Are there any /lit/ recommended books about how to converse casually with people better? Ever since I started college I've realized that my conversation skills have really gone down the shitter for some reason. In High School I could talk to anyone without being awkward but now I struggle trying to find words to say.
I've already read How to Win Friends and Influence People (an archaic, unhelpful book which people should stop recommending) and How to Talk to Anyone.
>>7594280
just be yourself by a normie
>>7594296
Yeah I try to get as much real world practice in as I can but I'd also like some supplemental literature.
>>7594280
This may sound like really weird and unhelpful advice but reading about Buddhism has been one of the things in my life that has helped my conversational abilities the most. Even if you don't buy into the religious/belief aspects of it Buddhist teachings can help you get to the point where feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, anger and other emotions that can come up in conversation don't negatively effect you and impair your ability to effectively communicate what you want to.
Also its teachings about the false-sense of self and ego can help in conversations as well. Again, even if you don't buy into the teaching of no-self/no-soul, being aware of it and pondering it enough can help you avoid saying things for the wrong reasons. If I think back to all the cringey things I have said in my life I find that the vast majority of them were said because I wanted to impress people or to have people think I was funny, I was essentially doing it for self-validation and to make myself feel good. Once you internalize the idea that ever doing or saying anything for those reasons are counter-productive and almost psychologically unhealthy it can help you avoid ever saying anything cringey or stupid.
Say what you want about Bradbury or about this book, you can call it high school tier if you want, but that doesn't make it any less important or any less delicious to read.
>>7594213
I was assigned to read it in high school but never got past the first page. Still passed the tests we were given on it from listening to class discussion. It was probably shit anyway.
I honestly remember it being pretty dumb. I read it like 5 years ago so I can't really recall much. But robot hunting dogs or some shit. Teenage dream girl. The premise itself doesn't make much sense and is overly dramatic. I couldn't stop thinking how silly the whole thing was.
Nah man, it's a pretty shit fucking book.
What Historians from antiquity -> 1500s are worth reading? Aside from the Gs and Rs?
Lots of stuff. Check out any "History of Historical Writing." Something old like Barnes will probably be more here-is-a-list-of-names-y, while something recent like Burrow's History of Histories is more detailed but less comprehensive. Maybe check out Alan Megill's Historical Knowledge, Historical Error for a look at the evolution of historical epistemology in the West.
The Renaissance can be try because its neo-classical "rhetorical" historians don't really resonate much. They often get seen as a dead zone of stylized circlejerking before interesting guys like Machiavelli and the unusually precocious Giuccardini come along, and the Reformation is likewise seen sort of as "critical philology, but no great historical insight." A lot of medieval writers were great, surprisingly often simple chroniclers who were cut off from the kinds of self-consciousness and education that a Florentine rhetorical historian might have, but managed to be weirdly precocious and insightful. And of course a lot of stuff that is mostly interesting because it's our major source for a difficult or scarcely sourced period, which is another metric altogether, stuff like Gregory of Tours is far better known than more insightful later historians simply because of how important he is as a source.
Trying to remember who is a good read on Reformation and Enlightenment historians but I can only remember a sludge of Georg Iggers, who has good coverage (somewhere) of Reformation/Enlightenment historiography that is often ignored because it was submerged/tentative/conceptually too early.
Even the rhetorical historians can be good btw. There are some really great books out there on how to read rhetorical history (and classical/renaissance rhetoric in general) from the perspective of its contemporaries. It's a lot less artificial and "phony" than it seems, it just has different priorities. But honestly I still find it hard to get into.
Islam has some good ones too though rarely any titans t b h f a m. Good ethnologists though, al-Biruni i dunno
Just read some modern Barnes equivalent and check out what seems interesting.
Oh, church historians of later Rome are great. I can't remember if it was Eusebius or Lactantius saying that when Galerius died his rotting ass stunk up the whole town.
>>7594070
Gs and Rs?
>>7594110
Greek and Romans, desu senpai.
An OP, the Byzantines. Try Nicetas, tons of Greek and New Testament references and cool history too with Muslims and stuff about the 4th crusade. There was also a woman Byzantine historian who covered another crusade.
I looked a spanish thread in the catalog and couldn't find one.
I was trying to post my taco writing in the critique thread, but I feel it wouldn't be apropiate to put it there.
Asi que decidi hacer un hilo en español.
Por fa den puntines pls.
Disculpen las fallas de ortografia, mi open office no tiene el diccionario de español.
>que mierda es la imagen
estoy intentando hacer una pequeña historia tipo animoo para ponerme a dibujarla o algo asi.
>>7593769
Pues está aceptable pero tienes que mejorar tu gramática (tildes, comas).
>>7593973
gracias, hay algun buen recurso o manual para escribir bien en español aparte de leerse el manual de gramatica de la real academia española?
3/10
si corregís las faltas de ortografía y lo redactás mejor (por ej. en los primeros dos párrafos decís catalina 3 veces, eso es mala redacción)
asciende a 5/10
What are you writing, or have written? Share your work. Comments welcome.
I'll start off with this short story I just wrote. (1k words).
http://pastebin.com/DHUADAkR
>>7593670
Where did you write it? Typed or handwrote? What software?
Ending to a ss
Is it just painful purple prose?
p.s I liked your stuff OP, terse and lean, unlike...
On the walk back through nowhere in the UK, all of my senses are alive to Jacob’s description. I notice that the air, which doesn’t sit or hang in between the street lights, but is merely pitched there, calls forth nothing but it’s own cold, and when a midge dances through it, from one point of illumination to another, all but the cold air which it displaces will not be animated, and there is not metaphor to be had.
I look at the piebald canopy of pale glows and black, shimmering over the top of the Lindam, and as I had thought of them: the lights as little eyes or fairies, the jet and unseen roads as webs of tar, they slide off, and underneath is Lindam council estate, chock full with people patiently breathing, and flicking through their television channels; they are going nowhere.
And it is not without remembering Jacob’s crooked smile that I see the empty plaza, where Cecily is approaching 24 hours from now, through a dream she later tells me was full of harsh luminous water, which to touch felt like sand paper and to look at was to see bleak stone.
When I get to my house there is orange light mixing with orange light and ambulances out the reach of fire. My Uncle has sat down to T.V with the hob roaring and now most of his skin shines like wet cellophane. The ambulance crew and the firemen don’t speak a word but run, run, run in and out and around the flying flames and to the van and to the gurney.
By my Uncles side I walk on feet that feel like charged balls of nothing, up to the open mouth of the van and weightlessly onto it’s stiff lip.
I know he doesn’t know that the house is on fire, or that Jack’s brain caught it’s death on the steadfast pavement in 1972; and I am glad. And then we are going at the same speed, on our way to the heart of nowhere in the UK.
But then the ambulance man says that we are going to Waltham county general and we are 41219.
>>7594558
Don't use words like shimmering lad.
So /lit/ how is this NOVEL and the translation? i want to READ it but im not sure that i can stand 600 pages of a badly translated NOVEL.
well, i've never READ this NOVEL
Just because another NOVEL ripped off this NOVEL, that doesn't necessarily mean that this NOVEL is worth READING.
This NOVEL is less rapey than the MANGO but it's still a good NOVEL. i don't know if that is a good translation because i READ the Yuji Oniki translation of the NOVEL which is very apt.
http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
Pic shows how to start with the Ancient Greeks, including various second-hand sources to help you understand the works better.
ITT: we create equivalent charts for other parts of Bloom's Western Canon.
>>7593352
Posted wrong pic, meant to post this:
Why is /lit/ so obsessed with the greeks?
>>7593456
Because all works of literature is built on other works of literature, and the Greeks are basically the best starting point for unravelling this entire fucking mess.
What's some good LGBT literature?
>good
>LGBT literature
>literature
Oh wait, confessions of a mask
>>7593106
>good
>LGBT
>literature
pick one
The Greeks and romans
What do people think of this one?
>>7592721
Confusing as shit. It's cool to read slowly, and alongside of the lecture courses from the period, but I have no idea what's, erm, happening in it.
>>7592721
Why did this one take so long to get published anyway?
>>7593957
At least in Germany, it was published in accordance with Heidegger's wishes, following the publishing of a bunch of other texts he thought needed to come out before it. With respect to America, his stuff gets published roughly in accordance with the German schedule, but that can take a while, especially given the difficulty of his texts, let alone the challenge the present to translation specifically.
Thoughts on this book/author?
I don't think you'd like it.
bumping for you
What's your favorite book? Mine is pic related. I love books that reference mythology in an interesting way that reveals the interconnectedness between the past and present, between humans and nature, and between the world and the universe, and this book fit every bill! :)
>>7591945
The Martian.
i know this is a troll thread, but i have to say i was honestly disappointed at how intolerably bad it actually was. i shamelessly enjoy brainless popcorn novels and the sandman comics, but i seriously couldn't even get through the first chapter of this garbage. he writes like a 14 year old.
Why is Vallejo never talked about on this thread?
>>7590879
He is the only one talked about on this thread.
>>7590882
Yep, we're talking about Vallejo here
>>7590879
best poet of the 20th century, to bad he was a gommie
Hey guys, do you have any recommendations for really good books about the Italian mafia? I've read Wiseguy, but I was kind of underwhelmed by it. Can you recommend me some really good ones?
Anybody?
Start with the Greeks.
Thanks a lot, /lit/
Can /lit/ recommend me a good translation for "Notes from the Underground" and Dostoyevsky in general?
I was going to read P&V, but then I read this article which totally ripped into them:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
Their translation method also sounds weird. Wife translates Russian into literal english, husband writes down the literal translation.
Thoughts? Recommendations?
Dude I always feel so dirty reading translations because of shit like this. it's fucked.
Magarshack does a good one
Garnett revised by Matlaw.
>>7587793
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6DtYC9N8RM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh7Z4mTza4
/lit/ tries to direct a movie
>>7588545
>no baby, no baby
my fucking sides
