Book Nerd’s Comments (group member since Dec 20, 2018)

Book Nerd’s comments from the Never too Late to Read Classics group.

Yeah mine is just over 1200 pages and 80 chapters in three [edit FOUR] parts.

I know. I'm just wondering what they left out.
Journey to the West has a hundred chapters. It starts with Monkey's birth and a lot of his monkey business, goes on to Xuanzang's early life, they start their quest, meet Pig and Friar Sand, then lots and lots of episodic adventures. Probably a lot of those are what's left out.

God these are some looong paragraphs.
And there's endless descriptions of clothes but I want to know what witches, imp, goblins, pixies, etc look like. All we really know is that demons do in fact have horns.

I read Journey to the West a while ago. Which parts are in this?

I'm a few chapters in. Glad to finally be rereading this.

I started this. Wow, the language is difficult! The book's a hundred years old but he was writing like it was hundreds of years older.

Yule was made for Lovecraft :)

Carol of the Old Ones

Yep, seemed like a good December read.

I've read A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man and The Cricket on the Hearth this month.
Reading The Battle of Life now.

The Festival

A Lovecraft Christmas

midnightfaerie wrote: "Thanks! I've been working on the classics for years. I love labs. Mine is named Max after the Grinch's dog. He's our 4th lab (others deceased). 7 months old and always into our Christmas Tree!"
Seven months old and you dare to put up a Christmas tree?

midnightfaerie wrote: "Hi, I'm Janine aka midnightfaerie, or even just midnight. I saw a list years ago on "100 books most ppl haven't read" and was appalled at how few I had read. So I jumped into it. Then I got into Gi..."
Wow you have a long list!
I also have a yellow lab. :)

John_Dishwasher wrote: "The idea that this might be better in German makes me feel better. I didn't know I was reading a translation. I hate to be a downer but what others are calling poetic felt to me laborious and sentimental. And while I respect the ambition of the work, I felt like she crammed too much into too few pages to keep track of. I had a hard time finishing it."
Yeah I thought it was poetic but the language was just a little weird sometimes.

I was wondering what Yoshiwara was. It's only mentioned a couple of times and it's not really clear. I found this Yoshiwara

So you have the New Tower of Babel, no mystery there.
You have Rotwang's house that they're constantly reminding you has hexagrams on the doors, representing technology as some kind of new age sorcery. (I would wonder if his name was some kind of joke except it was written in German).
There's Yoshiwara, their Sodom maybe?
And there's the cathedral left over in this city that seems to have no use for it.

I just listened to this.
I liked it. Very Lovecraftian. And the science was surprisingly good, talking about forth dimensional entities.

The movie was weird. In silent movies they have to be really expressive with gestures. The woman who plays Maria plays two parts and the faces and head movements she makes as "evil" Maria were so funny.

I might try to read Hiroshima if I can. I liked it as a freshman in high school.
So much to read and do.

It's not very long but the language can be a bit complex. I read it in around ten hours, you can probably do it quicker.

Belén wrote: "Hi! My name is Belén. I'm from Argentina and I've started reading quite recently. My favorite novels are Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, along with No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. I'm currently..."
Cool. You should definitely read Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov and The Tale of the Heike.

The back of my book says "In the literature of Science Fiction, there is no more an underappreciated and ignored piece of writing than Thea Von Harbou's magnificent Metropolis."
I have to agree. This belongs up there with the greats of sci-fi. Some parts are a bit hard to get through because of the language, maybe it's better in German, but totally worth it.
Now I have to watch the movie. I didn't realize it was silent. An almost three hour silent film might be tough to get through too. But it's so highly praised I want to check it out.

So what does everybody think of the tons of symbolism in this?