Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 506. page
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I know they were originally lumped together arbitrarily by merit of their supposed "difficulty", but am I the only one that sees the Meme Trilogy as thematically consistent? They're all concerned in some form with what DFW called "regular-guyness". In Ulysses, Joyce takes a mild mannered uninteresting lower-middle class man and makes transcendent art of mundane life. Then in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon tells the story of Slothrop, a normal regular dweeb transformed into someone of far greater importance by everyone else's misconceptions of him. And to round it all off, Infinite Jest is about genuinely extraordinary people who are ultimately defeated by their inability to be "normal".
Is that about right?
>reading gravitys rainbow
>reading infinite meme
>he thinks these are about the characters
>>8030807
>arbitrarily
>by merit
LITERATURE STUPID QUESTIONS THREAD
aka LSQT
Come in this thread to ask all stupid questions related to literature! duh
First question is gonna be a classic that I got meme'd on earlier:
Is infinite jest really worth reading? What is it about and does anyone have a link to the pdf?
thanks!
>>8030709
>is it worth reading
The worth of something comes from the individuals view point. You won't know it was or wasn't worth it until you read it.
>>8030709
any books with graphic rape and murder scenes?
>>8030709
>Is infinite jest really worth reading? What is it about and does anyone have a link to the pdf?
By todays /lit/ standards no. Because it got too popular. Anything remotely popular, even in a niche group is bad on /lit/.
It really depends on your taste on books really.
Second, use google or read the sticky stop being a lazy fuck.
Third. We already have a questions that don't deserve their own thread thread (I guess)
>he uses "the book has no character development!" as a critique
I'm not sure if you guys realize this, but most people in real life don't ever change away from their usual nature. Or atleast not like they do in fiction.
Using
>"the book has no character development!"
as a reason why it's bad or unrealistic is contradictory.
It's why I laugh when people complain a villian in a show or something is one dimensional because they don't have a 2deep4u background story. Some assholes are just assholes for the sake of being assholes.
>>8030297
you don't know many human beans, do yo?
>>8030297
Very valid point. This is obvious in many genres of fiction, even in movies and series. An antagonist can't be 'just' an evil person or even someone who is just in it for x (money, power etc.), just like le ebic antihero can't be a hero without having some grave issues in his past. Even in mindless sitcoms, the clown often can't be 'just' a funny guy, but he has to have some childhood trauma that he is surpressing through humour. I hate this kind of pretentiousness.
>>8030331
>human beans
What do you think about Per Petterson, /lit/?
>>8030040
Nothing.
>>8030040
Did you read it? I have it and remember having read some praise about it. So, you tell us what you thought.
>>8030040
Kraftig overvurdert, som det meste av norsk samtidslitteratur fra for Knausgård.
Hey /lit/,
Where can I find a top books list based on user ratings?
i. e. like these
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart
Only for literature instead of mocies and music
>inb4 sticky, not the same as recommended reading
goodreads?
Those lists are shit and so are book ones
>>8029590
This is correct
Rym has Radiohead and Pink Floyd in the top 3 come the fuck on man get some actual taste
What is the best translation of Tao Te Ching?
Or if there is no such thing as the best,then which one do you recommend?
I want to read it english,since it made me feel something so weird.
>>8029495
>torii
>China
Not that version, Magyaranon.
>>8029966
Cover doesn't matters as long as the content is fine.
>>8029966
then which one?
Name the 3 best books you read that originated in the African continent (north Africa doesn't count)
who the fuck cares
Things Fall Apart
Mayombe
Terra Sonâmbula
That was easy, boy.
>>8029233
Palm-Wine Drinkard
Seasons of Migration to the North
Collected Plays of Wole Soyinka
so why haven't you read one of the funniest books of all time yet?
Too hard 4 me
>>8029133
it's honestly not that hard. if you can read Ulyssess and gravity's rainbow it should be easy.
>>8029134
>if you can read Ulyssess and gravity's rainbow
I can't
What are some essential books about music?
I think I should tell you guys that I'm not some moronic shitposter from /mu/, in order to ensure that this thread isn't derailed by discussion of that board.
The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin
>>8029210
Great shit, but utterly fucking ridiculous to try to buy though. Get from a library.
OP, also check out Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Gardiner.
>>8029281
There are also other ways you can obtain it...
>Fantasy
Selected: http://i.imgur.com/3v2oXAY.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/
First for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
>>8028907
I should read the final one where they die
Ok, some guy from the last thread told me to summon 'Marc', so uh, here I go.
Is there any good chapter to chapter summaries of Book of the New Sun that only contain information pertaining that chapter, and don't spoil the rest of the book? Something to read after reading the book chapter primarily.
Hi, /lit/, I'm coming to the end of my first year in university and I want to keep on reading, actively, during the summer. I was considering writing up a programme for reading certain marxist and communist texts and then convening once a week discuss what we've read.
Is anybody interested?
TL;DR; I wanna read some marxist and communist texts and discuss it with other anons. Are you interested?
>>8028641
>wasting time on a broken system
>>8028641
There's already something similar to this on /leftypol/ but I can see why you'd want to do this here.
>>8029259
>Broken
>Not saying capitalism is broken
Haha okay, friend :^>
I'm trying to compile a list of the best and most important writers of both modernism and postmodernism.
Modernism-
Joyce
Proust
Eliot
Pound
Faulkner
Hemingway
Fitzgerald
Stein
Yeats
Stevens
Beckett
Barnes
Conrad
Williams
Woolf
Auden
Borges
Cummings
Crane
Postmodern-
Gaddis
Gass
DeLillo
Pynchon
Wallace
Burroughs
Calvino
McElroy
Roth
Heller
Who am I missing? I know I have huge gaps in poetry and plays.
me
>>8028580
What you're missing:
Modernism:
Ford Maddox Ford
Thomas Wolfe
Flann O'Brien
Hermann Broch
Thomas Mann
Franz Kafka
[Insert name of someone I haven't heard of here]
Postmodernism:
John Barth
Donald Barthelme
Robert Coover
Raymond Federman
Alexander Theroux
Ronald Sukenick
D. Keith Mano
John Hawkes
Gilbert Sorrentino
Stephen Dixon
David Markson
Harry Mathews
Arno Schmidt
Raymond Queneau
Georges Perec
Jacques Roubaud
Gil Orlovitz
William T. Vollmann
Roberto Bolano
A.G. Porta
Thomas Bernhard
>>8028586
this
>I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite enough for me.
Did he really say that? I always thought it was a /lit/ meme.
No, he's pretty mad people call him a recluse
>>8028321
Then were does this come from? Just lit?
>>8028316
I don't get it. What's so bad about an anteater?
ITT: greentext the last book you read and others guess what it is.
Mein gott, she could kill me in seconds. Does anyone get turned on at the thought of this girl wrestling you down and then using her strength and technique superiority to smother your face with her breasts while teasing you and laughing?
please post this kind of stuff elsewhere
>be me
>be an artist
>out of ideas
>go to a new place to clear my head
>immediately fall for this qt 3.14
>she's literally everything to me, all i ever think about is her
>take care of her younger sisters, get to know her pretty well
>she's promised to marry some fucking normie chad
>go away for a while
>all i can think about is her
>come back
>fuck this, one of us has to die
>decide to kill myself
>share a really passionate moment with qt
>goodbye guys, time to die.
>Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
>The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.
>'But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that.
So why do you shit on gurrm so much? He sounds like a very wise fellow and a lot better than Tolkien
inb4 >genre fiction fags
Go read your dead greeks from a bygone age and see how much wiser you get
>>8027822
Interesting though not exactly original observations from someone who certainly knows what they're talking about, considering Martin is considered the current grandmaster of medieval fantasy.
That doesn't make him smarter or better than Tolkien. You have to remember Tolkien was writing about myth, but Martin is writing within a ghetto that was formed in a large part due to Tolkien's writings.
>>8027822
The more I see this fat faggot the more I hate him.
Tolkien wasn't a "Dark Fantasy" writer.
>>8027846
That's because there wasn't such a thing as dark fantasy, let alone fantasy, before tolkien. Before him there were folktales and myths
