[HN Gopher] Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses
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Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses
Author : robin_reala
Score : 311 points
Date : 2024-05-31 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (standardebooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (standardebooks.org)
| Jun8 wrote:
| "... with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)"
|
| Fairly easy my foot!
|
| This rating aside, thanks for a great project.
| complaintdept wrote:
| 00.0 must be the output of /dev/random
| robin_reala wrote:
| Yeah, our reading score isn't always perfect. I had to fix it
| for the Mina Loy collection[1] I did as because it's free-form
| poetry without many full stops it thought the sentences were so
| long that it awarded it a negative score.
|
| I'll look to see if there's any obvious reason why this is
| being marked as fairly easy, but it's probably an issue with
| the standard algorithm we use more than the code.
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mina-loy/poetry
| ramijames wrote:
| I'm so grateful that this is being done. Many free ebooks are
| high-quality content in a low-quality format.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, this is such an incredible and important project.
| Anyone who has tried to get free and/or public domain works in
| ebook format knows how bad the situation is. Some versions are
| good, but most are poor inputs processed through outdated and
| error-prone OCR. I'm extremely grateful to have even that, but
| the need for this project is very real.
|
| I'll be supporting financially when I can, but until then if
| anyone involved is reading, please accept my heartfelt thanks
| and appreciation for your noble efforts.
| tantivy wrote:
| Many _paid_ ebooks are in a low-quality format too. I 've
| bought Kindle books from real, well-known publishing houses
| that had obviously not had a single proofreader go through
| after their OCR. A motivated volunteer would've done so much
| better.
| sherr wrote:
| I agree. I stopped reading on the kindle years ago because I
| got so fed up with the terrible mistakes in the text. Not
| just spelling but also formatting. I love paper books. Having
| said that, Standard EBooks are very good.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)
|
| Well, Joyce did say that it was just a lot of jokes.
|
| =========================
|
| Episode 14 - Oxen Of The Sun
|
| DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLES Eamus.
| Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and
| wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening
| and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening
| and wombfruit.
|
| Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, hoyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa,
| boyaboy, hoopsa.
|
| Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little
| perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most
| profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is
| ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly
| by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of
| veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they
| affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior
| splendour is the .....
| acabal wrote:
| Yes, it's a bit silly! The reason the score is so off is
| because we use the Flesch Reading Ease algorithm[1] to
| calculate it, which was designed for the US Navy to be able to
| score technical manuals. It works very well for most prose
| too... except highly modernist prose!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Reading_Ease
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Thanks. Maybe a simple fix is: don't use it for fiction.
| Since that's not its intent.
| hedora wrote:
| As an end-user of Standard Ebooks, I've found it works
| pretty well on average.
| acabal wrote:
| It works just fine for fiction. _Ulysses_ is a very special
| edge case in the pantheon of all literature, so it 's no
| surprise it doesn't work well for this one case.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| How's it handle Finnegans Wake?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Got another 11 years to wait before that enters the US
| public domain, unfortunately.
| Avid8329 wrote:
| Ulysses has mostly "real" words while Finnegans Wake is
| largely made of portmanteaus. It'll be interesting to see
| the results!
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I just ran it and got "segmentation fault (core dumped)".
| Is this one of Joyce's silly sentences he's famous for?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > It works just fine for fiction
|
| how about some other well-known novels and their scores?
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)"_
|
| Yeah, that's a very unnecessary misuse of AI.
|
| Is there an open-source human rating site for serious books, in
| how difficult they are to read--how tedious, how erudite, how
| much _pain_ you have to go through to get whatever reward you
| think you get at the end? With _Ulysses_ near the edge of one
| axis, _Moby Dick_ demarcating another... Surely this is all
| common knowledge to bookish people, but, _where_ do they write
| it down?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Hardly AI, just a simple Python function that implements the
| Flesch reading ease algorithm: https://github.com/standardebo
| oks/tools/blob/effcf0f6db05729...
| xandrius wrote:
| Everything is AI to an untrained person.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, these days, most AI is just a simple python
| program.
| tiagod wrote:
| Well, sure, because all the complexity emerges in the
| weights
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| AI stands for "artificial intelligence" and I think an
| algorithm which decides how easy a book is to read
| qualifies as some sort of intelligence.
| picture wrote:
| The input to the algorithm is literally three numbers:
| total words, total sentences, total syllables. If this
| counts as AI, then your thermostat or film camera feels
| pretty AI too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_read
| abi...
| wan23 wrote:
| Perhaps we could use AI to give us a score for how AI a
| given AI is
| logicallee wrote:
| ChatGPT gives it a score of 0.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/c1e700bc-7353-427e-a953-1e234f5
| e96...
| perihelions wrote:
| Right, and whether you call it "General AI" or "trivial
| Python script" my complaint stands-that it's a misfeature
| for the user, the novice reader user, the English-as-a-
| foreign-language user, who relies on a machine review that
| tell them reading Joyce is "easy English". That would
| seriously suck if that happened to someone, though I assume
| that's statistically unlikely (particularly given Joyce-is-
| difficult-English is a widely-known meme). It'd be an
| unpleasant experience, like being told glue is tasty on a
| pizza.
|
| I *get* that my opinion is an unpopular and minority one,
| so I accept the downvotes and ridicule, fine. This is the
| minority viewpoint I hold, I stubbornly stand by; and the
| hill I will die on. That it's disrespectful to users to
| inject unvetted machine scoring into book reviews; it's a
| malfeature and should not be a socially accepted practice.
| Treat the human user with awed respect; where you can help
| them, help, and where you don't know, say nothing--don't
| let loose some talking Python script. The user _doesn 't
| know_ the limitations of your script; the user _doesn 't
| know_ the language you posted on your page isn't
| authoritative language and is prone to major errors.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > That it's disrespectful to users to inject unvetted
| machine scoring into book reviews
|
| Very, very far from being unvetted. This algorithm has
| been used, unchanged, for the 50 years since Flesch-
| Kincaid was developed. I've used this metric for my
| entire life as a rough indicator of difficulty, and it is
| widely accepted. But it's a limited metric: it has two
| factors for difficulty that generally rate text as more
| difficult if it has more words per sentence and more
| syllables per word. It's a good heuristic, but as with
| all heuristics, there will be edge cases, and Ulysses is
| one of them.
|
| As I do with all critiques, I guess I'd ask you to make a
| better suggestion for Standard Ebooks. Given their
| resources, and the available alternative of "have a panel
| of diverse humans read every book and grade its
| difficulty", your position is dangerously close to
| letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Is your
| argument that Standard Ebooks would be a better product
| if they didn't include reading ease metrics? If so, I
| respectfully disagree.
|
| > Treat the human user with awed respect; where you can
| help them, help, and where you don't know, say nothing--
| don't let loose some talking Python script. The user
| doesn't know the limitations of your script; the user
| doesn't know the language you posted on your page isn't
| authoritative language and is prone to major errors.
|
| I don't think this is fair. Reading ease has flaws, but
| is widely accepted (although seemingly poorly understood,
| despite its simplicity). The guy who runs readable.com
| (DaveChild) responded to a post on Reddit about reading
| scores a few years back (that thread was also filled with
| tons of misinformation about how this is some black-box
| AI algorithm that's making everyone stupid), but his
| comment was quite well-grounded:
|
| > Readability scores are fairly crude, almost by design,
| because they were all created at a time when they had to
| be worked out without computers. But they do give a
| decent idea of the overall readability of a piece, and
| that helps you to see if your content is too wordy. They
| are not, by themselves, an indicator of quality. They are
| not a substitute for proofreading and editing. But they
| are a useful tool to have in your arsenal.
|
| This is a balanced, practical opinion. Life is filled
| with proxy metrics that are flawed, from insurance risk
| and credit ratings to SAT scores and the ability to do
| whiteboard-coding. In context, I think Standard Ebooks
| made exactly the right choice to incorporate some measure
| of reading ease in their offering, even if it doesn't get
| it 100% right 100% of the time.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Very, very far from being unvetted. This algorithm
| has been used, unchanged, for the 50 years since Flesch-
| Kincaid was developed."_
|
| I mean that the _instance_ is unvetted: the machine score
| is generated automatically, and placed on the website
| automatically, and no human in the loop checks if it 's
| reasonable or not. Not that the general algorithm is un-
| reviewed.
|
| - _" But they do give a decent idea of the overall
| readability of a piece, and that helps you to see if your
| content is too wordy. They are not, by themselves, an
| indicator of quality. They are not a substitute for
| proofreading and editing. But they are a useful tool to
| have in your arsenal. "_
|
| This is very fair.
|
| - _" Life is filled with proxy metrics that are flawed,
| from insurance risk and credit ratings"_
|
| And a lot of them are very rightly illegal to score
| algorithmically in the EU (for important decisions),
| without manual oversight, because of the possibility of
| egregious and unaccountable machine error. The trend of
| abdicating human agency is not overall a wholesome one.
|
| I'm coming from a place were I do read books (despite the
| fact I write HN comments like an illiterate stoned
| baboon, I'm trying my hardest really I am), and they come
| lovingly edited by obsessed people who put probably
| _thousands_ of hours into editing each one, individually,
| with commentary essays that are up to 50-100 pages long,
| fastidiously crafted to guide the novice explorer.
| Standard Ebooks is neither a publisher not attempting to
| replace publishers. But: it 's viscerally disturbing to
| me to see robots taking the hallowed place of human
| scholars in annotating--in this narrow example, _scoring_
| -books, and when they go badly wrong like this Joyce
| example, it's very upsetting, and makes me
| (irrationally?) think there's some terribly dangerous
| cultural normalization for replacing authentic human
| intelligence with fake, stupid, hopelessly lost machine
| imitations. And we'll lose many valuable things and our
| humanity in the process.
|
| I sincerely apologize to anyone I've annoyed with this (I
| infer I've annoyed a lot of people). I'm just very upset
| with seeing fake machine stuff everywhere.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I see several people calling this an edge case. That
| might well be, but how about giving us something to
| compare it to, in the realm of early- or pre-20th century
| novels?
| squigz wrote:
| Who even mentioned AI here?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| re "unvetted" and difficulty thereof : there are already
| reviews of its difficulty elsewhere on the Web, e.g. from
| Goodreads:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6752242
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4827595524
|
| 1. Telemachus. Difficulty : 0 2. Nestor. Difficulty : 0 3.
| Proteus Difficulty : 9 4. Calypso. Difficulty : 5 5. The
| Lotus Eaters. Difficulty : 4 6. Hades. Difficulty : 3 7.
| Aeolus. Difficulty : 5 8. The Laestrygonians. Difficulty : 5
|
| etc.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Reading ease: each word makes sense. -25.1 points for no 4
| words in a row making sense.
| retrac wrote:
| It's fairly easy... if you also speak French, Italian, Latin,
| and probably Ancient Greek. I don't and I know I missed a lot.
| I remember a lot of bilingual French/English wordplay through
| worked. He was multilingual and the puns/kennings are also.
| mikub wrote:
| You boys and girls are doing an fantastic job. I read alot of the
| old classics thanks to you.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Me too! I just finished Ivanhoe and was just heading over to
| Standard Ebooks to find another one.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| I love the project, but it really does need a way to find the
| most popular books:
|
| https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/298
| bnycum wrote:
| I was gonna comment on the sorting being less than ideal too.
| Only sort by release date (not publication date), author, ease,
| and length. Can't even sort by title.
| chasil wrote:
| Gutenberg.org is reporting the number of downloads; can't this
| be used?
|
| Are these two organizations otherwise not on friendly terms,
| and able to exchange ebooks?
| robin_reala wrote:
| We talk a fair bit! Gutenberg is the source for 95%+ of our
| productions, and personally I upstream any transcription
| issues I find.
|
| What differs though is the mission. Gutenberg generally wants
| accurate digital translations of the original source texts,
| whereas Standard Ebooks tries to balance that out with better
| readability. Both are valid approaches, and there's space for
| both of us.
| chasil wrote:
| Just curious... do you ever reach a consensus on a text
| that you decide to share between you?
|
| Can you actually share the full .EPUB file, or do they
| object to the expanded size with bundled fonts and
| formatting, resulting in identical HTML but otherwise
| different content in the ZIP?
| robin_reala wrote:
| It hasn't happened before but never say never. What we do
| do though sometimes is contribute our own transcriptions
| to Gutenberg first, then use that as a base for the
| Standard Ebooks version.
| raybb wrote:
| You can use the openlibrary.org API to get the popularity (want
| to reads, rating counts, reviews) to get you started.
| donatj wrote:
| Their tech stack is essentially a really weird really
| opinionated custom static site generator that makes
| improvements difficult. The build process is slow and
| troublesome.
|
| I talked with them about adding an index of authors, and were
| open to the idea. I put probably 5 hours into getting it
| running correctly and figuring out how to get it to work. They
| then were at the time unwilling to restructure their data into
| a way that made it feasible due to how they have books are
| structured for multiple authors.
|
| I've worked on hundreds of PHP apps over the last 20 years, and
| it's frankly one of the weirdest. It could benefit from even
| just a little SQLite db or something.
| cdrini wrote:
| It seems like we need to trigger another import -- we only have
| 491 of their 1,000! But you can search Standard Ebooks books in
| Open Library. Here they are sorted by how many people have
| added them to their reading log:
| https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo...
|
| Or by rating:
| https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo...
|
| Or by first published!
| https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo...
|
| I created an issue to kick off another import:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/9372
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Thanks - that's really helpful.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| "reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)"
|
| "O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words."
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I didn't know about this project but I'm really glad you're doing
| it.
|
| How do you choose which books to do?
| acabal wrote:
| Our volunteers pick what books they personally want to work on.
| Those books have to meet our collections policy criteria:
| https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy
| LVB wrote:
| This site works surprisingly poorly in Firefox (Mac). When I
| click a link, I usually get a blank page along with some CSP
| errors and have to refresh. No problems in Safari or Chrome.
| rafram wrote:
| Restart your browser? I use this site frequently in Firefox on
| macOS and have no issues.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I use Firefox on Mac and work on the site, and I have to say
| that I've never seen that. Something to do with an extension
| maybe?
| LVB wrote:
| Good call. It turned out to be React Developer Tools causing
| the issues.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| FYI
|
| > Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a
| collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open
| source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the
| quality of commercially produced ebooks.
|
| I'm looking at doing that for calculus made easy by sylvanus
| Thompson but I need to overcome my lazyness first
| robin_reala wrote:
| You can use Standard Ebooks tooling to create a white-label
| ebook skeleton if that would help you get started.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Someone else has done something similar for that work:
| https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=3194 -- you might find either that
| what he's done is good enough to satisfy you, or that you can
| build on what he did.
| jarvist wrote:
| That's great! Their motivation & updates seem very sensible.
| Calculus Made Easy is a very nice compact book for university
| students who have started to forgot their high school
| training, and I will certainly point people in the direction
| of this project.
| hedora wrote:
| If you want the opposite of that: University students that
| come into college with strong calculus fundamentals, then I
| suggest "Calculus" by Michael Spivak.
|
| I haven't used calculus in a decade, but I use things I
| learned from working through that book pretty much every
| day I write code.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| That's a great news, thanks !
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Ouch. Can't think of a more challenging one to work on. I can
| do most things epub now, but mathml is very much in the "no
| thanks now go away" category.
| squigz wrote:
| Standard Ebooks is a great resource. Consider supporting them
| https://standardebooks.org/donate
| joaorico wrote:
| For anyone diving into Ulysses, I highly recommend checking out
| The Joyce Project [1].
|
| It's filled with interactive notes that are very useful for
| understanding the linguistic and cultural references.
|
| Here's my reading method that I found effective:
| 1. Read a section on paper. 2. Go through the same section
| on the site. 3. (Re-)read on paper.
|
| I toggled between 1-2-3, 1-2, or 2-3 depending on my mood, and it
| worked really well.
|
| [1] https://www.joyceproject.com/
| patrick-fitz wrote:
| Thanks for the link, this does make it more approachable!
| WilTimSon wrote:
| I'll say this, with the caveat that I never did finish the book
| due to unrelated reasons, this is an excellent method.
|
| One may think "It's fine, I'll simply read the text and then,
| if I have questions, absorb some scholarly articles on it."
| Trust me, you will enjoy it so much more when you understand
| Joyce's intent and clever writing as it happens. You simply
| can't take it all in post-factum, too much would be missed.
| tame3902 wrote:
| There also is https://www.ulyssesguide.com. It has episode
| guides, which explain what actually happens in each chapter
| (this can sometimes be difficult to decifer), the cross
| references to other chapters, and sometimes possible
| interpretations. I found that extremely helpful and would have
| missed a ton without even noticing.
| ljsprague wrote:
| Is the effort worth it?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| If you're a fan of modernist literature or of literature as
| an at form, undoubtedly yes. If you're just interested in
| reading it because it is (justifiably, in my opinion) famous,
| then possibly.
|
| It's a bit like reading and studying the Bible if you're not
| religious. Will you come out having read and studied one of
| the foundational texts in English literature, able to
| approach later texts with fresh eyes to the unending
| allusions it spawned? Yep. Will it be 'worth it', though, in
| a revelatory sense? That's up to you in the end.
| mongol wrote:
| Something like this but for The Iliad would be awesome
| ckmate-king-2 wrote:
| 1. I think "fairly easy" badly mischaracterizes its difficulty.
| 2. I found Harry Blackmire, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide
| Through Ulysses, very helpful.
| JusticeJuice wrote:
| Congratulations!
| kstrauser wrote:
| I have never loathed a book so much. I read every page out of a
| stubborn refusal to let it beat me, then put it high up on a back
| shelf so I'd never have to see it again.
|
| It's not that there was _nothing_ of value in it. Sure, there is!
| It 's more that the return on investment just wasn't worth it. My
| experience was like walking through a desert to find a candy bar.
| Even if it's a good candy bar, that's way too much of a hassle to
| go through to get it.
|
| I do hugely appreciate Standard Ebooks, though. Such a wonderful
| project!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Same. I actually took a course on Ulysses, taught by a guy
| who's been teaching it for 50 years. So that's about as ideal a
| reading experience as you can have.
|
| Verdict: meh. Revolutionary for its time, maybe (100 years
| ago).
| block_dagger wrote:
| I had the exact same experience. Struggled through it, searched
| hard for the genius that was supposedly exuding from the pages.
| I didn't see any of it and I don't remember a lick of the
| story. I was simply bored. Perhaps I'm not intellectual enough
| to "get it."
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same, same. I'm an avid reader. I don't shy away from complex
| literature. I also don't take great pleasure from
| overcomplication.
|
| Computing analogy: It's like seeing that someone wrote
| "fizzbuzz" using a microservice architecture, quantum
| computing, multiple LLMs, and some custom hardware. Bravo!
| Cool that you pulled it off and made this monstrosity! I
| don't want to use it though, nor do I care to see the details
| of every bizarre choice, and I'm not impressed at the number
| of references to COBOL that you shoved into the diode layouts
| of the CPU you invented for it. I can see why other people
| would find it fascinating. I am not one of them.
| klik99 wrote:
| Everyone I know who loves it also has a scholarly level of
| knowledge about fiction so I suspect it has a lot of requisites
| to fully enjoy, like having to know a lot about american media
| to enjoy arrested development. I've been wanting to give it
| another go since I didn't enjoy or finish it last time, and my
| favorite book of all time (Wolfes Book of the New Sun) took
| three false starts to really get into it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've harbored a wholly unsupported, yet persistent, notion
| that no one _really_ likes Ulysses, but that it 's become an
| "emperor has no clothes" situation, where those who decide
| which books are "great" picked it on a lark, and dared others
| to say they didn't like it, knowing that none would lest they
| appear as the rube who couldn't appreciate great literature,
| resulting in a lineage of thinkers who encountered the beast,
| read it in horror, then told their colleagues about how much
| they loved it because obviously it's the brilliantest work of
| English, all while secretly hoping they weren't grilled too
| closely about it.
| tantivy wrote:
| I love Ulysses because of what it says about growing into
| middle age, facing irresolvable insecurities about
| yourself, and the solace against these that you can find in
| friendship--the way you can feel your soul sing when you
| find someone who wants to understand you. It's a very
| beautiful and humanistic book. I'm sorry that you weren't
| able to connect with it.
| j7ake wrote:
| It's a good one for ebook. Read it once and never touch it
| again.
| jderick wrote:
| For me, Joyce is the pinnacle of the English language. I can't
| say I understand too much of what is happening but noone writes
| more beautifully. I just love the sound of his words and the
| images he conjures.
| wozniacki wrote:
| > no one writes more beautifully
|
| Whats this obsession with beauty in language among some
| English-first speakers? Aren't meaning, insight and import of
| more consequence than beauty? Every single time I hear
| someone wax poetic about beauty and elegance in things it
| immediately sets off my bs meter. If you haven't got much of
| anything substantive to say, you use flowery artifices to
| mask it.
|
| Also non-English-first speakers, do you see this to be a very
| English-thing or is this sort of fixation if not fetish with
| beauty in language and other things present in your current
| day language too?
| staunton wrote:
| Same thing in all languages I know well enough to read
| books in.
|
| I can't at all explain how or why it works, but certain
| kinds of writing style have an almost magical effect on me.
| This feeling of well-rounded beauty, even when the content
| is barely relevant, is just amazing. One could maybe
| describe it as a kind of brain hacking, which is also what
| drugs do.
| jderick wrote:
| For me, reading fiction is all about beauty. I liken it to
| listening to good music. It isn't really to learn anything
| "substantive." It is to experience a feeling or be
| transported to another place. In fact, I like to listen to
| (typically instrumental) music while I read as a sort of
| "soundtrack." I would liken reading a good book to watching
| an epic movie. I guess you might occasionally gain some
| insight into the human condition, but it isn't primarily an
| informational medium.
| kstrauser wrote:
| There's an entire genre -- poetry -- dedicated to
| expressing ideas in the most beautiful and elegant way
| possible.
|
| I consider flowery artifices to be the opposite.
| lxgr wrote:
| Maybe poetry is just not for you?
|
| That's completely fine, but hopefully you can take people's
| word on that it can be very beautiful to them.
|
| It feels a bit like saying "if you don't have meaningful
| lyrics, why even sing a song": Different people can
| appreciate different layers of literature differently.
| dbspin wrote:
| As a writer, I think I can speak to this. I can certainly
| understand a non-native speakers frustrations with the
| complexity of english grammar, the enormous number of
| synonyms and colloquialisms, the variety of 'codes' and
| kinds of 'jargon' that must make learning and reading
| English profoundly difficult. Especially where the non-
| native speaker or reader's mother tongue isn't a romance
| language. I get that it must make certain forms of English
| - from the dense AAVE of the wire, to Elizabethan sonnets
| all but impenetrable.
|
| However, I see this 'pragmatism in all things, including
| art' perspective quite a bit on hackernews, and rarely
| enough anywhere else. Most often concerning fiction, but
| also contemporary and modern art. I'm not sure if it's a
| neurodiverse perspective, or a philistine one, but I can
| confirm that it's missing the aesthetic function of art.
| i.e.: the pleasure many people obtain from creating and
| experiencing it. There seems to be a frustration that some
| people who don't or can't engage in producing or enjoying
| certain kinds of art have - that becomes a denial of the
| value of the work altogether. 'I don't get it, so there's
| nothing there to get'.
|
| Specific to Joyce and the modernists is an absolute mastery
| of the complexity and nuance of a wide breath of kinds of
| English (and in Joyce's case numerous other European
| languages). To a native speaker with a strong grasp of
| language, and a love of words, reading Joyce or TS Elliot,
| or Yeats etc, is like listening to a complex piece of
| classical music. The use of reference, of meter, of
| onomatopoeia, the play with homonyms and antonyms, and at a
| higher level with the structure of stories and narrative
| traditions etc - all give the reader pleasure. In the hands
| of a truly great writer, like those above, they also serve
| to create layers of meaning in the way a koan or painting
| can contain complex fractal patterns of meaning. Reading a
| great writer, working with the nuances of language and
| narrative can literally lift the reader into a state of
| heightened consciousness. A place where new realisations
| about society, the self, the emotional depths and nuances
| of other people are elucidated in a way that's genuinely
| mind expanding.
|
| It's absolutely fine if you don't find this in literature -
| whether in a second language or your own. It's naive to
| assume that it doesn't exist because you personally can't
| perceive it. Aptly enough - that's a contradiction many
| writers have explored. Our tendency to diminish the inner
| lives of others, or the worth of things we cannot
| appreciate. One piece that springs to mind is David Foster
| Wallace's essay 'This is Water' - https://fs.blog/david-
| foster-wallace-this-is-water/
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is a bizarrely anti-English take. There's appreciation
| for the beauty of the language for literature/poetry in
| every language, as far as im aware. Look at Japanese poetry
| for one obvious example that takes appreciation of beauty
| in language to its absolute extremes.
| dvaun wrote:
| To put it bluntly:
|
| > Different strokes for different folks
|
| Don't you think you're exaggerating? I would imagine there
| are fans of written language in every language. English
| isn't special in this context.
| wozniacki wrote:
| Not in the least bit.
|
| Far too many of these supposed greats works of literature
| get an easy pass from uncritical also-rans of the world,
| who just want to move on in the name of different-
| strokes-for-different-folks without ever calling out the
| bs for what it really is. I'm not saying there aren't
| valid detractors of these works - there are - but far too
| often they're drowned out.
|
| Far too many of these works hide behind the crutch of
| 'fiction' to spew utter hogwash without making an ounce
| of sense to the regular, impartial and non-dyed-in
| reader.
|
| Far too many of these books - when coupled with a
| lackadaisical populace in general who are more concerned
| about seeming non-fussy - get that stellar mythical
| hallowed status and lore.
|
| I'm not saying that there are not enough people who
| genuinely get entranced with these works (although if you
| run that through a fine comb your results may vary) - its
| that the gatekeepers of education seem to be entirely
| made up of these uncritical clowns who will nod away in
| affirmation, decade after decade in cementing the
| undeserved status of these works.
| dvaun wrote:
| I agree with your take on the literature. My point wasn't
| in response to Ulysses or criticism of it, but of your
| statement regarding over-obsession with the English
| language.
| criddell wrote:
| > Aren't meaning, insight and import of more consequence
| than beauty?
|
| You are close to setting up a false dichotomy here. It
| isn't those qualities or beauty, it's those qualities _and_
| beauty.
|
| I first experienced it when I read Michael Ondaatje's _The
| English Patient_. I was able to enjoy the book on the usual
| axes of plot, character, etc... but there was another level
| that had me rereading pages because every chapter,
| paragraph, and sentence felt perfectly constructed. Some of
| it I read out loud to myself because the rhythm of the
| words and sounds were musical. It is a great story,
| beautifully told.
|
| That said, I'm not a fan of Ulysses and I'm sure a lot of
| people here would call me an uncultured rube for enjoying
| Odaatje's writing like I did.
| vidarh wrote:
| This happens in every language. I'm Norwegian, and there's
| an old Danish translation of Whitman I much prefer over the
| English original, not for ease of reading (Norwegian and
| Danish are close to mutually intelligible without much
| effort) but because the translation is beautiful.
|
| I wish I could remember the edition.
|
| There are books I prefer in one language or other. English
| tends to feel like it has a "darker" texture to me (no, it
| makes no logical sense) and so the same book - Lord of the
| Rings is an example I've read in both English and Norwegian
| - will hit me very differently emotionally depending on
| language.
|
| Sometimes I'll read something just for the beauty of it.
| Other times I just want to get at the ideas.
| newhaus1994 wrote:
| "Oxen of the Sun" is, in a sense, the apex of English
| literature to me. The modernists had a knack for essentially
| believing that if they just tried hard enough and wrote with
| enough complexity, they could capture essential truths about
| existence, and this chapter is the height of Joyce's effort in
| that regard. It is a chapter both about and structured like the
| birth and evolution of language, incorporating a density of
| reference and linguistic type that is somewhat absurd in its
| breadth.
|
| This is all to say that Ulysses is a book written for people
| who like the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine of literature. I
| happen to be one of those people, but there are brilliant
| literary scholars who hate the book.
| julianeon wrote:
| As I was reading I felt like my 'visibility' at any given time
| was only like 1-1.5 pages into the past. Sometimes less.
|
| Meaning the context for what I was reading, my understanding,
| went back about that far.
|
| So I basically experienced it as "word soup" with some
| identifiable parts in like the last page, that I could sort-of
| kind-of divine a narrative from, somewhat.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| > 268,481 words (16 hours 17 minutes) with a reading ease of 74.9
| (fairly easy)
|
| It's interesting when China introduced Ulysses years ago,
| publishers and reviewers often mentioned that how challenging the
| novel was. Often cited reasons included extensive use of stream
| of consciousness, long and complicated inner monologue, multiple
| languages and idioms used, and large vocabulary.
| kabdib wrote:
| I listened to an audiobook lecture about Ulysses, and that helped
| me understand the book better (at least through one professor's
| own opinions).
|
| It took me six attempts to get through Gravity's Rainbow (and it
| was worth it). My record is still just about halfway through
| Ulysses before I put it down for a year or two. Still worthwhile.
| pentagrama wrote:
| > Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses
|
| On that page I'm not finding that is the 1,000th title, and
| browsing around the site I can't find a counter either. I trust
| the OP who choose that title is right, but there is any title
| counter on the Standard Ebooks website?
| acabal wrote:
| There is no counter online, but you can trust me (the S.E.
| Editor-in-Chief) when I say I used Bash to count them :)
| SamBam wrote:
| Looks very good, although I'm surprised there isn't a page in the
| book detailing the date of first publication, the name and artist
| of the cover image, maybe the date the copyright expired, and all
| that kind of information. (I was particularly surprised by the
| cover image attribution omission.)
|
| Is this not standard?
| acabal wrote:
| Some of this information is included in each ebook's colophon,
| at the end of the book.
| SamBam wrote:
| So it is! I was unfamiliar with the word "colophon."
| alejohausner wrote:
| Don't read the book. Listen to it. I got a lot out of listening
| to a performance of the book, by Irish actors on RTE. It's a lot
| more fun than reading the book. There's a podcast for it:
| https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-...
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| That's honestly sacrilege unless doing so for accessibility
| reasons.
| samatman wrote:
| On the contrary, Bloomsday recitals are orthodoxy.
| Avid8329 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Please can we stop gatekeeping somebody enjoying a book
| that's known to be highly inaccessible. However one chooses
| to engage with Ulysses is perfectly fine.
| apetresc wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of Standard Ebooks, but it's pretty funny that
| twice in both the subject line and in the body of the e-mail they
| sent out announcing this, they typo-ed "1,000th" as "1,00th",
| given their whole raison d'etre.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Happy to find this website, nice to have soo much philosophy in 1
| place.
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?page=1&tags%5B0%5D=philoso...
|
| I just hate trying to google search to get an epub.
| kseistrup wrote:
| Another impressive ebook site is Global Grey:
| https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/
| Avid8329 wrote:
| > This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a transcription of the
| 1922 Shakespeare and Company first edition, with emendations from
| pre-1929 errata lists and the second edition in its 1927 ninth
| printing by Shakespeare and Company. It does not track any one
| particular edition, but rather is a blend of pre-1929 editions
| that aims to contain what scholars might consider to be the most
| accurate version of what was printed before 1929. Therefore,
| various probable misprints have been retained that may have been
| corrected in post-1929 editions. Consultation of various editions
| of the book and the historical collation list appended to Hans
| Walter Gabler's Critical and Synoptic Edition is advised before
| contacting Standard Ebooks about potential mistakes.
|
| As someone who is fascinated with the textual history of Ulysses,
| this is going to raise some hackles.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Their edition is _based_ on this. That does not mean it is
| faithful to it. For instance, if they followed their guideline,
| their edition modernized the text with modern US typography and
| conventions. See
| https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
| acabal wrote:
| You are correct that we usually do that, however for
| _Ulysses_ we made an exception and transcribed the print
| exactly, so there are no changes from the print edition.
| (Except for whatever pre-1929 corrections we brought in based
| on our research.)
| fjfaase wrote:
| The 'introduction' mentions Hans Walter Gabler's book 'Critical
| and Synoptic Edition' (in 3 volumes) that compares all the
| different editions and notes all the (often small) differences. I
| feel it typically a book that would be much more worth in digital
| form. (It would be nice if the author would allow it to be
| digitized.) If one would have the digital form of all the
| editions, it would be much easier to compare them. I am aware
| that this will be an enormous effort.
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