rubber soul

I liked Slaughterhouse Five. I think Breakfast of Champions is better though if you're into Vonnegut.

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TheBig3

I said this to some co-workers and they recommended Cat's Cradle. I think I read "Welcome to the Monkey House" back in Middle school but had no idea wtf was going on. I guess I could try these again.

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adidasss

Yeah I like BoC a little better too but both are excellent works and the pinnacle of his oeuvre I think.

He's not for everyone I guess (who is?), although I would say he is quite easy to read and like, if you get his sense of humour.

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“Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle.

Last.fm

Mucha na Dziko

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my Top 3 writers of all time actually.

His style is just over perfect and his imagination infinite
Rarely does the written word inspire such reactions from me

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Akai

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''To be honest, in my opinion, of course without offending anyone who thinks differently from my point of view,
but also by looking into this matter from a different perspective and by considering each and every one's valid opinion,
I do believe that I forgot what I was going to say.''


S p o t i f y

Marie Monday

I enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five too, as much as BoC I think. Vonnegut is funny, but the way he describes the realities of war (and PTSD?) is quite gripping and devastating I think.

I got a copy of a play by Racine with a translation next to the original French and I was happily surprised that I could read it with the translation's help (also is French grammar just richer than English grammar? It seems like English needs a lot of dead weight to say things for which there is a more elegant grammatical construction in French). So now I want to try reading some French, if jadis or anyone else has recommendations for easy books that'd be cool

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jadis

What the French call l'Âge classique (from late 16th to early 18th centuries) does have the advantage of "linguistic purity": the vocabulary is "soutenu" and restricted (Roland Barthes called Racine "l’homme aux deux mille mots") so knowing the few thousand Latinate words that are used in the literary registers of English gets you a long way. On the flip side, it's highly stylized and many of the words are used in ways that are subtly different from contemporary French, so I wouldn't focus on that era unless you want to be a scholar of French classicism or something.

I would avoid the 19th century: everyone thinks they're going to enjoy Madame Bovary or the Three Musketeers but it's full of lengthy descriptions of stuff like taverns and horses and chapels where you'll have to look up 5 words in every sentence. Impractical.

Many of the people I know who made the biggest progress in French started by reading plenty of nonfiction: it's just simpler than literary fiction and you can get it from wherever. From news agencies on Twitter to biographies of celebrities you like. Someone I know took herself to a new level by reading on her phone a French translation of an English-language Cure biography she found as an ebook (on Google's book app, whatever it's called) cause she was a Cure fan and knew a lot about them already, so she could figure out a lot from context as opposed to looking up every single word she didn't know.

rostasi

Can't seem to get to page 746. Making a post to see if it's me or the internet.

Trollheart

Hilarious.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Marie Monday

Thanks, that's good advice. I don't read much non fiction but that seems like a good place to start. I also ordered the first Claudine novel by Colette.
In the mean time I'm reading another French book, l'ultime secret by Bernard Werber. A French friend of mine lent it to me; the book is bad but the French is easy to understand with a little help of Google translate.
And on the side I finally started reading Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex (in English because that's beyond my level of French). I've only read the introduction but so far it's excellent.
edit for update: her take on biology is at times very dubious though. About pregnancy: '[...] loss of appetite and vomiting [...] signalise the revolt of the organism against the invading species' ...um sure Simone

Another update which I forgot about: a while ago I read the Mischa Mengelberg book that someone gave me, and it was great. Very funny, very playful. Lots of whimsical writings about music, absurdist little plays and poems that twist language and play with it. His Dutch is beautiful; he also writes in German and English occasionally (his English is adorably off-kilter, as happens when someone tries to cast English in the grammar and idiom of another language)

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