Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 131. page
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Have you ever just picked up a book thinking it would be garbage and only for it to fare better than most of literaturw today?
>>8232228
shill please go
Hi c/lit/'s
I'm really interested in politics of late.
The debates you see a lot on youtube with Sam Harris, Milo Yiannopolous and all those guys surrounding Islam and US politics.
Thing is I want to delve deeper than debates on YouTube, I actually feel if this is something I'm interested in I should start reading about these topics.
So where do I start? Has anyone got any recommendations?
Only book I remember enjoying was 1984.
>>8232170
Start with the greeks, in this case Plato and Aristotle.
>>8232170
Read the Quran in Arabic.
>>8232175
Why
How do you choose what book to read?
>>8232123
Based on your preferences and interests. Also the sticky helps a lot.
what a qt
>>8232123
authors give me hints when i read their books what i should read next. then I make a list and order it based on my current tastes, then I go and find similar works based on the ones the authors have shown me, to fill in the gaps. then I toss all that up and read whatever's on my wall.
Any books to help me with my shitty grammar/syntax? I slacked off in English back when I was a student
Any book will help you improve your syntax just by reading it. Unless it includes stream of consciousness. Finneganns wake is a good place to start tho
itt: good horror
>Poe
>Bierce
>Machen
>Blackwood
>Hodgson
>Lovecraft
>Clark Ashton Smith
>Ligotti
>Ramsey Campbell
>Caitlin Kiernan
>Laird Barron
>Robert Shearman
Twilight
>>8232499
I'm reading the Blackwood collection Penguin released right now and I'm really impressed. "The Willows" was legitimately spooky and I find the whole "nature horror" thing that him and Machen did very intriguing.
To add to that list
Robert Aickman (I think of him as a precursor to Ligotti in a way. very subtle and unsettling tales that stick with you long after.)
T.E.D. Klein (Lovecraftian horror from the 1980's that isn't a shitty pastiche with tentacle monsters. His novel "The Ceremonies" has a lot of Machen influence.)
M.R. James (the essential English ghost story writer. also see JS LeFanu.)
L.A. Lewis (more of a second-tier writer, but worth noting down for later. Had one book with some strangely hallucinogenic tales like "The Tower of Moab")
Haven't read a whole lot of their stuff, but Karl Edward Wagner and Clive Barker are solid for more contemporary horror.
Great books that /lit/ never talks about.
r a y u e l a
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I got pretty bored.
The Settembrini/Naphta stuff did not do it for me.
>>8232250
Buddenbrooks >> Magic Mountain
Recently, I've been reading The Cantos, and a lot of Pound in general. One thing that has sparked my interest is that he first began his literary ambition with a very clear direction in mind. He studied only those poets who he considered the absolute greatest. He even went so far as to dismiss the likes of Ovid as "second tier" poets who made minor discoveries, and eschewed Virgil and the vast bulk of the Western Canon all together.
Frankly, this is inspiring. I've always had literary ambition, and I've always wanted my reading to enhance my writing. Also, desu, I've always been extremely skeptical of the majority of what I spend my time reading. I'm a big proponent of the "I'm going to die" at some point school of picking up books, so naturally I'd be attracted to a guy like Pound who tried his hardest to cut through the bullshit to ensure he read only the best and only what would make him a better poet.
So, basically, I want to pick up where Ezra left off. I want to make a long ass work worth ripping my hair out over, and I want to make sure that every piece of literature I am consuming is as worthwhile as what helped Ezra Pound construct The mothafuckin' Cantos.
tl;dr This is another shitty list post. It goes across all mediums (mainly fiction-aiming prose and poetry).
Thus far I have narrowed down my focus:
Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns
Orestia
Theban Plays
Poems of Sappho
Poems of Catullus
Metamorphoses of Ovid
***MAYBE*** The Decameron
Divine Comedy
Old English Poems (Think Seafarer)
As Much of Spenser as I can stomach
The Canterbury Tales
General Ren. Poets (think Marlowe, Johnson)
Collected Shakespeare
Don Quixote
Poems of John Donne
Paradise Lost
Poems of Robert Browning
Complete Works of Goethe
Madame Bovary
David Copperfield, Bleak House, Journals of Charles Dickens
Middlemarch
Persuasion
Jude the Obscure
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
All of Joyce (Minus The Wake)
The Cantos
To The Lighthouse
Absalom, Absalom
Mason and Dixon
I'll probably throw Ibsen, Proust, Mann, Sterne,Turgenev, Melville, Borges, and maybe Bartheleme in there for fun
Any suggestions or refutations to help me hone this list???????
ALSO: Discussions on how the most modern piece on this list was written like 20 years ago :(
>>8231356
nigga u on the right track, but what about the eastern shit? Li Po? Nuffin?
I smell sum Euro centrism
If we are to consider the sensorial experience available to the reader between the pages of To The Lighthouse as sublime, methinks The Waves does it better.
>>8231356
I haven't read much but i'd narrow the list down to Spenser, Chaucer, Goethe, Ibsen, Shakespeare
Middlemarch isn't that great, and i'd stay away Ovid and Milton (personal opinion)....not sure about the other authors mentioned.
Was he Australian?
>Know that Marriage is an outward material thing like any other secular business.
>But the woman is free through the divine law and cannot be compelled to suppress her carnal desires. Therefore the man ought to concede her right and give up to somebody else the wife who is his only in outward appearance.
>Suppose I should counsel the wife of an impotent man, with his consent, to giver herself to another, say her husband’s brother, but to keep this marriage secret and to ascribe the children to the so-called putative father. The question is: Is such a women in a saved state? I answer, certainly
>I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.
>Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well about whom St. John tell’s us. Was not everybody about Him saying: ‘Whatever has He been doing with her?’ Secondly, with Mary Magdalen, and thirdly with the women taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even, Christ who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died.
>I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain al the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.
>To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog!
>Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.
>If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him over with the words I baptize thee in the name of Abraham.
>Like the drivers of donkeys, who have to belabor the donkeys incessantly with rods and whips, or they will not obey, so must the ruler do with the people; they must drive, beat throttle, hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check.
>Moses is an executioner, a cruel lictor, a torturer a torturer who tears our flesh out with pincers and makes us suffer martyrdom . . . Whoever, in the name of Christ, terrifies and troubles consciences, is not the messenger of Christ, but of the devil . . . Let us therefore send Moses packing and for ever.
>It does not matter what people do; it only matters what they believe.
>If we allow them - the Commandments - any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies and blasphemies
>One should learn Philosophy only as one learns witchcraft, that is to destroy it; as one finds out about errors, in order to refute them
>It is more important to guard against good works than against sin.
>Reason is the Devil's handmaid and does nothing but blaspheme and dishonor all that God says or does.
>St. Augustine or St. Ambrosius cannot be compared with me.
What did he mean by this?
Dr. Monk,
We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alley of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums...my awestruck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon.
Jonathon Doe
>>8231112
Whatever you want it to mean...
>>8231122
when he says see you anon. how did he know we were reading?
Post that book you've always want to rec to other people, but never had the opportunity to do so. Anything goes.
All That Is - Salter
it's like Stoner, only without the insufferable passivity. and better written.
vurt jeff noon
Thoughts on this one?
There's already a thread. Bet you weren't expecting that one.
Does /lit/ keep a journal? If so give us some of your entries.
An actual one, google translated for time and hilarity. A little cringe inducing, but I think that's just the nature of journal entries. You're always in a pathetic state when writing for yourself.
---
Nothing in life has confused me more than to be born as a woman. As a woman you are a woman before being human.
Through the ages, in every culture is man's domination of woman clear: from that tape feet in ancient China to men considered women's inability to walk and pain sexy, women who wear the burqa in Saudi Arabia today, women gender mutilated in Africa for that they should not have to feel pleasure - women should always be punished. And it is not about religion, religion is something beyond, and religion was additionally created by men. But note well how women accept the role, they allow themselves. Superior physical strength of men is not behind, but the woman's passive acceptance of the subjugation. Women have always been feminism's greatest enemy.
And this is why I think the modern feminism is trivial: in essence this deeper, existential phenomenon not discussed and dealt with. Psychoanalyze the entire female race.
It is tiring, exhausting, and I want to give up. Be fucked like an animal.
May 1st 2016
Today is Canada Day. Who Cares? I want the old flag back. I'd like to move.
-start a new book
-Write for 30 minutes
-tidy up room
post your shit and please try to critique others
>>8229636
Here's mine:
Some refer to life
As being snuffed out,
Like a candle in your chest.
But frequently,
It’s like beating flames
With a heavy wool blanket.
Tenacious fire
Can force waves
Of buffeting suffocation.
Some even leave
Embers that spring
Alive with each breeze.
Meteoric extinction
Is somehow much nicer
With it’s constant thudding,
Than bursts of light
Piercing through ether,
Like a rushing, mighty wind.
will critique back
I dreamt I was a bean
rolling along
down the hill
filled with feels
not even a human bean
just a mess
I hope I taste good
when someone eats me for dinner
I am the space between my eyes and wall,
To which I look and think of naught, at all;
As empty as the atoms in the air,
Existing as the space from here to there;
I am the light projection of myself,
Upon the open pages of my shelf.
I live in flux of transitory whims,
And hold the fleeting folds of phantom limbs
Of memory, the wake in which persists
A presence, that my sense of self exists:
I am the empty space between the leaves,
The pattern on the ground that shadow weaves;
And when I gaze into my mirrored face,
I see the emptiness inside a vase.
I sit and stare at shadows on the wall,
And wonder why I’m even here at all.
Recent cops. Post, r8, and get read ready to h8
>>8229565
It's not that "recent" but I still haven't read any of them.
wow, Esther Vilar really didn't think highly of women lol.
>>8229554
t. faggot
>>8229554
she does sound as if in real life she went though the polar opposite of what she's now suggesting in her book as a passive-aggressive coping strategy
