David Copperfield, Chapter 1. #readlong #buddyread with me (and @Ruthiella and whenever else wants to be tagged!)

What would tell a new author who brings you a manuscript that is written in the first person but describes things the narrator couldn‘t possibly know (like the circumstances of his own birth)?

More questions on Chapter One in the comments!

If anyone cares to join me as a #readalong or #buddyread, I just picked up David Copperfield, which I have never read before (although I‘ve read and liked other Dickens) and plan to read a chapter a day for 64 days in preparation for Kingsolver‘s Demon Copperhead, which is supposed to be based on it and comes out in about two months.

Join me!

People I respect gave this book good reviews. I feel like I‘ve been punked.

In theory, I enjoy the idea of exotic names and places and vocabulary sprinkled into Fantasy or Science Fiction. In practice, WTF?

So I‘m reading this book. It‘s new and very long, but it‘s actually broken into 3 parts, with each chapter alternating between the stories — one set in the ancient past, one in the present, and one in the distant future. And they‘re all separate stories, but they kind of intersect in unusual ways . . .

I‘m ambivalent overall on trigger warnings, but this book also has graphic pedophilia and incest, and there‘s no warning about that.

Also, all three (children having incestuous sex and cutting) are all presented in a positive light, which strikes me as possibly more upsetting than just that they are “depicted.”

“There are four types of readers…The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with... But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end while at the other, everything he reads pour out of him. The strainer let‘s through the wine and keeps the sediment…The sieve, on the other hand, separates out the chaff to give a result of only the finest grain.”

What kind of reader are you?

Over the course of 700 pages, three people in three different centuries struggle with undiagnosed executive function issues before eventually taking action with inconclusive results.

I know this book is set in 1978, but I‘m still 100% expecting to read about how Colleen stormed the Capitol.

I don‘t know how to explain this correctly, but I think my book and coffee are from the same universe.

We gave my mom a hand-knit RBG for Mother‘s Day yesterday and she sent this picture this morning — Ruth Leading Her Flock.

This was a mess. The author clearly had lots of good ideas, but chose to use ALL of them. Racism, magic, gender/sexuality spectrum, the multiverse . . . What did I miss? Anarcho-syndicalism for a few chapters, I think.

Changing from third to first person in ways that are supposed to surprise, but only confuse when you‘re barely following what might be Section One of a series, but doesn‘t cohere into a “Book.”

This was brilliant and I‘m shocked I‘m the first to post about it. It‘s a modern re-imagining if Daphne and Apollo at Oxford, with a great literary adventure and a split POV between a doctoral candidate and her thesis advisor who is so evil, but thinks himself so good, that I sometimes had to walk away for a while.

Not every modern retelling needs to be The Odyssey!

New Jersey enacted a plastic bag ban this week, so if you happened to go to the grocery store today, but forgot your reusable bags, you could pay 99 cents each for this — what? Objectively pro-martyrdom propaganda?

I want to start a book club where we just read about women who have almost ten of things you‘re only supposed to have one of.

Anyone think@these two know each other?

Just popping in to say that this book was first published in 1997 and in the ensuing 25 years nobody appears to have pointed out that Flash Gordon was not a member of the Justice League.

If the car in front of me at the red light was a Litsy post about how she DNF‘d her book on NFTs?

I really hope they don‘t tell me, so I get to guess which story is not narrated by a bisexual Puerto Rican cub.

In Chapter 1 Jane‘s father moves to Taiwan for a year for a job. Jane visits him and learns Dad is in love with a man and never planning to come home. Jane tells her mom that dad is lying to and cheating on her, then feels guilty throughout the book about “outing dad.”

I guess I am just not accepting the book‘s conceit that this falls within the intended definition of “outing.”

Blues Clues: No Way Home!

On the one hand, maybe it‘s too soon and I should have waited until after the pandemic to read a book where the pandemic shows up in the middle.

On the other hand, the “leave your groceries in the garage overnight” pandemic feels like seven pandemics ago.

Libby is trolling me.

When I was a sophomore in college, I had the most DeLillo-esque experience in my life, and it involved (incidentally) a DeLillo book. Our class was assigned White Noise, and when I started reading it, I experienced tremendous deja vu — like I had read it before, even though I knew I hadn‘t. Then, in class, another student said, “Did any of you get deja vu reading this?” and about six or seven of us immediately admitted to it! (See Comment!)

Does it bother you when books are set in a “future” that didn‘t happen?

This entire “novel” (hardback short story) is set over the course of one day — a futuristic Super Bowl Sunday 2022 between the Titans and Seahawks. That outcome is looking increasingly unlikely today. Do we care?

I don‘t even know what happened here. I love his poetry. I was excited for the novel. But it was a mess. 100 pages of unnecessary world building, setting up a series of intrigues. Then, a character dies and everything is dropped, to set up other intrigues that also aren‘t resolved. People are acting suspiciously. We suspect something! But we never find out.

100% set up. 0% payoff. Unless I‘m just not smart enough and missed the point entirely.

I just want to add that even though it is an integral part of my vocabulary, I had never seen “farkakte” written down until I read Anthem.

Six hardbacks I‘m working on today, to various degrees. The Sentence and To Paradise are signed first editions.

I need someone to please read this for me and let me know what I just read. It was amazingly…something. Amazingly brilliant? Amazingly horrible? It‘s The Great Gatsby, but from Nick‘s Girlfriend‘s point of view. And she makes golems. And Jordan is a Vietnamese Mary Sue. And Gatsby is a demon. And Nick is a . . .

It‘s a hot mess, but I can‘t stop thinking about it. Can we please take Gatsby out of the public domain until we clear this up?

I went to the bookstore today fully intending to buy this 900+ page behemoth, but when I opened it up, the PAGE NUMBERS WENT BACKWARDS.

I was not mentally prepared to read a book that was counting down, so I made an alternate selection.

I had to reset my password and log in after two-plus years to tell everyone how great this book was.

Last run to the bookstore to pick this up before we have to Shelter in Place in New Jersey, probably.

FIRST NOMINEE FOR WORST SENTENCE READ IN 2020!

When your community won‘t voluntarily engage in Social Distancing, it sometimes becomes necessary to employ harsher enforcement measures to scatter large groups.

I am reading both these books at once, and cannot keep them straight. They have literally the same plot.

In both, our heroes are royally born boys who have been secretly sold into slavery. They have been chained to oars and forced to row endlessly across the seas.

At the ends of the chapters I have just finished, they both find themselves shipwrecked on a frozen barren northern island.

I don‘t get it. It seems to be billed as a great love story or coming of age or something. But it‘s a 17 year old boy and a college instructor who‘s about ten years older. Are we all just okay with statutory rape now?

Theodore Roosevelt, Civil Service Commissioner, interviewing federal officials in Baltimore that sounds like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

A great, quick read memoir from one of my high school classmates who married and was widowed by another of my high school classmates. Direct and honest, but also not at all depressing.

In fact the memoir isn‘t even mostly about being a widow. Despite the title, the couple was in the process of adopting a boy when Scott died in his 40s, and the impact on the adoption process drove the narrative more than recovery.

Recommended.

Sociological Field Notes, Update: I have tracked the elusive Karen to Starbucks, where she had set up camp in a field consisting of food brought in from outside. She immediately complained that the floor was not clean enough. An employee promptly mopped the area in front of her. Karen has now placed the complimentary newspaper on the floor in front of her so that she will not get the bottom of her sneakers wet on the freshly mopped floor.

I never really figured out what was going on. No physical description and everyone gets female pronouns irrespective of gender. The lead acts on unknown impulse for unknown reasons — until she doesn‘t anymore. Seivarden changes personality halfway through for unexplained reason. I could never figure out anyone‘s motivation — hero, villain, bit players. No one will disobey the Lord! Everyone is disobeying the Lord! If I do this they must ... Why?

My eldest child has been selected (as a Freshman) to direct her college‘s Spring musical — Frog and Toad. She rewarded herself by re-purposing a Wegmans Eagles football-themed cookie cake.

Sensation Comics #3 (March, 1942)

Before inventing Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston invented an early polygraph machine for questioning German POWs in World War I.

One of history‘s longest running book clubs is the Daf Yomi. Since 1923, it is a tradition for Jews to all study the same “Daf” of Talmud on the same day (a “Daf” is both sides of a piece of paper, numbered 2A and 2B, for example).

There are 2,711 Dafs in the 63 Tractates of the Talmud, so the process takes about 7 1/2 years. The 13th cycle ends tomorrow, and the 14th starts Sunday and ends June 7, 2027! This is the first side of Sunday‘s Daf.

A formula that will turn a man into a monster?

“I‘ll just pour it into this empty milk bottle, and store it in the refrigerator!”

Nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan!

House of Mystery #1 (December 1951)

Night Eight. All full up!

Top: Ian McKellen reacting to the ludicrous idea that anyone would make a movie of Cats. (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993).

Bottom: Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatrical Cat in a movie of Cats (Cats, 2019).

Is this pet adoption poster implying that Hannah is a prostitute?

Action Comic #1, June 1938

I understand why Superman wants his alter ego to be a weakling, but why does he also have to be a whiny bitch?

She agreed to go on a date with you. Don‘t spend it whining that she hasn‘t gone on a date with you before.

Lois‘s face is the face of a woman who will NOT be giving Clark a second chance.

I‘m in the middle of 13 Narratives at the moment.

Action Comic #1 (June 1938)

I feel like the decision to make Clark Kent a newspaper reporter is based on a faulty conception of how journalism works. Who calls in a wife-beating tip to the newspaper before calling the cops, so that Clark can arrive while the beating is still in progress?