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bigdaniel75

@bigdaniel75

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Joined about 2 months ago

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Name three books or comics you'd recommend to anyone and tell us why

in Books & Comics

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1: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger has throngs of readers all over the world. The back cover of the English edition published in 2010 by Penguin claims that it is "one of the most translated, taught and reprinted texts, with at least 65 million copies sold". This is the new edition translated in 2014 by Matteo Colombo (the previous translation dated back to 1961).

2: The Little Red Book, by Mao Tse-Tung

It is well known that the Chinese population was already quite large in the last century, and therefore it is really difficult to establish how many copies this book sold. In fact, when Mao was the not-so-democratic president of China, the printing of his Quotations, for many Chinese publishing houses, was almost the only activity. Scholars have attempted to calculate the incalculable number of copies distributed in China and abroad: we are talking about stellar figures ranging from "800 million" to "5 billion copies" (that is, more than the world population then able to read it). In any case, it was certainly a widely read book.

3: Charles Dickens, Two Cities

200 million copies sold is the sensational record attributed to Two Cities by Charles Dickens by The Telegraph newspaper in an article by David Mitchell in 2010. Mitchell, however, does not explain on which sources he bases this figure. Of course, it may also be that the number is plausible, given that Dickens has always been a much-loved writer across the planet. But then how many copies would even more famous Dickensian novels like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist have sold?

Winner

Review your favourite film from 2024!

in Film & TV

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It is difficult to judge only half of a story, because if the first film gives us the direction, the second concludes the journey and opens up new scenarios. In any case, Dune - Part 2 confirms itself to be exceptional on a visual and formal level, reproposing the austere aesthetic grandeur that had struck me in the first chapter, also through chromatic solutions that prove to be particularly effective, contrasting the intense orange of the desert with a photography that is at times completely desaturated, the work of Greig Fraser. On a narrative level, I was perhaps more convinced by the first part, more airy and solemn. In any case, it cannot be said that the film is not effective, especially because it succeeds in the enterprise of telling this complex story with a clarity and internal coherence that other adaptations, including the fascinating yet confused one by David Lynch in 1984, cannot boast. The feeling remains that, after two films and just under six hours of viewing, our time on Arrakis was still short. Perhaps it would have been better to keep the sequence in three parts, as in the novel, but cinema is not made of "ifs" and "buts". This is Villeneuve's Dune which, like the prophecies of Paul Muad'Dib Usul, contains the past, present and future (the latter in clear echoes of Dune's Messiah, which I hope will arrive at this point) of this story. A narration that in almost sixty years has changed the face of science fiction, and in some ways of contemporary myth, and has reached us in other forms, conveyed by other stories. All of this can be perceived, in Villeneuve's film, while enjoying the journey. The greatest merit of Dune, in the end, in the sum of its parts, is that of having built a bridge between the original work, a child of its time and its nature as a literary epic, and contemporaneity.