Master Milk said:
There's nothing wrong with starting a little early. Enthusiasm is definitely a good thing.
Warrior Keoni and Mr. Hyde, I've got you added to the list.
I wrote this in the writing thread, but I might as well paste it here...
First story:
1. "
Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov: First published in The New Yorker, this short story tells the sad tale of an elderly couple and their mentally ill son.
Well, Signs and Symbols was quite the trip. I took quite a few notes, but I don't really want to share all of that, (well I don't want to bore you actually), so here's a snippet:
I found the story fascinating. Not merely because of the plot but also by it's construction, by it's author, and by the mystery alluded to, towards the end. Take for example, the frequency of the paragraphs in the three sections (7,4,19) equating to the year it takes place, 1947.
Signs and Symbols, or Symbols and Signs, as the New Yorker would have it, has a second story (not secondary) within the main story, a concept that Nabokov alluded to in his famous letters to the editor regarding another story, the Vane Sister. The inner scheme as, he calls it, requires one to solve what the passive reader would probably ignore, e.g. the dialing codes, the cards, etc ; thereby alluding to a truth gotten by peeling the fruit. Which of course I'm not going to spoil for you here, but which you can read
here.
As Dolinin concludes:
The elegant riddle in "Signs and Symbols" was composed for the sake of the narrative. Discovering and solving it does not undermine existing ethical, historicist and psychological interpretations but challenges stale clichés of reader-response criticism. Those who refuse to look for a hidden closure beneath the deceptive openness of "Signs and Symbols" are more guilty of a "referential mania" than their opponents because they, like the insane boy, believe that everything in the world created by Nabokov refers to them and they are free to project their own doubts, uncertainties, and fears upon it.
...
one down. 49 to go.