when you read a good book

[dolf]

do you daydream yourself into that scenario and create a parallel plot based on how you would behave?

 

[butters]

do you daydream yourself into that scenario and create a parallel plot based on how you would behave?

not while i'm reading it, no - if it's that good, i'm busy experiencing it or trying to work out the twists. alternate/parallel plots happen when i dream about it later on.

 

[trysail]

do you daydream yourself into that scenario and create a parallel plot based on how you would behave?

No (honestly). Most of the stuff I read is about "interesting times." In deference to the well-known curse, I'm perfectly delighted to have been absent (e.g., Guadalcanal in WW II).

 

[blobfish]

No, but I sometimes obsess over it for days or weeks.

 

[VaticanAssassin]

do you daydream yourself into that scenario and create a parallel plot based on how you would behave?

Yep...typicaly when I am going to sleep at night.

it help me stop thinking about work and actually fall asleep..

 

[dolf]

alternate/parallel plots happen when i dream about it later on.

Yep...typicaly when I am going to sleep at night.

which books?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I think about how to improve it.

 

[butters]

which books?

way too many to name, but i must dream about at least 4/5's of the books i read. sometimes i'm a character in it that either re-experiences what i've read, or things change - might have funny moments where none were, or they interact with other characters in other locations/times, what have you. my dreams are mostly a mish-mash and rarely scary or sad. anymore.

 

[VaticanAssassin]

which books?

I read everything. But I would say my main genres are...

• 
  Fantasy
  Military thrillers
  History (NF)
  Human Nature (NF)

 

[CandiCame]

I totally do. And then I realize that it's good I was born into the time period I was. And then I get to wondering if dumbassery is hereditary. And I'm pretty sure it was... because my ancestors tended to make the same horrible choices that I would. And that, my friends, is why I was born into poverty. You would think that, at some point, evolution would set in and somebody would learn some shit.

It's like, I read DWG shit and I keep thinking, "Somebody needs to bitch-slap this sonovabitch." And then it really fucks with me when somebody does come up and bitch-slap that sonovabitch. Like, it seriously really shocks me when a character acts the way I would, and then I instantly identify with them.

Simon in Lord of the Flies is one of the folk that comes to mind. He was the one guy who would have made the perfect sassy gay friend. He was like, "Guys! Guys! Seriously! What are you doing? What, what, what are you doing?"

 

[trysail]

Would you want to be here?

Not me. I'm perfectly happy to have missed most of history.


_________________

...Almost every town in France now has a museum of 'daily life' or of 'popular arts and traditions'. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.

Naturally the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer's name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone's trouseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life— the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle— are impossible to display.

Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the purposeful display is belied by the photograph of a face scoured by hardship. The expression is often one of faint suspicion, dread or simply dull fatigue. It makes imagining the life that belonged to these objects seem a blundering intrusion. It seems to say that daily existence is harder to fathom than the obsolete tools and kitchen utensils, and that, if it could be recreated, the staple diet of a past life, with its habits, sensations and smells would have a stranger taste than the most exotic regional dish.

Written descriptions of daily life inevitably convey the same bright sense of purpose and progress. They pass through the years of lived experience like carefree travellers, telescoping the changes that only a long memory could have perceived. Occasionally, however, a simple fact has the same effect as the photograph in the museum. At the end of the eighteenth century, doctors from urban Alsace to rural Brittany found that high death rates were not caused primarily by famine and disease. The problem was that, as soon as they became ill, people took to their beds and hoped to die. In 1750, the Marquis d'Argenson noticed that the peasants who farmed his land in the Touraine were 'trying not to multiply': 'They wish only for death'. Even in times of plenty, old people who could no longer wield a spade or hold a needle were keen to die as soon as possible. 'Lasting too long' was one of the great fears of life. Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départments, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice.

When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity. In the relatively harmonious household of the 1840s described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, the family members speculate openly in front of Émile's bed-ridden grandmother (who has not lost her hearing): 'I wish we knew how long it's going to last.' And another would reply, 'Not long, I hope.' As soon as the burden had expired, any water kept in pans or basins was thrown out (since the soul might have washed itself— or, if bound for Hell, tried to extinguish itself— as it left the house), and then life went on as before.

'Happy as a corpse' was a saying in the Alps. Visitors to the villages in the Savoy Alps, the central Pyrenees, Alsace and Lorraine, and parts of the Massif Central were often horrified to find silent populations of cretins with hideous thyroid deformities. (The link between goitre and lack of iodine in the water was not widely recognized until the early nineteenth century.) The Alpine explorer Saussure, who asked in vain for directions in a village in the Aosta Valley when most of the villagers were out in the fields, imagined that 'an evil spirit had turned the inhabitants of the unhappy village into dumb animals, leaving them with just enough human face to show that they had once been men.

The infirmity that seemed a curse to Saussure was a blessing to the natives. The birth of a cretinous baby was believed to bring good luck to the family. The idiot child would never have to work and would never have to leave home to earn money to pay the tax-collector. These hideous, blank creatures were already half-cured of life. Even the death of a normal child could be a consolation. If the baby had lived long enough to be baptized, or if a clever witch revived the corpse for an instant to sprinkle it with holy water, its soul would pray for the family in heaven...

...Categorical terms like 'peasants', 'artisans' and 'the poor' reduce the majority of the population to smudges in a crowd scene that no degree of magnification could resolve into a group of faces. They suggest a large and luckless contingent that filled in the background of important events and participated in the nation's historical development by suffering and engaging in a semblance of economic activity.

Even with a short term view, these categories turn out to be misleading. Rich people could fall into povery and peasants could be rich and powerful. Many peasants lived in towns and commuted to the fields. Many were also craftsmen, traders and local officials, just as many so-called aristocrats were semi-literate farmers. Statistics based on a mixture of surveys, censuses and guesswork give what seems a balanced view of the whole population. In 1789, three-quarters were described as 'agricultural'. A century later, the agricultural population had fallen to about 48 per cent, while 25 per cent worked in industry, 14 per cent in commerce and transport, 4 per cent in public services and administration and 3 per cent in the liberal professions, and 6 per cent were independently wealthy. But for reasons that will become clear, these figures always exaggerate the tidy divisions of the population and underestimate the number of people who tried to live off the land...

-Graham Robb
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War.
New York and London, 2007.


​

 

[Sean]

Dunno. Do you troll your best friend because you're a coward?

 

[dolf]

way too many to name, but i must dream about at least 4/5's of the books i read. sometimes i'm a character in it that either re-experiences what i've read, or things change - might have funny moments where none were, or they interact with other characters in other locations/times, what have you. my dreams are mostly a mish-mash and rarely scary or sad. anymore.

thats kinda cool

 

[Sean]

Do you message your best friend about the latest boyfriend when you know she doesn't like it?

 

[dolf]

Would you want to be here?

i'm so not reading that! you just like freaking me out.

 

[Lancecastor]

Vacations do that for me...I figure out the logistics of moving to (wherever) and a life filled with rum, beaches and bitches, etc.

 

[Recidiva]

I have learned something about this. I imagine what I want to have happen, what I think would be fun or interesting, and then I'm really happy when my expectations are exceeded.

When I think up much better stuff and think that there MUST be something good by the end...then I'm disappointed. Think "Ann Rice." "She must have a really good point if there's 1200 pages...." I was wrong.

Ulaven has a skill where he knows through what the author has done so far, what they're likely to do in the future.

So I see what I want to see. He sees what's there and what the facts dictated.

 

[Sean]

Interesting timing, btw.

 

[dirtycarol]

Yes, I like to create my own character in my mind and add it to the story.

 

[dolf]

Vacations do that for me...I figure out the logistics of moving to (wherever) and a life filled with rum, beaches and bitches, etc.

but there are no zombies on vacations.

I have learned something about this. I imagine what I want to have happen, what I think would be fun or interesting, and then I'm really happy when my expectations are exceeded.

When I think up much better stuff and think that there MUST be something good by the end...then I'm disappointed. Think "Ann Rice." "She must have a really good point if there's 1200 pages...." I was wrong.

Ulaven has a skill where he knows through what the author has done so far, what they're likely to do in the future.

So I see what I want to see. He sees what's there and what the facts dictated.

you should stick to reading the first third of a book.
he should stick to reading the last.
middles always drag out anyway.

 

[Recidiva]

you should stick to reading the first third of a book.
he should stick to reading the last.
middles always drag out anyway.

It's worked out that way for me anyway. I rarely make it through the first third of a book or a movie anymore. Ann Rice taught me a lot.

Apparently I've missed some really good movies, but if it doesn't start well or it starts with the trope of "We're all assholes now, but wait! We'll learn something by the end, we promise!" I'm out of there.

 

[warrior queen]

I very rarely read fiction. The last fiction I did get through was the Dragon Tattoo trilogy (recommended by folks from here!)
Mostly, I read historical biographies or histories of civilisations.... And in neither case do I ever wish I had been there or imagine myself there.

 

[Instant_Star]

No, but I sometimes obsess over it for days or weeks.

oooo, book hangovers, those can be a bitch.

 

[CandiCame]

I very rarely read fiction. The last fiction I did get through was the Dragon Tattoo trilogy (recommended by folks from here!)
Mostly, I read historical biographies or histories of civilisations.... And in neither case do I ever wish I had been there or imagine myself there.

Were those good? I downloaded them but haven't read them yet.

 

[warrior queen]

Were those good? I downloaded them but haven't read them yet.

I enjoyed them enough to have bought the hard copy so I can read them again.
I never buy books anymore!