it's okay - it's only the end of this stage of humanity and life as we know it - after December 12th 2012, the human race will evolve into a wonderful new era of love and understanding...
or everything goes to shit. it's fifty fifty really.
-------------------- If Chuck Norris is late, time better slow the fuck down Posts: 2740
| IP: Logged
posted
Top ten books that best define the 20th century (in order of publication) according to a *poll.
quote:Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald Brave New World by Aldous Huxley The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
Put them in rank order, suggest your own top ten or just have a bit of a rant. Bring cakes.
posted
I've read two of those, and I'd be much happier if modern life was "Hellerian" than "Orwellian". In Catch-22, life is completely ridiculous and frustrating, but there's plenty of characters ready and willing to stand up to it and rip it all to bits anyway. Nineteen Eighty-Four is just pure, hopeless bleakness and it's incredible that it's actually been taken as almost an inevitable prophesy of the real future. It's like, "Ah, yes, that was in 1984... I've been expecting that to happen. *sigh* Never mind, eh."
"GIMME EAT" should be the response on everyone's lips the minute some twat starts laying down new rules and regulations, not "Oh, it's Big Brother look. Awright Big Brother?"
I don't want to read any of the others because they're probably even more depressing.
(I think I read The Grapes Of Wrath once, but it doesn't fit in with my comments, so fuck it.)
Posts: 8467
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Time for a haemmorrhoid gag?
It's always time for a haemmorrhoid gag, especially as everyone else seems to have gone out somewhere for the day.
Is Brave New World good for a laugh then? We've got a copy at home but it has this kind of depressing aura about it similar to Marvin the Paranoid Android so I've never picked it up.
Posts: 8467
| IP: Logged
posted
There you go, ladies. In order to cut it as a twentieth-century great you have to either, a. get murdered by the Nazis or b. be a caricature of shallow materialist ditz.
Posts: 8657
| IP: Logged
posted
The Diary of Anne Frank isn't a "real" book, if you know what I mean, so it doesn't count to my mind.
If the list is specifically "define the 20th Century", then there should be at least one movie tie-in novel, plus a Jeffery Archer, as a reminder that most people in the last century either couldn't read or didn't deserve to be able to.
P.S. Only a godless savage would find Heart of Darkness boring. It's only about 90 pages long ffs.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
| IP: Logged
posted
Heart of Darkness is great but I'd go for The Secret Agent, a novel that casts a gimlet eye over the potential political upheavals of a scary century pregnant with change.
All Quiet On The Western Front, anyone?
Bulldog Drummond by Sapper is an interesting thumbnail of the bullet-headed spawn of a brutal and ignorant Empire sniffing its imminent demise.
The Bond novels, of course, should be in there somewhere.
Um, Burroughs' Junky or Algren's Man With the Golden Arm, Puzo's The Godfather or Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run, or towards the end, you should have Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as a diagnosis of a very sick superpower.
posted
The list of defining books of the 20th century is probably very, very large. We could go on all day, tossing names into the hat like grains of sand into the gritty cauldron of "20th century literature soup", or somesuch other ludicrous analogy.
To get a top ten out of it is ridiculous. Although you could do that google wars thing maybe to get an idea of perceived importance, which although differs from actual legacy, is probably more valid. If. Or. Maybe actually perceived importance is the most useful thing though. It's not like anybody actually reads books.
[ 05.06.2007, 08:55: Message edited by: Jimmy Big Nuts ]
Posts: 4376
| IP: Logged
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
I only got round to reading Heart of Darkness a couple of years ago. Suddenly, the point of Apocalypse Now became much more clear.
I didn't even make it past the first twenty pages of Catcher in the Rye, I have an inbuilt Wiganners loathing of Orwell, the rest of 'em are alright, apart from Catch 22, what rocked.
I also second Benny's Steinbeck preference. And why no American Psycho?
Posts: 5776
| IP: Logged
H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
posted
Just for the StevieX of it...:
co·her·ent (k-hîrnt, -hr-) adj. 1. Sticking together; cohering. 2. Marked by an orderly, logical, and aesthetically consistent relation of parts: a coherent essay. 3. Physics Of, relating to, or having waves with similar direction, amplitude, and phase that are capable of exhibiting interference. 4. Of or relating to a system of units of measurement in which a small number of basic units are defined from which all others in the system are derived by multiplication or division only. 5. Botany Sticking to but not fused with a part or an organ of the same kind.
com·pre·hen·si·ble (kmpr-hns-bl) adj. Readily comprehended or understood; intelligible.
-------------------- i'm expressing my inner anguish through the majesty of song Posts: 4243
| IP: Logged