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Reading this summer

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Emikins:
I read constantly. I think it is because I don't really do much else in my day-to-day life and so reading just fills in the time and allows me an escape into different words. I'm also rather suseptible to day dreamin'. Every time I finish a book I have decided no a new career path I want to take, or a new time/place I want to live in. Recently I read a book about the profiling of serial killers and decided that I just had to find some way to work at the BSU of the FBI. Probably not likely considering i'm English, and live in England, but a dream none the less. Similarly, I read Tender is the night last week and decided that I needed to live in 1920/30's America, and be rich, and a socialite.

I'm an English Literature student and so reading for the summer is going to be taken up by a hell of a lot of my course books, unfortunately. With over fifty to read next year, a whole module to devise myself and everything I just want to read, this leads to a lot of booktime. Plus, I have a tendency to attempt to make my small, cubelike bedroom, look like a miniature library - with four large floor to ceiling bookshelves filled already, the dream is coming along swimmingly. So, reading this summer? Well, I travel to America on thursday for two months with some webfriends. I presume they'll have books, they're quite geeky. So i'm only going to take a few on the plane and then i'll raid what they have on their bookshelves and devour everything possible. Or, i'll buy books there, because its cheaper.

Summer Reading LIst

Tender is the Night
Profiling the Serial Killer
How to write/read fiction
The Saga of Darren Shan (all twelve)
The Interpretation of Murder
Eragon
A Clockwork Orange
Mrs. Dalloway
Catcher in the Rye (again)
The Noodle Maker
Shades Children
Superior Saturday (I <3 Garth Nix)
The Communist Manifesto
The Book Theif
War and Peace
The God Delusion
The Ancestors Tale
A Brief History of Time
Brisingr
Poetry of Charles Bukowski

And then probably a lot of other stuff that I just pick up when I have the time. So ya know, any suggestions that people may have, i'm sure I can find the time to fit them in.

Pff. I read a lot more than I thought I did.
-Shall go find a life now-

a pack of wolves:

--- Quote from: zerodrone on 15 Jun 2008, 00:03 ---Yeah, as a writer/musician/visual artist myself I'm definitely gonna have to say it annoys me that some people think my intentions and input can be completely removed from a comprehensive analysis of my work and still have said analysis be more than intellectual masturbation.


--- End quote ---

The thing I like about the idea of the death of the author isn't that I entirely agree with it, but that it puts artistic practice on the defensive. It questions why your intentions and identity should be important. After all, knowing an author's intentions is incredibly hard. Statements about a work may not be entirely true even if the author has the best intentions of clarity when they make them, and you can end up in a ridiculous situation of trying to psychoanalyse someone through their art. Since we can never know what an author was exactly meaning to convey should this bother us?

However, I do think readers have more agency than Barthes seems to describe them as having. Also, I think authors become a part of the text. Or at least, ideas about what they might have intended or who they are influence the reading of the text. Personally I have the exact opposite reaction to you, I love the idea of my work becoming something not my own, and instead being part of someone else's creation of meaning. This might differ if I made different art, but I don't think biographical detail about me or what my intentions were when making the art are very important at all when compared to what happens when someone reads it. If that wasn't the most important part of the whole process then why put anything out there?

Emikins:
Once, Samuel Beckett was sat at the back of a lecture about some of his dramatic works.  The speaker analysed his plays for all assembled, telling everyone exactly what Beckett 'meant' by what he had written. At the end of the lecture Beckett stood, disgusted, and shouted. "But that isn't what I meant at all..." and walked out.

That anecdote is something which reminds me of how little we can really know about an author, or authorial intention, unless we're blatantly told by the author themselves.

Jackie Blue:

--- Quote from: a pack of wolves on 15 Jun 2008, 18:02 ---you can end up in a ridiculous situation of trying to psychoanalyse someone through their art.

--- End quote ---

I would say that attempting to glean insight into an artist's mind by analysing their work is just as valid as any other of the various forms of analysis.

I know personally my fiction writing reveals a veritable laundry list of mental quirks!   :wink:

loam:

--- Quote from: TheFuriousWombat ---This [Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon]  looked pretty cool. How is it?
--- End quote ---

I shall report back when I am finished. I'm not very far at the moment.
[/quote]

I'm finished now, and I highly recomend it. It's a very loose confederation of essays all having something more or less to do with Genre Fiction. Some are about works he's enjoyed, some are about the place of Genre works in the world, some about writing Genre Fiction himself. It sounds a lot more booring than it is - on the contrary I suspect that reading Mr. Chabon's essays about the stories he loves may be more interesting than reading his actual novels, although I haven't ever actually read any of them (a situation I will rectify asap) and I am probably wrong about that. I certainly enjoyed Maps & Legends, although people who view themselves as literary critics will probably get their knickers all knotted over Mr. Chabon's criticisims of the litterary world's tendancy to dismiss all Genre Fiction out of hand. If however you are like me and couldn't give a fig for litterary criticisim, tend to view litterary (and art) critics as pompous blowhards who kill the joy right out of everything, and in general just love reading... you'll probably enjoy Mr. Chabon's musings.

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