These are what I want for my birthday next year.

^ http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/the- ... ible/music
includes a read aloud version, too.

As of right now, I'll be taking an intense lit course next semester to satisfy two graduation requirements. Reading list is:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Gilgamesh
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Oedipus Rex
The Crying of Lot 49
Waiting for Godot
The Road
Frankenstein
A Modest Proposal (included in a book of Swift's satire)

I'm thinking of reading Mein Kampf. Is that weird?

Happy birthday, Mr Dickens.

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? I'm too old--too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be like me to-day, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!"
- Strether in Henry James' The Ambassadors

Or as Emerson put it: "Make haste."

We should have a thread for favourite quotations/segments from literature.

Know it's pretty popular, byt "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" would have to be one of mine.

Yes. Emerson and James (especially Awkward Age and on James) have a lot in common. What I particularly like of this carpe diem formulation though is James' emphasis on being either too stupid or too smart to have truly lived, to have truly experienced much of your life. Remarkable insight there, somehow. I will admit when taken out of the context of the novel it seems a bit little more than an aphorism, but in context it's horrifying.

My next LoA volume will probably be a James one. I'll try to get the one with The Ambassadors.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/762031 ... orld.thtml
i heard a review of "Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist", By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst


sounds interesting.

The "Learn from the masters" bit is stupid.

On the whole, can't really tell if it's trying to be funny or serious. It fails pretty badly at both.

anyone of you guys read Norman Mailer? I've always ibeen nterested, but not quite found the motivation to make the jump. last month of summer may be the time to do it, though.

Mailer is unfashionable now and the man is obviously a lout, wrong about many things, but I enjoy reading him. The best thing to get is his collection Advertisements for Myself. It's a collection of his early shorter works (some immature, some great) and bolded self-commentary, most of which is in itself as entertaining and revealing as the official works themselves. His greatest single achievement is collected in it: "The White Negro", basically the definitive statement on midcentury hipsterdom as far as I'm concerned (with out a doubt a more honest and powerful literary encapsulation than anything written by the Beats). As for his greatest longer works I'd say Armies of the Night is by far the best that I've read, with Why Are We In Vietnam coming in second. I started reading Ancient Evenings and The Executioner's Song and thought they were very good but I didn't have the motivation or time to finish either of them.

Richard Poirier has some great lit crit on Mailer's works. It would be worth checking out your library to see if it has any.