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mii1337 t1_iwyb2tc wrote

Using purple and red and blue might not have been the best choice. It makes it all seem kinda purple as the bars are very slim and morph together a bit.

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aminervia t1_iwyc8v4 wrote

The red works for anger and blue works for sadness, but the purple doesn't really work for fear. Because of the red and blue it definitely makes the purple look more prevalent

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Oscar_Cunningham t1_iwygnqu wrote

The colour yellow is associated with cowardice. So you could use that for fear, leaving green for joy.

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aminervia t1_iwygv7a wrote

Sections with lots of fear and sadness would then appear green though, we'd have the same problem

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Oscar_Cunningham t1_iwyhhv7 wrote

It depends what colour mixing model you use. With paint it's true that yellow and blue mix to make green, but with light they instead make white (and your problem would instead be red and green mixing to make yellow). I was thinking of the Natural Color System in which red and green are opposed and yellow and blue are opposed.

I suppose the other solution would be to use lightness as well as hue. For example each mixture of the four emotions would correspond to a mixture of red, green, blue and white.

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Campbell_MG OP t1_iwyi01q wrote

This is exactly how it works. Each emotion is layered on top of one another with the opacity driven by the likelihood of the emotion from the ML model.

I tried a few different colours but this ended up being the most distinct I could find.

While red and blue mixed won't be helping, the model definitely seems to lean towards fear. If you look at the raw numbers fear seems to show up the most.

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luke_in_the_sky t1_iwyu9fs wrote

Well, it's weird because sadness+anger layered on top of one another will appear as fear.

Maybe, instead of bars, you could use a grid with colored squares and a good resolution, so they don't get mixed.

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mez1642 t1_iwyz8rh wrote

And opaqueness could indicate intensity. Each grid could be a page, but always scaled to a fixed maximum with so the barcodes are always 2 inches wide by 1 inch tall at 300 dpi (or insert your dimensions here)

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legbreaker t1_iwz0lhe wrote

How about using black for fear and white for neutral pages. Breaks the colors up

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viridiformica t1_iwz408d wrote

Doesn't that mean that whichever layer is added last will dominate?

I'd quite like to see this as a stream graph, maybe using a rolling average. Is the data available somewhere?

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TheThiefMaster t1_iwypv5q wrote

For what it's worth - it's two different blues!

The positive primary (light) is "royal blue", and the negative primary (paint, ink) is "sky" blue.

Children's paint sets regularly get this wrong...

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Lightning_Lance t1_ix2u5qz wrote

Modern paints use magenta for "red" and Cyan for "blue". So it's literally just inverted RGB, using the secondary colors instead of the primary (of course, language is malleable and so they just call those the primary colors in paint... But it's the secondary colors of RGB).

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[deleted] t1_iwyszwo wrote

[deleted]

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Oscar_Cunningham t1_iwytz9p wrote

To me that mixture does look almost grey. But changing the exact choice of yellow and blue will change exactly what mixture they make. In any case it's much closer to grey than a 'primary' green would be.

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According-Bad8745 t1_iwyt7ih wrote

nah to me yellow is joy and fear is green. just like english is red, math is blue and science is green 😆

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printergumlight t1_iwymxmm wrote

Black for fear would solve all the color mixing issues I think. Stands out well on its own.

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ArsenalAM t1_iwypofx wrote

Or lighter filter (you could represent it with white I guess) for joy, and darker (grey or black) for fear? Not really an opacity filter but maybe a gradient filter? I’m not sure what to cal it really.

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supersayanssj3 t1_iwz24ap wrote

Kinda confused why noone has suggested something obvious like black for fear. Would contrast to all the others and give clear separation between colors.

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541mya t1_ix1fbtt wrote

Yeah I was looking at the bars and thinking.... I don't remember Peter Pan being such a fearful movie.

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sanpunkanmatteyaru t1_iwye8wh wrote

They're the Inside Out colors

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ScuttleCrab729 t1_iwyh9ri wrote

Where’s disgust [green]

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plg94 t1_iwyqbob wrote

There's a lot of green and orange and light blue in the second film, but not in the label.

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Campbell_MG OP t1_iwyhqio wrote

Yep, keen eye

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detecting_nuttiness t1_iwz3jgq wrote

You should redo this with different colors! I'd love to interpret it but it's just not possible with these color choices.

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300kIQ t1_iwyd8sq wrote

Indeed, black for fear would have been much better

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nifty_fifty_two t1_iwyu866 wrote

Black for sadness. Blue for fear. Red for anger. Green for joy. White for any emotion I've forgotten.

Most digital displays work on RGB, so that'd be the best way to display the data on digital screens.

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breddit1945 t1_iwz4h8y wrote

Also, if this is done by each implication of emotion, that is far too much data in my opinion. Do it by chapter and if that’s too few data points, do every 0.5 or 0.25 chapter. That, or pick something other than emotional points. A fun example might be: deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire, or switching of character perspectives/setting/scene in a different book or series, or frequency of a particular word/phrase.

Part of the charm of the movie poster one is that you could possibly distinguish the film without a title. Take away the titles here and I’d have no clue what I’m looking at.

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biaimakaa t1_iwz8gwh wrote

As a slightly colorblind person who have a hard time differentiate blue and purple and sees red as just not popping like it would to anybody, this is horrendous.

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Craygor t1_iwy8sll wrote

I don't remember so much of "Moby Dick" being so frightening.

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kiwilapple t1_iwygsly wrote

I think it's because the red blends in. He's mad at the whale right??? Idk i didn't read it lol

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Craygor t1_iwyh8ee wrote

The book isnt really about Captian Ahap, but follows the story of Ismael and is quite light hearted in the first third (at least I thought so). Ahap doesn't really show up much until the last quarter or there abouts. .

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kiwilapple t1_iwyhb0n wrote

Ohhhh. I should probably read it.... But also. Lazy. Thank you!

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Craygor t1_iwyi6j5 wrote

Warning, the middle of the book is EXTREMELY dry, but I think you'll like the friendship that develops between the New Englander Ismael and a harponner named Queequeg, a Polynesian tattooed cannibal.

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alt_account_6 t1_iwyuojb wrote

I liked the exhaustive discourse on cetology. It's almost religious. But not really a book for people who need constant stimulation and action scenes

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fallllingman t1_ix2emns wrote

The book isn’t dry. The prose is brilliantly evocative and is consistently great throughout.

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fallllingman t1_ix2016v wrote

Abah is a pretty prominent character from about page 200 onwards, and I’d argue the book isn’t about the story of Ishmael. It’s about Ishmael’s role as a witness or observer, not a participant.

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leftiesrepresent t1_iwz4g5v wrote

The book is purely Melville showing off how smart he is. He wrote the novel with the expressed intention of proving his higher command of English than his contemporaries. The "story" and "plot" are alllll tertiary to that goal lmao

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Craygor t1_iwzxjcc wrote

I'm not going to argue. One, is because I'm not that smart, and two, that actually makes kind of sense

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fallllingman t1_ix2058y wrote

I’d argue a great story isn’t as good as a meaningful story.

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2020Hills t1_iwz887j wrote

I thought Moby Dick was a comedy?

I’ve never read it, that’s just what I’ve heard about it

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fallllingman t1_ix20c3v wrote

It’s occasionally very funny and satirical but it’s not a comedy as a whole. Melville is pretty earnest.

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kramerica_intern t1_ix0y3ch wrote

Very little of the book is them trying to kill Moby Dick. Most of it is a textbook about whales.

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fallllingman t1_ix20a59 wrote

Very little of it is a textbook about whales. Only about 4 chapters are like that, out of the 100+ total chapters. I mean, there’s also a lot about whaling, but the actual textbook parts are still pretty brief. It’s like 1/4th of the book, it’s not that much.

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kramerica_intern t1_ix22fam wrote

Yeah, I should have said whales and whaling. I don’t know the percentage of pages that are actually devoted to chasing Moby Dick but whatever it is it feels like a very small amount.

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fallllingman t1_ix2515k wrote

I mean do you expect 500 of 600 pages to be devoted to chasing a whale in hot pursuit? If we choose to call the whale God (and goodness knows Moby Dick is all about it’s symbolism), isn’t it proper that he makes an appearance only in the last thirty pages after we spend the novel doubting his existence? That’s not my personal interpretation of it, but the novel would be much worse if any more of it was devoted to chasing a whale. This is Herman Melville, not Robert Louis Stevenson.

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kramerica_intern t1_ix25vjc wrote

I didn’t think they’d be in hot pursuit the whole time but yeah, kinda. I picked up the book expecting to read about Ahab insanely chasing after Moby Dick. I didn’t expect entire chapters about objects found on a whaling vessel.

Though I suppose that’s what whaling might have been like. Lots of boredom before you finally get the intense rush of the chase.

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cutelyaware t1_iwyeofa wrote

Same. They were pretty much just excited about killing whales, though they were rather concerned near the end.

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Conarm t1_ix1hogm wrote

Purple should be erronious rope details and outdated whale zoology

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Colalbsmi t1_ix1inz7 wrote

It was outdated when he wrote it, I loved when he said scientists are wrong about whales being mammals.

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fallllingman t1_ix20g2i wrote

And it doesn’t make the book any the lesser. In fact it does the opposite, because the book is, in part, about the unknowability of things.

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Colalbsmi t1_ix2drgp wrote

I only enjoyed it more for the author’s weird tangents

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fallllingman t1_ix2e4on wrote

Yes. Beyond its reputation as a literary masterpiece it’s just such a peculiar and odd and funny book

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IronicStrikes t1_iwy7y5f wrote

How do you do these? Looks like a lot of work.

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MmM921 t1_iwyh7ho wrote

google "sentiment analysis", neural networks are used to analyse texts pretty widely these days on social media and what not

op probably took every sentence of these books and ran them through sentiment analysis to get this graph

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Campbell_MG OP t1_iwyibbh wrote

Yeah, this is exactly right. There's a comment in here with a link to the model I've used.

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tommy_chillfiger t1_iwywwwc wrote

I would be interested to see the same viz with a 'less granular unit' if that makes sense. Sorry I'm chronically weak on terminology lol - but instead of having the model classify every sentence, maybe every paragraph. It is so granular as it is now that it's hard to read intuitively, but I also suspect mood is more meaningful in literature over longer units than a single sentence on average.

I have never used ML models except for janky bespoke corpus analytics software in college linguistics classes so if there are computational reasons this approach wouldn't work then I get that.

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lordicarus t1_iwz8c78 wrote

It also needs a category for general apathy. The four emotions here don't allow for complete neutrality which would 100% be possible with many sentences.

Like... The sentences above. Sad? Happy? Angry? Scared?

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rockingmonkey t1_iwywijt wrote

> op probably took every sentence of these books and ran them through sentiment analysis to get this graph

Op probably wrote some code to feed every sentence of these books and run them through sentiment analysis to get this graph. I doubt op spend 4 days just copy pasting lines one at a time and running them through the algorithm.

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MmM921 t1_iwyx5a7 wrote

well duh, someone who knows how to use neural networks definitely knows how to use "sep = '.'"

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aminervia t1_iwyc3s5 wrote

You could do a search for emotional words in the text without actually having to read the book. If each line is an emotional word then you could lay them out in order. Personally I couldn't do it but I could see how you could automate this pretty quickly

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thepuksu t1_iwyll1f wrote

Imagine the horror of actually reading? r/bookscirclejerk

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SquirrelAkl t1_iwyvbyx wrote

This would help you decide which books to read, based on how you want to feel.

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99-bottlesofbeer t1_iwyhdot wrote

The colours come from Inside Out (2016), don't they

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Nosttromo t1_iwys0rx wrote

You used purple, then used red and blue, which in turn produce purple. People won’t be able to distinguish if a certain part has fear or is a mix of anger and sadness.

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SquirrelAkl t1_iwyvj2o wrote

Is that why Moby Dick looks like it’s filled with fear? I haven’t read it myself, but I didn’t think it was a fearful/scary book.

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Nosttromo t1_iwzdxc1 wrote

perhaps its that mix of badly colored anger and sadness kicking in.

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anonuman t1_iwyatan wrote

There is NOTHING that emotional in Moby Dick. The whiteness of the whale is clever, but not emotional.

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RamenTheory t1_ix1lc08 wrote

Would have been interesting if the data were some kind of spectrum. Like if the neural network didn't just put a blanket label on every scary section of the book as 'fear,' but were instead able to rate out of 10 how intense the sentiment is. Then in the barcode, the color of corresponding 'fear' sections could be on a scale of gray to purple, and same for the other sentiments. A less emotional book like Moby Dick may be more desaturated or something

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StagnantEnema t1_iwygpfw wrote

This shows nothing besides books being sad

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Slamdutch t1_iwyjtzh wrote

as someone who is colorblind, this all sounds very interesting but i see four kinda slime-colored bars lmao

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Nameless408 t1_iwy8vvu wrote

Note to self, Moby Dick is a horror story.

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Achakita t1_iwygwoz wrote

This is a nightmare for a person who is bad with colours. Although I can't follow the colour patterns to the tiniest details because of my eyes, I must say this is an interesting take on the books.

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Campbell_MG OP t1_iwy7ans wrote

These were created by running public domain books from Project GITenberg, through a python script that uses this NLP model to determine the emotions in a given sentence. Each sentence is then processed into a colour representing each emotion's prevalence and stitched together into these barcodes.

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The_real_Hresna t1_ix0nvxx wrote

I was as interested in the how, maybe more, than the product. Thanks for including this

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nicholasimontwo t1_iwyoc8u wrote

Like the idea (not being critical) however the execution requires a lot more thought. That could be anything. 'I smudged some colors in photoshop'.

Not sure of the answer however there must be a better way to do that

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Seal-zx t1_iwyu8ou wrote

I feel black should replace purple for fear, more representative and evocative. And as someone with color deficiency, significatly easier to distinguish.

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chrisfrh t1_iwyza2j wrote

I liked this concept. Here is a barcode of my life

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Nasty9999 t1_iwyiry0 wrote

Thought is was AMC daily trading.

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JaxTaylor2 t1_iwyw2h0 wrote

I wonder what a Calculus textbook would look like? lol

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SnooLobsters8922 t1_iwywgpi wrote

Curious about the method: are those emotions attempts the author makes to raise them in the reader or felt by the characters?

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letsreticulate t1_iwz0dcb wrote

The Stone Angel would be almost all blue and red.

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sofwithanf t1_iwz4ecq wrote

The Anne of Green Gables one is really captivating. There's so much joy mixed in with all the other emotions. I love it

I wish I knew what green meant though

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JonathanL73 t1_iwz5569 wrote

Great idea, but I can’t tell the difference between fear, anger & sadness when it’s all next together, it just looks purple.

Probably better to use a different color, like Red, Green, Blue,

Joy = Green.

Fear = Gray? Black? White?

Anger = Red

Sadness = Blue

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bigclams t1_iwzahpo wrote

Is there a r/Datacirclejerk?

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FungusFly t1_ix0jbm7 wrote

Looks like a shitty couch from the 80’s.

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Commercial_Habit_923 t1_ix2hhoa wrote

Personally I am not able to draw any conclusions from this due to the way the data is presented

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Karl_Havoc2U t1_iwyqtv2 wrote

I really dig this a lot! Thanks for sharing

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MercedesCR t1_iwyuv3k wrote

How did moby dick give you that much fear lol. Looks cool tho

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JaxTaylor2 t1_iwywbqo wrote

This explains the survey over at r/polls about whether the math binder should be red or blue. lol

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Charly500 t1_iwyweib wrote

I’ve never read Huckleberry Finn. It looks almost as scary as Moby Dick!

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DrTommyNotMD t1_iwywxtn wrote

Look at these dynamic characters with their 4 modes. Here I am just happy sad neutral.

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winged_owl t1_iwyx1mc wrote

Does anybody know the big sad block in huckleberry finn?

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ferriswheelpompadour t1_iwyzrml wrote

This is a cool concept. I'd like to see a more thorough range of emotions. And maybe have subcategories for anger as it's a secondary emotion.

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RonstoppableRon t1_iwz0zkg wrote

This is bizarre. You represent 4 emotions, but 75% of them are negative, and those 3 are really all interrelated emotions that are much the same thing, just different phases(fear anger sadness) For all this is worth you could have just done 2 emotions positive vs negative and it’d be a better representation of your “data”.

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Ok_Stomach_5448 t1_iwz1qqw wrote

As a color deficient person, this looks so confusing

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polandtown t1_iwz1qtx wrote

Nice! Was this via HF or did you train your own model?

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supersayanssj3 t1_iwz20tj wrote

Should have used black for fear. This is just a blurry purple mess tbh.

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purplezart t1_iwz2hr0 wrote

now do the very hungry caterpillar

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oudenetekei t1_iwz3a5z wrote

I'm trying to pick out the scene in Anne of Green Gables where she breaks the slate over Gilbert's head

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leftiesrepresent t1_iwz474w wrote

I dont get the Moby Dick one, which color is supposed to denote Melville showboating his command of English?

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somethingrandom261 t1_iwz490g wrote

If there was a gray for boredom, and black for stopped reading, I could do the same for those books lol

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nothingidentifying_ t1_iwz52th wrote

yellow for joy and purple for fear feel pretty random, but otherwise, this is just fantastic!

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ethosveros t1_ix0qg50 wrote

With a filter this would be too good

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SirSaladHead t1_ix0tpyf wrote

People are complaining about the colors, but it’s just Inside Out lol

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Chrisboy265 t1_ix0xd5e wrote

This might be beautiful if I wasn’t color deficient. I can’t tell the blue from the purple.

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Sure_Surprise_1661 t1_ix0xlc3 wrote

Was this using sentiment analysis? Would you please share your methodology?

We have no idea how you are interpreting this data.

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ThrowAwayRayye t1_ix0xx20 wrote

If you did stormlight archives prepare for Big deep blue bars for any kaladin chapter.

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gsvnvariable t1_ix0yps6 wrote

Nice, can you do the same for my investment portfolio with those same emotions 🥹🥹🥹

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westlaj t1_ix104ch wrote

The movie bare codes are representative of the colour composition aren't they?

This is just subjective of the consumer

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WritPositWrit t1_ix11jaf wrote

All I see is purple. These books are 100% fear.

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smaugthedesolator t1_ix1n6jt wrote

I wonder what the Fox and the Hound would look like... definitely a big block of blue at the end

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tier7stips t1_ix1prs9 wrote

I am reading Moby Dick right now. About a third through. Got some sadness to look forward too.

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thedadinblack t1_ix2dd4q wrote

Moby needs a hug. Is that the whale or the dude trying to kill it? I never read the book.

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iMakeWebsites4u t1_ix39dve wrote

Can it be scanned? If not, then it's not a barcode.

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ayyohh911719 t1_iwydebw wrote

Well Moby Dick looks like a real charmer

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cutelyaware t1_iwyes9w wrote

It's not like that, though the well-known rule is that it shouldn't be read by anyone under 40, and I kind of get that.

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SquirrelAkl t1_iwyveyn wrote

Why not?

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DukeofVermont t1_iwz1ro8 wrote

That's the dumbest rule I've ever heard. I would say that most people won't like it because they are not used to books written like Moby Dick.

It's the same reason that a lot of people HATE reading LOTR. It's slow, boring, has too many details, reads like a textbook, etc etc etc.

There is nothing wrong with the book, it's just different from what people are used to and makes them work. That second part is important because I think it's what separates good art from great art. Art that engages you, brings you in and makes you think will always be better than art that is easy to digest. Now it's vital to understand that easy art is still art and just as valuable. Filet Minion for breakfast everyday would make me puke and I'd gouge my eyes out if I had to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey every week. But when you are in the right mood and want it? It's amazing and far better then a bowl of cereal or re-watching Captain America: Winter Solider (both of which I really enjoy).

A lot of people only consume easy art and so when art (film, poetry, theater, literature, dance and even paintings and sculpture) doesn't just tell them what to think or feel they get bored and drop it. If you try to watch/read a deep film/book like you would a Tom Clancy book or a Marvel film you'll hate it. You'll miss the forest for the trees. You'll never actually understand what really going on because you only see the character actions and nothing else. "It's so boring!" is the complaint I hear the most when trying to get people to read or watch amazing things that are not paced like a Marvel film.

I personally love classic lit and classic films. So much amazing work is overlooked by many people because it is old, slower paced or made with a different purpose. A book like Moby Dick has depth and when read thoughtfully you can get a lot more out of it than just a book about a man explaining whaling and his crazy captain hunting a white whale.

I think the "don't read it if you are under 40" is idiotic but younger people have so much easy art that they haven't seen yet. A lot of people just indulge in the easy art, but by the time they are 40+ they get sick of it. Like eating candy everyday as a kid is awesome but when you are older it is gross, and there is so much better stuff out there anyway. So you turn 40 and want something new and deeper and read Moby Dick and actually engage with it whereas someone younger might just get bored and drop it.

Personally I think Moby Dick is average for the great books from the 1800s. It's much better IMHO than Les Mis, or War and Peace, but no where close to Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, or Tom Sawyer. I'd put it in the same level as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Count of Monte Cristo. (also this is very much my personal taste and not me trying to say which is objectively better or worse).

TLDR: I've read a lot of "classic lit" so I know what to expect when I start reading but a lot of people go in blind after being told "it's amazing!" and are not ready for how different books can be.

Personally I love deeper books which really are about so much more than what happens on the page. When you can get into them it's really like nothing else. Some of my favorites are: On the Beach-Nevil Shute 1957 (post-apocalyptic survivors of nuclear war in Australia), Solaris-Stanisław Lem 1961 (Scientists try to communicate with an alien that's the size/shape of our oceans, but on a different plant so it remakes their dead loves ones). Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 (a man struggles to live with the effects of being a murderer), The Forever War-Joe Haldeman 1977 (a sci-fi war book that's really about the effects of coming home from Vietnam). Slaughterhouse Five-Kurt Vonnegut (a man experiences life out of order because of aliens aka finding meaning after seeing the horrors of WWII) and a light one The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy-Douglas Adams 1970s-80s - It's just silly, hilarious, funny and amazing. I love that book so much.

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SquirrelAkl t1_ix0co6r wrote

I like your distinction of “easy art” vs “harder art”.

I am well over 40 but I pretty much only consume “easy art”. My job is mentally and emotionally demanding, I read (economics & business stuff) all day, and at the end of the day I like to be able to switch my brain into neutral and just consume entertainment.

Perhaps I’m missing out though? Perhaps what you describe is what the people who say “I love reading!” actually love about reading?

Hmmm, food for thought. Thank you.

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DukeofVermont t1_ix2hrww wrote

Hey nothing wrong at all with having personal relaxation time. Like I said I love slow complex movies but I can't watch them all the time, just too taxing and not what I want to do after a long day.

I also think it really depends on what you are looking for. I love reading because I can really connect with characters, and find it interesting to explore how they think/feel/etc and I like loooong books because you can spend so much time with the characters.

I wouldn't say you're missing out because it might not be your thing and that's a-okay. It's like food, some people love to try new things, challenge their tastes/ideas of what food can be, explore textures, flavors, etc. But it's perfectly fine if you are not a food person and like sticking to what you like.

That said it's hard to know if you are "a gourmet" or "a cinephile" or love classic literature until you try it with an open mind. No one is ever too old to try new things and if it isn't for you there is nothing wrong with that. I love complex Lit/Film but oh boy do I have no interest in modern art. I've tried to get into it, and I can learn and understand what they are going for but I just don't like it and have zero interest in it. It's just not my thing.

I'd suggest figuring out what types of shows/films you like and find an old classic book that's on the same topic. Also not all old books are "hard art" for the snobs like me. Just like how not all new books are "easy art".

Agatha Christie's crime mysteries and Sherlock Holmes were/are the popular media of their day. Agatha Christie is the most successful author of all time with over two BILLION sales (she's only behind the Bible). Her play "The Mousetrap" opened in 1951 and has played continually ever since (but stopped for a year due to corona). They are somewhere close to the 28,000 performance now. I think they both are great because they are engaging and can really pull you in as you try to figure out what happened.

Lastly I should say that it's also super dumb shove everything into the two boxes of "easy" and "hard" art because we all know it's much more on a spectrum. But it is important to try new things, challenge ourselves and explore what it is to be human.

So try new things, but don't feel bad if it isn't for you. The world would be a boring place if we all had the same interests and tastes.

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SquirrelAkl t1_ix2ouva wrote

Agatha Christie is a very good recommendation for me. My favourite genre of TV is “British cop drama”, so Christie will be a good place to start. I have 3 weeks off coming up over summer, so I’ll add “figure out how to use Libby and get some books out” to my list :)

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cutelyaware t1_ix0ziov wrote

Speaking of tomes, that's quite the comment! I think it's fair to boil it down to easy vs hard books. That's sort of what I understood the rule to mean. IE it will turn people off to the book if they're not mature enough to make the effort needed. Personally I simply skipped all the expository sections on whaling as I found them both dry and disturbing, and not contributing much if anything to the story.

I also agree with your comparison to LOTR where I learned to simply skip over the songs. I thought they were terrible and didn't add to the story.

I think we're on the same page, which ironically supports the idea of not pushing heavy works onto young people who may reject them and then never discover those gems later.

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DukeofVermont t1_ix2fo58 wrote

I think not pushing is key and properly introducing things. It's the same for literally everything, you start small and learn, but for some reason a lot of people just are thrown in the deep end of literature and hate it because they got pushed.

I think my love of classic lit is because I had an amazing 75 year old high school teacher who taught British Lit. He was super chill, it was all he taught, he was a great teacher and you knew he loved it. He did a great job explaining and introducing things so Shakespeare wasn't just reading it to read it.

It's a world of difference being introduced to something by someone who can explain, is excited and can answer questions vs my junior year English teacher who just assigned books and spent 50% of class talking about his old high school sports achievements (no joke, I hated him) and no one cared at all about anything we read.

I also taught ESL in NYC and I had my class read a simplified version of Frankenstein and they loved it. I was really surprised how well they took to it. They though the simplified Dr. J and Mr. Hyde was just okay in comparison.

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Robodachi t1_iwz0lmn wrote

Hm I read it at 25 and liked it. Sometimes it feels like reading a wikipedia page on whales.

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cutelyaware t1_ix0xqq5 wrote

Yeah, I thought it dragged unnecessarily with those long sections on all the details of whaling. I'm also vegetarian and really dislike that sort of thing so I simply skipped over those sections, and didn't feel like I missed anything important to the story. Same goes for all the songs in The Lord of the Rings books.

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Lachimanus t1_iwyhdkg wrote

Problem with this is that is subjective and not clearly defined.

You could push words into certain categories and then do this. But still not nice, I think.

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AhoraMeLoVenisADecir t1_iwy96dk wrote

Omg, this is soooo useful. How you did that? Is it page-by-page evaluation?

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Campbell_MG OP t1_iwy9m6f wrote

I have no idea why my main comment isn't showing up but here's how it was done:

> These were created by running public domain books from Project GITenberg, through a python script that uses this NLP model to determine the emotions in a given sentence. Each sentence is then processed into a colour representing each emotion's prevalence and stitched together into these barcodes.

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cactusphage t1_iwyek55 wrote

That model includes neutral. Why isn’t that on the legend. If I squint enough, will I see a fifth color in the barcodes?

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err0rz t1_iwyflqn wrote

Moby Dick is without a doubt the most boring book I’ve ever read.

Edit: getting downvoted by people who haven’t read moby dick lol

Edit2: no seriously, I absolutely don’t believe anyone who read Moby Dick found it exciting. Please enlighten me as to what you enjoyed. If you’re about to downvote, leave a comment explaining what you thought was good about it and I promise to award you. I 100% do not believe anyone who has read it is downvoting this comment.

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fallllingman t1_ix24lps wrote

I have read Moby Dick and I believe it is one of the most perfect novels to ever exist. I’m not writing a well organized essay defending its merits and I’m sure there are plenty of those around. Since you’re coming to it in a bad capacity of bad faith, you’ll probably reject a lot of what I say as trying to inject meaning into a work where there isn’t any. To that I raise you Nathaniel Hawthorne, famous for his incessant use of symbolism. He was Melville’s best friend.

If you’re looking for a plot or a rousing adventure story, it will definitely bore you. It’s deliberately slow-paced, deliberately plotless. I don’t expect many people will have the same appreciation for it that I do, but I found myself intrigued by the symbolism in it, the sort of mythicism it has and it’s religious references. I loved it’s almost surreal atmosphere (a good example is the squid chapter), and how it grows increasingly dark and mysterious until it crescendoes in its climax. Plus the prose is astonishingly evocative.

Since you’re positing it as a “boring book” I’ll address the main issue that most readers have with it, because it’s really not an accessible work. First and foremost, Moby Dick is about the unknowability of God in a world with seemingly no meaning. The book is therefore deliberately obsessive. Ishmael writes extensively about whales and about whaling, with an almost religious fervor. He writes about whales extensively and yet still their unknowable whiteness lingers on. The whale himself even seems to possess godly powers, with how it teases them before disappearing ahead of their ship. All of the crew try to interpret the coin, but none of them can truly know it’s nature. The quest itself is meaningless. There is no justice for Ahab, no Old Testament victory.

And most of the nonfiction chapters deal explicitly with the meaning of life, like in The Line where Ishmael likens whaling lines to mortality.

The book is also simply very funny to me. All of the weird gay undertones with Queequeg and Ishmael, the whale penis, and the chapter about squeezing sperm are so peculiar and distinctive I couldn’t help but love it. Name another gay whaling novel. The book feels more modern than even a lot of 20th Century works.

Melville was also ahead of his time in many ways. His description of Queequeg is wonderfully subversive among other texts at the time that portrayed the “noble savage.” Queequeg is one of my favorite characters in any book because of how sensitively Melville treats him. He treats him not as a native, but as a human. He is by far the most likeable character in the book, and he was introduced as a “cannibal.” And of course the famous line about his birthplace: “It is not down on any map. True places never are.” As a huge fan of experimental fiction, I was astounded by all of the techniques that he invented. I mean, he was using metafiction two centuries before it became popular.

Also, it’s hard to think of a better “sea” novel. One as evocative as Moby Dick. Many marine biologists list it as the reason they chose to enter the field. Think of the chapter in the whale breeding ground. How it’s instantly torn up by bloodshed, and the mother whale staring at its dying child. I felt like I was at sea for two weeks reading it. No other book has given me that feeling.

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err0rz t1_ix2zf1s wrote

I like that you just wrote an essay acknowledging that it’s boring.

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fallllingman t1_ix477rh wrote

It’s not boring to me. I acknowledge it’s boring as an adventure novel because it isn’t an adventure novel. That’s like saying Taxi Driver is boring because it’s not a good thriller. The book fascinates me because of its symbolism, postmodern techniques, evocative prose and it’s humor. It’s slow paced but it’s more intriguing to me than virtually any other American novel, exceptions being Invisible Man and The Recognitions. If you don’t like the things I’ve mentioned, then it’ll bore you. It’s not an intrinsically boring book however. I mean, I first read it in its entirety when I was fifteen. I loved it then and I love it now.

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Character_Mushroom83 t1_ix4hy4j wrote

I’ve been meaning to read The Recognitions lately. I’m currently reading The Instructions by Adam Levin & Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu (solenoid JUST got translated into english, brilliant romanian surreal novel, check it out if you haven’t).

The most detailed writing i’ve read about the experience of reading The Recognitions is from Franzen’s essay Mr. Difficult where he talks about feeling cool because he read it (which was unhelpful, and a little annoying hahahhaha). I love what you wrote about Moby Dick and would love to read a short rundown of what you enjoyed about The Recognitions. I would really appreciate if you would be kind enough to do so: i want to get hyped-up to read it but need a little motivation to push it to the top of my list.

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fallllingman t1_ix4mrxg wrote

The Recognitions is a long, bloated mess of a book. Its underlying plot (and it does have one, and it's a good one) works in fits and starts. You follow about ten different characters concurrently, with the focus of the story being on a struggling artist who has abandoned his aspirations and become an expert forging. The characters are all very good and memorable, but they revolve around and orbit themes rather than a central story.

It's a book about fraud and forgery, about pretentious pseudo-intellectuals claiming to see the meaning of life in a used t-shirt, about drug addicts and alcoholics who think God is their Man, about crazed Christians turned cultists and about nihilistic capitalist pigs. It's about finding truth and meaning in a world of falsehoods and deception, not the truths espoused by ministers or Dale Carnegie or shitty artists, but real truth, real meaning, that Recognition.

The book was completely dismissed when it was published. 53 of the 55 reviews published about it were negative. It was doomed to obscurity because all anyone could say about it was that it was a piece of shit. What's funny is the book itself takes aim at critics and paints them as idiots who like only what's in trend. In The Recognitions, real art is neglected and ignored by critics who don't even bother to read what they review (likewise, most of the critics who reviewed this book wrote wildly inaccurate summaries of it, implying that they had not actually read it themselves).

Reading it now, it's hard to see why it was so dismissed. It's a perfect critique of pseudo-intellectualism and the capitalist art world. It's a hilarious roast of the modern era. Its language is beautiful and completely unusual, containing countless references to literature and history. He can describe an apartment room party as a hellish underworld, can find the bizarre in the ordinary, can make the deal between a capitalist and an artist as life-and-death important as a deal with the devil. And it's really, really funny, it's absurdly humorous. There's a grave robbery scene where they steal a corpse so they can make a forgery of it (long story) and they sit it up next to them on a train, Weekend at Bernie's style, and move it a little and talk to it try to make people think this decomposing corpse is their grandmother.

Anyway, before this gets too long (it already is), I'll leave you with two quotes. One of which is from Gaddis himself and disputes that arrogant prick Franzen's assertion (seriously, fuck Franzen), in explaining the necessary difficulty (which is really overhyped imo, I've read far more difficult works) of The Recognitions. The other is the first two sentences of the novel, which I think constitutes one of the most peculiar and intriguing openings to any book ever.

​

>"I do ask something of the reader and many reviewers say I ask too much ... and as I say, it's not reader-friendly. Though I think it is, and I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. ... Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures."

​

>"Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the fourteen stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funeral carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionery stand), might have ruffled the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible."

By the way, thanks for the recommendation. I've been reading a lot of surrealism lately (I'm reading Maldoror now) and I'll check Solenoid out.

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Character_Mushroom83 t1_ix50mw8 wrote

This is precisely the write-up i have been wanting about The Recognitions, thank you. This has me extremely excited to start it. I listened to Gass introduce Gaddis at some event and (if i remember correctly) he talked of the fun of Gaddis’ writing. To have it all laid out here like this (especially the weekend at bernie’s style scene) is encouraging. I just checked out Maladror from your mention of it: it looks awesome, added to my list.

I want to recommend you another author: Evan Dara. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them but they are an anonymous author whose work gets compared to Gaddis. William T Vollmann judged and awarded their first novel The Lost Scrapbook. That book is fucking amazing. It’s almost all monologue, and anecdote. It’s like tuning through a radio. Pretty brilliant stuff.

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fallllingman t1_ix51lln wrote

I've heard of Evan Dara but I haven't had a chance to read him. There's such a huge world of great neglected authors that never get their place in any bookstore.

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Character_Mushroom83 t1_ix53fd9 wrote

So fucking true. Speaking of bookstore i recently found both Laura Warholic & An Adultery by Alexander Theroux in my local used bookstore. Both in great condition for super cheap. And i’m ALWAYS on the search for Joseph McElroy in a bookstore. No luck so far but one day.

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fallllingman t1_ix4rhyw wrote

Also I looked through your account because I like your taste, it is absolutely imperative that you read The Tunnel. Personally I found it extremely difficult but reading it was like a revelation to me. I doubt there’s a better novel about human hatred, or a novel more philosophically disturbing. It’s one of my favorite books next to The Recognitions, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Under the Volcano, In Search of Lost Time, Darconville’s Cat, Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Divine Comedy.

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Character_Mushroom83 t1_ix50umx wrote

Sounds amazing! I have been meaning to get to William Gass. I will absolutely be reading it i have a copy on my shelf. For some reason that book seems so opaque to me: i can’t for the life of me imagine what’s inside. But that’s not so important. When i read it i’ll see.

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err0rz t1_ix4hi49 wrote

My initial point was that it’s boring.

You can’t refute this point by rephrasing my initial statement.

It’s boring, end of.

I didn’t say it’s unenjoyable or without merit.

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fallllingman t1_ix4i2rf wrote

End of? Boringness is subjective.

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err0rz t1_ix4k2aj wrote

What part of this long detailed response would you say claims it wasn’t boring?

Ahh the “unknowability of G-d” what a riveting subject.

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fallllingman t1_ix4n7qk wrote

The humor. The sperm jokes. We find different things interesting but I think most people would find the sperm chapter of Moby Dick and constant innuendoes quite amusing. Also, you asked what aspects did I enjoy, not what aspects would you enjoy. I answered honestly and sincerely. I hope I've convinced you that I myself don't find this work boring, although others, looking for plot or whale battles or conditioned by the constant need for stimulus in the modern world may. I personally find it exciting, you don't. That's the only end of we have here.

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JanitorKarl t1_ix4mcfi wrote

> It’s deliberately slow-paced, deliberately plotless. I don’t expect many people will have the same appreciation for it that I do, but I found myself intrigued by the symbolism in it,

That would be boring to me.

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fallllingman t1_ix4nmmz wrote

Fair enough. I'd be more excited to watch a Tarkovsky film than a mindless action spectacle, but that's just my personal preference.

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