FHC Book Club: Heavy Reading for LibArt Failures

[Spaztick]

Okay so times up for Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? so it's time to start on Paradise Lost.

This is heavier reading but still easily interpretable, so I'll give everyone 4 weeks to read it through. We can discuss stuff while reading on any book you previously read, but say which book and part of the book you talk about or give a summary. Put it all in spoilers so I know when to skip your opinion.

Book's out of copyright so steal it from wherever you can get. Dirk and I recommend the Gutenberg Project for all your free out of print and copyright book needs.. If you're enough of a consumer whore to have bought a Kindle I have a .mobi for you to put on yours here.

Begin reading! Try not to cry when you read; Satan's a real bastard no matter how you cut it. Also taking suggestions for next book.


Books FHC has utterly failed to comprehend so far:
- Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick (lol dick)
- Paradise Lost by John Milton

[fffuuu]

will find a copy and get started.

[Reed Tiburon]

sweet, always wanted to read this time to find the ebook. it's somewhere on my desktop...

[Timaios]

Oh, Paradise Lost is a good book. I'll give some ideas on what to look out for later on, it's in spoilers with the proper chapter numbers so you know when it's safe to read.

Regarding the book in general, it would make sense to have passing knowledge of Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy was written approx. 300 years earlier and if you compare on how events and biblical teachings are discussed, you'll notice something interesting. My suggestion, for when reading the Paradise Lost, is to think on how people were thinking about these things (or the world in general) back in the 17th century and if (or if not) Milton's writing reflects those beliefs. The article on Milton in Wikipedia makes a good read and puts the book in perspective. Then, one could look at Dante and ponder the same. For example, in Divine Comedy, the narrator meets a man in Hell who is being tormented there. Meanwhile, his body is still on earth, continuing its' life but being controlled by demons. This was a novel idea, as earlier the idea of the body and soul being separate entities was unfathomable. There was, for example, quite a bit of theological debating going on about what happens to cannibals on doomsday when all the dead people arise to be judged and it was believed that the same matter which made up the body at death would have to be used to make up the resurrected body as well. If the matter cannibals had eaten belonged already to someone else, that matter would have to make up both the resurrected corpse that had died and been eaten, but at the same time the matter was also part of the cannibals body which would also need to be raised and so on.

The idea of having a separate nonmaterial soul sort of solved this issue.

Quotes from Milton have been used in some popular culture, e.g. Book IV

[spoiler:lezkovo0]in the animesque 2001 Nights, the following comment of Satan is used, actually by the pope, to support a scientific expedition. "Knowledge forbidden? Suspicious, reasonless! Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know? Can it be death?"[/spoiler:lezkovo0]

If I could suggest, you might like to read Divine Comedy next, but it might be a bit too boring to have two books of the same theme in succession.

[Sacul]

If I could suggest, you might like to read Divine Comedy next, but it might be a bit too boring to have two books of the same theme in succession.

La divina comedia is terribly written. Pompous and long drawn boring. If you want complex heavy reading that is well done go read something by Conrad like the long version of Heart of Darkness not that trimmed lit. 101 class bullshit or Umberto Eco's 'Foucalts pendulum'. Any book by Garcia Marquez would qualify as heavy aswell.

Really most of the 'old' classics are terrible books and i have read allmost all of them. I enjoy a contemporary writer much more than some guy like Dante.

[Grendelfreak]

I have read some stuff related to Paradise Lost before (essentially how British poets referenced him when comparing Napoleon to Satan) but I never learnt how to read poetry properly, I just end up reading each line faster and faster. So what is the 'correct' way to read this stuff?

[Spaztick]

If I could suggest, you might like to read Divine Comedy next, but it might be a bit too boring to have two books of the same theme in succession.

La divina comedia is terribly written. Pompous and long drawn boring. If you want complex heavy reading that is well done go read something by Conrad like the long version of Heart of Darkness not that trimmed lit. 101 class bullshit or Umberto Eco's 'Foucalts pendulum'. Any book by Garcia Marquez would qualify as heavy aswell.

Really most of the 'old' classics are terrible books and i have read allmost all of them. I enjoy a contemporary writer much more than some guy like Dante.

I enjoyed Inferno but couldn't really stomach Purgatorio or Paradiso except the very end as I felt it was too heavily politicized to stand on its own without some knowledge of the history behind it (that I still don't have).

I have read some stuff related to Paradise Lost before (essentially how British poets referenced him when comparing Napoleon to Satan) but I never learnt how to read poetry properly, I just end up reading each line faster and faster. So what is the 'correct' way to read this stuff?

I find myself skipping the poetry part and just reading it through normally.

[lt]

Is it possible to put .mobi on android phones?

[kzig]

I've read through nearly half of this at work over the last 12 months while waiting for things like:

• Database queries (it's not the code, we just have to work with very large numbers of rows )[/*:m:1bmi3w45]
• Dataset format conversion[/*:m:1bmi3w45]
• Model fitting[/*:m:1bmi3w45]
• External tasks on which my work is dependent.[/*:m:1bmi3w45]

I have the complete Project Gutenberg text embedded as a comment in an obscure piece of code on one of our modelling servers.

The vocabulary alone is fascinating - I keep coming across words and phrases I've seen in all sorts of other contexts (e.g. quaternion). I find it quite an exercise in concentration to read a whole paragraph at a time, take in all the imagery and make sense of the narrative. It's the literary equivalent of eating very rich fruit cake.

[Spaztick]

Is it possible to put .mobi on android phones?

I'm not sure, I think it's a proprietary thing, but there's a handy program called Calibre that I use to convert PDFs and stuff to .mobi and you can convert it to a bunch of other formats, it's a free program and the main purpose is to use it as an e-book converter.

[pratell]

didn't they make a movie out of paradise lost with nicholas cage?

[Spaztick]

Okay so a bit more on Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?:

[spoiler:36wensnw]Thinking on what Mercer actually is, I think he's the machine that hooks people up to his films; he's the sympathy boxes that everyone holds on to when they need to feel what other people feel, and being a machine can't help but observe other people feeling empathy toward everyone else and the Mercer in the films. One thing that puzzles me slightly is his quote of "I am required to do wrong. Everything I've done has been wrong from the start." Does this mean he's doing wrong by giving people an artificial fix of empathetic response or does it mean that people are feeling empathy off his machines without him reciprocating and thus denying them empathy from himself to them?[/spoiler:36wensnw]

[Dirk Magnum]

For all things out-of-copyright, consult http://Gutenberg.org.
Paradise Lost

[Spaztick]

For all things out-of-copyright, consult http://Gutenberg.org.
Paradise Lost

[Takon Orlani]

Fuck reading all that.

Cant we do some TS E or WB Yeats or something? Hell, HP Lovecraft?

[Spaztick]

Fuck reading all that.

Cant we do some TS E or WB Yeats or something? Hell, HP Lovecraft?

If you dare read something else I will bust into your house and hold a gun to your head.

[Takon Orlani]

Fuck reading all that.

Cant we do some TS E or WB Yeats or something? Hell, HP Lovecraft?

If you dare read something else I will bust into your house and hold a gun to your head.

I'll return the favor

[Sacul]

Fuck reading all that.

Cant we do some TS E or WB Yeats or something? Hell, HP Lovecraft?

TSE was a pretentious faggot. The rest is ok.

[Sacul]

ow wait i ment Joyce....Ulyses that is. I started reading him because Michael Ignatieff spoke highly of him but i think i started with his worst book and can never get myself to open A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that has been gathering dust on a book shelf for a good 8 years now. I am a big fan of Philiph Roth tho.

[ThonEney]

Is it possible to put .mobi on android phones?

http://goo.gl/WVu4z Best/simplest so far
Edit: Actually after looking around a bit http://goo.gl/RGbcR seems better