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Originally Posted by pilotbob
As I said, perhaps it is just a European stuff that I just don't get. And other US folks think this book is a "roaring funny" book?
BOb
BTW: I laughed my ass off at Hitchhickers Guide and that was very dry British humor.
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i think tompe is right, it's perhaps more subtle than some books (including hitchhiker's guide, although it is a similar kind of humour) and has sometimes slow buildups to the jokes but the situations are so well-described and he makes such a masterful use of litotes that i find it more evocative and more effective than a more heavy-handed approach. there are some scenes which will make me giggle just thinking about them, like singing the comic song, or the "stuffed fish" in the inn, or the maze... the writing style seems to allow a lot of participation from the reader to imagine the scene and so i feel always quite drawn in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
It's always fun to watch the boats go up and down  |
yes, isn't it ?
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Most of the towpaths here have been transformed to biking paths. And even we, in one of the flattest countries, have locks. When we were on our way home last saturday, we passed a lock where they had the old (1945) prices hanging (people used to pay for passing a lock). A tree trunk costed 3c per trunk! (which would be about 1.3 euro cent).
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here as well. in fact the client i was working for this month always takes a cycling holiday in the summer, he was showing me his route this year on a map and quite a lot of his route is along canals, he's going to go all the way down the
canal du midi.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
Interesting canal-related bit of etymology:
If a tunnel didn't have a towpath running alongside it
"...the boatmen had to find another way of getting their boat through the tunnel. ... the boatmen had to lie on the roof of the barge and use their legs to "walk" the boat through the narrow tunnel. ... it was this procedure which coined the phrase "legging it". "
http://www.yorkshire-escapes.com/yor...-narrow-canal/ |
ha ! how funny ! i love stories like that.
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Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
Hi All! It's been a while since I posted here. After a while re-reading some of my old p-books (I had an anxiety attack when I was jobless and started re-reading my whole fantasy-romance collection, lol), I am back to e-books and reading two of them at the moment:
Nouveaux souvenirs entomologiques by Jean-Henri Fabre (new entomological memoirs? Something like that), the second volume of his memoirs, which I find fascinating. I've always been interested in insects because they are the easiest wildlife to observe, but I don't have the patience to spend years just watching them and I'm happy he did that so that I get to read about it instead. He was a very thorough observer and experimenter, and I like his lively style too. He was completely wrong about evolution, but it's also interesting to read about his opinions on that, which probably were shared by many of his contemporaries.
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem is weird, because it's the story of a boy who was born almost at the same time I was, but his childhood is so different from mine we could be from different planets. Otherwise it's well written, a good book for sure, but somehow there is something missing I can't quite put my finger on. Good, but not great.
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hm, Nouveaux souvenirs entomologiques sounds quite interesting, i will have to take a look at it. thanks for the recommendation ! by the way, we've started
a thread on this subject in the french forum now as well.
i've just finished some short stories by moejoe and peverel.
it's really great discovering the writing of our members and i want to thank them for sharing it !