Day 25: Favorite book you read in school
Why not? We already did Moby-Dick, right? And “school” is ambiguous. Yay for open doors. In door #2, Tarzan! In college, I always spent my summers reading as much as I could get my hands on. Eventually, I got my hands on Tarzan of the Apes. I was surprised. It came out in 1912, 1914 in book form. I figured, it being a “classic,” it would be slower than it was. More like Ivanhoe than Stephen King. Turned out, the latter was a closer comparison. Tarzan is fast. Maybe it’s not a quick read for everybody, but it definitely was for me.
Here are two things I didn’t know about Tarzan. It was so popular, author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote two dozen sequels, which took the series into the 1940s. (Secondly,) unlike many “classics,” Tarzan was never meant to be anything but the pulp-like fiction it clearly was. Burroughs was a “pencil sharpener wholesaler” and desperate for money, so he started writing what he considered throw-away fiction. I don’t have the exact story on me, but I read that he actually had some ambitions about the novel before remembering what kind of audience he was writing for. The end of the novel, I think, speaks to this. It’s a jumble of action that not a lot of adaptations follow faithfully but that, I think, set up the long series of sequels perfectly.
(Also, part of the novel centers on the use of fingerprint identification. This was a new discovery at the time, and what reminded me of this novel. 30 Day Book Challenge: The Challenge; The Books)
Now, I AM going to spoil it for you, because it’s important for my reading of the novel. If you don’t want to know, stop after the next sentence. Just know that Tarzan of the Apes does not end the way you think it does.
![Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
There are a lot of books I’m comfortable talking about that I haven’t actually read or finished. Ulysses is a good example. Or Waiting for Godot (though I’ve seen it). I don’t hide the fact, though, that I haven’t read these books.
However, this challenge was in the back of my mind for a few days now, and last night [edit: two nights ago, forgot how time+queue works] gave me the perfect book to write about. A friend e-mailed and asked if I’d read this. She wanted me to say I’d liked it. I desperately wanted to make her feel heard, so I thought about telling her I’d read it. I thought about just sending her a quote. I thought about buying it on Kindle and plowing through as much of it as I could. I went to sleep instead, and woke up a bit saner. I told her I hadn’t read it, but now I want to. I think I’ll order it from Powell’s.
30 Day Book Challenge: The Challenge; The Books
theriogrande:
Petersburg by Andrei Bely
“… the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century.” — Simon Karlinsky
Here is the long-awaited, authoritative, unabridged translation of Petersburg, the Chef d’oeuvre of Symbolist writer Andrei Bely. Nabokov has ranked Petersburg beside Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the four great works of prose fiction of the twentieth century.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqpgrwjBr31r1y7mko1_400.jpg "Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
There are a lot of books I’m comfortable talking about that I haven’t actually read or finished. Ulysses is a good example. Or Waiting for Godot (though I’ve seen it). I don’t hide the fact, though, that I haven’t read these books.
However, this challenge was in the back of my mind for a few days now, and last night [edit: two nights ago, forgot how time+queue works] gave me the perfect book to write about. A friend e-mailed and asked if I’d read this. She wanted me to say I’d liked it. I desperately wanted to make her feel heard, so I thought about telling her I’d read it. I thought about just sending her a quote. I thought about buying it on Kindle and plowing through as much of it as I could. I went to sleep instead, and woke up a bit saner. I told her I hadn’t read it, but now I want to. I think I’ll order it from Powell’s.
30 Day Book Challenge: The Challenge; The Books
theriogrande:
Petersburg by Andrei Bely
“… the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century.” — Simon Karlinsky
Here is the long-awaited, authoritative, unabridged translation of Petersburg, the Chef d’oeuvre of Symbolist writer Andrei Bely. Nabokov has ranked Petersburg beside Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the four great works of prose fiction of the twentieth century.")
