Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 600. page

Hanging there in the starless night, it boasts of a world known but unseen; A mirror to the light of day, so that the stars of man know the brevity of their days.

Distilled dental grade anesthetic right there.

>wrote this five/six years ago
>tfw it was the last thing I wrote
Here you guise go:
(1/2)

“It shines when it rains and the sun knows nothing about it,” the grey man said gaily in his chair. “The big fire up in the sky is one of those guys whose whole prerogative is to lie in ignorance, you see. Not that he isn’t happy to be a star on-and-off the red carpet, ohnono, but the fact remains that he’s oblivious to the joys of the wet.”
Now you and me,” he leaned through the somber gleam of the roaring fire, “know how it is in reality.” He took a puff on his self-rolled cig and looked deep into the eyes of the young man on the other side of the richly furnished room. He exhaled almost as deeply and contentedly as he had inhaled. The smoke seemed to fly away on wings of eagles. He spoke again. “The rain is life, dear brother, pure unadulterated life which is the blood and breath of every living thing. Even the sun takes part in its elegance, ‘though he knows it not. She—the rain, I mean—seems to be in an unwilling sibling rivalry with her brother, the dry, cursed sun.”
Oscar looked at his friend, so curious was he in his funeral-like suit. Martin was at least twice the younger man’s age, at least he looked it, though you couldn’t be able to tell with his eyes, those eyes that were brighter than the sun it seemed and sparkled even more than his love, the rain, oh Good Lord that dear mistress of his, the Rain. It drummed on the far-off-above roof even now, speckling it rapidly and heavily and very tribal-like, oh yes! it was hypnotizing oh so it was. Martin was also twice of size as Oscar, who in turn was heavier and fatter than his thin waist deceived. Oscar was like one of those stars that are the size of a reasonably-sized bowling ball but which contain as much matter as a small galaxy, boom! there it goes, some day he’ll become even bigger than his starry-eyed friend. But for now, no.
Oscar squawked contentedly, the fire betwixt him and his companion dying down now from a heavenly shadow-banishing power to a thing that turned the gargantuan room into a flickering red-orange-and-darkcorners chamber.

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Come on, don't tell you faggots don't find this stuff interesting.

>>9766582
What is this book about anyways?

>>9766586
Peyote and Mesoamerican philosophy/mysticism basically.

>>9766406
I don't understand the point of just reading to re affirm your bias but not reading opposing viewpoints. You will never convince anyone by doing this

Id read most of them, except for mein kampf which is crap

>>9766408
everyone else is wrong. Molyneux told me so

>Miami University
>Lawyer (please fucking kill me)
>The Brothers Karamazov

fuck off I'm not giving you my data for free you data collection agency shill

>>9766175
Is this a joke

All livings things on this world are alive, and thus deserve special attention.

>Everything you accomplish is a step closer to the best possible you
>When conflict arises, be the voice of reason and avoid it

We all end up looking like the pills we take

>see superscript for a footnote
>find the page
>the footnote is 30 pages long

>there are no chapters
>there are no divisions
>it's 200 pages of non-interrupted text

>start reading a new sentence in Proust's A la Recherche
>peek ahead to see how many pages it is
>40 pages

Raping ronald reagan

>>9784843
Gadzooks

>>9784850
Is the work political or erotic?

>>9784634

on my laptop*

>>9784634
How the fuck can you read a book on an internet capable device?

>>9784634
it's just you

Haven't seen you in a while. What is the Münchhausen trilemma based on, by the way?

>>9783940
Literally wikipedia it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

>>9783942
Which of these three is the trilemma based on? What is its claim to truth?

The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other
The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts

>>9782813
I'll let you know, going to have to think about it

Read it like a year ago and loved it but haven't read up any more Dick.

Any suggestions, I have flow my tears the policeman said if that's rated amongst you lot?

>>9782837
Read Ubik

>>9782796
Same. I just smoke.
>that image
>super shitty movie

>>9782796
Start making notes where you analyse the texts and the themes of the literature you're reading. Like written notes. Hand written.

Really get into it, and keep checking old notes in spare time to reminisce at how much of a retard you were when you wrote the notes initially and how much you've grown.

>>9782830

>image

Picked it cause I read from my kindle and that's frequently a face I make in frustration.

all thats different is instead of endless kafka and camus threads we have endless youtube memes and off topic shit

>>9782747
Bring back the kafka and camus, I say

>>9782753

they'll be back in september when all the high schoolers get their assigned reading lists and come here to try to get us to do their homework for them

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>>9782207
No lol. Paperbacks are far better and intimate than ebooks.

Here's a dude speaking on it
https://youtu.be/XNWE17GqibI

But memes aside. Physical books have aesthetics that ebooks can't even come close for comparison.

>>9782207
Reading is reading, in that there is little to no difference.

It doesn't evoke the same sensation and mentality but I believe this is more due to familiarity and nostalgia than anything else. If you read your whole life, especially in child hood, you have a lot of things associated with it. So when you try to shift to ebooks, you are lacking a chunk of that.

>>9782207
un no because one is on an electronic device and the other is on a fucking book

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THE MOTIVATION:

I’m a natural reader, and I used to read voraciously. It's in my blood to read, so I'm glad that I'm getting back into it after a long lapse. Over the years of browsing /his/, /lit/, /sci/, Reddit, and various other podcasts and forums, I’ve accumulated a vast and convoluted list of book recommendations from all over the place. There are so many books that I've wanted to read, so many books that I started and never finished, and so many charts that I've saved, that the sheer amount of choice is killing me. I know that I HAVE to stop worrying about “getting it right” and that I HAVE to stop worry about what I might miss, so I’ve made a commitment to just start reading: 1) /lit/’s starter kit, 2) a few major-related textbooks, and 3) a good philosophy anthology.

End of story, right? Wrong. I don’t know what to do with my old book wish list. I can’t let it go out of my sense of autism, or maybe I should call it obsession or hoarding. Maybe I should just delete the list, but I’m afraid of forgetting to cover the works on it. And they're all choices that I value a lot, like Faulkner, Stirner, Engels, Girard, Lasch, Hayek, Deleuze, Hollecbecq, Morrison, Spengler, Rorty, Rawls, etc., that I just don't want to throw all the recommendations into the trash and start anew. And even if I work organically towards these books and rediscover them anyway, how am I going to keep track of them all, especially when I move out of college? I can’t keep kicking the can down the road, because I know it will bother me later.

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THE PROBLEM:

So how do we start organizing this giant mess? I figured that I might as well I tried organizing my books and my book wishlist by academic field/methodology. Formal sciences, natural sciences, cognitive sciences, social sciences, humanities, and languages... should work, right? Wrong. This proved to be an enormous hassle because there's no clean way to categorize history, since it can be either like humanities or like social science; there's no clean way to categorize study of the mind between social science and natural science; there's no clean way to categorize philosophy at all since outside your core Plato -> Aristotle -> Descartes -> Kant -> etc. track because philosophy has commentary about everything, etc. Also, trying to figure out why cultural anthropologies, social histories, etc., would be classified so differently from another was mind-bendingly annoying.

I then wondered whether I should start categorizing books by MATTER and not by SUBJECT, because then you can see various perspectives on how minds work and allow multiple disciplines to inform one another. Formal systems, natural world, cognition, individuals & societies, arts & humanities, and finally "the great ideas" for philosophy that is for it's own sake and not, let's say, a commentary on the mind or language. Brilliant, right? Except nobody organizes anything like that apparently, neither in academic booklists nor departments, so every organization attempt I make looks like it was written by an utter hack who couldn't decide when to get a solid grounding on anything (sounds like me), and no expert seems to think that it's a good idea for some reason.

AND THEN there's the whole idea of categorizing books by whether they're introductions to a field or if they cover breadth and depth within a field, since you don't want to start reading about groundbreaking or important yet tangential works in philosophy without a grounding in the basics first, etc., that makes organizing a book wishlist even more infuriating. Having some random book stacked next to a formative textbook or classic is annoying. Maybe that’s a sign that some of those books are unworthy anyway. Don't forget, I haven't even gotten started on organizing the various works of non-fiction that are just about "ideas" that can't be readily classified in any section, like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens, or the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and I don't even want to think about how that will happen.

Here's a protip to make you into a better person: stop being a fucking narcissist. Writing about yourself for 5 fucking posts isn't healthy.

I wouldn't recommend it normally since it's just something that repeats the source material, but Hamilton's Mythology might be just what you're looking for. Also, you plan on explaining to your daughter at bedtime what rape is?

Get the Robert Graves all-in-one collection. That's what I was read as a kid. There are kid's retellings out there, depends on how old she is I suppose. Go for the originals and best.
>inb4 Montaigne joking with his father in Greek and Latin at the age of 4.

>>9782034
>Also, you plan on explaining to your daughter at bedtime what rape is?
and then zeus forced europa to make babies with him - done