ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

plane journeys with ppl laughing at their reading material is yr idea of heaven no doubt

this thread makes me feel bad for not really liking austen, tho i understand why ppl do. i've given her a try several times, and i always come away feeling the way i do after a long, tedious meeting at work. there are bits i remember fondly (the dad in 'pride and prejudice' is pretty funny) but i've never really found any of her characters that engaging or memorable. prob my fault, not hers.

frederik b is otm that dostoevsky comes from a world that's completely alien to ours in most ways, so much so that i don't think he can be blamed if pretentious college kids or whoever pretend to see themselves in his characters. anyway, the truly insufferable kids are the ones insisting they will never read dostoevsky because st. nabokov disapproved of him.

demons is my second favorite novel ever at this point but still feeling v good about my austen vote (beyond the natural pleasure of minority selfrighteousness) (i think)

halfway thru my first read of emma cuz of this thread, not embarassed to admit i keep track of characters like "oh right breckin meyer". maybe i'll try the gambler again next. found it too upsetting the first time tbh lol.

voted autism

hah clueless is the best. heckerling gets austen.

what's the best austen to start with? i actually remember liking 'emma' more than the others i tried, but ended up misplacing my copy during a move.

P&P is as good a place. Also Persuasion because it's short and so unlike the others.

persuasion is long as fuck

idk Emma or nothing sorta. Mansfield park is sort of brilliant qua minor work and has one of the most fuckable male leads in lit but you should probably read fanny burney &/or ms Radcliffe first really /:

My Penguin copy of Persuasion is just over 250 pages!

S&S is more minor than MP, I think. It lacks the tensions that make the latter so frustrating in places.

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to

in my head Persuasion is definitely "the long one"

felt v much ambushed by emotion at one line of wentworth's. "am I not yet so much changed?". something like that, anyway.

P&P should be your first, I think. Persuasion is really short, though; you guys are weird.

Best introduction tbh is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009 parody)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Pirates and Ninjas and Bacon

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41u0oA1ReQL._SY300_.jpg

has anyone read this? is it good?

Pride Prejudice and Poops

persuasion def the short one to me. mansfield park the long one.

Never given these two a proper go.

http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/norte-end-history

^ However I am watching this film -- 'based' on C&P -- so that might inspire me.

In regards to Austen boyz who are into ECONOMICS are reading her: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p020wmkt

I liked this talk by the climate ethicist, Stephen Gardiner. He uses the opening chapter of S&S - where a husband and wife incrementally talk themselves out of their obligation to support the husband's mother and sisters - to analyze moral corruption around climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChgJIhWXXbE

giving p&p another try. it's pretty funny!

Mr. Bennett!

Yeah, the relationship between Lizzie and her father is one of the great joys of that book--he's retreated from the foolishness of his family to the point where he's actually letting them all down, but the vibe of intellectual equality and pride he has in his one really clever (not just "book clever") daughter... It's just lovely.

making Donald Sutherland perfect casting in the otherwise meh 2005 adaptation.

"Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody."

^^^

good thread let's do again

I'd probably go for Austen this time. there was what Kevin Blackwell once memorably called on some TV punditry "the width of a gnat's cock" in it the first time round.

twoagc *in it* the first time round.

it's not a particularly Janeite phrase I feel, but a buffoon in Dostoevsky certainly.

darragh do you mean a new matchup or, let's just argue about austen some more

my next one was going to be the romantic Big Four vs pound/eliot

def both thomp

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 21 July 2014 20:16

I wanna know more about this.

Austen, of course.

it's about the same as saying smth is "mission"

a chore? an unrewarding effort?

but you can use it of anything from visiting friends in zone 4 to, like, a family member, a genre of music, the ouevre of a major novelist

I want to see which one gets cut to make a romantic Big Four.

yeah apparently for some minutes earlier i totally forgot about the existence of john keats?

well if he will write his name in water

https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews/schmausterlitz-58d005d29592#.ijei72fuu

^ reminded me of the fun we had in this thread.

in laughs, the first seventy pages of demons is giving jane a run for her money

I am finishing Karamazov and I picked Mansfield Park to re-create the um, spirit of this thread.

I’ve read Crime, Underground, Brothers, Demons, The Idiot, The Gambler/The Double. Haven’t read any in a numbers of years. I am so anti-religion these days I don’t know if I could deal with D’s nonsense now.

Haven’t read any Austen, unless I read something in high school and forgot. This thread is making me want to!

Austen captures the politely strangled reserve of her characters just as fully as Dostoevsky captures the extreme emotional volatility of his. She's great, but the tone of their respective novels could hardly be more different.

This is the top Goodreads review of Pride and Prejudice pic.twitter.com/ZXbbUh6uAj

— Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) July 11, 2020

Feel like Tolstoy would have been a more appropriate comparison? Idk

― 龜, Sunday, 20 July 2014 bookmarkflaglink

As I finish Middlemarch wonder if Eliot would've been an even closer result with some of the "politics of taste" we got here.

This piece reminded me of this poll

Men make up just 20% of the audience for literary fiction. Please, I beg you, get over yourselves and into novelistic chitter chatter! https://t.co/R8x8ZYlFuP

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2022

Broadly speaking there is a mini-genre of pieces by women writing about why men hate fiction and why, which could be worth exploring though I haven't as I'm pretty dismissive.

ime it seems to be men who don’t read who don’t read fiction, I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction.

This piece is a bit different because it goes onto talk about men who don't read fiction at all from the set-up which is more SF/genre reader Vs 'proper' canon fiction.

I wouldn't say the piece does a great job of selling literary fiction.

Or it seems to concede the premise that literature is basically about chitter-chatter.