Hi my name is Jackie, and I think I am a (classics) book snob.
I am that person from your high school honors English class who actually enjoyed reading “The Great Gatsby” and “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was assigned it. I chose to enroll as a literature major in college and my current bookcase *has a system*. Fiction: organized by author’s last name, Non-fiction: size of the book ’cause those babies are thick, plays and poetry, mysteries, and then … classics. (If you have a better system hit me up!)
Snow Crash is the only book listed that I’ve read. Loved it, as well as several of his historical novels–The one with Newton, especially.
You didn’t mention Elmore Leonard, though. Gasp.
“Gone With the Wind”? Seriously? I tried to read it in the midst of a tween fixation on the books of S.E. Hinton (you’ll recall that GWTW is treated like the Bible by Ponyboy’s friend Johnny), but was put off by all the racial epithets (not okay in my very Republican house as it was the party of Lincoln and what would Abe do?). I avoided the movie until, as a film professor, I couldn’t, and it didn’t ease matters in the least.
Years later, the father of my goddaughter (who named her own daughter Scarlett) recited a passage from his attempt to read it and it was even worse than I had remembered. A bit of Web scholarship reveals that Margaret Mitchell was an late entry in the second KKK wave of Lost Cause mythologists and that she wrote multiple effusive letters to early second wave KKK mythologist Thomas Dixon, whose novel The Klansman was the source for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
So, no, and no thank you for mentioning. The less GWTW in the cultural life of the nation, the better.
I have a really difficult with the pre ww2 movies-the racism, the disrespect is just dehumanizing for everybody. The relationship between Sam and Rick is such a quantum leap forward, but even in Casablanca, when Ilsa sees Sam, her first question is ‘Who is that boy?’
I am a 71-year-old Canadian woman (my 100-year-old mother is American). I first saw the movie when I was nine years old, all four hours of it, at a drive-in with my family (mom, dad, two kids and my grandmother) and I loved it. When I was about 11, I read the book, all 1,034 pages of it over the summer, and I loved the book. I have rewatched and reread both many times since. The book was written by a southern woman about a particular time.
From the beginning, at the ages of 9 and 11, I knew slavery and racial discrimination were wrong. I didn’t have to have it explained to me. I read a lot of historical fiction. I certainly don’t want to have it whitewashed or censored to edit out what was happening at the time, or what people were thinking because we may (or may not) have learned a thing or two since.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“Snow Crash is a satirical vision of America in the not-so-distant future where mega corporations have taken over and society is radically different
Originally when I read it years ago. I took it as a romp, fun and very strange at the time. Unfortunately too many things in that novel are getting too close to reality for comfort. Stephenson was well ahead of his time in writing that.
If you want to be taken away by an imagination that can only be described by the most imaginative of prose prepare to be fascinated by Bruno Schultz. His book " The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories" is the only book I have read repeatedly. The translation by Celina Wieniewska is my favorite, there are newer ones but I prefer her’s. One of the stories " The Cinnamon Shops" still takes me for a ride.
The author’s tragic short life is a story of another, sadder nature.
“The Catcher in the Rye” was a very good book, but if you haven’t carried on with Salinger and read his books about the Glass family, you are missing his best work. “Frannie and Zooey” is a sparkling gem and his short stories are absolutely wonderful.
I also have to mention Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of 20 books. I am a fan of the British Navy books like Hornblower but O’Brian’s opus is, in my opinion, the best thing written. What a great writer he was.
Salinger’s Nine Stories was probably the one book that most turned me off from reading fiction (even though we only read three of them). God I hated that so much. Just remembering the name Seymour Glass fills me with rage at its insipidness (see-more, GET IT GET IT GET IT???).
Has anyone read Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s series, The Nameless Republic, vol. 1 being Son of the Storm ?
It’s speculative fiction written by a Nigerian author, inspired by W. African traditions. It looked intriguing on a sale list.
sorry, o/t. He does live half the year in Arizona, however.
I still find The Diamond Age to be my favorite Stephenson book (re-read it during the pandemic). That or his non-fiction classic In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. We were just talking about him the other day at work regarding how his term “the metaverse” seems to have recently caught on again as the term de arte for virtual and augmented reality after almost 30 years. My theory there is that a bunch of us who have been in the field a long time all read Snow Crash either early in our careers (or at least early in our lives) and its concepts stuck with us.
I don’t think they’ve preserved recordings of his radio program from the 60s and early 70s, which is a tragedy. 5 nights a week I’d fight to stay awake so I could hear him.
With Shepherd’s written and radio productions I can recall literally tears in my eyes from laughing so damned hard. That’s not to mention how much a working class kid like me can identify with his characters and situations.
