sub-genre I would love to read your 'genre classics' list, with maybe a sentence about why I should enjoy it. Not quite as comprehensive as a class on books, more than a bullet point.
Edit:
I just realized I didn't change the title. By the 'gap', I originally meant the gap between the books everyone suggests from the past and the mountain of dredged pulp you find in libraries and bookstores: books which are worth still reading, even if they aren't one of the 'Classics'. More like underrated recommendations.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
I can understand why the journey to make this into a film is so convoluted. I'm not sure I've ever read anything so dense and epic. I was always sort of keen to the series, and always thought the worm god was just cool imagery. So I did have kind of an internal motivation to get this far, but now that I'm about to dive into God Emperor, I just feel bad for anyone that called it quits after the first book. Frank Herbert had a lot to say, and faithfully adapting this to any kind of screen, I think, is impossible.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
Just finished (re-)watching the Friends TV series ... End of the last episode, sitting in the empty apartment (Joey: "Has it always been purple?" Phoebe: "Do you realize that at one time or another, we've all lived in this apartment?")
Got me thinking, more as a plot contrivance than the actual plot, a story about an apartment, spanning a century or more, and the various people that lived in it, jumping back and forth across time, linking them together through history ... perhaps even, a la "Ship of Theseus", spanning multiple centuries and multiple homes/dwellings that occupied the same space.
So specifically, I'm wondering if anyone can think of any novels that adopt this idea, or anything similar, as a primary vehicle for their storytelling?
I have a vague recollection of a short story or novella in 2ndary school, about the life of a redwood, and the various people and animals that lived in and around it over the centuries ... and also I recall reading "A Winter Tale" by Mark Helperin -- a semi-fantastical novel about the city of New York ... oh look, apparently, they made it into a movie, too.
But those two are the only examples I can think of that come close to this idea.
PS: I love to write fiction, and someday I may even finish a novel ... but generally, I get about halfway through, figure out how it's going to end, and then lose interest ... so if anyone with more ambition likes the idea, you're welcome to it.
ETA: I'm not looking for the 10,000 variations of "oooh, haunted by the ghost of a person that died here 20 years ago". Broader, covering a longer timeframe, multiple substories interwoven into the same living space, you get the idea.
There are a ton of recommendation lists out there right now, each with a ton of titles. While it's nice to see that the topic is being addressed by so many different voices and from so many different angles, it can also make it so that it's difficult to know where to start or where to go next.
I'm curious as to which books about racism people here would recommend. Please share not only what the books you've chosen are about specifically, but why you are choosing to recommend them.