I like most of them but I keep stumbling in parts. Right now Master and Commander is giving me fits because I like the characters and I think I like the story but there's so much about the ships and the time period that I just don't understand that sometimes I feel like I'm flailing.

I'm good with the time period, but I'm about halfway through the series, and my eyes still glaze over when they get into the specifics of sails and masts. I think I finally understand what it means to have the weather-guage, though. Kinda. Probably better than Maturin does, at least.

Problem is, I have a plot bunny for a novel set on a ship of that era, which means I'll have to get a much better grasp on the details sometime soon. "He ran up the such-and-such mast, because one of the topsail-thingummies needed to be tightened, or maybe loosened, 'cuz it was all stormy and shit and if they didn't do something the ship would, like, sink, or go way off course" just isn't good enough when you're trying to be the Patrick O'Brian of romance writers.

Didn't defend it upthread, but I liked it as an examination of the dilemma of a mid-19th century woman who didn't fit into "her place."

Except there are so many of them that are better written, and contain fewer anvils!

Not terribly comfortable with deep discussions of lit, likely because I'm self-taught to a great degree. I've had to build my own roadmaps and don't have the vocabulary for much of the discussion.

I think this is an important point, and it's something I see often in fandom. It's made worse because a: vocabulary shifts and change, and seems to do so faster in the academic world than outside of it, as terms we used when I was in college a decade ago appear to now be used commonly to mean something almost completely different (see: fannish kerfuffles, recent); and b: in fandom especially, some of the academics don't understand the intimidation factor of academic language to those who do not speak it, and can get downright snarly about it.

The mast and sails were confusing me until I got to where Maturin has them explained to him then I kind of had an idea of how it worked. Not really but a better grasp of it. I'm not very far into it they had their first little skirmish.

It was giving me fits trying to figure out what kind of man Jack Aubrey is but his beginning friendship with Maturin is what's kept me going.

This is definitly not like the Sharpe's books.

Jen, much later:

Are you asking, "If I identify with a character, can I no longer analyze it?" or "Can I only analyze if I identify with the character?" Or neither?

I'm asking the first. I suspect steam escapes from Hec's ears when people get too character oriented, and a couple of his remarks led me to wonder if he thought that identification mandated a lack of ability to discuss or analyse.

It was giving me fits trying to figure out what kind of man Jack Aubrey is but his beginning friendship with Maturin is what's kept me going.

I had the same reaction. Aubrey grew on me, both in the sense of understanding and liking him, but it took a few books to get all the way there.

This is definitly not like the Sharpe's books.

I tried the Sharpe books but decided I wasn't crazy about Cornwell's writing style and would stick with the Sean Bean ogling. And I'm reading the Hornblower series, which so far I find good, but not great, and not quite as fun as the TV versions because of the Ioan Gruffudd ogling factor.

I keep meaning to try Hornblower (books and show).

I actually haven't read a Sharpe's book in a while but I remember them being more...well, less...I'm not sure how to describe it but in some ways it seemed easier to read because maybe the narrative style felt a bit more modern. But I'm not sure that means what I think it does.

Joe Boucher pointed me to this thread at a Canada Day party tonight, so I'm a-catching up. Hec, you star.

This thread has always had an anti-intellectual, anti-academic, pro-populist slant. People are actively hostile about critical reading and defensive about reading for pleasure. And it's never simply championing genre or the pleasures of reading, but there's a weird defensive/guilty/angry whipcrack of resentment about difficult literature, the way literature is taught in colleges and critical theory. And it's layered on with self-congratulation and reverse snobbery.

This is, in fact, precisely why I don't regularly read this thread. This and what I'm going to address next. I love critical theory. Romance novels as a rule bore me. I do not, as my homies say, see myself represented within the discursive community formed here, and both the self-congratulation and the reverse snobbery tend to actively repel me.

(Though I will say that having been on the side of pop-culture in a "Can a work like Buffy ever reach the heights of art represented by Moby-Dick?" debate that raged for days in another Internet forum, it amuses me to no end to see them yoked together again here. Must be something in the, ah, water.)

Hec, do you have an issue with identification? How much is too much? And I include woobie-fication in this question too.

I'm not Hec, but I do have an issue with it, because it's really one of the shallowest forms of reading. As my tutor at Glasgow once put it, "some of my students write as though Elizabeth Bennett is going to walk into the room at any minute! Which is charming, but wrong."

Clearly, everyone loves a certain book or author or whathaveyou for all sorts of complex reasons, many of which are identificatory. I could point at the dissertation proposals of every one of my friends in grad school and tell you, "oh, this comes out of her bad relationship with her ex" or "he's working through his past with the church in this topic." But that's not all there is, or was, and the proposals that became finished works are a lot deeper in all sorts of ways than that facile five-second summary.

So, I'm not against identification -- I think it's a key part of the pleasure of the text, as Barthes calls it. But if you stop with identification, yes, you're missing something key. Because Elizabeth Bennett is never ever going to walk into the room. And so her story has a beginning and an end and themes and metaphors, and those tell you something key as well, both about the character and her times. Austen is a very scathing social critic -- not just about characters like Mr Elton in Emma, or Scott's influence in S&S, but about the entire system of marital exchange that she may at first seem to be hymning. If you never get past how dreamy you think Mr Darcy is, then you miss layers of what's going on in the book.

And I don't think it's necessarily limited to the canon -- I will happily tell you about the structure of the current Nightwing arc, and how "Becoming" works like a classical tragedy, and unpack all the thematic resonances in the final scene of the season ender of Smallville. What I do think is that there are two things that make a book canonical: one is the tenor of the time in which it is being read, which, as Hec notes, can change radically on a writer, and also, whether a work has the kind of depth that can really support a lot of readings and conversations and debates about it. Part of what makes Shakespeare great is that that there is so much going on in his work, and so much of it helped shape our current notions of (among other things) self-consciousness, comedy, and poetic form, that in different eras and places since then, people can feel like Beatrice is going to walk into the room at any minute, and yet take radically different meanings away from Much Ado About Nothing. Often, those works are more difficult than, say Nightwing. But they may tell you more about the nature of human existence, in the end.

And I still don't want you, or anyone else, fucking with the mechanism of what makes me happy by insisting I dissect every single fucking word down to its molecular level, under the guise of intellectualism.

Deb, if you really think that's what criticism is, then I feel sorry for you. Because you've missed some really great, mind-altering reads.

Michele (and Hec, if he's reading this), I have a question for clarification: when you say identification is a shallow form of reading, do you mean shallow in the sense of surface? Because if so, while I disagree, I can see and respect where you're coming from. In earlier instances where it came up today, I read it as "people who read for the pleasure of identification are shallow," which pisses me off.

And for myself, I have no trouble identifying with a character and simultaneously seeing themes and metaphors and what have you. But I think the fact that you feel like Elizabeth Bennet could walk into the room at any time is what makes P&P sing. And I don't think appreciating that and finding joy in it is shallow in any sense of the word.

I don't mean the people are shallow, no -- that it's a shallow form of reading. So you find Elizabeth Bennett lifelike. So? Why do I care? How does that make the book more or less valuable than any other with a well-drawn protagonist?

It's not that enjoyment or identification is bad -- I thought I'd made that clear, and I thought it was clear that I'm saying the way of reading is shallow, not disparaging people, either (what was that about defensiveness in the Literary thread, again?). It's just that identification is a necessarily local and limited way of talking about any work of art.

I think identification, at best, provides a point of entry to start digging into the meat of a character. Though I can't think of an example other than Buffy herself where I've really been able to do that.

I love reading/hearing critical theory *if* it's presented in an enthusiastic, inclusive, and accessible fashion. Which is probably exceedingly lazy of me, but I find it easier to connect with it that way.

That said, somewhat like Fred Pete, I'm uncomfortable/feel weird about discussing literature or even the more literary aspects of comics because I keep expecting to hear "bitch, PLEASE!" in harmony from the more educated portions of the crowd, who in my head have some sort of position of authority that trumps whatever I'd have to say, because a BA is a weak hand so I fold, and I think I just mixed my card metaphors.