Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 253. page
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Are these the best books of the last century /lit/?
The critic's list is much more accurate: Lolita and two Joyce novels in the top three. Everything in that list, barring Tolkein, is trash of the lowest order but that goes without saying.
>>8178546
Whats wrong with 1984? I personally enjoyed it and thought ti was written well
>>8178631
It's fine as a science fiction novel but it's not in the same league as Nabokov or Joyce's work or any of the other authors who deserve to be on a list of the best fiction. The best novels are works of art, 1984 certainly isn't a work of art.
Hey /lit/, I have a question that might be dumb. How is it exactly that poetic forms are created, and what constitutes a legitimate form? I've finally decided to buckle down and study forms, and think that I understand their purpose: that certain forms are better at conveying certain effects in an organized manner. However, how is it that these poets construct these forms in the first place? For example, how is it that Arnaud Daniel created the Sestina, and how is it that poets decided that it was a legitimate form? The Sestina seems almost like an arbitrary sort of mathematical pattern, and though I like the almost dreamlike effect it has, I wonder about the thought process behind its construction. Do poets find that a form is legitimate as long as there is a pattern? I hope this makes sense.
>>8178474
Are you on Adderall?
>>8178489
Nah but I'm tired as fuck right now so if my post was shittily constructed I apologize
>>8178497
>Nah but...
There's your problem bruv. Ask yourself what you've written here when you're tweaking. It's the secret of great art to be sleep deprived, terribly sober, terribly depressed, tweaking, or tripping. However you get there, your answer will be found
Question for weak readers who like to read non-fiction.
Have you considered making notes at the end of each chapter of the most important information, so eventually you've compiled a list of notes you can refer back to some months after you've finished the book?
I tend to forget everything I've just read when I finish a book.
I forget to take notes most of the time, but when I do I usually use a word doc
>>8178319
But that interrupts reading. You have to get up and go to your computer chair.
If you have a notepad you can quickly jot it down without moving much.
>>8178308
I write notes as I read. If I ever leave a non-fiction book for a while and come back to it the notes usually help get back into it.
rec books to keep modern capitalist/consumerist culture from ripping out my soul and killing any individuality/creativity I have
>>8178251
Ride the Tiger
>>8178251
Trotsky- The Revolution betrayed
the theory of the leisure class by Thorstein Veblen exposes just how silly everything really is
Post your favorite novel and your favorite album and get relentlessly judged by a bunch of pretentious elitists!
>>8177975
does it feel good to possess literally no originality?
Okay. Hit me with your best shot.
>>8177975
dank
>410 pages deep
>kind of bored
>>8177864
bummer! i wanted to check this one out soon. does it just lose steam, or what?
>>8177870
Well, while the dialect Pynchon uses is very impressive, I don't really enjoy reading it. I'm also having a hard time understanding it. The basic plot I get, but I'm not entirely sure what the overarching themes are... Parts of it are extremely fun and fantastic, but the last chapter I read was boring and made me realize a lot of the chapters are pretty boring.
I also have no idea what's going on with the duck or what Dimdow's deal is.
wot until the last transit. it comes together
Essays, Criticism, History etc edition
What are your favorite non-fiction books *about* SFF?
Previous: >>8170521
Recommendations
>Fantasy
Selected: http://i.imgur.com/r688cPe.jpg/
General: http://i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg/
Flowchart: http://i.imgur.com/uykqKJn.jpg/
>Sci-Fi
Selected: http://i.imgur.com/A96mTQX.jpg/
General: http://i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/ / http://i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg/
I decided to go with A Wizard at Earthsea for my next sff read. Didn't read Le Guin in a while and it seems like a good, fun read.
>>8177503
>and it seems like a good, fun read.
It's neither of those things.
What the fuck was his problem?
This meme is dumb.
WWI knocked a few of his screws loose. And all that psilocybin he took didn't help either.
The fuck is his point anyway
Tantric sex and feudalism or something?
How do they translate "old sport" in your language?
>French
>"cher vieux"
>literally "dear old man"
>>8176575
What a useless, inefficient language.
>>8176578
>no direct equivalent of a colloquial expression in X foreign language
>must be because that language is shit ahahahah XDDDD
Literally retarded comment.
"Vieux" also means "mate", though.
Sublime books that never get mentioned here. I'll start:
Middlemarch. Expansive, thought-provoking, moving, and terrifying in the depth of its suggestion that two people never really know each other.
>>8176173
The frogfaggots will ruin this thread, but I wholeheartedly agree. Masterpiece
Bleak House.
Like the rest of Dickens' oeuvre, severely overlooked by you fucks. Don't worry that it's long. It's in its length that there's pay-off.
The Confidence Man.
Intention, scope, achievement, anything, this book holds measure for measure with Ulysses for greatest work in the English language.
ITT come up with terrible opening lines for a novel. I'll start.
Hemlock looked at the dead bodies pitifully, the horses of his mind galloping towards a suspect.
It was dark in the city and raining, and a child's forgotten balloon floated by.
An immense ass bobbed up and down inches from Bobby's face, but his mind was elsewhere; every waking second, his thoughts gravitated with utmost certainty towards cock.
Henrietta vaulted out of the agency bird like a seasoned pro, not, of course, that she wasn't, and her encrypted sat phone chirped with an intel update: "Mom, don't forget about my parent teacher conference tonight!"
>"My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me —namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. My difficulty, however, is that not all the readers to whom I talk in this or other classes are experienced. A good third, I should say, do not know the difference between real literature and pseudoliterature, and to such readers Dostoevski may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called From Here to Eternity and such like balderdash."
Other than the established fact that he has absolutely no regard for human life, can we have a discussion about Nabokov's ideals with regards to art and literature, I suppose, in this case with reference to Dostoyevsky, being the ? Do you think his criticism is warranted? Why or why not? I've included a snippet from his lectures on Russian literature.
>>8172386
His taste was actually pretty awful and he had a very narrow view of what a novel should be like, dismissing everything that didn't cater specifically to him personally.
>Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place." Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoevski the Prophet.
And with specific reference to his writing:
>In the light of the historical development of artistic vision, Dostoevski is a very fascinating phenomenon. If you examine closely any of his works, say The Brothers Karamazov, you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoevski characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance any more in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist, say Tolstoy, who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment.
Can this be attributed to mere stylistic differences, or does it point to Dostoyevsky's failures as an artist?
>>8172447
stylistic. dostoevsky was primarily concerned with the internal and how the characters themselves view the world and their own being.
Tolstoy preferred a more balanced approach that tilted towards the external and how characters interact with each other and project their selves to the society around them
What is the edgiest book you ever read?
>>8172279
Your diary.
Ham on Rye or No Longer Human.
Disliked both.
By Steven Hall. The ideas in the book are really cool but the writing is just horrible and incomplete.
Spent a good portion of yesterday struggling over a page in one of Aristotle's books and after reading the page again for the tenth time, what he was trying to say finally hit me and I understood everything and it felt so good. Probably the most sublime experience I've ever had while reading philosophy. Is this what it's always like?
>>8181552
what book and page was it?
>>8181552
This is cute
>Lev Tolstoj
"Death is more certain of tomorrow, the night that follows day, winter follows summer. Because then we get ready for the night and for the winter, but not to the death? We have to do it. But there's only one way to prepare for death: live well."
I need to find the original source!
It comes from a book?
Do you know it?
Thanks!
Poccия являeтcя пeниc cocyт
>>8181170
> dat translation
Come on guys! Anyone can help me?? :(
