Full Thread: What are you reading?
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Old August 16th, 2017 #876
Matthaus Hetzenauer
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Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
Am reading Emma by Jane Austen and Vol I of Les Miserables by Viktor Hugo. Both excellent. Extremely tiny type in Hugo but quick read because interesting.

I like Jane Austen a lot. Emma I've read about 60%, is a book in which basically nothing happens. It's all about social interaction. It's not as interesting (exciting) as Pride and Prejudice but it's still great stuff. If you want to read about serious white adults interacting unjewed, you pretty much have to go back to this era. All these people did was seek approbation, offer kindnesses, etc. In this book, as in Jane Eyre which I read earlier this year upthread, you get to see white men and women -- often 20-somethings interacting seriously without any kind of sex garbage. They take seriously the ability to read character. Emma tries to set up her friend Harried with a Mr Elton but Knightley correctly points out that he is actually interested in her. She doesn't believe it, but he is proved right. Leading her to reassess herself and the clownishness of matchmaking. She has actually got her friend to turn down a proposal from a good man, as she mistakenly thought Elton was a better one and about to propose. Austen's books prove the superiority of talk to action, as Oscar Wilde would say. Talk is more interesting. You can see white culture of a very different type in Austen's books, you can see where we came from and where we certainly aren't now. We are about 10x fatter and stupider than in the early 1800s when Austen wrote Emma. I spend most of today driving around god's country (missouri) and I seriously believe I can determine IQ within five points by watching someone operate a car. It is good that automated cars will be here soon because shortly at least half the population will too fat/stupid to operate a vehicle.

As for Hugo, I've only read 100+ pages, just introduced Jean Valjean, who steal things, but mainly a priest who actually cares for his office and not money or boy-glutes. I have never seen that musical or read the book so trying to get a little less ignorant.
Being somewhat intimidated at taking on a 1200+ page full-length edition of Les Miserables, about 20 yrs. ago I opted instead for a condensed version (roughly 550 pages). And remembering just how good that book really was prompted me to tackle an unabridged edition (1222 pages; Charles Wilbour trans., Barnes & Noble) a couple years back. With a tome that long you'd expect to run into more than a few dry patches along the way; but no, not with this bad boy. It was superb; and I rank it among the ten best novels I've read. People often say of a certain book that they "can't put it down"; such was the case with me and this uncut edition of LM. On a scale of one-four I rate it an easy four. You're gonna love it, Alex. On the other hand...

I read an unabridged edition (approximately 1300 pages) of War and Peace two or three summers ago, and though I found it pretty good, at times I was bored shitless. Tolstoy has a tendency to introduce certain characters early on in the book and then they suddenly drop out of sight only to reappear hundreds of pages later. You're left wondering, "Now who the hell is this clown?" And seeing as how it's a novel and therefore has no index, you're more or less fucked; you can't find the page on which the character was first mentioned and just where he fits in in the story. All in all I think Tolstoy's "magnum opus" is overrated and I give it a three on the scale.
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