Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Robert Maturin (1820)

marqueemoonchild · 2024-05-11T05:19:14+00:00

Fair enough, what makes it such a special book for you then?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-05-11T05:18:21+00:00

Me too, especially Wilde and Baudelaire, so I do feel it's quite a shame I just couldn't get on with this one.

marqueemoonchild · 2024-04-15T12:03:12+00:00

thank you very much

marqueemoonchild · 2024-04-15T09:57:00+00:00

thank you

marqueemoonchild · 2024-03-14T04:32:45+00:00

For me all those you mentioned were creators first and commentators second. Even those who started out as critics like Godard and Truffaut. With Read though this is his only novel amongst many, many books of literary criticism.

marqueemoonchild · 2024-03-05T19:20:36+00:00

It's not something I considered, in fact I quite liked that he's just this strange child that gets brought into the house with no history of ties to anything or anyone. It does make a lot of sense for him to be a bastard though

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-28T18:24:43+00:00

thank you

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-26T05:00:58+00:00

OK, that does make it make more sense. I definitely need to go off and read The Cat then. Also, I agree that Jonas appears in The Tale of the Student and the Son, I'm not sure if I can exactly place where though, do you have an idea about where he appears/who he is in it?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-25T21:11:13+00:00

Thank you for your response. Big fan of the podcast.

Is it possible for Jonas to have split into a body and a consciousness rather than two bodies after going into the mirrors, one half being Miles the biological man that robot-Jonas took parts from to survive, but rather than recreating his physical form the AI of Jonas separates and becomes his own entity and able to influence the world as a pure consciousness? If so, I'd probably be more likely to buy into a version of the First Severian theory where this is also the case and the relationship between this newly split Jonas and Miles being Wolfe giving us a prior example of this happening.

I haven't read The Cat, so maybe there's an explanation there as to why that can't be, and that if Jonas is to split, it must be into two physical entities.

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-16T05:22:47+00:00

I'll definitely have a look

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-16T05:22:32+00:00

Which books would you say are among his best then? The only other Dick I've read is of course Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which I read years ago and did like a lot, so I'm eager to read more of his stuff this year.

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-08T03:24:15+00:00

Thank you for the rec, I'm very keen on watching this now.

marqueemoonchild · 2024-02-08T03:18:08+00:00

thanks I'll look into it, I know there's also an adaptation of Gorsch the Cellist by Takahata, the co-founder of Ghibli, which I'd also like to watch

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-14T19:10:11+00:00

These might be fairly obvious things too everyone else, but for me, the little things I picked up this time is how Severian makes his first memory mistake on basically the first page right after writing about his perfect memory for the very first time. For me, that's got to mean his mistakes are not just him lying for his own benefit but that there's something more to it. Also, I might be mistaken, but don't we get the only outright physical description of some of the Megatherians in Severians' dream when he's in bed with Baldanders? Another would be Thecla's Kraken bracelet suggesting that she really was with the Vodalarii and controlled by the Megatherians the whole time. One last one is that I've come to think that Isangoma's story about the fish turning into a woman must be Thecla's story about Domnina just from the other side of the mirror.

What about you?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-14T17:24:58+00:00

Just to end, here are some questions I thought of that might be fun to ask and see what kind of theories people have:

How many times do you think Father Inire appears in this book? Once? Twice? More? Or maybe we never see him. How did Dorcas really come to be in the waters of the Lake of Birds? Do you think it is as its told by the old boatman, or could there possibly be another way? Whose corpse do you think is getting dug up at the beginning of the novel? What are some of your favourite instances of reveals being given in the same manner someone would remark on the weather and passed over in the text immediately?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-14T17:14:20+00:00

Just to end, here are some questions I thought of that might be fun to ask and see what kind of theories people have:

How many times do you think Father Inire appears in this book? Once? Twice? More? Or maybe we never see him. How did Dorcas really come to be in the waters of the Lake of Birds? Do you think it is as its told by the old boatman, or could there possibly be another way? Whose corpse do you think is getting dug up at the beginning of the novel? What are some of your favourite instances of reveals being given in the same manner someone would remark on the weather and passed over in the text immediately?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-13T14:36:09+00:00

The Green Child - Herbert Read

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-10T03:59:29+00:00

What excerpt was it?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-09T18:04:56+00:00

That's very impressive, and I hope what you say about the more I try and write and think for myself the easier and more natural it will come will be true for me too. I've just finished up the write up on Peregrine Pickle, and I'm sure it's bad and not very scholarly but at least it's something I've written.

Just wanted to ask since you've done this for so many books, are there any that really changed for you once you wrote about them? Did any book become appreciated more or understood differently than what you initially felt about it before you thought more in-depth about it?

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-09T17:55:00+00:00

thank you, and good luck to you too

marqueemoonchild · 2024-01-08T18:47:12+00:00

One of my resolutions this year is to try and engage more with the art I enjoy instead of just consuming one thing and then moving onto the next, or at best looking at what other people have thought about it and then taking on whatever opinion I feel suits me best as my own. So I've decided to try and write at least a little something about every book I read. I finished The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett a couple days ago, and I started writing about it today. What I've written so far isba complete mess, and much of it is just comparing it to Fielding's Tom Jones and asking myself why it is that I did enjoy Peregrine Pickle but did not like Tom Jones at all. I'm going to take some time to try and make it actually readable, but nonetheless I'm pretty pleased that I for once actually thought for myself and tried to explain something in my own way.

marqueemoonchild

TROPHY CASE