Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/30/the-rise-in-videoconferences-l.html
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Hey look a new way to try and impress with the bookshelf full of stuff you’ve never read but want to hitch yourself too.
I’ll start with my copy of Ulysses. Apparently people think you’re smart/educated/whatever if you’ve read that one. Near as far as I can tell is it really just means your masochistic.
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C. Robert Cargill spotted his own book on Geraldo’s bookshelf
Similarly, I have two Umberto Eco books on my shelf. I made it a third of the way through one and I’m sure I will never finish either. Yet there they sit because I like to think of myself as the kind of person who reads Umberto Eco.
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I got like 98% of the way through Focault’s Pendulum and was “I’m good. Plot’s more or less wrapped up. Can just stop now.”
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If I were on a Zoom conference you’d see a wall of LPs behind me, and good luck reading that small print.
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I mean, we had a thread, but it died… only to be resurrected… and died again…
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Ulysses is funny, really funny.
Which is something also rarely mentioned
about Moby Dick.
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Haven’t read Ulysses, but can confirm about Moby Dick.
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Same. Melville mixed in some good laughs with the tedium and wonder.
But yeah, Ulysses always felt like an alienating slog to get very far with it. Finnegans Wake too.
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It’s still open… 
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You should finish those! I know Eco can be taxing but it is worth it.
And I’m not saying that to make myself sound cool. I freely admit that I have abandoned copies of Ulysses and of Gravity’s Rainbow and that it took me a nearly year-long hiatus to finish The Third Policeman.
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AHENNY (adj.)
The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.
GREAT TOSSON (n.)
A fat book containing four words and six cartoons which cost £6.95.
LIFF (n.)
A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words. ‘This book will change your life’.
Adams, Lloyd / The Meaning of Liff
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Is one of those “Name of the Rose”? If I had to have a favourite book, it might well be that. I got ‘Foucalt’s Pendulum’ and ‘Baudolino’ hoping for more of the same, but they weren’t.
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I read it over a weekend. I think it has to be taken at speed. The action only covers a day or two.
The ‘clever’ side of this is the correspondence between people and places in this book and features in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’: an educated someone of this day would have been all “whoo, he’s the cyclops, right, hehehe” and I got none of that. I could look it up, like I could look up all the references in The Four Quartets, but never did. But I thought it stood without that: it might just have been the scaffolding to build the book, but you take it down at the end.
Finnegans Wake is the book I wish I could read.
I gave it a good go, too.
I went so far as to learn the story from other sources,
but I could never tell where I was in the story at any time.
I feel it’s a sort coming on my part, oh well.
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Meh. Maybe it’s just not your proverbial cup of tea.
I’ve pretty much stopped listening to the implicit messaging that if I don’t get what’s Great And Glorious about this or that work of “Art,” there’s something wrong with me. It’s all mostly a matter of taste really. And of cultural gatekeeping by empowered groups whose power I’d rather not bow down to, thanks very much.
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GR is also a real good time.
