I'm on the third "Game of Thrones" book. I'm enjoying it, there are no hero's are really even villians, just people, but it jumps around so much, its sort of a hard read.
Not at all. You have to have read game of thrones to understand. He kills every main character besides Daenerys
Only three times? Did you find these books late? I figure the average read for Toliken is once every two to three years, if not once a year. I will admit, getting married and having kids puts a serious damper on reading for 4 hours at a time.
I'm watching way too much tv now. I need to read more, I do love it so. of course, I am reading stuff for my CPE class.
My bride and I read through the Bible last year using the Old Testament/New Testament reading plan. We started reading the Bible in chronological order this year. Thanks @youngunn for the suggestion!
I'm not sure which one I like the most, but I *do* know I like the last one the least. The parts between the sheets (so to say) are a bit overdone to me (too many and too wonderful - I mean: let's get real... ).
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's Frankenstein, the originally published 1818 version. All I can say is that tastes and standards have apparently changed considerably.
Can you elaborate, Jas? I've also read many of the horror classics: Frankenstein, Invisible Man, Dracula, Dorian Gray... Plots and characterizations are usually modified for the screen to include more gore, sensationalism, sexual innuendo...all the things that younger audiences find appealing. So much so that their attention-span demands a murder, car chase, sexual assault, or blood-letting generally every 5-6 minutes, or they lose interest. e.g. My adult daughter had heard so many good things about The Maltese Falcon that she asked to watch it with me one night. She lasted about 10 minutes, because in here words, "Nothing's happening!"
The basic inconsistencies of the timeline, characterization, and motivations of Victor and the Creature are such that - as a former Creative Writing major - I would fully expect to be required to fix these basic problems in order to get a good grade, were I to write a similar piece, as an undergraduate. To say it baffles me that a work that I do not believe could reasonably expect to get a good grade for an undergraduate should be considered a classic worthy of such a prominent place in our literary and cultural heritage is understating it by a good bit.
I believe this all depends on our designation of the label, “classic.” Who would argue that War and Peace is not a classic? Yet it is often disjointed in point of view, switches from historical fiction to first-person philosophical narrative and back again. Most of Tolstoy’s adherents admit to this lack of “unity of matter.” And I must admit, if I reviewed any work (novel, magazine article, academic paper…) written in that disjointed manner, it would be returned to the author filled with red penciled notes. Yet War and Peace sits at or near the top of any list of great novels.
I do not recall Tolstoy often having characters citing information they factually could not have, being sustained or otherwise behaving in ways they physically could not (the vagaries of the Creature's animation forgiven as a necessity of the tale), or claiming motivations that flat-out contradict their own statements (without anyone I've seen citing the possibility of the Unreliable Narrator trope). Perhaps my recollection of Tolstoy is faulty?
I'm about half way through Farley Mowat's accounting of his experiences fighting WWII with the "Hasty Peas" of the Canadian Army. It's called And no Birds Sang. Excellent read so far with a pleasing mix of Farley's sense of humour and the horrors of battle. For those that are into this kind of thing I can highly recommend this book.
No, I found no such ambiguities or anachronisms in War and Peace either. But surely there are other faults that qualify for criticism and would cause a professor to reject such writing as in need of more than a “tweak.” The scattershot insertion of chapters (into a novel) that were essentially academic first-person dissertations, were, to me distracting and unnecessary. In this way the book more than once strayed from what I thought was its subject matter. And the changing point of view at times had me shaking my head. (The Russian Army is referred to as ‘we’ sometimes, and at other times ‘they’, yet the narrator was the same.) I think anyone in a creative writing class would be directed to avoid such slipups. My point is simply to illustrate that to be labeled “classic” a book need not be perfect in terms of flow, characterization, point of view, anachronism, motivation… I guess it first and foremost must stand the test of time, which both Shelley and Tolstoy seemed to have achieved.
In the middle of Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance. Fantastic book this is my second time through the budding series of The Stormlight Archive. Highly recommended if you like high fantasy but don't mind having to wait for the subsequent books to come out. Also always looking for good suggestions in this genre of books if anyone has some.
