Reddit Reddit reviews Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook)

We found 11 Reddit comments about Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Literature & Fiction
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Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook)
New Directions Publishing Corporation
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11 Reddit comments about Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook):

u/fathermocker · 24 pointsr/SF_Book_Club

Labyrinths, by JL Borges.

From Amazon:

> If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.
Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in "Name of the Rose").
Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.

Reviews

“Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature.” (David Foster Wallace - The New York Times )

“Borges anticipated postmodernism (deconstruction and so on) and picked up credit as founding father of Latin American magical realism.” (Colin Waters - The Washington Times )

u/egypturnash · 6 pointsr/Fantasy

Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Yes it has elves and dragons and whatnot. On the other hand those dragons are massive sentient war machines, made by changeling slave labor. This was "steampunk" before that label ossified into "British colonialism with cool gadgets"; there are Dickensian orphans, student riots, strange Elven politics, and the raw animal lust of being mind-linked to a sleek black death-machine. It's a beautiful book. I also really love Swanwick's "Stations of the Tide", which straddles SF and fantasy in the last days of a planet of islands about to be engulfed by rising tides; a nameless bureaucrat from the Bureau of Technology Transfer chases a mysterious magician through the most lyrical apocalypse ever written.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks - a few groups of secret immortals war through the ages. Beautifully written, and delightfully coy in how it dances around the magical happenings for most of its length.

Russel Hoban, The Medusa Frequency, an unsettling little story about a writer looking for inspiration and getting lost.

And perhaps you are ready for Jorge Luis Borges. Short stories that are more about the concepts than the worlds: a near-endless library that contains every text that could ever be written, a cabal of rebel historians creating an alternative history that begins to swallow up the world... very fantastic, very not something a D&D campaign would be based on.

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth. And here is something that was an explicit influence on D&D - the 'forget a spell the moment you cast it' system comes from Vance. A thief named Cugel steals from the wrong target - a wizard - who sends him halfway across the world. Cugel's quest for vengeance drags him back, twice, and ends horribly, but really what the story's about is the weird people and places he encounters along the way. (Originally a series of short stories.)

And while I am talking about stories of Self-Serving Bastards Who Inspired D&D (and quite possibly Locke Lamora), how about the first of Fritz Lieber's books about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser? A blonde mountain of a swordsman teams up with a little weasel of a thief (with a few bits of half-remembered cantrips); they wander the mean streets of the rotting city of Lankhmar, getting in and out of trouble. There's a bunch of stories about these two guys, with varied emotional tones. Also I liked his Our Lady Of Darkness a lot; it's about a person who stumbles into a skyscraper built with very particular magical proportions.

Oooh yes, also. Zelazny. Let's go right to the most wild and experimental, Creatures of Light and Darkness. Technomagical Egyptian gods war with each other through time and space. The story is told in a dream-like kaleidoscope of styles, but builds up to a beautifully strange whole. It is broken and difficult and short and rewarding.

Tim Powers. Would you like to read a story about pirates and voodoo magic? (A certain series of Disney movies owes a lot to this, not the other way around.) Or a story about time travel to Dickensian England and a disastrous attempt to resurrect dead gods? Or how about the secret history of how Byron, Shelley, and other consumptive poets were beset by vampires?

(And any mention of Powers should also include his buddy James Blaylock; I recommend "The Last Coin" and "Land of Dreams" in particular. The former is a madcap chase for thirty silver coins; the latter is an elliptical story about a Magical Carnival of Dubious Morality.)

Also if you are bored with traditional fantasy try reading some Lord Dunsanay. His work may rekindle the 'standard' fantasy for you; 'King of Elfland's Daughter' is melancholic, magical, and beautiful to read aloud; 'Idle Days on the Yann' is a wonderfully elliptic bit of world-building.

And finally, an extra-weird one. Larry Marder's Beanworld, an 'ecological romance' that I think is one of the best things to come out of the 80s B&W comics boom. It is gorgeous, alien, and familiar, all at once.

(Spoiler: The fate of the world hangs in the balance in one of these books. The protagonist, however, intends to destroy it. And succeeds. Despite this, there is a sequel to that book.)

u/Chive · 4 pointsr/books

Ambrose Bierce- The Devil's Dictionary.

Don't really read it as much as browse through it from time to time. It's an old book but much of its cynicism is as relevant and as funny today as when written.

Something a bit longer try Post Office by Charles Bukowski. That's semi-autobiographical, easily accessible and there's not really that much of a plot to it- so it doesn't really matter too much if you lose your place.

edit: Would you consider collections of short stories? I often find them the best thing to read if I'm unsure as to when I'll get the chance. Most definitely not light but short would be a collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories. Some of them are complete mind-fucks a few pages long. I have a copy of Labyrinths and it's pretty damn good, but there are many similar collections about. It's the only book that I've lent out, not had returned, and then replaced- usually I don't bother if it's something I've already read.

further edit: Both non-fiction and short- Anton Chekhov- A Journey to Sakhalin. Truly remarkable book, especially the letters to his family.

u/darknessvisible · 4 pointsr/books

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

u/wesatloldotcat · 3 pointsr/pbsideachannel

On more than one occasion, Mike's brought up Layrinths. I think he even named it as a 'desert island' book.

u/simonsarris · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Some Borges for you:

Consider every book possible.


Princess Bride:

You killed my father.

Alternatively, Star Wars:

I am your father.

Or the Da Vinci Code:

Murder, murder, murder, Pope.

u/ResumidorEstatalBot · 1 pointr/argentina

Resumen de la noticia


>> “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s.
>
>“It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego.
>
>It was later included in Labyrinths (public library) — the 1962 collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, which gave us his terrific and timeless parable of the divided self.
>
>> Borges begins by noting the deliberate paradox of his title, a contrast to his central thesis that the continuity of time is an illusion, that time exists without succession and each moment contains all eternity, which negates the very notion of “new.” The “slight mockery” of the title, he notes, is his way of illustrating that “our language is so saturated and animated by time.” With his characteristic self-effacing warmth, Borges cautions that his essay might be “the anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentine lost in the maze of metaphysics” — and then he proceeds to deliver a masterwork of rhetoric and reason, carried on the wings of uncommon poetic beauty.
>
>> Writing in the mid-1940s — a quarter century after Einstein defeated Bergson in their landmark debate, in which science (“the clarity of metaphysics,” per Borges) finally won the contested territory of time from the dictatorship of metaphysics, and just a few years after Bergson himself made his exit into eternity — Borges reflects on his lifelong tussle with time, which he considers the basis for all of his books:
>
>> Time, Borges notes, is the foundation of our experience of personal identity — something philosophers took up most notably in the 17th century, poets picked up in the 19th, scientists set down in the 20th, and psychologists picked back up in the 21st.
>
>> Returning to Hume’s notion of the illusory self — an idea advanced by Eastern philosophy millennia earlier — Borges considers how this dismantles the very notion of time as we know it:

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u/empleadoEstatalBot · 1 pointr/argentina

> Borges ends by returning to the beginning, to the raw material of his argument and, arguably, of his entire body of work, of his very self: paradox. He writes:
>
> > And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
>
> The essay, as everything in Labyrinths, is an exceptional read in its continuous entirety; excerpting, fragmenting, and annotating it here fails to dignify the agile integrity of Borges’s rhetoric and the sheer joy of his immersive prose. Complement it with Bertrand Russell on the nature of time, Virginia Woolf on its astonishing elasticity, and Sarah Manguso on its confounding, comforting ongoinginess.

u/Wylkus · 1 pointr/InsightfulQuestions

To this day there is still no greater book for opening up the world of thought than Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. This book is indispensable.

Aside from that the best advice, as many here have noted, is to simply read widely and often. Here are some other books I can personally recommend as being particularly insightful:


u/WhiteRaven22 · 1 pointr/suggestmeabook

Anything by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. After reading his short stories, I would always have to sit and think about what I had read for a while. Here's one of his more famous stories, The Zahir. I highly recommend the book Labyrinths, which is an English-language collection of his short stories.