I tried that, and you're damn right, Haz!
I don't do a reader response journal, Hazlitt; I think Terrydoolittle does, and perhaps Tartarin.
In my case, I think it is myself who changes, bringing more or less to understanding a given text on different dates. However, many times I make connections with either other reading or my own experience as I read, and that may substantiate the text, add nuance to it, or I suppose debunk it. It is a little bit like growing a leg from a piece of paper...
I'm about halfway through "I, Victoria". It's a fictionalized autobiography of Queen Victoria, similar to "I, Claudius". I'm enjoying it quite a lot.
Just started on 'Faster Than Light' by physicist Nick Herbert, with three science fiction novels on the night table, all waiting to be dog-eared.
I highly recommend Bayou Farewell - a non-fiction account of coastal erosion in Louisiana by Mike Tidwell. Very well-written. Captures the people and the land and the dangers of losing the wetlands there.
Oss, you were right. My question about reader response journals should have been directed to Terry. My apologies; however I found your comments very interesting
Oss wrote:In my case, I think it is myself who changes, bringing more or less to understanding a given text on different dates. However, many times I make connections with either other reading or my own experience as I read, and that may substantiate the text, add nuance to it, or I suppose debunk it. It is a little bit like growing a leg from a piece of paper....
Your's is certainly the common sense point of view. This is the way, in our innocence, that we experience reading. When I read, I assume this is what is going on. It is the reader, or the readers at large, that are always in a state of flux. What we lose over time is the ability to recapture what the author meant, way back when, at the time he or she was writing. To say that the text has changed just because one's perception has changed simply adds a layer of misunderstanding.
Not sure what a reader response journal is. Unless it's a notebook you keep by your chair in which you take notes about just about everything that's going through your mind, including thoughts about books. I keep a little Indian painted box on the table by my reading chair and in it (among other things) are scissors, a box cutter knife, a glue stick. That means I can swiftly cut stuff out of the paper or a magazine and paste it in the "journal" -- which is actually too fancy a word for the black Cadic notebook with scrawls...
Hazlitt wrote:BillW, I'm not sure why, but I've never gotten into science fiction or fantasy literature. I know they have much to offer, but they have never been my cup of tea.
I don't get into a bunch of it either, especially Sci Fi. However, I do like Bradbury. I think the reason is, IMHO, he doesn't do Sci Fi; ie, he takes a Sci Fi story and uses the setting as a backdrop to a story - if you know what I mean.
About my only other Sci Fi is Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Herbert's "Dune" series. Fantasy is pretty well restricted to Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant".
Deart wrote:As for "The Dead"--it really got to me, as did a film version some years ago. Angelica Huston as the wife, if memory serves. Haunting, I'd call it.
Thanks De'art for this comment. I watched this film today. I thought it was fantastic. The whole party sequence was perhaps the best thing of it's kind I'd ever seen. I thought it was spellbinding. The same goes for Angelica Huston's recitation of Greta's story of her earlier love.
Both Ebert and Pauline Kael gave this film great reviews.
I need to rent that, find a second hand copy... Have only ever seen snippets...
Hazlitt--
JCO discussion took me down memory lane, and I have some ideas for new reading material.
Gimpel the Fool--Issac Bashevis Singer
The Gospel According to Mark--Jorges Luis Borges
Harrison Bergeron--Vonnegut
(book) A Patchwork Planet--Anne Tyler (also Morgan's Passing, Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, ) You can just sink down into the worlds Tyler creates. Quirky, but oddly comfortable.
The Lottery--Shirley Jackson (gruesome)
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas--Le Guin (gruesome, too)
(small book) Things Fall Apart--Chinua Achebe
Ah, The Lottery. Just seeing the title gives me a chill!
What an innocent is she...
well, or lazy.
I was an english major for a few months, but couldn't bear the level of analysis required, it killed my joy.
I might be better at all that now.
I am actually interested in information about authors, their times and their points of view, that would help me understand a text, but I absolutely read first for primary effect on myself.
Somehow I have the words 'brain pan' in my mind, perhaps my mother said them. Since I heard them, whenever it was, perhaps in my teens, I have learned a lot more than I knew then about how the brain works. Still and yet, I can tantalize into view a picture of the brain as some kind of velvet laid out upon, oh, a mirror, with ripples left in, the velvet waiting perhaps for some little lame' like chips to land...
When did you first read The Lottery?
I am trying to remember, I think it was in one of the paperbacks by Hitchcock, as in 14 Short Stories, (presented by) Alfred Hitchcock...
but, was it presented by Hitchcock? Stay tuned, as door creaks..
not to make fun. That one short story really got me.
There was another one, something like The Pearl Necklace, by O. Henry..
and then Lardner and then Thurber and then Parker and then into sports stories of the year from the local library. And then Checkov....
I shoulda known, my ex never listened when I mentioned I liked Checkov's short stories. (He'd only read the plays. Still has only read the plays. My cousins used to give him novels for Christmas, he put them in the S/Army sack. Not that I hold a grudge.
)
I think The Lottery was first in the New Yorker, wasn't it? Way back?
I don't know where I read it first. I did read the NY in the fifties, but not anywhere as memorably for me as more recently.
It was in my really thick college lit book. I loved the stories so much, I didn't sell the book back. It must have 100 short stories, literary criticism, 70 or so poems of all kinds...
It wasn't required reading, but I happened upon it in that book a few years ago.
<I just checked the book for a reference, and Tartar is correct. "The Lottery" debuted in the New Yorker in 1948, and quickly sold out.>
Osso: (This is typical of my kind of nearly useless memory) -- I can see in my mind's eye the NY'er type style when I think of the story. Ergo: it's possible, but I wouldn't count on it!!!
Understand. And I couldn't quite picture it in the Hitchcock book... yet, I read it, fairly early...
but not a chance in '48.
