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You make The Brothers Karamazov sound appealing enough that I may finally actually read it. I have an unreasoning prejudice against Russian novels, because the first two I read were Tolstoy's, and the third I tried to read was Crime and Punishment. And I could see why Tolstoy's a gazetted Great, all right, but reading Anna Karenina and War and Peace made me feel battered about by clue-by-fours: I kept wanting to shake the Great Man's shoulders and say, "Yeah, yeah, really fucking subtle, Leo, I get it, okay?" And that was better than my reaction to Dostoeyevsky, which was more along the lines of, "this might be really interesting if it weren't too repellent to read." I tell myself it probably all feels a lot less heavy-handed in the original Russian, but the truth probably is that I'm just a philistine.

I've been watching the top-five list meme go by with considerable interest, but without being able to think of anything to ask anyone. You're an exception, though, because you have that astonishing ice-cream place you go to. Somebody should definitely ask you the top ice cream flavor question, and I appear to be first in line to do it.

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questionable537.livejournal.com

I never got to be forced to read Steinbeck or Orwell or Tolstoy.

Hm...I remember reading Steinbeck in high school. Did it really take thirty pages to say "The turtle crossed the road"? Actually, I went through all three authors, though with less than stellar results. Orwell was a bit too much for a class of twelve year olds in middle school (it would have been just fine a couple years later, though), and the teacher didn't like Tolstoy and took the books away one week into it.

Then again, I read The Crucible for fun when I finished The Scarlet Letter for class nearly a month ahead of time....I'm convinced The Crucible is better.

Top five? Hm...I want to be random. What are the top five wierdest things you've seen people do while they drive?

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Karamazov is better than Crime and Punishment, but is still very Russian.

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Top five authors you missed in high school.

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ranalore.livejournal.com

I have Opinions on school reading curriculum, but I'll keep them to myself.

Top five profic authors.

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Top five story arcs that went horribly wrong, in any medium. I'm going to ask everybody else, too, now that I've thought of it.

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redshoeson.livejournal.com

Since you are clearly averse to phone calls, I will try LJ. :P My last week of 20 hours/week is July 25-31, after which it will be hard to hang out (plus you're leaving the state, you twerp you), so do you want to chill some time this coming week? I can come from work like I did the other day. Let me know.

Top five phrases you never want to see in fanfic again, on penalty of death.

...hey, there's a lit pattern happening here. ^^

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Did it really take thirty pages to say "The turtle crossed the road"?

That's the way I feel about Dickens- one of the few authors I did actually have to read in school, though only A Tale of Two Cities.

Hmmmm. I don't drive myself, so my time in cars tends to be much better spent with things like playing with the radio or reading or figuring out if I can drape my feet out the window without getting them hit by passing traffic, instead of actually paying attention to the people in other cars. But here's what I can come up with:

5. Making out (I've seen this multiple times, actually)
4. Pounding on the roof, in a strange, rhythmic pattern, like an OCD twitch
3. Holding animated discussions, complete with hand gestures, even though no one else was in the car
2. Taking notes on a clipboard on, it looked like, the people in cars around him
1. Playing a trombone. No, really. It was particularly weird because my friends and I always play the game of watching for personalized license-plates and shouting them out to each other. We were at a stopped light, and for some reason pretended to read the person's next to us, even though it wasn't personalized. It said TRB and plus some numbers, and we were joking with what that could stand for. "Treble!" somebody suggested. "They must be a musician." And then the light changed, and we pulled even with the car, and the driver was playing a trombone. So weird.

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questionable537.livejournal.com

I've never seen the trombone one before. Shaving, yes...playing musical instrument, no. 0.0

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Hmmm... In the sense of "People I had to discover for myself, thus missing years of reading them, you bastards": (not in order)

1. Dante
2. Oscar Wilde
3. Faulkner
4. Orwell
5. Salinger

There's others I would include, but all the people I keep thinking of get cut out of the running by having been featured in a single (usually entirely unrepresentative, like the poem by Sylvia Plath about mushrooms that we read one year) assignment.

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In no order:

1. Terry Pratchett
2. Neil Gaiman
3. Neal Stephenson
4. Arundhati Roy
5. Robin Hobb

And by the way, have you read anything by Robin Hobb? Her 'Liveship Traders' trilogy is all about the pirates. And merchant traders and dragons and slavery and corrupt kings and magic and politics, but mainly pirates. I think you'd like it; it's set in the same world as her other two trilogies, but in a different country and with different characters, so you don't need to read them to understand it.

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Oh, good question.

1. Anyone's "jewel-colored"- emerald, amethyst, rose, sapphire, whatever- eyes.
2. Also, no one should have a "pucker". I don't care that there's not a lot of options, that's a gross word.
3. "S/He had finally found a soul-mate." Gag me.
4. "His eyes darkened with despair." Or anything similar. Eyes do no change color! I mean, well, sure, maybe if you put on a different shirt, or readjust the nearest light source, they'll look lighter or darker, but! Eyes don't magically reflect your every passing emotion! ARGH!

I have a thing with eyes, apparantly.
5. The phrase "sex kitten" should never be used seriously, ever. Especially in regards to characters who are a. male, b. adult, and c. spend more time pissed-off than flirty.

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I've read Anna Karenina- though not War and Peace- and I wasn't fond of it either. What annoyed me about it was a problem that seems to inflict a lot of novels of the period, Russian or not: endless random tangents on the author's personal interests and philosophy. Victor Hugo is the worst offender at this that I've ever read, but Tolstoy had some of it too.

My Brothers Karamazov is a fairly recent translation done by Pevear and Volokhonsky, which from what I've gathered is quite different from the one more commonly known. It was very modern; at one point, during a fight, a character yells out "Sic him!" So if heavy-handedness bothers you, you might search out this translation.

*laughs* I adore ice cream. It's a family thing- the only times growing up where we had something other than ice cream for dessert were rare special occasions like birthdays or Thanksgiving (when you must have Pumpkin Pie instead, of course). It's not particularly unusual for my parents to have three or more flavors in the freezer at any given time. However, it's one of those things where I have a new favorite every week. So these are my choices of the moment, in no order:

1. Lemon & Blueberries. This is, indeed, a flavor from that wonderful ice cream place. It's so good. Crisp, tart lemon sherbet, so sour you can only eat it in little bites, all threaded through with a sugary blueberry sauce. Mmmmmm.
2. Buckeye. This is a local flavor, but a very popular one, to the extent that even the big companies like Edy's and Breyer's make their own versions of it. It's a variation on chocolate and peanut butter, usually done with vanilla ice cream threaded through with the chocolate, solid chunks of the peanut butter, and small dark chocolate-covered lumps of creamy peanut butter dropped in.
3. Mint chocolate chip. Especially if you get the really cheap kind with neon-green ice cream. A classic.
4. Goat Cheese with Fresh Berries. Also from my wonderful ice cream place (this and the lemon one are both seasonal flavors; I'm going to be distraught when they disappear). I wasn't sure about this one before I tried it, but it's great. The ice cream is almost salty-tasting, and somehow... drier than regular ice cream (I have no idea how to describe the way this tastes, it's just different) and the berries are sweet and plump.
5. Cookies & Cream. Particularly Edy's, which has big chunks of Oreos for their cookies.

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Not actually disagreeing with #4 as a literary matter, but for some pointless and un-analyzable reason I feel compelled to say that while most people's irises don't change color, pupils do dilate or constrict in response to 1) intensity of light and 2) emotion/neurotransmitter levels/whatever.

The only thing is, when emotion is involved, you usually get dilation with the good feelings: excitement, attraction, happiness. So your badfic character's eyes should presumably lighten with despair, not darken.

But it doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?

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redshoeson.livejournal.com

2. ROFLOL, EW!!! X/ X/ X/

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See, I'd be willing to read about the pupil contraction/expansion thing, because you're right: that does happen. However, it hardly ever shows up in writing, other than in sex scnes- for some reason, expanded pupils are one of the details that often get mentioned. But in most of the cases that I've seen this description used, the author was speaking of a literal color-change, occasionally even one as extreme as a change from green to blue, for example.

But I dunno. Maybe it's just one of those things that bugs me, and that most people never even notice.

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I'd notice that. Maybe it's that you're a more adventurous reader than I am, so that something about the stories where this happens frightens me off before I get to it.

I had a surgeon once whose eyes really did change color. But it was weird, and not normal, and everybody talked about it; and the changes certainly never seemed to have anything to do with emotion.

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Hmmmm. In no order:

1. The Spike/Buffy relationship in BtVS. I really wanted to like this. It was one of my favorite pairings, back when it wasn't canon. I liked it in Season 5, when it was just Spike's unrequited yearning. I'm willing to concede most of early Season 6, when it was baddirtywrong. But by the time it gets to the attempted rape and the resouling and the craziness, I'd bailed. So bad.
2. Gothika. Okay, you probably didn't see this movie, and that is a good thing. However, I adore horror films, and have seen the vast majority of the ones that have come out in the last decade. Gothika comes to mind when talking about about story arcs gone horribly wrong because it was so bad that it's become a injoke within my friends who saw it. But it works especially well for this meme because it could have been good. It's a thriller/suspense; like a lot of movies, there's a mystery to it. Naturally, when you watch a movie like this, you try to put together the pieces before things are explained, to solve the clues. We did this. Every single one of our "this is what I thought was happening!" stories were interesting and exciting and many, many times better than the actual backstory, which was so stupid as to unbelievable.
3. Tale of Two Cities. Possibly this is sacrilege, but to me, this book is the ultimate example of "it could have been so good, if only someone else had written it". There's nothing wrong with the plot or characters themselves, but the way it's told destroyed every interesting thing about it.

Possibly my feelings on the matter were influenced by the fact that I read it when I was only 14. However, I hated it with such an intensity that I can't quite bring myself to try it again to confirm things.
4. Memoirs of a Geisha. I don't know if you've read this, and with the movie version coming out soon, I don't want to spoil it if you haven't. Let me just say that most of the story is good. But the part that's bad was enough to ruin any enjoyment I'd gotten out of it.
5. Banewreaker by Jacqueline Carey. This one's probably a bit of a cheat, since I think it's likely that you've never heard of it, and I enjoyed her earlier trilogy (the Kushiel (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0765342987/qid=1122178654/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7873660-3862420?v=glance&s=books) books) solely as popcorn thrillers, so I shouldn't have been expecting too much, but I just read it, so it's on my mind. Banewreaker actually strikes me as though Carey read The Simillarion and decided that "it would have been really good, if only someone else had written it" and set out to write it herself. The biggest problem I had with it, though, was the three main characters. You've got this god, a god who has fought with the other gods and been exiled to "Earth", and is understandably a little angry over the whole thing. So he decides to seek out three humans who share his rage and pain, and make them immortal so he won't be so lonely. The main character's backstory is that his wife cheated on him with his best friend, and he killed them both. Which, don't misunderstand me, is a bad thing, but... doesn't seem like the kind of rage that calls out to the very gods. And then every single scene featuring the guy featured a reference to his pain and regret, if not yet another entire extended flashback. By the end of the book, I wanted to tell him, "Look, I get it, but it's been a thousand years, you need to MOVE ON."

One of the other two main characters? Was greedy. That was the entire justification for why he had been chosen out of every living entity for the many years this god looked for companionship. I didn't get it either.

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Oo, that's interesting.

I knew a girl once who had two different colored eyes. I often want to complain about the cheesy Mary Sues who often share this feature, but a little voice in the back of my head always says "Well... it does happen sometimes. You've seen it!" and then I feel nitpicky if I critize them.

Ah, real life. Takes all the fun out of whining about bad fic.

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Mmm. Oscar Wilde. Amusingly, my first Silvia Plath was a posthumously published kid's book. XD

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