Linval Wrote:1984's It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. would be a serious contender.

I like Neuromancer's The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel a lot too...

Speaking of first lines and the like, I've always really liked the first two paragraphs of Lolita, which are a great introduction to the narrator's obsession with her. He's also obsessed with her name, of course, an idea that is played with throughout the book:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Loo Lee Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Lolita's a pretty f'ed up book, and is actually quite hard prose, but definitely a masterpiece.

[Zgarbas]

I don't think I've ever had any one line get to me as much as the opening line from The Stranger. It got me hooked from the first second. Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. (not the language I read it in but whatever).

Zgarbas Wrote:I don't think I've ever had any one line get to me as much as the opening line from The Stranger. It got me hooked from the first second. Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. (not the language I read it in but whatever).

Albert Сamus L’étranger:
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

Miss Rutracker has a powerful recording by the author himslef.

English translations of his books are somewhat clumsy.

I have a parallel French-Polish text, anyone interested is welcome.

« Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut-être hier. »

Arguably one of the most famous openings in French literature. Funny how it got so pervasive - even The Cure named one of their songs in reference to the book. Though I'm not sure if that's a good thing ... ?

Linval Wrote:That's a pretty impressive list - how did you manage NOT to get completely burnt-out ? Many of these books are extremely deep and dense, it's a lot to digest in only a year.

Some days it was easy, when the book was good. I breezed through Frankenstein as it was so compelling. Other days, I questioned the entire year-long project. Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery was particularly difficult--ultimately rewarding, but still difficult--as it assumed the reader had an understanding of advanced physics and calculus, and had paid attention to recent debates related to the philosophy of science.

The Jungle was easy by comparison. It pretty much just assumed that you were angry, or wanted to be.

After the year was complete, I returned to my normal reading focus, which consists of mostly historical and biographical nonfiction, plus an occasional selection of light reading (P. G. Wodehouse and the like). Also, short attempts at real Japanese content (shudder!). That I rarely pick up a classic today is perhaps indicative of the conclusion of the project. I will still read Great Books, but now I need to have a goal and reason to do so, as it's hard to convince myself that I will gain some deep insight without some intentional purpose going into the book.

Just finished Resident Evil Zero Hour. AWESOME.
Review → http://cyberpunkcahoots.wordpress.com/20...ur-review/

I'm going to start reading today this baby

Rina Wrote:

Linval Wrote:

Rina Wrote:And still reading The Great Gatsby.

Good luck with that.

Just finished it! I looked up for interpretations online, I really liked reading it, it's beautifully written, but I can't help but feel that I couldn't understand it fully (hence looking up online).

If ya didn't come across this, John Green, who's pretty awesome, did two videos on The Great Gatsby for his Crash Course in Literature series:

I finished "the litigators" by john grisham! Great stuff!

Now I'm reading

"echo park" by mark connelly
"Of mice and men" by Steinbeck (as a kind of preparation to start reading "the grapes of wrath") - I'm an american literature geek, have been reading for the past year several classics
"the essential sheehan" (a book about running)
"Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think"

I'm getting older and older and more and more senile, no wonder I'm getting interested in children's literature.
Here are some passages from two books I read not a very long time ago.

1.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
In one village in the Kharkiv region, several women did their best to look after children. As one of them recalled, they formed “something like an orphanage.” Their wards were in a pitiful condition: “The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs; their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets, and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Within the great city Russians (and others) faced the same dilemmas that Ukrainians and Kazakhs (and others) had faced ten years before, during the collectivization famines. Wanda Zvierieva, a girl in Leningrad during the siege, later remembered her mother with great love and admiration. She “was a beautiful woman. I would compare her face to the Mona Lisa.” Her father was a physicist with artistic inclinations who would carve wooden sculptures of Greek goddesses with his pocketknife. Late in 1941, as the family was starving, her father went to his office, in the hope of finding a ration card that would allow the family to procure food. He stayed away for several days. One night Wanda awakened to see her mother standing over her with a sickle. She struggled with and overcame her mother, or “the shadow that was left of her.” She gave her mother’s actions the charitable interpretation: that her mother wished to spare her the suffering of starvation by killing her quickly. Her father returned with food the following day, but it was too late for her mother, who died a few hours later. The family sewed her in blankets and left her in the kitchen until the ground was soft enough to bury her. It was so cold in the apartment that her body did not decompose. That spring Wanda’s father died of pneumonia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder

2.
I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb
Chapter 6 Children of the Rubbish Mountain

One day my brothers were not home and my mother had asked me to throw away some potato peel and eggshells. I wrinkled my nose as I approached, swatting away flies and making sure I didn’t step on anything in my nice shoes. As I threw the rubbish on the mountain of rotting food, I saw something move and I jumped. It was a girl about my age. Her hair was matted and her skin was covered in sores. She looked like I imagined Shashaka, the dirty woman they told us about in tales in the village to make us wash. The girl had a big sack and was sorting rubbish into piles, one for cans, one for bottle tops, another for glass and another for paper. Nearby there were boys fishing in the pile for metal using magnets on strings. I wanted to talk to the children but I was too scared. That afternoon, when my father came home from school, I told him about the scavenger children and begged him to go with me to look. He tried to talk to them but they ran away. He explained that the children would sell what they had sorted to a garbage shop for a few rupees. The shop would then sell it on at a profit. On the way back home I noticed that he was in tears. ‘Aba, you must give them free places at your school,’ I begged.
(.............)
In my experience, if my father couldn’t help with matters like these, there was only one option. I wrote a letter to God. ‘Dear God,’ I wrote, ‘I know you see everything, but there are so many things that maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.’ The problem was I did not know how to get it to him. Somehow I thought it needed to go deep into the earth, so first I buried it in the garden. Then I thought it would get spoilt, so I put it in a plastic bag. But that didn’t seem much use. We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.

My year with Malala, by Christina Lamb _ The Sunday Times
http://features.thesundaytimes.co.uk/public/malala/

学校に行きたいけれどお金がないの
着て行く服も靴もないわ
A screenshot from a 46-minute documentary about Marara-san (Malala Yousafzai).
You can watch it here:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2dmcqj..._lifestyle
More about the ten-year-old girl in the screenshot (in English):
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23268708
(Half-)happy ending:

He Named Me Malala by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Guggenheim
Official Trailer

Finished reading "of mice and men" this morning and started reading "calico joe" by john grisham.

Mice and men was...intensely beautiful.

Rina Wrote:Mice and men was...intensely beautiful.

I agree. 'The Pearl' is even better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck