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Pit Book/Discussion Thread

Well it is just like Netflix in the sense that there are a lot books available in nearly every category. Also like Netflix it won't have a ton of brand new books or a lot of recently popular titles like The Hunger Games, or John Grisham books. It does have a ton of classics and a lot of books mentioned on here (Barbarians at the Gate, Tolstoy, Vonnegut, Hubert Selby, etc.)

I really like it, it helps me test different writers out before I invest a lot of time or money into their stuff. A good example of this, for me, is Chabon. I don't think invest would have read his stuff if it wasn't for having this access.

Thanks. I'll keep it in mind if I move away from my beloved ZSR.

How's the poetry selection on there?
 
As regards Chabon, I feel like I only really enjoyed Kavalier and Clay. I didn't like Yiddish Policeman's Union or Manhood for Amateurs all that much. Guess I should read Wonder Boys since that's probably his most famous.

Wonderboys was the first one I read, and loved it. I think you would really like it. I haven't read the ones you've named but I did read Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and Maps and Legends. I really need to read Kavalier and Clay.

Did y'all like _Telegraph Avenue_ ?? It has been sitting on my shelf for a year and a half, and I haven't touched it yet.
 
Catch-22 was the funniest book I've ever read. Also, one of the most poignantly tragic at times.
 
As regards Chabon, I feel like I only really enjoyed Kavalier and Clay. I didn't like Yiddish Policeman's Union or Manhood for Amateurs all that much. Guess I should read Wonder Boys since that's probably his most famous.

I thought K&C was his most well-regarded and famous. The first half of that book is one of the best pieces of literature I've read. Second half dragged a bit.

Wonder Boys was the Quad Book Club book. I read it then; K&C is better.
 
I thought K&C was his most well-regarded and famous. The first half of that book is one of the best pieces of literature I've read. Second half dragged a bit.

Wonder Boys was the Quad Book Club book. I read it then; K&C is better.

Wow. Looks like I know what I'll be starting next.
 
Catch-22 was the funniest book I've ever read. Also, one of the most poignantly tragic at times.

I actually didn't think it was that funny, probably because I started out thinking it would be a WWII version of M*A*S*H, only to get into it and find people dying left and right. The line that stuck with me more than any other came from the Preface, rather than the novel itself. "Sooner or later, I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away too. But it won't be by my hand." Love that bit, and the sentiment that's within it.
 
Catch-22 was the funniest book I've ever read. Also, one of the most poignantly tragic at times.

My entry for most poignantly tragic piece of writing is the Benjy chapter of The Sound and the Fury (I definitely didn't appreciate it when I first attempted to read it in high school, but very glad I revisited it after college). Homo Faber (Max Frisch) stands out too.

And yeah, Catch-22 is also in my top 10 or 15 favorites ever. Strong contender for if I were to name one book to read before you die.
 
My entry for most poignantly tragic piece of writing is the Benjy chapter of The Sound and the Fury (I definitely didn't appreciate it when I first attempted to read it in high school, but very glad I revisited it after college). Homo Faber (Max Frisch) stands out too.

The ending of Lolita, hands down, by far, nothing else comes close.

Nabokov does such a good job of getting you to fixate on the horror/repulsiveness of their physical relationship that you (or at least I) don't even notice the tragedy of her losing her childhood in the process. I cried my freaking eyes out when I hit this part, “One could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”
 
I actually didn't think it was that funny, probably because I started out thinking it would be a WWII version of M*A*S*H, only to get into it and find people dying left and right. The line that stuck with me more than any other came from the Preface, rather than the novel itself. "Sooner or later, I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away too. But it won't be by my hand." Love that bit, and the sentiment that's within it.

This question may be philosophically impossible to answer, but do you think it is an objectively funny book? Or does the interjection of deaths distract too much? I thought the spectrum between the two was brilliantly transversed.
 
Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22 are two books where you laugh and cry the hardest in the shortest span I think.

Agreed! I also admit that I was a huge sucker for the Hitchhiker series (returning to the discussion of comedy).
 
I feel like there are more, but interesting read.
 
hit a speed bump at Moby Dick, stopped at The Silmarillion

tough for 11th graders
 
Naked Lunch is one of the easier Burroughs. Pet Sematary isn't challenging in any regard. You could pick a handful of DeLillo books.

I can't imagine reading Faerie Queen without annotation or as a layperson, or rather, someone born in the 20th century, but that could be said of Chaucer or plenty of medievalists, no?

And there are far more challenging books than these 50, but these are the more accessible of the extreme reads, I'd imagine.

Spenser is an Elizabethan, not a product of the Middle Ages; you're right, though, his poetics are purposefully archaic (for lack of a better word).

Thing is, Chaucer is easy stuff compared to his contemporaries -- it is in verse and it rhymes and his Middle English is not that dissimilar from Early Modern English (keeping in mind that all Shakespeare editions significantly modernize the language). The Pearl-poet, for instance, is a much more difficult read.

So, I buy your argument about accessibility.
 
I wasn't referring to Spenser or even Chaucer when I was talking about medievalists, just suggesting that authors writing in pre-modern English are inaccessible to most of us today. And I was trying to make your second point, but you said it far better.

Gotcha; I read it on tapatalk on the bus, so I'd missed your point. Yeah, I can't imagine even a determined reader trying to decipher early-Middle English prose. Or, perhaps, read even the most popular surviving poem of the Middle Ages -- the _Prik of Conscience_ -- which, by the way, has been finally printed in a teaching text for the first time in 600 years!
 
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