Fiction Books (Literature)
PrevNode LinkNextWhat are your favourite fiction books?
Node LinkNextMy favourite children-oriented book is The Hobbit by Tolkien, which I read first in a translation to Hebrew and then several times in English. Aside from high adventure, I now realise it contained a lot of criticism of the contemporary English society.
My favourite adult-oriented book is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand which I bought and read once, and shortly afterwards my sister confiscated my copy because she too enjoyed reading it. Despite loving it, I found it necessary to parody and modernise it, and it is likely that I had had, even back then and at least sub-consciously, a lot of contempt for the original work.
Do note that I threw away my only physical copy of The Hobbit (a cheap one that featured this image of Rivendell on its cover, and which we bought in London) due to my anti-"stuff" policy.
What do you think about the other books/films by Tolkien?
PrevNode LinkNextI read the book The Lord of the Rings in its Hebrew translation, and found it boring and not memorable. By some peer pressure, I tried reading it again in high school, and stopped in the middle of the first volume.
I strongly suspect that if it were written using fan fiction characters (e.g: Sauron → Ashurbanipal ; Gandalf → Moses ; Frodo → David ), it would be better in many ways: more memorable, shorter, funnier, more fun, and with a more effective message.
The Silmarillion - was OK but I do not remember most of the plot (and do not care enough to).
Farmer Giles of Ham was incredibly funny, succinct, and memorable. I may gladly read it again sometimes.
The film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring could have been more enjoyable if the cinema my father and I watched it on would have provided an intermission, because by the end of its 3 hours we really had to pee. (Re Alfred Hitchcock's quote.)
My father and other family (but not I) have watched the other two films on DVD at home, which was easily capable of being paused and sought. I do enjoy the "One does not simply" snowclone, however.
What do you think about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment?
PrevNode LinkNextI spent large parts of a high school summer vacation forcing myself to read a paper copy of a Hebrew translation of Crime and Punishment. It was boring and I'd have stopped much earlier if I didn't want to prepare for the next year's literature classes.
For the record, I read and completed some long books in both Hebrew and English which I found more interesting and captivating, and which I wasn't forced to read for class. I also struggled less with some other assigned texts (e.g. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ).
That put aside - analysing it in class, after the summer vacation, was fun.
In retrospect, I could tell that Raskolnikov is described as having clinical depression.
At least one friend of mine did enjoy reading it, and found it captivating.
On a different page, I compare Crime and Punishment to Little Red Riding Hood and conclude that the latter was far more influential, successful, and better written. (Even though I have some reservations about its message.)
I'm not going to read Crime and Punishment again willingly.
Zehu Zeh's reflection on Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" - (from the Israeli Educational Television; in Hebrew) was incredibly funny and true.
So: should you read it? On one hand, this is the kind of book that every modern intellectual is expected to read. On the other hand, its Signal to noise ratio is extremely low and it is not compliant with TL;DR / TL;DW / TL;DL. It is possible that reading the wikipedia page or a different summary will be adequate (assuming you are not forced to read it in class).
And take my advice at your own risk. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. 😉
Have you read the Harry Potter books (by J. K. Rowling)? What do you think of them?
PrevNode LinkI read the first four installments. My favourite was the first because it didn't take itself as seriously as the next three. I stopped after reading the fourth book, because I noticed that, except for the first one, they all ended up making me ecstatic (see "hypomania" (= "below-mania")), which I preferred to avoid.
The books I read were captivating enough for me to persist in (although they seemed to have a slow start), often funny, contained interesting supernatural elements, and appear to have been written in an English register that was accessible enough for a foreign speaker like me (with a few unrecognised words that I looked up) yet not too dumbed down to be annoying (like e.g: the Simple Wikipedia).