No.
Would you be sad if your favourite daycare baby was moving to Australia, or happy because, you know, one less baby to deal with?
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No.
Would you be sad if your favourite daycare baby was moving to Australia, or happy because, you know, one less baby to deal with?
Aw croikey! All jess be 'appy if thoiy kin koip th' dingoes off the li'ell toik!
It's okay to care, Clopin.
What books would you recommend to your 22 year old niece who wants to be well read and sees you as the family intellectual?
Well I'm 23 so i would just recommend whatever I read myself probably (though i'm definitely not 'well read', quite yet) It depends on what sort of a person she is, I think I'm usually good at tailoring book recommendations for people.
If someone is new to reading (literary fiction) my recommendation is always Dostoyevsky. Hemingway, Salinger, Orwell and Austen also make sense to me for beginners. Right now my rec's to anyone would be:
Chekhov, Stories (any collection)
Alice Munro, Stories (any collection)
Italo Calvino, Folktales, Invisible Cities
Yeats, Mythologies, Poems
Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Gogol, Stories
C Bronte, Jane Eyre
Adams, Watership Down
White, The Once and Future King
And modernist picks even though you hate them:
Joyce, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young man
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, Orlando
Eliot, Poems
Pound, Poems
Ovid is also incredibly fun to read if the reader has any interest in Greek mythology in the first place.
Who is your favourite author from my list and who is your least favourite - is my question?
Depends on her personality: The book thief is good if she's into heavier stuff or Norwegian Wood by Murakami. (I'm pretty atypical for linet and don't dwell on very old classics, especially for someone who is 22)
What book has made the largest impression on your life in terms of it's psychological content? (The intellectual's equivalent of self help)
I read The Brothers Karamazov when I was sixteen and it caused me to pretty much reevaluate everything. After that I think The Book of Disquiet made a pretty strong impression on me, I honestly could have written that book (I mean... I couldn't have, but it consists of ideas very pertinent to my life and personality, most of which I had considered before but nowhere near as lucidly).
Same question.
Best is Ovid, of course. Pound was kind of full of himself, so he makes a good least favorite, but I haven't read some of them (or much of Pound for that matter), so it doesn't mean much.
Gogol is high on my list of unread authors. What should I read by him (besides, obviously, Dead Souls)?
I would read his short stories before Dead Souls, and probably The Inspector General too, though it's included in a lot of Gogol story collections. Avoid the often recommended Pevear and V- (something hard to spell) translation because I think they do a **** job on Gogol, accurate or not.
Yeh Ovid really blew me away and I can only read in a plebeian Germanic dialect.
Have you read the Ted Hughes translation of Ovid and did you like it?
I have, it's very good.
What is the best book that was made into a movie post 1970?
Stephen King's novella 'The Body', adapted to the big screen as 'Stand by Me'... the movie was every bit as good as the original story.
same question...
Maybe the Merchant Ivory production of Howards End. Certainly not Lord of the Rings.
Do you know your Chinese horoscope animal offhand?
Year of the GOAT, though I used to claim it was dragon when I was a kid and we talked about our Chinese horoscope, I thought goat was really lame back then but now I'm happy with it. I am also a leo.
Do you believe even remotely in anything related to any kind of horoscope?
I am year of the Dog. No I think they can be fun to read but I don't believe in them.
Have you ever been to a fortune teller of any kind?
Not unless you count watching the weatherman on TV.
I'm a pig, by the way, and my wife is a rat.
Erich Ludendorff, German hero of WWI, and sometime Nazi, sometime pacifist, expressed a theory at one point that the natural human state was war, and that periods of peace were imposed from time to time by governments. His other nutty ideas notwithstanding, do you think he was right about that?
if you read hobbes' leviathan, I think that's close to his premise and "civilization" is one of the purposes and impetus of government.
and if you argue from Christian theology, that is a part of the "natural man" (as opposed to the spiritually regenerated man) condition also.
so I lean towards at least a partial yes.
favorite scene from either the hunger games movies, harry potter or LOTR? (or all three)
I like the first Harry Potter movie, my favourite scene might be when they first get to Hogwarts, but I honestly think it's just a well made movie (I don't like any of the sequels though, even if I quite like the first four books of the series). Lord of the Rings, again, I only like the first movie and my favourite scene is Bilbo's party right at the start.
Most sympathetic anti hero in literature?