Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 358. page

>>9907507
>Catch-22
>Realism
The whole point of Catch-22 is to portray the funny, surrealist antics of shoving horseapples in your cheeks and selling chocolate-coated cotton with rape and Snowden bleeding to death on the inside of the B-24 in horrifying detail.

Anyway, try Anthony Burgess's stuff which isn't A Clockwork Orange, like Time for a Tiger or Honey for the Bears. Alternately, Kingsley Amis (Stanley and the Women being my favorite) or Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust being my favorite).

>>9907516

You guys should try Paradise Lost for a nice dose of wartime absurdity. My favorite part was when Satan and his crew were rolling in a fiery gulf of perdition for nine days and nights. Absolutely btfo by God.

>>9907507
Catch-22 was fucking garbage. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

>>9907461
I'm a white man, I don't give a shit what you think, cuck. I'm proud of my heritage and convictions

>>9907461
Couldn't I just read J R?

>>9907461
>J R
Which Harry Potter book did she write?

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

>>9907453
Honestly, a lot of people on here have a hate on for Lovecraft. You'll get a lot of people responding to this thread with things like "hurr durr, y u read HP" and "blah blah, he was an aspie with a terrible writing style, nothing deep to say, and no understanding of human nature" etc. Then you'll also get the people who chirp him based on his social life, based on his prejudices, based on his looks, etc. At the end of the day, it is obviously up to you what you take from all this. But if I could tell you one thing that I think you should take from it, it is this: Lovecraft might be an autist, his prose style might be shit, but at the end of the day, shit readers like shit writers, autists like autists. Ultimately, he was a dud, and will not even outlast Steven King.

r.w. chambers' "the king in yellow" influenced lovecraft and the rest of the weird fiction authors.

"the hounds of tindalos" was a nice little weird story by someone or other

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>>9907414
Pretty embarrassing when all your dystopian critiques of socialism were done better by an actual Socialist

>>9907437
Orwell did not go at it from an incentive perspective

>>9907437
Too bad he never wrote anything as powerful as Anthem.

>>9907384
>still buying into the academia meme

Read Culture of Critique by McDonald if you want some insight into why academia is a bolshevik sham

>>9907387
Im in too deep, i literally need one more class to finish my bachelors and then im out.

then ill try to do something not worthless

>>9907387
Oh, its the I learned world history through ms-paint pics made by stormfags on /pol/ guy

I've never read it but Jared Diamond has been posted enough that I know he's apparently very Eurocentric in his thinking and deliberately ignores non-western cultures and civilizations unless he's using them to compare to the "superior" western civilizations.

>>9907357
>what other anthropological theories counter this?
Try Kevin McDonald's Culture of Critique series, where he proves that Guns germans and steel is a jewish lie

>>9907357
It's written by a Jew so it's full of environmental determinist distortions and ignores important aspects of race. West Hunter has been taking this book apart recently if you're looking for criticism.

>Jared Diamond notices that early development of complex civilizations had ongoing consequences: peoples that developed such things way later or not at all continue to do poorly today, even if they encountered Western technology and technologists several hundred years ago. “We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place.” p 25 ” Yes, the transistor, invented at Bell Labs in the eastern United States in 1947, leapt 8,000 miles to launch an electronics industry in Japan – but it did not make the shorter leap to found new industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by peoples from those centers. Unlike Zaire or Paraguay, Japan and the other new powers were able to exploit the transistor quickly because their populations already had a long history of literacy, metal machinery, and centralized government. The world’s two earliest centers of food production, the Fertile Crescent and China, still dominate the modern world, either through their immediate successor states (modern China) or through states situated in neighboring regions influenced early by those two centers (Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Europe), or through states repopulated or ruled by their overseas emigrants (the United States, Australia, Brazil). Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans remain dim. The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us.” p 417.

>Some economists have noticed this same pattern: Was the Wealth of Nations determined in 1000 BC?

>This is not what his overall theory would lead us to expect. If people in New Guinea or the Mato Grosso are smarter than Europeans or east Asians, or even just the same, why can’t they adopt (and then go on to advance) new technologies? Yet they haven’t. Why aren’t people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo building particle accelerators? Even if they’re too broke right now, they could be sending theorists, mathematicians and physicists, off to CERN. All they need is chalk. Yet they don’t. Neither does the African diaspora.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/

Nice blog

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>>9907344

No books but man I got stories.

>around a year ago, fag cousins try to make me look like an idiot thinking they're throwing jokes over my head
>they fail to realize I'm low key playing PWAA and Prison Manager like retards as they play FO4

>today, they don't talk to me because I ruined their lives legally

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>>9907348

well that escalated quickly

>>9907331
For me, personally, it has to be the Culture of Critique Series by Kevin McDonald

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>>9907331

The László Krasznahorkai books from the Serpent's Tail editions have a minimalist design that is pleasing to look at.

>>9907331
For me it's my diary desu

>>9907306
Neither. Just read The Old Testament and stop there.

>>9907306
They're both useless, you can throw them in the trash

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>>9907306

>English Standard Version

>>9907215
Robertson Davies' What's bred in the Bone- or why not the entire Cornish Trilogy? Clearly, youve got the time.

John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz

>>9907215
also
>new england
>neighbours
nice try guy

You stole my 2d koala, bitch!

>>9907170
>get girlfriend
>get job
>do some athletic shit
>ALSO have higher-brow intellectual and aesthetic interests
>...?
>Profit
>...?
>AND prophet

>>9907184
>just do it all B R O energy and motivation is limitless and you have more than 24 hours daily just D O I T

>>9907109
Despite that it's fairly base and plebian by /lit/'s standards, Bad Behaviour, by Mary Gaitskill, cuts deep into dysfunctional relationships in 80s America, with grace, power and depth that I've not seen anywhere else.
Also: depictions of BDSM relationships that do not glorify or demonize.

The characters in Dubliners are more real than most people I know.

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Okie, imma hit you up with pic related.

I was 15 at the time, getting into reading and it's what we used at school. It's not an exhaustive collection, but it was one that was my first exposure to different cultures and worldviews in a literary way. Every story felt fresh and magical in their own way, even if they're mundane, and each was presented with a strong identity and character, and so I easily remembered which was which. It's silly, but I just love these little stories. You've got people from Thailand, China, the US, Botswana, South Africa, Russia. I wouldn't have thought about world literature unless that was put in front of me at school.

It did what the title says - opened worlds to me.

I kinda compare it to The Crying of Lot 49 but really long. If you are not getting the paranoia and the ways in which the plot slowly works itself on seemingly random everyday events like suspicious last names, random occult references, secret rituals

>>9906914
Somewhat, yes, but it's still largely made of historical digressions and anecdotes about Belbo's childhood

>>9906914
The first time I tried I stopped about 100 pages in.
The next time I finished it. The ending is really great. Keep at it. Let all the historical stuff you don't understand just wash over you, don't sweat the small stuff.

>>9906889
If you understand the individual fragments not understanding the whooe shouldn't be a problem. After all, it is a book of fragments, understandings of the whole should come naturally and intuitively.
However, you can sum up Pessoa with 'I wish I was aware of my unawareness' and the Book of Disquiet with 'I wish an impossible dream was true'.

>>9906889
I really want to read this book but I'm worried about picking the wrong edition. Not only does the translation need to be good, but it also requires a good editor to faithfully curate a bunch of notes left in Pessoa's trunk and turn them into a novel. What's the best edition?

I didn't even know there was supposed to be a bigger picture, I just like when he roasts people.

>>9906878
a story well-told

>>9906878
a good story well told

>>9906915
Cheater.