Introduce Yourself here and say Hi.

[muser-miki-1984]

Hey, I'm Miki!

I love to read everything and am glad I finally found a literature forum not dominated by Twilight fangirls.

I love dystopia novels, like George Orwell and Aldous huxley, and have always been addicted to Jack London. All of his stuff is amazing.

Ad with current literature... meh. Not too into it. There's a couple series I read like Warriors and Maximum Ride and I read individual novels sometimes. But they aren't as good as the classics.

I'm also big on vampires. But UGH I hate Twilight! I like authors like Anne RIce and Bram Stoker.

I can't wait to meet some new lit freaks like me on this board.

Cheers!

[Il Dante]

Greetings. My name is [not] Dante.
Nevertheless, looks like a great site and I can't wait to participate!

Favorite epic poem: La Divina Commedia
Favorite Romantic poem: Music, when soft voices die (by Shelley)
Favorite Victorian poem: Tears, Idle Tears (by Tennyson)
Favorite modernist poet: T.S. Elliot
Favorite novel: All Quiet on the Western Front (for now)
Favorite satire: Gulliver
Favorite strange novel: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
Etc.

[Scheherazade]

Favorite novel: All Quiet on the Western Front (for now)

Welcome to the Forum

[magzarelli]

Hi! I'm Max, I love books.

[ResearcScholar]

Greetings to one and all from Southeast Asia. I am hoping this forum will keep me up to speed with what is "in" in the book world.

cheers!

[unexplained sam]

Hello everybody, It's nice that we are getting so many new forum members who share with us their precious views. There should be a place to introduce yourself and say hi; and this is it.

Come on and tell us about yourself. What are your hobbies? What are your favourite books? And also share with us everything else you would like to tell us about yourself.

Have a nice time browing the wonderful world of books and book-worms!

Hi I'm new, all i know that is i like writing stories,and reading stories. So i figured why not join. SHould be good

[D.S. Poorman]

Hello, my name is D.S. and I'm an alcoholic... Oh wait, wrong group! Sorry, sorry... do over.

Hello, my name is D.S. and I'm a novelist and poet and joined due to one book but I see that there are all kinds of engaging topics on these boards so good on that. Hmm, what else? I've a novel published with a very small (now defunct, in fact) press and another novel finished that I've query letters out to agents as we speak. (Trying to avoid the small soon-to-be defunct presses this time around .) As well, I'm about 50 pages shy of finishing a third novel. I've read my poetry in NYC, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and here at home in Louisville KY among other exotic locales between here and the moon. I'm awaiting yet another notice that I've lost the Yale Younger for the sixth straight year so that's exciting and something to keep me going. I also write essays on varying subjects of whatever interest strikes me although about half of them tend to be about the seventh art. My knowledge base on film, literature and writing are all self-taught through willful exposure to countless films and works of literature and 20,000+ hours of writing. What else? Outside the paradigm of my deleterious enslavement to art I enjoy cooking and riding my bike. That's me in a thousand words or less.

Some favorites of the various mediums are Moby Dick, Lolita, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Great Gatsby, Daemon, Huckleberry Finn, Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy, Wuthering Heights, The God of Small Things, Life of Pi, H.L. Mencken's The American Language (I'm an amateur lexicographer but more on that later perhaps), Wallace Stevens, Phillip Larkin, Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams, Neruda, Lorca, Dorothy Parker, Fritz Lang's M, Blade Runner, Unforgiven, Nights of Cabiria, Ran, Tron, Casablanca, Touch of Evil and No Country For Old Men (although, ironically, that's the only McCarthy novel I did not enjoy).

I joined to discuss Anna Karenin but I'll save that for the AK message boards.

And I'll leave you all with one of my poems. Not my best poem but a damn good one and one I really enjoy (which is just about all that matters in art):

NIGHT PASSING

The night is in that special way
blacker than her darkest prime
as all the birds asleep
beneath a cloud of hush
and the moon it shines
a pendant about her neck
innocent and white again
over the hill and tree,
the forgotten colors all black,
barkscars of pick and axe.
She is alive and full of age
like the windlifted roof
she leaks into the window
and everywhere she is at ease
across the desk, a lady in lust,
in the chair, over the bed
curled about herself like a cat,
an eye of black, a wing of bat.
There is no place she will not go
where there is nothing
where there is no one
she is there already in waiting
at a cave undiscovered,
a drawer rusted shut,
in the mouth that never opens
on the tongue that feels no breath.
She is the one to whom
the moon was promised
and even yet delivered.
There is no diva but her
no madonna, no mother
in waiting without her.
She is swollen with everything
time suckles from her breasts
the starlightmilk of nipples
gathering in her belly
the child she raises from darkness,
a spider of gold
that eats its lovely mother
and dies in one day
from the guilt.


Alright, I know my hello kind of carried on. I've never been accused of being pithy.

[hungseo]

Hello, everyone.

My name is Hung, from Vietnam. I'm an engineer, English is not my native language, never been to a proper English school. Love reading. Occasionally I read some detectives, but classic literatures in English are still hard nuts for me. Just try some bites.

Right now I am trying the "French lieutenant's woman" and a got to you after while of searching on internet.

Wishing you all many moments of inspiration while reading.

[kjc]

Hello, hello. I am but a drop in the bucket of new members here, I am sure, but why not introduce myself anyway and get a feel for posting on this forum? I'll give the rundown of my favorite literature.

I have differing interests in books - I read children and adult literature alike. My favorite literature remains to be tragic stories, and, admittedly, Young Adult novels. My favorite YA novels include The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, just to name a few.

My favorite authors. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who doesn't enjoy Holmes?), Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book and American Gods were my favorites), George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe, and so on. I won't ramble.

I read a lot of different things, and I particularly enjoy diary/journal stories (Go Ask Alice, Anne Frank, Perks). I sought out this forum as a place to read about reading, to get some good ideas of what to read next, and to find a place for intelligent discussion.

It's nice to meet you all. I'll probably lurk for a while before making any grand posts.

[Isobel]

First
I was desperately looking for a book I haven't read yet, and googeling brought me to a thread on this forum. I have never been into forums, but now I give it a shot. I suspect I will be doing more reading than writing.

It happens a lot, that I get a desperate need to read a book that is about something I am living at the moment, or something that has the same kind of breaking movement or atmosphere that I can somehow relate to. Or some book treating any existensial issue I am wresteling with at the moment. And either it is not to be found, or it has not been written yet.

I hope I am going to be able to write some of those stories that I am looking for that does not seem to be anywhere. But actually I would rather find them. Remains to be seen how I will go about doing that on a forum.

Second
I am both working and studying. Literary theory and aesthetical philosophy in the continental tradition is my main focus. I work with pictures. On and off, autonomous. I am a priviliged white middle-class-moving-down completely stereotypical arty woman, impulsively always landing in trouble without quite meaning to. Not quite. I've had a slightly above average interesting life so far. And I've been reading a lot while I was at it. Currently on my feet, not quite landed.

Third
I have: curiosity (killed the cat, luckily still some lives left), enthusiasm, naivity and brains (a very strange combintation, makes life interesting), love and care (I find people likable and loveable almost always, but do not mistake me for a hippie), restlessness.
Some very different authors everyone should try out: Bulgakov, Iain Pears, Steinbeck, Julio Cortazar, Tove Jansson, Arundhati Roy
My favourite philosophers and thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Jaques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Paul Deman, Helen Cixous, Jaques Lacan, W.J.T. Mitchell

That was my idea of an introduction. I will be reading about you now!

[One Gallant]

Hello everyone.

I signed up to this today simply so I can chat about books. Always good for people to exchange ideas when it comes to literature so I look forward to using this forum.

My favourite authors are Samuel Beckett and B.S Johnson. I'm also a big fan of George Orwell,Ian Rankin,James Kelman,Haruki Murakami,T.S Eliot and Philip Larkin.

I'll pretty much give anything a go so I look forward to seeing what books people are talking about.

Cheers.

[toni]

Welcome, OneGallant. I'm also a huge Murakami fan. You may want to check out the discussions here on this group: http://online-literature.com/forums/...php?groupid=19

[D.S. Poorman]

Isobel, your introduction is a riot (in the very best sense of that word)! Absolutely friggin classic. My face hurts from laughing.

[SAGMUN]

In the attic of my mind, among the trunks and boxes, there are two guiding, creative principles:

• The flower rises among the rocks and weeds, not because of what it should be, but because of what it wants to be.
• The successful creative life, from moment to moment, is a changing Gestalt with elements that come and go. Gathering the elements is a journey of discovery that begins and ends with one step.

One day I was born, the next day I was 81, from the in-between here are some highlights:

After two years in kindergarten, I've decided to get on with my life. Not knowing the difference, I spoke a mixture of German and English, elided, screwd-up my diction and syntax. But I've learned to translate what the teacher said into what I could understand and do the same for her.

Saturday Night Magazine seller, paper boy, horseradish grinder and bottler, liquor truck driver's helper, cinema usher, library page, Army Photographer, President of the local chapter of an National Honorary Art Fraternity, honor graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and I did much more.

I began as an Industrial Designer for a kitchen cabinet manufacturer located next to a pig farm. Then I moved into the fields of marketing, education, publishing; I advance from a Senior Graphic Designer to a Art Director for McGraw-Hill Magazines, then at 60 got a job for ten years at Loyola Press as Design-Production Manager.

13 years later, and after exhibiting on Canyon Road, Santa Fe, I decided to become a writer because I've read Robinson Davies, Gabriel Carcía Márquez, Mckee's Story Principles.

[waltereegho]

Hello, I'm Walter. I like old books and contemporary classical music. Other interests include photography, history, typography, skateboarding and doing things for no apparent reason. I have little ideals and even less ambition. To me, reading is a balance between escapism and truth. I generally avoid the extremes of both approaches.