Peter’s Comments (group member since Jun 19, 2014)

Peter’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

I think Marlowe could take Spade. I think Marlowe could outdrink, outrun and out-suffer Spade. But Spade is smarter, can see through the tricks and not get taken in like Marlowe does. Not even hot dames can trick him. : )

Anna Karenina, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation is surprisingly readable. Although Tolstoy is generally surprisingly readable anyway. That other Russian, Ayn Rand, however, is a sort of slapstick writer. I got through Shrugged in grad school, but had to give up on Fountainhead. Shrugged contained the best description of a steel forging plant I have ever come across, but the speechifying is grating. Shrugged is a nice contrast to Frederick Lewis Allen's "The Lords of Creation" with the exception that "Creation" is reportage of fact, and Shrugged is some broken Russian aristocrat's paranoid fantasy. Other monsters: Don Q, Les Mis, anything by Dumas...

Oh, sorry, Yes, The Sound and the Fury was the iceberg to my Titantic.

A Critique of Pure Reason, by that guy Kant.
Yeah, the Stand, that is a slog as well. the republished unedited version is like 1,300 pages. I had to put it down after 300+. It was just too depressing.

The main character in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, Undine? Although if she is a bad person, does that make her a "bad girl?" Was she just a product of her class and culture? Were her parents just too permissive and dotting? She was silver coated amorality -- sort of a fictional Ayn Rand.

I am Peter from Tokyo, originally from Ohio.
Favorites, I have ... 70 and counting. Let's say JR by William Gaddis (But I think to really enjoy it you have to read it aloud the whole way through, to my two year old ... it put him to sleep and my laughter didn't bother him at all). My reason for joining? Well, I am looking for friends, and was browsing the groups I might want to join and I stumbled upon the Morphtastic thread and found it filled with brilliant wit ... so, here I am.