My friend who is also a very avid reader was purging her quite enormous book collection… she ran out of space… and she decided to announce anyone feel free to take through so, I purged her shelves and just saw what was interesting and I grabbed it actually from her… and she never ended up even reading it, so… I’m reading it instead of her!
So far, what perspective have you gained from it?
Initially I thought it was going to be going in a certain direction, and now that I’ve gotten a good way through its not what I expected. Um… but its… very interesting. Its really about the relationship between writers and reality…. which is what appealed to me.
Would you recommend it, and if so, to who and why?
Uh, I think so far my first gut reaction would be yes, I would recommend it. Um… and… I would definitely recommend it to other avid readers. Other people that really enjoy reading. Only because that… that’s what this is really initially about. Um… its… really good for those who appreciate that, you know… discussion, the intellectual… the questions that come from reading books, um… so, that’s why.
This is my roommates book actually, and he’s traveling in Europe so I borrowed it while he’s gone… and I’m in love with it…it’s great!
So far, what perspective have you gained from this book?
Well… David Foster Wallace’s writing is amazing… his style, if you’re not familiar… it’s like he uses these end notes that are used to put jokes in the middle of… well not always jokes, sometimes their informatory… but uh, in the middle of the text, which is great. But the very first… as far as insight goes… it’s really his vocabulary… it’s amazing so it’s… I mean I’m a song writer so it helps me jot words through my mind. [bctt tweet=”He’s also very funny and smart which I love; it’s great when someone can mix the two.” username=”cityreadsnyc”] It’s sad… unfortunately, he ended up committing suicide… but yes, he was very smart. The specific essay I’m on right now is about him covering the 2000 primaries when John McCain was going against Bush… so, he’s just talking about the times current politics in 2000 so it’s very interesting to read that from his perspective.
Would you recommend it, and if so, to who and why?
I would recommend this for sure! To who? I mean, literally everyone! I think… it’s just…. all of it is amazing… but yeah, anybody who is interested in writing… his grammar is impeccable and his vocabulary is just amazing. So, like I said, as far as songwriting goes, it’s really helping me out a lot just purely through his vocabulary… it’s amazing!
Umm… well… I’m on Twitter now and then and I follow designers… female designers… and it was something that was being mentioned often, so I kind of wanted to check it out. Here I never get to find Korean books, so whenever I visit home I try to get as many books as I can… and this was one of them.
So far, what perspective have you gained from this book?
Well… I’ve just found it really interesting that, although I expected a really aggressive feminism in the design field in Korea, it was actually… like some people were not feeling or experiencing the discrimination… and that some female designers thought themselves lucky enough to have male supporters… like within their family or colleagues. Oh… I also have found it interesting to have female designers, of different age groups, or of different positions in their field… talking to each other in interview format… which was easier for me to read and to understand their perspectives, instead of just long, long writings from one persons perspective… I thought that interview conversation format to be way better for me to absorb. Also… this book looks into the mystery of… [bctt tweet=”Where did all the female art students go?” username=”cityreadsnyc”] …illustrating why some had to stop… and how the survivors survived… since the stats show that the majority of the design students are female yet the notable and established designers are highly consisted of men. It really shows how there are different shapes of feminism… that the individuals experience… and how they deal with it.
Would you recommend it, and if so, to who and why?
Yes, definitely… I would probably recommend it to guys… like, male designers… or non-designers as well. But… I think… you know how guys… I mean I’m not trying to be offensive about this, but… guys would have less experiences of what we experience… and they would probably take it for granted… of what they get in the field. So, if not, that’s great… but in my experience I would not say that, so… yeah… yeah… I think I would recommend it to my designer friends… my male designer friends. Also, I would recommend it to both male and female designers of director positions… thinking and hoping they would gain a better idea of how to enhance the growing female designers to balance their work and life as women better… without having to give one up.
Umm… I was researching Victorian ghost stories… you know, like Christmas… like those scary ghost stories in that Christmas song. So I started just reading different Victorian ghost stories around Christmas and it’s just been… kind of uh… sending me down a worm hole of all these different authors… and so, the author was just somebody that cropped up when trying to find other ghost stories.
So far, what perspective have gained from this book?
Umm… unlike a lot of other Victorian ghost stories… not exactly ghost stories is… just that; they’re not exactly ghost stories. I mean, the tradition, you know… tends to be about haunted love stories… they tend to be romantic as well as scary. This stuff is all… well, one of these stories was about this little kid who had heard one of the neighbor kids had fallen down a well and they heard another kid screaming for help, and so it scared the kid… and he didn’t find out until years later that it wasn’t a ghost… that it was somebody he in theory could have helped but he didn’t realize because he thought it was a ghost. You know… so it’s… it’s an interesting riff on the Victorian ghost stories in that they tend not to be about ghosts.
… when asked, “do most ghosts stories tend to happen in that way?”
No… that’s just the one that I finished most recently. Yeah… they tend to be… like for instance, one of the ghost stories was actually just about… [bctt tweet=”A haunted writing desk that compelled people to write grave stone epitaphs…” username=”cityreadsnyc”]… you know… and, it turned out that it was once owned by this guy that had gotten in trouble for slander and so… because he was writing these horrible little poems about people and… so his spirit had made people write these non-sense, little grave stone things… you know … but again, it wasn’t really a ghost… it was just this idea that this man’s ill temper had gotten into the desk and compelled other people to be… grumpy, I guess.
Would you recommend it, and if so, to who and why?
I honestly don’t know if I would recommend it yet… umm… yeah, I suppose that I would but… I would say that if you were… you know… a person who is reading a bunch of Victorian ghost stories… it’s a nice change of pace because it’s clearly written by somebody who had spent a lot of time reading them and just decided what he wanted to do different with the form. I just don’t know who that person would be.
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