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Beast and Man is finished, and I recommend it to everyone. I've also finished the last pages of Susan Sontag's On Photography, which was a bit boring so I was always making pauses. And now I'm reading Paul Davies' The Last Tree Minutes, which imagines how the universe might end. It's fun.

An effeminate Frenchman reminisces about his childhood after the death of his father. Sexual attraction for his cousin, shameful secrets about his aunt, and the narrator thinks his mom should wear black for life. That's basically it after 20 pages. But the prose is beautiful!

Come on, Ions, it has nothing to do with Portrait. Nothing in Ulysses comes close to the terrifying third chapter, the sermons about Hell, Stephen's moral guilt, his fear of sinning. That chapter has more vitality than the 933 pages of Ulysses. But the fifth chapter does already show traces...

The human species is pretty arrogant. I love how in many sci-fi movies aliens always tells us how special we are :rolleyes:

I used to be more open-minded about this possibility; but nowadays it seems rather irrelevant whether aliens exist or not to me. I prefer we cared more for our own planet.

It's not ignorance, it's detachment. The same detachment that allows me to enjoy Roman Polanski's movies, or Ezra Pound's poetry. I just don't see what's the controversy here: Grass had no choice; Grass lived in a time and a place that did not allow him to have a choice. In so far as we know...

You know, eyez0nme, 'film' is just the stuff used to make movies. That's like calling a novel 'paper and ink'. definitions are killers, so let's just start again ;) I'd have to say The Exorcist: never scared me once! In fact, the first time I saw it, mislead by the hype that called it the...

I have sorted out in my consciousness that embryos are not humans or anything resembling human life, so it's easy for me to say, Yes. Plus, steam cell research works on the assumption that only embryos slated for destruction would be used, so it's in fact optimizing an otherwise useless waste.

It's a victimless crime which, for being marginalized, creates black markets that probably cause more victims than it would if it were legal. I have no intentions of using it, the same way I've made a choice not to smoke and not to drink (yes, I am a tee-totaler ;) ); but I have no problems...

The four Romance languages (I'm excluding Romanian here, of which I know nothing about :o ) are extremely similar regarding vocabulary and syntax: Portuguese, Spanish (the closest to pt), French and Italian. If I hadn't been a lazy bastard during high school I could have mastered French...

Heroes don't rape. Even if the Hulk were under mind control by a powerful, evil telepath who had crushed all the heroe's self-esteem and reduced him to an infantile state, and were forcing him to do it, in the moment of rape, he would triumphantly snap out of his mind control!

I said I retained almost no impression ;) I enjoyed the penultimate part, a collection of short sections each starting with a question and written in over-the-top scientific babble. That was funny. The 'prālāyā, tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt' joke was brilliant too. I'll admit Mr...

I have finished this nonsensical Ulysses at last, and am free! Looking back, I regret having wasted so much time and energy, having agonised about its meaning, and having convinced myself to persevere just to prove a point. How many more, and better and funnier, books I could have read...

I have read Jem, but that was many years ago. I remember enjoying it: it tells the story of humans colonising a foreign planet and meeting an alien race. I loved it for its hopeful ending. This was back when utopias still seemed like concrete possibilities to me :D

Ahhhh, sounds wonderful :eek: But baseball? I'm sure it's a great game... for Americans. But I bloody hate baseball!

Portuguese, English and Italian. If my life really depended on it, I could easily learn Spanish and French :D

What's Underworld about? I ask because I'm looking for my next DeLillo novel. I enjoyed Libra a lot, mostly because I like cold war paranoia and conspiracy theories about JFK, and detested White Noise. But I'm trying not to give up on him yet.

Autopsychography The poet is a forger who Forges so completely that He forges even the feeling He feels truly as pain. And those who read his poems Feel absolutely, not his two Separate pains, but only the Pain that they do not feel. And thus, diverting the Understanding, the...

First time I keep a list too: currently at 42. I should probably finish one or two more books before the year's end.

Heathcliff belongs more to the Gothic villain tradition; his conception of love is rather demented. He wants to possess Catherine. He's callous, he acts without a consciousness to reach his goals. How can anyone not like such a character :D