I realized recently that I was reading but not remembering a whole hell of a lot. My internal summation of "Madame Bovary" boiled down a single sentence and the image of someone eating a lot of poison. While that's certainly efficient in terms of storage it certainly seems to miss the point. In an attempt to augment my tattered recollections I started taking handwritten notes in true luddite fashion. My notes hit the high points as I read through things and I'll read through the notes and extract the high points from those. It's the ultimate in compactification! (or compaction or compression if you prefer to be 'correct'... pfft...)
Since I started halfway through Emma Courtney I didn't make note of the plot (not to worry, it's a simple Plot 1g: Woman meets man, woman likes man, man can't marry woman because his uncle's will forbids it, woman marries other man, woman still wants first man.) I did make note of a few cool quotes and words I found amusing. Aren't you lucky to get them all without even having read the book?
splenetic - Basically, this just means spiteful but it's handy as it might make people think you admire their spleen if you use it on them.
"The ideas, associations and circumstances of each man are properly his own and it is a pernicious system that would lead us to require all men, however different their circumstances to act by a precise general rule." - William Godwin as quoted by Hayes.
captious - I DO so admire efficient words and this is one of them. A captious person is one who tends to stress the faults of a person or idea and constantly raise objections and argue. Much more evocative than the commonly used relative 'nitpicker'.
specious - Another example of a highly efficient adjective, a specious argument is one that has an outward appearance of truth but is really just a load of crap, similar to sophistry.
gallimaufy - yet another of the many words for a hodgepodge.
1 comment:
Yeah, I've got an Access database full of these things. Well, not full, but about 150 different items. I've got a few random dates in here too. Date of the Aztec conquest, etc. Things I'd like to remember from various books. I'm telling you, the next party I go to I'm gonna whip out some of this history crap and people are going to be friggin' dazzled, man!
AGH! Highlighter! Don't be comin' round here with your blasphemy, Charlieist! Writing in a book... what will the world come to next. Dog earing pages?
NoNoNo... see, with me, it's different here. My mind works like a simple queue. I'm convinced it's because I only have a thin covering of brain material on the inside of my skull and the rest has been nibbled away by rodents of some kind. Push one thing in and something else pops out on the other side. There's all sorts of interesting crap in these books that I've just forgotten. I need to exercise the queue try to stretch it out a bit.
Fiction would not be worth reading if it didn't reflect real people. See previous post about the only real interesting problems in the world involving people. Mathematics.... Science.... all that crap is much to simple and predictable. They operate based on (generally) simple predictable rules. People are like butterflies in a hurricane though. The tiniest push can move them from one extreme to the other. Fiction is about people and therefore an illustration of the most complicated of all problems...
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