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Pete Buttigieg recommended My Name is Red in Books (curated)

 
My Name is Red
My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk, Erdag M. Goknar | 2010 | Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"Ah, the days when Hollywood harbored existentialistic realists, and the entirety of America—from its back roads and highway saloons to its hinterland betting subcultures, working-class desolation, gone-wild farm fields, and small-town cafeterias—was a metaphor for itself, and for all of our postwar lostness. Monte Hellman’s career peak is easily the greatest film I never even heard of as a film-hungry 1970s kid, vanished and hardly ever TV-broadcast, even as I thought the sobering, grown-up likes of Deliverance and Chinatown and Scarecrow were emblematic of an American cinema that had finally reached adulthood. Then came Star Wars."

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce | 2014 | Fiction & Poetry
5.0 (4 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet. But the modern reader can't help but note that, as a story of a working class adolescent who thinks he's intellectually superior to everyone around him, is desperate to be a writer, and wanks a lot, Portrait of a Young Artist is also incredibly similar to."

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Awix (3310 KP) rated The Dig (2021) in Movies

Feb 6, 2021 (Updated Feb 6, 2021)  
The Dig (2021)
The Dig (2021)
2021 | Drama, History
7
7.7 (3 Ratings)
Movie Rating
True-life Anglo-Saxon chronicle is brought to the screen as another wartime hats-and-fags tale of class and repression. Posh woman hires blunt-but-brilliant working-class bloke to examine her mounds (don't snipe, the film does the same gag, more or less); what ensues reminded me, for a while at least, of a big-budget version of Ted and Ralph with Carey Mulligan playing Charlie Higson's part.

Really a film of two halves: the first part, which is very quiet and still and all about figures in a landscape with Vaughan Williams-esque music playing, I found was much engaging than the second, which is not particularly focused and turns into a bit of a soap opera (there's a forbidden romance, terminal illness, political squabbling over who gets to run the dig and keep the treasure, etc, etc). Decent performances from a strong cast and it looks good in a fairly cinematic way, but by the end it seemed to me that archaeology in general and Sutton Hoo in particular had rather been forgotten about, which seemed like a shame.
  
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Othello
Othello
10
6.8 (17 Ratings)
Book Rating
I'm not going to lie - the main reason I like Othello so much is circumstantial.

See, when I was seventeen, my brothers and I had to move to a completely different state. I was going into my senior year, and my new school didn't offer a real Honors English class for seniors - the only option available to me would have been to go into AP English which, in that particular school, would have ONLY prepared me to take the AP exam. It wasn't actually an English class.

I wasn't very enthusiastic about that fact, so I was put into a tiny 11th grade Honors English class instead. (There were ten of us - eight girls, and two boys.)

Things went fairly well, considering, until we came to the Shakespeare semester. The play the teacher chose was [b:Hamlet|1420|Hamlet|William Shakespeare|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351051208s/1420.jpg|1885548].

I'd spent a semester and a half on Hamlet when I was in 11th grade, so I was already weary when the choice was made. After the first few days of reading the play aloud in class resulted in an entire five lines of Hamlet being covered, I was desperate. For the first time ever, I was ready to bash my head into my desk in an English class in order to relieve the boredom.

I approached my English teacher, and explained that I'd already done Hamlet, and the slow pace the class was taking wasn't really working for me. I offered to read another Shakespeare play in place of Hamlet, and said that I'd even still take the Hamlet test at the end of the semester to prove that I was serious. Because he was an awesome English teacher, he agreed, and told me to just get back to him to let him know which play I was going to read on my own.

Guess which one I picked?

Compared to retreading Hamlet for the seventh time, Othello was a breath of fresh air. Othello saved my brain that semester.

In light of that, I absolutely adored Othello.

*shrugs*

Like I said, completely circumstantial. I'll have to reread it at some point, to see how it holds up when it isn't the only thing standing between me and three months of mind-numbing boredom.