I don't know what the heck to call this thread!

[Libaax]

Finished a re-read of The Big Sleep. Been at least 15 years since I'd read it last. I remembered there being significant differences with the movie (which I love) but didn't really remember what they were. Great book with incredible writing and atmosphere and a number of very troubling plot holes.

What did you think about the movie ? I was hugely impressed by it. Seeing not so long ago for the first time in TCM.

The script,Bogart made it more enjoyable than the book for me. Which is weird the book is still great thanks to mostly Marlowe himself and not the plot.

The script had some awesome lines i didnt see in the book.

[berk]

Finished a re-read of The Big Sleep. Been at least 15 years since I'd read it last. I remembered there being significant differences with the movie (which I love) but didn't really remember what they were. Great book with incredible writing and atmosphere and a number of very troubling plot holes.

The Big Sleep was a seminal reading experience for me, one of those books that just draws you in and never lets you go, even long after you've finished it. Something about the way Chandler used language as a tool for his work has always clicked for me, right my first reading of the opening pages of this book. Before discovering Chandler I'd been mostly an Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes fan, as far as detective fiction went, and I still love that stuff. But The Big Sleep opened up a whole new world for me. American detective had never felt that compelling to me, but when I read The Big Sleep, I almost felt like, oh, so this is what they're trying to do.

What did you think about the movie ? I was hugely impressed by it. Seeing not so long ago for the first time in TCM.

The script,Bogart made it more enjoyable than the book for me. Which is weird the book is still great thanks to mostly Marlowe himself and not the plot.

The script had some awesome lines i didnt see in the book.

I like the movie a lot, but for me it doesn't really capture the book at all. Great piece of art in its own right, though. I'm a big Bogart fan, but he was seriously miscast as Marlowe, IMO. (OTOH, I don't think he made a bad Sam Spade, although he didn't really fit the physical description from the book, IIRC).

But there's a line from the movie that some famous (I assume, since I remember the line) reviewer used to describe the allure both the movie and the book hold in spite of all the plot incoherencies: "The stuff dreams are made of." Especially for the book, I think it's the atmosphere, as Slam mentioned, moreso than the problematic plot or even the well-drawn characters, that make it something special. And that's largely due to Chandler's style.

[Libaax]

I think The Big Sleep wasnt so strong compared to its sequel. Better plot,characters then. Big Sleep had too weak convulted plot, characters. The girls in that family specially. I thought the writing,Marlowe was great but the rest wasnt.

Whats wrong with Bogart ? He wasnt tall enough or something look wise ? I thought he was great and made Marlowe come alive. No one does PI Noir roles better than him.

The film was more enjoyable for me because the actors was so perfect in their roles. Lauren Bacall made her character memorable too.

[Ronald Bryan]

Finished reading Bull Hunter. Strange little book about a man's start at being a legend.

Read Song of Susannah, which I can see why people are down on it, since Wolves of the Calla was so good, but it's not like it's a bad book. Maybe a bit egotistical.

Started The Gods of Mars.

[Gothos]

Finished reading Bull Hunter. Strange little book about a man's start at being a legend.

Read Song of Susannah, which I can see why people are down on it, since Wolves of the Calla was so good, but it's not like it's a bad book. Maybe a bit egotistical.

Started The Gods of Mars.

I assume it's ERB "Gods of Mars?"

I consider that his second-best novel after the first TARZAN. Cool world-building. (PRINCESS is a little too stuffed with Jules Vernisms.)

[Gothos]

I'd say his philosophy refutes itself in the books themselves and that the interesting thing isn't so much the philosophy as such, but the place it comes from - the intellectual and socio-political background of the late 18th century - and how it plays out in the narrative, how, despite the protestations of the characters who espouse it, the action demonstrates its own unsustainability and self-contradictory nature. Try reading, or at least reading about, things like la Mettrie's "Man, a Machine", or Baron d'Holbach's "System of Nature" (don't trust the on-line Gutenberg translation for this one, though) to get a hint of some of this background.

Yes, I had much the same experience with Ulysses and I was hoping to do something similar with FW, but in this case the narrative is buried so deep underneath so many layers of multi-lingual wordplay and obscurity that I find I really do need the aid of a commentary to help me along. The humour and imagery are still there, and some of that can be enjoyed at face value, but what lends context and meaning to that imagery and humour can be difficult to appreciate without the help of the Annotations or something similar.

What is it you like about the two works you recommended to me?

[Gothos]

I'm reading Eva Luna by Isabel Allende & The Dubliners by James Joyce. Reading both of them for two different courses I'm taking this semester.

Eva Luna is great. I'm liking this book so much and its hard to put down. Even when I put the book down, I'm still thinking about it & feeling guility that I'm not reading it. lol. Seriously, its a great book. Can't wait to read more of it!

As for Dubliners, well, its not bad, but I'm not sure its for me. Its not hard to read, but...hmmm...its just not that interesting. Especially when compared to Eva Luna (and East, West by Salman Rushdie, which I just read some of before Eva Luna).

Also have to read Ulysses by James Joyce later in the course...

DF2506
" But the class I'm reading Eva Luna for has a bunch of very cool books to read. Very glad I'm taking that course."

I had the same reaction to DUBLINERS recently.

My problem is that most of the stories are variations on the same theme and that they don't work well in a collection.

[berk]

I think The Big Sleep wasnt so strong compared to its sequel. Better plot,characters then. Big Sleep had too weak convulted plot, characters. The girls in that family specially. I thought the writing,Marlowe was great but the rest wasnt.

Whats wrong with Bogart ? He wasnt tall enough or something look wise ? I thought he was great and made Marlowe come alive. No one does PI Noir roles better than him.

The film was more enjoyable for me because the actors was so perfect in their roles. Lauren Bacall made her character memorable too.

It's a great movie, and I enjoy watching it as its own separate thing. But yeah, didn't have quite the right look or attitude for me. It's a very subjective reaction and hard to explain, but I read Marlowe as a more stolid character, in spite of his wise cracks, a little less sharp than Bogart. But that doesn't really capture what I'm trying to say. It's more something underneath the surface than anything you can point to or describe. In contrast, I thought Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye, captured something of that whatever-it-is beneath the surface I'm trying to talk about, even though on the surface he was about as far from Marlowe as you can get. Love both movies, neither of them is really faithful to Chandler's books, but I'd probably say that Altman's Long Goodbye comes closer than the Big Sleep. Have you read all the Marlowe novels, BTW?

[Libaax]

It's a great movie, and I enjoy watching it as its own separate thing. But yeah, didn't have quite the right look or attitude for me. It's a very subjective reaction and hard to explain, but I read Marlowe as a more stolid character, in spite of his wise cracks, a little less sharp than Bogart. But that doesn't really capture what I'm trying to say. It's more something underneath the surface than anything you can point to or describe. In contrast, I thought Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye, captured something of that whatever-it-is beneath the surface I'm trying to talk about, even though on the surface he was about as far from Marlowe as you can get. Love both movies, neither of them is really faithful to Chandler's books, but I'd probably say that Altman's Long Goodbye comes closer than the Big Sleep. Have you read all the Marlowe novels, BTW?

I have read the first two Marlowe books. I like Marlowe and plan to finish the series. I like Lew Archer series more at the moment. Chandler is better prose writer but i like Macdonald social stories,Archer down to earth,lack of wise cracks.

I discovered Hammett and his wonderful OP stories,novels after two Marlowe books so i almost forgot the other PI writers :D

[berk]

What is it you like about the two works you recommended to me?

I like them because they were two of the earliest and best articulated expositions of the materialist philosophy that was an important strand in the development of Enlightenment thought. Holbach's book in particular was notable as a passionate and I think intellectually very brave defence of atheism at a time when that was an extremely dangerous thing to publish, even anonymously.

But I recommended them not because I thought you'd enjoy reading an early atheist tract (I might be mixing you up with another poster, but I don't think you'd be particularly interested in that subject for its own sake?) but as seminal 18th century texts that I think probably influenced Sade's worldview, directly or not. The Enlightenment raised the question of whether or not we needed God to explain the world, whether we needed the idea of soul or spirit to explain human behaviour, and La Mettrie and Holbach are two of the best examples of this question raising, to put it mildly. But these questions shook the foundations of just about everything upon which the culture - including the political, social, and moral structure - of the time rested. So a little later on you got people like Kant trying to rebuild those foundations on a firmer intellectual base, not with unalloyed success. (And have a look in the philosophy book thread for what I thought was a very intriguing observation by Tobias and oscarwildebeast regarding the link between Kant and Sade).

It's pretty clear Sade's work was deeply informed by these problems. For example, if you no longer have God to hand down the idea of right and wrong to frail humanity, where does that leave individual human beings? That's one of the things Sade explores in his books, and as you've seen, the answers he came up with weren't pretty. So no matter what you imagine his own attitude might have been, I'd say you could argue that Sade was in some ways at least very much a traditionalist, perhaps in spite of himself.

All this is just touching the surface of the Sade problem, and I have a lot to learn myself, having just read him for the first time this past year, and not yet having read any of the 20thcentury commentaries on his work. I'm still working through the question, and looking forward to discovering new angles as my reading continues (thanks Tobias and oscarwildebeest for giving me one more reason to read that Adorno book). The main idea I was trying to get across with the recommendations was to look at the intellectual climate - the Enlightenment and what the Enlightement was reacting against - in which he wrote, and what was happening in the world around him at the time, especially the French Revolution.

[berk]

I just finished Shelley's Queen Mab, which - not really coincidentally since I've been reading a lot of this stuff roughly in chronological order - is itself heavily influenced by Holbach, whose System of Nature Shelley quotes extensively in one of the notes to the poem. And now I'm going through a short (88 pp) collection of a few of his essays, including The Necessity of Atheism, from which that Holbach-quoting note was later expanded. I've really grown to have a lot of admiration for Holbach, so I kind of knew what to expect and it was really preaching to the choir, but the one that really impressed me so far was a very short piece called On Life. Not sure how to describe it, but it's so short I'd say it's better that anyone whose curiosity is piqued should just read the thing rather than any feeble attempt on my part to condense its essence.

Queen Mab itself I was very impressed with. Haven't read much of Shelley before this, outside the stuff you learn in school, like Ozymandias, and wasn't ever all that interested in him. But to this point - and Queen Mab's one of his earlier poems, so this could change - the more I see the more I like. I'd been planning to just skim through the Oxford collection I have, but now I'm starting to think I might have to look for some of the things that aren't included in it.

[berk]

I have read the first two Marlowe books. I like Marlowe and plan to finish the series. I like Lew Archer series more at the moment. Chandler is better prose writer but i like Macdonald social stories,Archer down to earth,lack of wise cracks.

I discovered Hammett and his wonderful OP stories,novels after two Marlowe books so i almost forgot the other PI writers :D

I'm a great believer in the practice of never forcing yourslf to read something when you don't really want to. Everything has its time, so I'd say carry on with whatever you feel in the mood for now and come back to Chandler and Marlowe when it feels like the time is right.

[Libaax]

I'm a great believer in the practice of never forcing yourslf to read something when you don't really want to. Everything has its time, so I'd say carry on with whatever you feel in the mood for now and come back to Chandler and Marlowe when it feels like the time is right.

I believe in the same thats why i read 5,6 books of my favs no matter the genre in a month or two. I have read 3 Richard Stark Parker,3 Matt Scudder by Lawrence Block in the last month cause i felt for those authors. If you know those series.

I will focus on Marlowe after i read 5,6 books of Archer series. I was a bit disappointed in The Big Sleep storywise but Farewell, My Lovely was great.

Cant read too much of Hammett, im afraid of reading everything in less 1 or 2 years...

[Slam_Bradley]

It's a great movie, and I enjoy watching it as its own separate thing. But yeah, didn't have quite the right look or attitude for me. It's a very subjective reaction and hard to explain, but I read Marlowe as a more stolid character, in spite of his wise cracks, a little less sharp than Bogart. But that doesn't really capture what I'm trying to say. It's more something underneath the surface than anything you can point to or describe. In contrast, I thought Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye, captured something of that whatever-it-is beneath the surface I'm trying to talk about, even though on the surface he was about as far from Marlowe as you can get. Love both movies, neither of them is really faithful to Chandler's books, but I'd probably say that Altman's Long Goodbye comes closer than the Big Sleep. Have you read all the Marlowe novels, BTW?

Of those made before his death, Chandler liked Murder, My Sweet the best. I'd be hard pressed to disagree with him that Dick Powell was the Marlowe from his novels. That said, I think as a pure movie, The Big Sleep is the best. Faulkner and Brackett's script, particularly the dialogue, is scintillating. And the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall is among the best ever.

[Gothos]

Currently reading an old adventure of The Shadow titled "The Red Blot." It's surprisingly good, especially considering this isn't a title that gets referenced a lot when people talk about the best Shadow yarns. It's got a good villain who is constantly 2-3 steps ahead of everyone, Lamont Cranston gets a bit of face time (which isn't always the case) and has enough gun fights and explosions for a Die Hard film. I've only got a few pages to go.

Funny you mention the Shadow: I'm just finishing up a 1938 yarn, SERPENTS OF SIVA, which like the novel you describe is much more action-packed than many other such yarns. A lot of Shadow tales are like drawing-room mysteries, tending toward dullsville.