Re: Re: Re: The sort of fiction you're most likely to find me reading:

[jaldhar]

in reply to Re: Re: The sort of fiction you're most likely to find me reading:
in thread The sort of fiction you're most likely to find me reading:

Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't that offended. (Well there is a difference between "stern letter to the editor" offended and "burn your house down" offended. :-) You're right epic doesn't cover the whole range. Gravity's Rainbow in particular is an an anti-epic. How about just literature?

Incidentally two really imaginative and thought-provoking short story collections I''ve read recently are collected works of Jorge Luis Borges and Phillip K. Dick. I'd heartily recommend to monks looking for a good read.

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જલધર

[ailie]

I am reading the Borges collection now (I'm assuming you mean the Collected Fictions translated by Hurley and published by Penguin) and it is great stuff - although I did have to ask a co-worker to explain a little. It's disconcerting at first to see fiction presented in such a non-fictional manner.

I gave my Dad the Philip K. Dick collection for Christmas this year, and promptly borrowed it to read for myself. Good stuff. The book design is nice too - peek under the dust jacket.

Mea culpa too on The Bhagavad Gita - Petruchio ran the list by me and we both missed it (although I had earlier made him take the Bible off the fiction list!)

(For the record, I voted for Gravity's Rainbow.)

[allolex]

(For the record, I voted for Gravity's Rainbow.)

Ditto. A bomb already fell where my apartment is (really), so I'm safe for the time being, I think.

Anyone tackle Mason & Dixon yet?

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Allolex

[grinder]

Anyone tackle Mason & Dixon yet?

I've started it (heh, that must be the most frequently stated comment about Pynchon).

There are some delightful tales in it, such as Mason meeting his wife involving an octuple Gloucester (a man-crushing cheese) and the French chef's story of a mechanical duck that falls in love with him and forces him to flee to America.

The writing style (it's written in 17th century English) works well and isn't really that hard to read, although it did take me a long to to infer what "to smoak" meant. I finally figured it out by context.

But, like I say, I've sort of lost traction on it, about three quarters of the way through. Which is about where I lost it in Gravity's Rainbow.

My favourite Pynchon novel is still V. I've read it three times over the space of fifteen years. If you've look at the home page of my site on jc's server you have a fair chance of stumbling on a quote from V. And the Paris Perl Monger's server is called sferics :)

At the moment I'm reading Terry Pratchett. I was over in England this summer and I bought the next four books in the series. Which should time me over, oh, at least until Tuesday.