Clarity??

'The first thing "polysemous" calls to mind is Polyphemus.'--Whoops, I just implied that you're a very tall creature with only one eye; suppose that sort interpretation is inevitable when one doesn't write clearly.

The editors have now closed this correspondence.

Good lord, if it's any consolation in no way whatever was I suggesting that you had brain damage or the like: I simply listed the things that that 'brain-training' called to mind.

All that 'brain-training' suggests to me are rehab after a trauma to the brain, having an overwhelming influence on someone's early childhood, and constant indoctrination by a totalitarian government,not reading in hopes of establishing neural connections.

I've not read every word of your post--reading French authors of the last 100 years might train your brain to condense many words into succinctness--but forgive me it has a ring of the self-help and of self-righteousness about it.

If it was people giving you stick about reading so much that provoked your post, never mind them; just carry on reading.

I think it's meh.

(Stupid update, stupid broken Typio lost remarks about each book in first post.)

Four good novels:

Thursday Night Widows, Claudio Pineiro.

The Past, Alan Pauls.

Open Door, Iosi Havilio.

The Incompletes, Sergio Chejfec.

I hugely enjoyed the Pinero & wd re-readit before the Pauls but list is inorder of increasing regard for the books.

Thanks, but it's you deserves all the credit. (Though I must say I'm rather pleased with 'sighed defiantly'.)

I can tell you exactly what a flanchion is. It's a word on a wiki list of medieval swords.

'I would that I could draw back but found to my despair, and shamed though I was it to my secretest delight, that I was as firmly transfixed by the quivering of his sturdy flamberge as banquet goat is fixed on a spit. Reader, I fucked him.'

Sorry. '. . . goat is fixed on a spit. "I have heard tell of your undefeated flanchion," I sighed defiantly, "but perhaps your flamberge excels it." '

Would you lot please take a deep breath & count to 10 before downvoting OP's posts just because her/his years as a teenager weren't exactly like your own?

Simple enough. Unless you've many bookcases, move the ones you have to north walls. (Fwiw, I've many many bookcases & live in a place where in summer there is prolonged northern sunlight but I've never been over-bothered about fading spines for the most part; I don't like to see the effects of glare on art & design books spines, but I lower the blinds on west side of house in late summer afternoons for my own benefit anyway.)

They won't warp if you put them between firmly placed bookends or better still when you have enough books to fill a shelf with books that will cheerfully provide support to their neighbours.

It doesn't matter. There's no such thing as 'messing up' one's reading. Just read on and take in what Milton has to say. You don't have a good ear. but so what? in fact, maybe you've simply no sense of rhythm but again, so what? There's no entrance exam on pentameters you must pass before you're allowed to read a poem. Trying to hear what you can't will only lessen whatever reward you might get from it.

Because it's wrapped up like a douche?

When I was charitably giving The Great Gatsby another chance I got up from the chair in the middle of one or another conversation in it to go do something more gratifying and when I did my knee hurt a terrific lot. And I began to feel a migraine whilst re-reading Vanity Fair. That's a seriously weird concidence, given that all the characters in the novel have heads.

You can put an end to your worries by ensuring that any relatives who survive you are the Estate of James Joyce.

(As an afterthought, would anyone really expect better from someone who wrote a 'time-travel historical romance'?)

Thanks for this. My reaction wasn't loud hilarity but quiet chuckling that went unheard under my deep sighs. This smug ignorance paraded with a knowledgeable tone isn't at all surprising: When I've gently corrected Yanks online who refer to the Irish language as 'Gaelic' (a language used in a nearby country known for its very hot peppers) I've been 'corrected' by many of them using a more markedly knowledgeable tone.

Dunno about OP but I need to like a character because then I like the book and that means as you should know that it's a good book and I only wanna read good books and BAD BOOKS MAKE ME PUKE AND THEY ALL OUGHTA BE SENT TO DEVIL'S ISLAND AND IF YOU DON'T STOP LOOKING AT ME THAT WAY HUCKLEBERRY FINN I'LL CUT OFF YOUR HEAD AND STUFF IT DOWN YOUR POX-SCARRED ESOPHAGUS.

I'm curious: 1) One of the fuzzy US terms I've no time for, or hadn't until reading OP, is 's/he has anger issues'. Is this the sort of thing ye mean when you use it? 2) Is it easier to read a rant all in upper-case/caps than one with occasional Germanic ones?

No need to apologise. You were perfectly clear. A few replies are from people who read your OP in too much haste, and that's hardly your fault.

Download away. Sounds like you've no alternative, & in that circumstance most authors would without doubt be pleased to have their writing read in any form.

Sorry about your parents. Fair dos to you though for having an open mind despite their closed ones.

Very interesting; thank you for taking the time to post this. SK's influence on existentialism was apparent to me but not Nietzche's. Now I'm half-considering starting the new year by having another look at Unscientific Postscript (though if I'm going to go with something worthy, suspect I might be sidetracked by S. Weil further down the shelf).--Always nice to see a new connection made, especially one that isn't the likes of 'Wow, Stephen King and James Herbert both wrote stories about a deadly fog!' Happy new year.

Don't suppose you'd say a bit more about latter comparison--? A long time since I read Kierkegaard & not read Nietzsche since uni so memory first brings forth theological difference between them and then the marked dissimilarity in writing style which makes in retrospect any similarities less apparent. Cheers.

'Epic' to me suggests that Priam will be mentioned or that play with words, stereotypes, and conventional sensibllities will be used to cock a snook or that a couple knights will cry a lot & self-harm out of fleeting agony. I'

(Since you asked so nicely, Odyssey by Homer, Don Juan by Byron, The Knight in the Panther Skin by Rustaveli.)

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard.

Having said that, you're probably not going to able to say anything 'valuable' about a particular book if you've not read it--though whether the assigned book merits valuable remarks or even close attention is another matter.

hellosugar7 is right, full stop. And not only is not attempting to at least attentively browse the book in some way dismissive of his/her father but OP would be missing a chance to learn something even when the person who could answer questions about it sitting there in the next room chloroforming & pinning helpless creatures to a board or watching videos of Gunsmoke episodes.

Maybe 'voice' has taken on a new meaning fairly recently, but to me it's nothing like 'opinion',

It's much like 'tone' & is determined partly if not mostly by the author's diction (choice of words), phrasing and the like & not related at all to opinion. Saying that a narrator has a strong voice is praise. Nothing to do with opinion. In fiction voice is probably most striking in 1st-person narratives.

Author's opinions are okay if the writer is so skilful that they aren't apparent. Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is an unusually powerful book about a few generations of farming family that I never suspected was written as a protest against mistreatment of animals, but Ayn Rand and Scarlett Thomas don't write well enough to use their advocacy of selfishness or homeopathy as anything but blunt objects.

They didn't scream so we now know they were sleeping rough? (Cf lamentably recent & damnably lamentable court judgements and the Bible on the screaming though tbf a connection to homelessness isn't made even in those.) Having read that claim I strongly doubt the author has suggested a proof that the women weren't prostitutes rather than 'labelled' as ones. Surely the murder of a prostitute is as odious as that of someone labelled as one or indeed of anyone else. Assuming you mean the city of London & not the City of London, the poor weren't huddled in piles throughout it nor would they have been allowed by authorities to have been; they were most obviously concentrated & starving & driven to desperate measures & dying in the East End. There's nothing in the least celebratory about scones and tea.

I'm only going by what you say of the book. If I've got a good idea of it I think you might want to look further into its author's research before you celebrate it with stodgy bread rolls and milky tea.

Obscure but not used only in a small region, and replying to it with 'Ah, but if it were submitted to the compositers in a different typeface?' is the streetwise way of saying, depending on region, 'How much for full intercourse?' (Catalonia) or 'By the gushing blood of martyrs tortured with excruciating pain, you look like an undercover cop to me.' (Andalucia)