Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 419. page

>>9860429
>In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, there's a verse that says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day". Well Shakespeare wanted to say that the person in question is "mediocre

Are you trolling or just retarded?
He's not saying the person is mediocre he's using a summer day to talk about how lovely they are.

>>9860434
That is not the point. I haven't even read the song, nor do I feel competent to. If he talks about HOW lovely they are, than that means that they're not the loveliest, just mediocre lovely.

>>9860454

>I haven't even read the song

So why are you insisting on argument when you literally have no idea what you're talking about?

>>9860417
Draw a dick.

>>9860420
Thanks

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>>9860420
Pic related

I recently read Mrs Dalloway. Haven't read Ulysses, but litfags seem to think that Woolf made a cheap rip-off. Either way, I enjoyed the book, although there was something overly tedious in every fucking paragraph. Maybe Woolf just wanted to make a stream of consciousness prose for underqualified fags.

The Iliad references though... you don't even know they're references.

Just dont pay attention to the authors name.

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>>9859637
>mfw reading cook books

>>9859637
>unable to ask the clerks about classics or a theme you like then follow their suggestions.

If you can crack a joke to the clerk you can easily ask for fuckin help mate.

Fucking Christ, anon.

>>9859598
>>9859598
either for show or for having read

>>9859598
to find. why do you read? the same. that which the two seek differs only.

kill you're self

>>9859303
JR

>>9859303
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Molière's complete works
Terence's complete works
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Voltaire's short stories

A confederacy of dunces.
Easily the smartest comedy I've ever read and you'll be smirking at how smart you are for getting the obscure references.

bad samaritans is such a piece of shit, that guy makes so many humblebrag excuses for korean success, meanwhile if you're known any koreans you know that are maniacally hardworkers, like calvinist tier workaholic mother fuckers, some go to school, but many more start businesses and work like dogs, so his "the reason korean is more successful than africa is just luck and racism lol" is such bullshit and quite frankly it's harmful to lie to african and african-american people that koreans don't work hard and their high incomes and wealth are just random, be honest and tell people how you achieved success so they can follow your path, don't be a modest little bitch and pretend you didn't work hard

>>9858731
I work with koreans and it is true they can work hard, probably that 2 years of military service that does it.
But would the countries success overall have nothing at all to do with policies of pursuing internal development and industrialization and economic protectionism for a long time - something Africa has been denied? Which is the point of the book.

>>9858750
africa has been free from colonialism for the same amount of time as korea, so that's bullshit, there's nothing stopping africans from practicing protectionism and internal development, they're just corrupt and lazy

Nobody says it, but let's be honest. The Pentateuch is some crazy shit, and Moses was just a cult-leader who used God as an excuse to commit genocide and appropriate land. It's better to ignore that part of the Bible. The rest of the OT is solid, though I would argue none of it should properly be placed in a single tome with the New Testament. And I say this as a Christian.

There is no way to make sense of these sorts of passages and still claim that the Old Testament is in any way compatible with modern morality.

The only answer is that millennia ago, people (surprise) did fucked up things like stone people as ritualistic and functional exercises in the maintenance of a punitive, disciplinary social order.

It has literally nothing to do with any sort of transcendent morality or theory of the cosmos. If it did, christians today would say "yup it's pretty simple, god says stone people so we gotta do it"

The fact that they don't signals that they have a separate source of authority (modern morality, common sense, whatever) that trumps the Bible, or at least the Old Testament. That's at least a tacit recognition that the Bible isn't actually the word of God.

Isn't the idea that "turn the other cheek" is making the law stricter, rather than revising it, by limiting how you can punish people?
>t.read Mathew once

Because Orwell wrote literary fiction and Rand wrote """"philosophical fiction"""" accompanied by volumes of """"philosophy"""" so uninformed and ridiculous that she's been roasted by other philospohers in decades worth of footnotes and parantheticals

>>9858394
Because Ayn Rand is a Jewish woman and we live an antisemitic patriarchal society

>>9858394

It's pretty easy to agree with "fascism is bad." Very few people agree with Rand's ideology, and reading 1000 pages of an ideology you don't agree with is not something most people would enjoy doing.

First for Blindsight

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I thought I should read something more contemporary than usual, so I picked up Jim Butcher's Storm Front (2000) from a bargain bin. This is the first book of his popular Dresden Files series, an urban fantasy that combines elements of detective fiction, police procedurals and magic. The protag is a practicing wizard for hire in modern day rain-soaked Chicago; an impoverished and dishevilled technophobe with a dark history who feels the weight of the world upon him. In this book, a routine missing husband job and a gruesome murder case become entwined, and the unfortunate protag is soon embroiled with a mafia boss, demons, a vampiress, a rival wizard, an increasingly impatient police, and the wroth of the 'White Council' who govern magic.

The book is well plotted; Butcher deftly orders a narrative involving many conflicting parties and interests in a coherent way, while giving us entertaining action sequences, twists, and lighter comic moments. The prose is written in a fast-paced first person POV with much dialogue, but for my taste there are too many hackneyed Die Hard-esque quips, Americanisms ('gee', 'you have got to be kidding me'), plot recaps, and extended passages of cogitation. Furthermore, the characterisation is thin, mostly constructed from cliches. Even so, this is a competently done piece of frivolity, something I would have enjoyed a lot more when I was younger. Now, though, I doubt I will continue with the series unless it appears under my nose in another bargain bin. So I will have to diverge from the opinion of best-selling author Patrick Rothfuss, who lavished five stars at Goodreads, and merely award Storm Front a lukewarm 2/5 rating.

>>9858295
Storm Front is much worse than the next books. It gets going for real in book 3.

Attention span of modern millennials, folks.

>>9858036
>t. le epin troll who unironically is jerking off reading it
try harder

>>9858044
>can't detect bait

Critics of millennials, folks

major depressive disorder

>>9857803
your pic related

>on the night on April 1, 1876, Mainländer hanged himself in his residence in Offenbach, using a pile of copies of The Philosophy of Redemption (which had arrived the previous day from his publisher) as a platform

/lit/ as fuck

His viewpoint has historically been that Jews are probably the biggest contributors to problems in the West but this is caused by them being suckups to the establishment and not due to any inherent subversiveness in Jewish genetics. He may be changing his view on this though, not sure.

>>9857745
hes a retard

sage

>>9857745
He seems to question their 'protected status' as an effect of the holocaust, when plenty of other races who have suffered genocide are not given that privilege.

He doesn't buy into any /pol/-tier conspiracy theories about the jews running the world.

>>9857645
>Relevant to ideas/issues that have been talked about since the Beginning
pure ideology

>>9858567
>pure ideology
Right. Naive, Catholic, Strong. Mortimer Adler was quite a character- the type the United States of America no longer produces. Sadly.

>>9857645
My school library had a full set of these. Depressing how they lay completely untouched year after year. The shock on the librarian's face when I asked if I could take out the Aristotle.

>>9857596
I'm trying to read him but, as a brainlet, most of the real knowledge goes over my head. I can read page after page and know the denotations of the words I'm reading and understand the sentence, but the "real meaning" of what he's writing escapes me, if that makes any sense. pls help

Easy answer: because he can be difficult to read correctly. Especially your bit from Zarathustra there - it requires a familiarity with his philosophical tradition that many (especially plebs) don't have. In fact, only a couple pages away from his bit about the metamorphoses, he explicitly states that widespread literacy devalues writing and that he's basically trying to be obtuse. Not that I think he's wrong to do so, but there you go.

That said, I totally agree with the sentiment. Uncle Freddy really can change your life.

>>9857596
where should I start then?