Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 749. page
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Just watched the movie
It's stupid, violent, anarchist and rebel, the perfect edgy teenager combo
Is the book better or is it as bad as the movie?
>>7844534
Book is fairly similar. It could even be a little more "edgy" since the girls he picks up at the record shop are 14 or so. It's been a while since I've read it though.
I don't feel the same way about the movie though. The second half is a little slower/drawn out.
>>7844534
You have to see the movie in the context of the time that it came out, not watching it a decade after Irreversible came out.
>>7844534
You couldn't read it so it doesn't matter.
Have you all read any of Peter Sotos' work? Is it any good?
>>7843772
>Peter Sotos
Literally, who?
Please go, Peter. Please go.
>>7843779
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sotos
>>7843781
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sotos
I say again, literally who?
Please go, Peter. Please go.
Greetings /lit/, italianfag here.
Name me all the best English/American books that you think should be read in their original language by non-native English speakers.
Please, don't recommend anything that could be too complex or difficult to understand for me (i.e James Joyce). My English skills are quite good, but not enough.
Jude the Obscure
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Christmas Carol
Blood Meridian
Lolita
American Pastoral
The Waste Land by Eliot
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Probably Orwell and Huxley
Romeo and Juliet/Othello/Hamlet
Frankenstein
Moby Dick
Scarlet Letter
Heart of Darkness
Kim
Lord of the Flies
In Cold Blood
The Catcher in the Rye
The Bell Jar
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
Churchill's History of the English Speaking People
No particular order and off the top of my head
In my opinion most of the works that absolutely must be read in english are the most difficult to understand. Shakespeare is lauded as having some of the absolute best use of sound, but his writing is archaic and uses some very advanced vocabulary. You mentioned Joyce, who is the same way.
On the other hand you have writers like Hemingway or McCarthy who write very well and could most likely be understood by you, but probably don't lose too much in translation either. Those two would be good authors to work through for you though. Add some Vonnegut too -- he gets shit on for being simplistic and high school-tier, but he tells some good stories and writes in a unique way that might not translate well. I find his short story collections better than his novels for the most part.
Have you ever read shakespeare? If you don't mind keeping a dictionary nearby you might be able to handle him, and it'd be very worth it.
>>7843058
Also forgot to mention Moby Dick. One of the best works ever written in English. Melville uses some large words but 1) the actual outline of the story isn't nearly as confusing as something like Joyce and 2) many of the stranger words are specific nautical terms that modern english speakers wouldn't understand without looking them up either.
is Pushkin better than Dostoyevski?
pushkin's prose fiction is horrible. his plays are okay. his poetry (barring onegin) is good.
no but he is better than tolstoy
>>7842732
>>>barring onegin
Fuck off pleb
What are your thoughts on reading books that you aren't "ready" for?
I've recently been reading quite a bit of Pynchon, but haven't tackled the larger of his works.
I feel like I understand probably 70% of what I'm reading on first read-through, there's maybe 20% that requires re-reading a few times, then 10% which just doesn't sink in at all.
But this 10% which I'm not quite understanding, is to me, what makes Pynchon, Pynchon. Very long sentences with confusing prose. References to historical places,events, characters, etc.
Now I'm really enjoying what I've read, but comparatively to when I read something like Don DeLillo, I feel like I'm maybe just not quite ready to tackle Pynchon's larger works. The other thing is that I have an entire lifetime to read them, and novels like Gravity's Rainbow are typically considered 'difficult' and a test of your literary prowess.
So do you typically power through things you're not quite getting? Or is there a book or author you're waiting to tackle until you're more well-read?
Pic somewhat related
In general, don't be too much of a pedant. You have to start somewhere and you have to grow a kind of thick skin to things unknown or understood incompletely.
There's a huge irony to learning: the more you do it, the more knowledge you have, but the more aware you become of your ignorance. If you let the ignorance baffle or overwhelm you, you will not be able to handle learning.
Depends. Do you only work out by lifting weights you can lift easily, or do you try and lift the heaviest ones available on day one?
I don't think pynchon's too hard to understand desu. All writers are understandable, its the reader that needs to up their knowledge. reading should be a process of learning senpai
what happened to his wife?
this was literally the worst book ever written.
>>7846315
>using 'literally' figuratively on a lit board
Pretty brave, m8
>>7846292
she hit the road
>In Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2009), the main character Aomame spends an entire fall locked in an apartment, where the book becomes her only entertainment. Aomame's days are spent eating, sleeping, working out, staring off the balcony to the city below and the moon above, and slowly reading through Lost Time.[28]
This sounds really comfy. Has anyone read it? Is it a comfy read?
>>7844752
Never read it. I read the first 30 pages or so of Wind-Up Bird though and it was pretty decent. I just realized that 1984 and 1Q84 are pronounced the same in Japanese.
>>7844752
DONT YOU EVER READ THIS FUCKING BOOK
It's a comfy read, but some anons are upset about the lack of payoff at the end. I'm a journey-not-the-destination kind of guy, so I thought it was time well spent.
In what order do I read these guys? Chronologically straight through, or seperately?
Berkeley is pretty fun to read.
>>7844622
it depends why youre reading them, but generally chronological is nice
>>7844622
skip spinoza
"Write drunk, Edit sober"
What are your favorite go to inspiration quotes /lit/?
"When the red rivers following, take the brown road home"
"The first draft of anything is shit, unless you're a woman then all the other drafts are shit too"
>>7844092
get rich or die tryin'
also, OP is a total faggot
Examples of sentences that are (or make) statements:
"Socrates is a man."
"A triangle has three sides."
"Madrid is the capital of Spain."
Examples of sentences that are not (or do not make) statements:
"Who are you?"
"Run!"
"Greenness perambulates."
"I had one grunch but the eggplant over there."
"The King of France is wise."
"Broccoli tastes good."
"Pegasus exists."
-Wikipedia
I believe that the last 3 of "non-statements" are incorrect.
I believe they are statements.
"Pegasus exists." might be false but it does make a statement.
>>7843329
"Pegasus exists" should be a statement.
>trusting wikipedia
You need to remember that by 'statement' the anals (analytic philosophers) mean something entirely different than one would expect ordinarily. By 'statement' most of them mean a declarative sentence that has a definite truth-value (belonging to {T, F} or {1, 1/2, 0} or whatever). In this light, "Pegasus exists" bears neither of the truth-values because "Pegasus" is a non-denoting proper name, and so the sentence as a whole does not qualify as a statement.
But there is however a family of logics termed 'free' (as in 'free logic') that embraces non-denoting terms of that kind.
>>7843329
In the time it took to post this you could've just corrected the wiki.
What are some books that manage to create an effective atmosphere of overwhelming paranoia, without relying on gimmicks like weird formatting?
Gravity's Rainbow
1984
my diary desu
Ok , we are done.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japanese-ai-writes-novel-passes-first-round-nationanl-literary-prize/
>>7846630
1 9 8 4
9
8
4
> I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.
>The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.
This is actually a pretty beautiful ending
Fuck synths
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2081832-lead-ink-from-scrolls-may-unlock-library-destroyed-by-vesuvius/
>Some 800 scrolls, part of the classical world’s best-surviving library, have tantalised scholars since they were unearthed in a villa in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum in 1752. About 200 are in such a delicate state that they have never been read.
>Now physicist Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council and his colleagues have revealed lead in the ink on two Herculaneum papyri fragments held in the Institute of France in Paris.
>The presence of lead means that imaging techniques could be recalibrated to pick up the metal, something at which X-rays excel.
What do you hope are in these scrolls?
>>7846122
Ancient shitposting
>inb4 "lost knowledge"
I hope at the very least original documents and not just an iliad translation
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/23/jk_rowling_s_twitter_feed_is_ruining_everything_i_love_about_jk_rowling.html
I know the writer chosen for the article won't resonate with /lit/, but do you guys agree with the gist of it?
I mean, imagine if you got to see Pynchon or Salinger tweeting about football, politics or just general banal shit.
i love how these fucking people cannibalize their own so often
they just always need some kind of thing to be upset about.
>>7845050
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>>7845057
what?
>female character represents purity/redemption
>character represents something
>>7844305
>male protagonist takes action for no reason other than 'it advances the plot'
>each characters represents a different part of the human brain
