Book Addicts Anonymous

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vampyre_princess
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by vampyre_princess »

Okay, so i'lI beg for money for books, I love going into bookstores and buying books, all my mates go on the internet!!

I love the smell of new books and the feel of them inyourhands as you look at them in detai, but I wont buy a book if it's got one crease in it, I suffer form a bit of OCD that way!!

Everyone thinks I'm crazy i have tens of thousands of books and I've read them all.

It takes me 6 hours to read the HP series, 2 hours to read Twilight Saga, and about 2 hours to read the HoN series. So I read really quickly and I take it all in, I've run out of books and I'm not allowed anymore money to go buy more. I have to keep reading King Lear by William Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte over and over for my A2 English!!
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dimber
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by dimber »

vampyre_princess wrote:
It takes me 6 hours to read the HP series, 2 hours to read Twilight Saga, and about 2 hours to read the HoN series. So I read really quickly and I take it all in, I've run out of books and I'm not allowed anymore money to go buy more. I have to keep reading King Lear by William Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte over and over for my A2 English!!
:o How can you possibly read the whole HP series in 6 hours????? It's less than one second per page...come on :shock:
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paula_bnsnt
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by paula_bnsnt »

♥midnight_sun♥ wrote:And can anyone recommend which Jane Austen or Charolotte (sp?)/Emily Bronte book is the best? I've been reading too much Shakespeare lately for this other project its making my head hurt. :? Which means...I just need something simple that I won't get too attached to to read and classics usually fit that bill for me.
By Jane Austen I reccomend Mansfield Park or Pride & Prejudice (the only ones I've read). From Charlotte Bronte I only read "Jane Eyre"... It's interesting but the ending let me down completely. And Emily Bronte pretty much means "Wuthering Heights"! I reccomend it for the book itself and also because it'll help you understand everything Bella and Edward discuss about it.

dimber wrote: Allende and Garcia Marquez are two of my favourite authors but I've never dared read them in the original language, though I can read Spanish pretty well. I might give it a try next year ecause I have Marquez's opera omnia in pdf ;)
Try Allende.
García Márquez is hard even for someone who speaks Spanish as a native language. I had to read "100 years of solitude" with a dictionary in hand. He uses very... "Colombian" words. It's beautiful though... he's a genius. Maybe you should start by his short stories like "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes" ("A very old man with large wings" --> excuse the homemade translation please! =P) or "El ahogado más hermoso del mundo" ("The world's most beautiful drowned") and then move on to longer ones.
You may also enjoy Jorge Luis Borges. He's also into "magic realism" as Márquez.

dimber wrote: Regarding Moccia, I have to disagree...his writing really sucks: too simple, no metaphors, too many dialogues.


I noticed the same but I liked it. His style is like that mostly because he's a screenwriter.
dimber wrote: They're targeted for a YA audience but all the delicate topics like pre-marriage sex, violent teenagers and school life are treated superficially and with no understanding of the teen world.
You're right about the messages but he's always been like that. Parents know.
Of course I just read two of his books so what you say may apply to the rest.
dimber wrote: ...his writing, compared to the average Italian standards, simply sucks


Average Italian standards... I hope you don't mean Dante, Pirandello, Leopardi, Foscolo, Montale or Calvino 'cause next to them anyone sucks! lol I'm just kidding... I see what you mean. But instead of thinking he sucks because of that, I see it as... innovative (don't know if it's the right word) and it makes me like him more.
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dimber
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by dimber »

paula_bnsnt wrote:
dimber wrote: ...his writing, compared to the average Italian standards, simply sucks


Average Italian standards... I hope you don't mean Dante, Pirandello, Leopardi, Foscolo, Montale or Calvino 'cause next to them anyone sucks! lol I'm just kidding... I see what you mean. But instead of thinking he sucks because of that, I see it as... innovative (don't know if it's the right word) and it makes me like him more.
I don't want to appear snobbish but our standards are Calvino, Foscolo and many others. We are used to read them since childhood - at least my generation is used to it - so everything like Moccia doesn't feel like good literature. Italian is a very complex and beautiful language: to deplete it to screenwriting standards is such a shame!!!!
By the way, I respect your taste :)
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paula_bnsnt
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by paula_bnsnt »

lol And I yours, of course!
I graduated from an italian school (elementare, media & liceo) in my city (Esame di maturitá an all!) and even though the liceo was scientific, we mostly had humanistic subjetcs. So I pretty much had 7 years of Latin and Italian literature. I wish Argentina had so many history and authors like Italy but we're just getting started! lol
We studied La Divina Commedia for three years and it was the best experience of my life.
Must be hard being an Italian writer and have to be as good as that. I feel sorry for Moccia 'cause you have a great point and there's nothing he can do about that.

By the way I totally wish I could be saying all this in italian, dovrei esercitare un po' il linguaggio!
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dimber
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by dimber »

@ Paula: that's really cool! I guess you have Italian ancestors...I read somewhere that a high percentage of Argentinians are of Italian origin. If you wanna practice your Italian I'll be glad to help...or, if you prefer, we can meet in the middle and speak Spanish. I took Spanish for 4 years at college and university and now I tech it in Italian middle school. That's why I would like to read something in Spanish.

We used to read quite a lot in Spanish in college but all the books belonged to the Spanish classic canon, so I read a lot of theatre and poetry and very few novels. I loved Garcia Lorca and Neruda, of course...and just to jump "in-topic" again I would suggest "Bodas de Sangre" by Lorca (the title in English is "Blood Wedding"). Absolutely amazing!!!! I'm afraid the beauty of the language will suffer from the translation but I guess it's worth a try.
For everybody in the thread fluent in both English and Spanish, I would recommend a very witful Canadian theatre monologue by an Argentinian-Canadian author called Guillermo Verdecchia. The monologue is called "Fronteras Americanas-American Borders" and is about the stereotypes about Latin people in the English speaking countries. It's funny and clever at the same time and makes you think a lot about the "border" as both a physical line between countries as well as a cultural line between cultures.
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paula_bnsnt
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by paula_bnsnt »

dimber wrote:@ Paula: that's really cool! I guess you have Italian ancestors...I read somewhere that a high percentage of Argentinians are of Italian origin.


I do have Italian ancestors on both my mother's and my father's side of the family. I have been trying to get the citizenship for eight years! My cousins have it and I descend from the same people so I should have it too but the Consulate keep delaying it.
dimber wrote:If you wanna practice your Italian I'll be glad to help...or, if you prefer, we can meet in the middle and speak Spanish.
I'd love to but I don't want to leave anyone out of whatever we say. It wouldn't be fair! Maybe through PM?

I think it's great you want to read in Spanish and I advise anyone to read as much in the original languages as they can. It really helps to speak better and the styles and the stories themselves are appreciated more.
The first time I read Twilight, it was actually "Crepúsculo", the Spanish translation. It is terrible. It's translated so literally that as someone who speaks English I could tell that the sentences meant something completely different! I practically threw it away and had to get the whole Saga online, delivered from the US in English because at the time it wasn't available in original language in any bookstore.


I haven't read a lot from the Spanish classics... other than "Don Quijote" and "La vida es sueño" (Life is a dream) by Calderón de la Barca (I reccomend it!!). I've read some of the most famous poems by Neruda and what he does with words is just magic. But my Spanish literature teacher wanted to skip through Spain that and go straight to Argentinean authors. I'm glad she did 'cause it'd be shameful to know more about Spain than Argentina... but still, classics are classics and for a country that practically descends from Spanish culture it's was mistake to separate them. García Lorca is definately on my "To read" list.

Where can I find that monologue from Guillermo Verdecchia?? I've never heard of it and it sounds interesting!
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dimber
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by dimber »

Paula I'm glad I read Twilight directly in the original language...I read some pages from my hubby's Italian translation and I can say it's really horrible. The problem is we don't have good translators here. The good ones translate "high" stuff like Nobel prizes and the like so YA books are translated by people with no training at all, sometimes, especially when the book is totally new. The publishing houses don't want to spend money to get a good translation of a book that might be a total failure on the Italian market. That's why successful books sometimes change their translator along the way...it happened for HP, for example. For LotR it was even worse. We've had a horrible translation for decades until some people from the Tolkien society, for truth's sake and without getting any money, checked the whole book for mistakes and mistranslations and corrected them.

Regarding Verdecchia's books if you have a Postcolonial or English Department at the local University you can try in their library. It's almost impossible to find them in bookstores, even in Canada, but there some websites on the net that sell them. I got some photocopies from my university and was very lucky to see the monologue performed by Guillermo himself.
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virre
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by virre »

dragon620026 wrote:Hi everyone! I was wondering if someone might be able to help me out. I am currently trying to find a book as a present for my boyfriend but I have no idea what I could get him. The type of books he reads for fun are:

War and Peace
Prodigal Mage
Angels and Demons
The Lost Symbol
The Alchemist

Then he also mentioned that he likes historical fiction.


This may be like weeks to late, but the first author i thought of was Alexandre Dumas i have read 3 of his books; The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and i enjoyed all of them very much! I would recommend the three musketeers and the man in the iron mask (especially if he likes french history) they are not really historically correct, but hey have what i would call a "historical base" with an accurate "environment" for the time epoch and with fictional and non-fictional characters in the senter of the story. It is the kind of books that inspires you to research and find out what is rooted in reality and what is fictional. (at least that is what happend to me :))

Also i recommend this book to, although i think i might be more of a "girly" book :P it has many letters of great historical people. And it is really breathtaking to think that these are actual letters that Leo Tolstoy, Mozart, Napoléon and many others have written "once upon a time" :P

Or for you sex in the city fans out there in book land, this one inspired by the book Carrie reads in the movie is also a great book!
Last edited by virre on Tue Nov 17, 2009 5:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Book Addicts Anonymous

Post by blasphemous_contessa »

My friend gave me this really great book as a going away present. It's I Seem to be A Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller.

Has anyone read it? I would love to discuss it's content seriously with someone who actually got the point of all the seemingly randomness of it. If you haven't read it, make sure to get a first edition, the later reprints completely ignore the original format which is actually pretty important to the overall thesis
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That one's for Ianto. Risen Mitten, Life Knife, and that old classic...Stun Gun.
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