Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

The Literary Quest Thread (Back Catalogue Book Discussion) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-18 18:43:16
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Content

Dear Book Club Readers ---

It’s so wonderful reading your insights from exploring the back catalogue reads. And it would be so great to know how your reading is going this month.

This discussion thread aims to make your conversations around the Big Reads in the back catalogue more visible. You might consider this thread to be like a tavern or a check-point where you can rest from your literary quest and discuss these specific works with your fellow travellers.

This is also a fantastic place to compare these great books and discover overlapping themes and commonalities. So let's get these writers talking with one another.

This thread is different from our general reading discussion, which is always an exciting place to discover tons of fascinating new reads. This thread is specific to the things you want to discuss related to your current back catalogue read in a more visible way. You may even wish to put the kind of comments you would leave under specific lectures here too.

Simple format:

  • Put the title of the work you’re discussing at the start of a new comment (e.g. Ulysses, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina).
  • Indicate your location in the book if applicable. A chapter or page number would be appropriate enough. This signposts spoilers for those who may not have read that far, but also helps fellow readers of the same work get their bearings and understand what part of the narrative you’re referring to.
  • Then let us know your insights, thoughts, questions, meditations, things you loved, things you want clarification on, passages you appreciate, and so on.
  • Enjoy the conversation!

This thread will also serve as a great way to see the readers joining you on your reading quest and gives you a place to find each other.

Let us know:

What back catalogue book are you exploring at the moment?

Happy reading, folks!

Files

Previews only

Comments

Tim Lovelace

The Lost Stradivarius I greatly enjoyed Falkner's Austen-esque prose and his superficially Gothic plot, with the ghost of Adrian Temple symbolizing, I would say, the lurking tendency of a serious musician towards unhealthy obsession. Ben's lecture on the novel was Stradivarian in its excellence, and it trod a number of ideological trails down which I have journeyed far in my own contemplations. I especially appreciated Ben's bringing up Aristotle, as I consider the Stagirite a fundamental touchstone on the issue of flow vs. obsession. Aristotle insisted that one is truly virtuous when the practice of virtue has moved beyond the performance of an onerous duty and has become a pleasure. As long as Maltravers just fiddled around, he remained on the right path, but after finding the Stradivarius he took a bad crossing (Maltravers="bad traverse"?). The Stradivarius's influence as an avatar of the highest excellence turned Maltravers from a recreational player into a self-destructively intense striver. A detail from the end of the book stood out for me. Gaskell says that Maltravers' son, Sir Edward, "has been brought up to think more of a cricket-bat than of a violin-bow." I think the cricket bat is introduced here to connote the kind of enjoyable, healthy, virtuous "playing" that John Maltravers left behind on his grimrose path to perdition. In Maltravers' day athletes were much less inclined than now to the downward spiral of intense obsession. Involved with Maltravers' obsession is the quest for an unholy Grail. In a striking passage from Chapter 4, Gaskell says that while under the influence of music he has "often felt on such occasions on the very verge of some high mental discovery, and though a hand has been stretched forward as it were to rend the veil, yet it has never been vouchsafed me to see behind it." In Chapter 11 Sophia speaks of John's violin as "singing to us in a mystical language more deep and awful than any human words" (One might think here of Swann's musical phrase). Thanks to the influence of Temple, whose name garners ironic significance from the Malefic Vision Gaskell attributes to him, Maltravers as spiritual quester follows the "wandering fires" warned against, as detrimental to one's duty, by "Lawn" Tennyson's King Arthur in "The Holy Grail." Also relevant to Maltravers is the waywardly visionary knight in Yeats' dramatic poem, "The Seeker," who, when finally vouchsafed to see behind the veil, finds...Infamy.

Tim Lovelace

As an afterthought on The Lost Stradivarius I'd like to suggest that a film called Whiplash is remarkably similar thematically to Falkner's novel. Both the film and the novel deal with the detrimental application of a berserker-like intensity to the field of music.

Melody Luetkehans

Brothers Karamazov. I just finished Brothers K, P & V translation. Originally, Ben had asked us to report on what character we most identified with. For me that was Ivan. Interestingly, I found the chapters surrounding "the grand inquisitor" more interesting than the story of the G.I. itself, even though I've watched several performances of that chapter. I also was taken with book 12, maybe because I am an attorney myself and I truly enjoyed how Dostoevsky was able to, with the same facts we were all given, right to opposing but convincing narratives from the defense and prosecution. My paperback copy is littered with underlines. I can truly see why this book had such appeal to so many great thinkers.

SusanG

In Search Of Lost Time, yes, I am years late to your extraordinary platform. As an avid reader of average books previously I cannot praise your enthusiasm, knowledge and generosity in making this site the best I have found on literature.