Book Discussion #2
Ms. Haiku
Washington DC Posts: 7,265
I'm not willing to give up, yet! I think the book discussion of "Da Vinci Code" spanned more than just the day, and by October 6th there wasn't much else to discuss. Or it could be that the book was a dud. Anyway, I would like to try this again. I'm completely open to suggestions, but the books I'm interested in discussing are as follows:
All the President's Men - by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Mating - by Norman Rush
Anyone else have suggestions?
All the President's Men - by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Mating - by Norman Rush
Anyone else have suggestions?
There is no such thing as leftover pizza. There is now pizza and later pizza. - anonymous
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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The Celestine Prophecy-James Redfield
100 Years of Solitude-gabriel Garcia marquez
just a couple that I found very interesting.....:D
NEWAGEHIPPIE
Keep your eyes open, eventually something will happen....
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Awww, it's one of my all-time favourites!
I am a big fan of all of Garcia Marquez's stuff.....Of Love and other Demons, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor....the list never ends....some are better than others....but they are all worth reading...IMO...
I reallly urge you to check out Celestine Prophecy....and it's sequel and triquel(sp)....
NEWAGEHIPPIE
Keep your eyes open, eventually something will happen....
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
I really liked "Love in the Time of Cholera" much more than "100 Years of Solitude" though.
What about something by Virginia Woolf?
That was my sister's favorite book for years.
"Mrs Dalloway" is great book club-type material. It's a novel made up of moments of being rather than of action. It challenges in its form but it also presents many literary as well as gender and social issues, relevant both in its time of publication (1925) and today.
Yes, and it's easy to read quickly too.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Q> In Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf combines interior with omni-scient descriptions of character and scene. How does the author handle the transition between the interior and the exterior? Which characters' points of view are primary to the novel; which minor characters are given their own points of view? Why, and how does Woolf handle the transitions from one point of view to another? How do the shifting points of view, together with that of the author, combine to create a portrait of Clarissa and her milieu? Does this kind of novelistic portraiture resonate with other artistic movement's of Woolf s time?
Q> Woolf saw Septimus Warren Smith as an essential counterpoint to Clarissa Dalloway. What specific comparisons and contrasts are drawn between the two? What primary images are associated, respectively, with Clarissa and with Septimus? What is the significance of Septimus making his first appearance as Clarissa, from her florist's window, watches the mysterious motor car in Bond Street?
Q> What was Clarissa's relationship with Sally Seton? What is the significance of Sally's reentry into Clarissa's life after so much time? What role does Sally play in Clarissa's past and in her present?
Q> What is Woolf s purpose in creating a range of female charac-ters of various ages and social classes-from Clarissa herself and Lady Millicent Burton to Sally Seton, Doris Kilman, Lucrezia Smith, and Maisie Johnson? Does she present a comparable range of male characters?
Q> Clarissa's movements through London, along with the comings and goings of other characters, are given in some geographic detail. Do the patterns of movement and the characters' intersect-ing routes establish a pattern? If so, how do those physical patterns reflect important internal patterns of thought, memory, feelings, and attitudes? What is the view of London that we come away with?
Q> As the day and the novel proceed, the hours and half hours are sounded by a variety of clocks (for instance, Big Ben strikes noon at the novel's exact midpoint). What is the effect of the time being constantly announced on the novel's structure and on our sense of the pace of the characters' lives? What hours in association with which events are explicitly sounded? Why? Is there significance in Big Ben being the chief announcer of time?
Q> Woolf shifts scenes between past and present, primarily through Clarissa's, Septimus's, and others' memories. Does this device successfully establish the importance of the past as a shap-ing influence on and an informing component of the present? Which characters promote this idea? Does Woolf seem to believe this holds true for individuals as it does for society as a whole?
Q> Threats of disorder and death recur throughout the novel, cul-minating in Septimus's suicide and repeating later in Sir William Bradshaw's report of that suicide at Clarissa's party. When do thoughts or images of disorder and death appear in the novel, and in connection with which characters? What are those characters' attitudes concerning death?
Q> Clarissa and others have a heightened sense of the "splendid achievement" and continuity of English history, culture, and tradi-tion. How do Clarissa and others respond to that history and cul-ture? What specific elements of English history and culture are viewed as primary?
How does Clarissa's attitude, specifically, compare with Septimus's attitude on these points?
Q> As he leaves Regent's Park, Peter sees and hears "a tall quiver-ing shape,... a battered woman" singing of love and death: "the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth. . ." singing "the ancient song." What is Peter's reaction and what significance does the battered woman and her ancient song have for the novel as a whole?
Q> Clarissa reads lines from Shakespeare's Cymbeline (IV, ii) from an open book in a shop window: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun / Nor the furious winter's rages. / Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: / Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." These lines are alluded to many times. What importance do they have for Clarissa, Septimus, and the novel's principal themes? What fears do Clarissa and other characters experience?
Q> Why does Woolf end the novel with Clarissa as seen through Peter's eyes? Why does he experience feelings of "terror," "ecstasy," and "extraordinary excitement" in her presence? What is the sig-nificance of those feelings, and do we as readers share them?
Copyright 2002 Harcourt Trade Publishers
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The narrator veers from third-person external reportage of event to focalised constructions of characters' thought processes, using various sophisticated forms of free indirect discourse, sometimes ambiguously either third or first person. Free indirect discourse (F.I.D. for short) has been about in the novel since before Ann Radcliffe, but Woolf's narrator makes sudden plunges from external observation to types of interior monologue without signposting variations in diegetic and mimetic levels of discourse. Woolf's intention as a modernist was to blur distinctions of character and plot, so that the omniscient narrator is not like a nineteenth-century claiming to represent an objective reality in language but rather something very twentieth century, expressing experience as subjective, endless and freeforming like the pulsions of physical and spiritual being. The Victorian convention of inverted (sometimes wittily called 'perverted') commas is absent from mimetic renderings of thought processes and the space of the novel becomes inexorably interiorised.
"Which characters' points of view are primary to the novel; which minor characters are given their own points of view? Why, and how does Woolf handle the transitions from one point of view to another?"
The major inner worlds of the novel might be those of Clarissa, Peter Walsh, Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa's interior world - concerned with fears of lack of fulfilment, superficiality and impending death - is juxtaposed against that of Peter Walsh - the socialist writer who fears his work has come to nothing. Clarissa's sense of sexual detachment and alienation from true connection with understanding of commonality with the modern world in which she plays hostess is doubled with the thoughts, by the shellshocked, androgynous Septimus Walsh, that he is pathologically unable to love.
However, the most minor characters can be attributed a consciousness. Note Scrope Purvis at the very beginning of the novel. Scrope observes Clarissa and we never see Scrope again. That's different from what we expect of a novel: When a character is given an inner world we conventionally expect them to play a part in the unfolding narrative.
"How do the shifting points of view, together with that of the author, combine to create a portrait of Clarissa and her milieu? Does this kind of novelistic portraiture resonate with other artistic movement's of Woolf s time?"
Multiperspectivalism in the modernist novel creates an impression of a multifarious modern metropolitan consciousness that inevitably alienates rather than defines or includes the individual sensibility, since no single consciousness is distinct from the discourse of objective narrative. Woolf's novel echoes Joyce's 1922 Ulysses in portraying the bourgeois malaise of a society where one cannot reassert one's status, once dictated as a given of nineteenth-century individual and social identity, after drifting in an odyssey of urban restlessness where constructions of class and gender are endlessly reformulated.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
On another note, what would you like the next book to be for December. My suggestions are:
James Joyce's Ulysses (sp?)
Nadine Gordimer's Burgher's Daughter
What do you think?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
This is how Blissweave did "Jane Eyre". There were only a couple of contributors, but it worked out fine:
http://finsbury.conforums3.com/index.cgi?board=readings&action=display&num=1096725661
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird