Lolita: Is the book worth reading? I got through the first few chapters, but I decided to just watch the movie and enjoyed it, and I know the book is different (I haven't committed to a long length novel like this in a long ass time.)
>>9338675
>long length novel
How long is your copy?
What was the last part you read before you stopped?
It's dope, you should read it, but if you have to force yourself to you wont enjoy it.
Why are you asking us? You obviously don't want to read it. Mark Twain said that a classic is a book that everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read. So you need to ask yourself, is there anything in "having read" this book that will be worth the torment of reading it?
Or you could listen to it. Jeremy Irons nails it as Humbert Humbert.
the films suck.
Why is it deemed necessary to read Dante?
Dante you know? He'sa Italiano! Mama mia!
eh, don't
You have to be literate.
what is /lit/'s top books philosophy? What is your personal philosophy?
>>9338619
my diary desu
>>9338619
my diary desu
wu-wei
In the case of Illiad and Odyssey, and the other epic poems, is it a better idea to listen to the audiobook.
They were literally made to be listened.
Of course, the best would be to listen to them in ancient greek:
https://youtu.be/MOvVWiDsPWQ?t=51s
But still, isn it a good idea anyway?
>>9338465
that seems like a bad idea. there are no footnotes in audiobooks, Unless you have a strong understanding of bronze age history, you'd be missing a lot of content
>>9338494
So you can just check the footnotes at home, or probably there are audiobooks with footnotes.
>>9338501
I have strong doubts about this
I've heard this is pretty good, has anybody read it? Thoughts?
okay, here'sch the thing...
>>9338456
why not read it and find out for yourself
>>9338476
because there are limited hours in a day that can be used for reading?
>>9338423
14 year old nihilism tier
id rather listen to black metal
reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeddit!
It's always met with 'dude are you for 14 lmao, fucking edgy bro xD', but I think it's a decent enough book.
It's essentially a collection of excerpts written by various meme philosophers tied together by Ligotti.
Anyone else get the bone from reading slave lit? I mean, it is shameful, but there's something about American slavery stories that is wildly arousing.
From the book:
"The spongy earth oozes into the hollows, sucking the metal plow points. “Fuck this mud,” the men mutter.
Fuck. From an Old English word meaning: to strike, to beat. Before that, in an even older language: to plow. To tear open.
The seeds are waiting.
In the sack in the shed. Or maybe safe under the entrepreneur’s high bed. The bed where he fucks his wife. Bed brought by wagon from the landing, bed bought with last year’s crop. Maybe he didn’t bring his wife. Maybe the sack is under the bed where he fucks the sixteen-year-old light-skinned girl from Maryland"
more
"This tree-turned-into-a-bush, in short, is fucked. So, too, is the soil. When the enslaved men broke it open for the entrepreneur, he fucked this dirt with them as his tool. He fucked this field. He might fuck their wives out in the woods, or in the corn when it is high. Or their daughter in the kitchen. Then the next new girl he buys at New Orleans.
But he fucks the men, too. He plants in all his hands the seeds of his dreams. In fact, he plants them all, men and women, in this place, just as he plants as those seeds. Plants, ecosystems, people strain to live their lives according to their own codes, but he twists their efforts into helixes of his own design. He takes their product, keeps it for himself. He breaks open the skin on their backs with his fucking lash, striking their lives with his power, marking them and their world with his desire."
>>9338377
shut the fuck up. keep your fetish porn to yourself. fucking creep.
>start writing
>1 hour later
>only written one paragraph
but it's the best fucking paragraph you've ever written.
"I fetched a rug (that my uncle Pisemsky had stolen from a merchant in Tashkent in the belief that it was an expensive Turkish relic, not realising that Turkish rug-weavers might well have woven epigrams from the Quran into their rugs but that they probably wouldn't have done it in Russian and they definitely wouldn't have used the Cyrillic alphabet to spell them out) and laid it out in the hallway in an attempt to keep the brackish water that still leaked from my boots off the once-expensive hallway carpet. I walked the length of the rug, then stood on the far end while I bunched up the remainder, spun it about underneath my feet while performing small jumping motions then laid it out again. It reached into the drawing room where the carpets were so worn with constant foot traffic, tobacco ash and spilled vodka that no-one (excepting perhaps Professor Chornigovsky, who rarely passed up a chance to put someone down) would comment on water stains and mildew as well. My socks squelched as I walked, as if to say see how he treats us? You'd think it was us stepped in that puddle, and on purpose!"
>>9338408
>he spends hours writing descriptions of trifling bullshit
>>9338374
this is why you write short stories or essays until you're better at transcribing your thoughts
it gets easier
In great indolence
I have been tamed
But
But I have known its name.
The jungle is the jungle same
Which I forgot
And then was tamed
But
But I have known its name.
The following is an essay i wrote for class. I took some risks in order to make sure i didn't leave out any good expressions, since he said that this essay wouldn't really be graded on strict technical points.
We live amongst a surfeit of information, from which we feel we can know little and of which we can say with certainty even less. Vast quantities of data are collected and processed by massive arrays of networked computers, collected through the smallest and largest of methods. We herald ourselves as the paragons of rationality, with our secular world view, and we place no credit in that which is without the rubber stamp of the scientific or political body of authority. Reductionist materialism, the idea that we must believe and act on nothing which cannot be comprehensively explained to the satisfaction of collective social assent, is the popular default. Consequent of peoples varying abilities to understand orders of complexity, we achieve by our domesticated egalitarianism only the lowest common denominator. Where one is shamed into admitting, ‘what can I know? What can I say?’, authority – the ultimate and most expensive luxury item - steps in to arbitrate. Society finds itself in a pitiful state between abject confusion and groveling capitulation. The conclusion we’ve arrived at is that nothing is ultimately true, reality is ultimately unknowable, we are just complex chemical automata without volition. And in this bleak cacophony, in this ‘post-truth’ age as it is called, we must rediscover the tools by which we can navigate reality with wisdom and purpose.
Through long centuries, mankind has sought to achieve liberation from the cruel constraints of nature. From plague, famine, warfare, and general suffering we have fled since the beginning of recorded history, first (and often attempting once more) to create a better world through strength, suppressing those who have caused us to suffer. As we grew more sophisticated, the Greeks began to envision philosophy and virtue as the means to a good life, which was attainable by some, but not all. Greek society operated through citizens, which owned slaves, and by application of ones capacity for thought, we could achieve an Olympian state of exaltedness. The romans forged empire with simplified precepts of morality and overcame the Greeks through mechanical might. They built structures and walls which have not to this day finished crumbling, testifying to their efforts to fly from suffering though lurid excess of wine, women, and slaughter. They too, as the Greeks before them, were stultified through the flaws of their civilization, as they grew too large for the binds of the Fasces to hold and dissipated into history. The catholic church grew upon the corpse of the roman empire, ordering society by divine enlightenment, and teaching Europe to accept order abstracted from the tribal modes.
>>9338432
The time came eventually that we began to pursue the arts of scientific investigation, and we have accomplished miracles of medicine and technology. Gross labor has been largely done away with, as hydraulics and motors render our muscular capacity unlimited. Meanwhile computers automate repetitive mental process, and do for the brain what a backhoe does for the body. We’ve invented a form of progress, a gradual glorification of egalitarianism above all else, kindness above all else. From this movement, we’ve arranged government to accomplish the goal of extricating individuals from the unfairness of life, unequal circumstance, and the hierarchy natural to human relationships. The cruel mother at whose teat we have starved and died is dead to us, and the faculties of our body and mind which grew hard and strong in her embrace have withered from neglect.
Let us define some terms in preparation for the theorem. Domestication is the process of taming and subjugating the wildness of a creature, in order to accomplish civilization. Hallucination is the experience of an imaginary reality resulting from an absence of understandable stimulation. Radicalism is the extremes of behavior that result from hallucination and lack of experience. Savagery is amoral accuracy of action which aims to achieve simple goals. Savagery requires a clear awareness of reality as it really is, but lacks sophistication in its brutality. Clarity is a perception of reality that is substantial enough to act accurately and temperately on.
>tfw you realize Aristotelian formal and final causality is true
>tfw when you realize substantial forms and real essentialism are true
>tfw you realize God exists
>>9338329
Welcome to the club buddy. Now change thyself accordingly.
>>9338329
im dumb lol explain that stuff u said in laymans termz
>reads Feser once
This fuckin guy. I swear, he comes out with a new book every couple of months, and they're all the same. Just unoriginal shit that he also has to make a shitty commercial for. So not only is he the shittiest, most unoriginal author who probably only does less than half the work it takes to write a novel, but he also is the only writer who would ever make a COMMERCIAL for this kind of shit. I fucking hate this guy with a deep passion.
What writers piss you off, /lit/?
people still watch commercials?
also Stephen King. How the actual fuck did he NOT LIKE Kubrik's The Shining??!! What is wrong with him?
>>9338324
Kubrick's Shining is not the book. It's a great movie for what it is, but it doesn't respect the spirit of what King wrote.
As for writers who annoy me, most are local ones.
>>9338359
the ones who take the best seat at the coffee shop, never apparently order anything, and work on their "novel" all day?
just ordered a copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Never read it before, anyone wanna tell me what i'm in for?
it's fuckin epic
I recently found out that it is humanity's oldest piece of literature. I'm super stoked to read it.
>>9338274
>humanity's oldest piece of literature
Does the history channel have a forum, and are they invading /lit/?
so i read this (the english translation) and i still don't really get the whole idea of absurdism. is it really as simple as believing that nothing except narcissistic hedonism matters because ultimately everyone dies?
can someone clarify this for me? i want to be as cool as meursault, but if that's actually the foundation of his belief system, it seems awfully childish
bumping for answers
>>9338165
>>9338227
>self-bumping on /lit/
One must imagine OP as happy.
It makes more sense if you read The Myth of Sisyphus first
For Camus, it basically comes down to the idea that existence itself is absurd and so the action of being and the struggle itself is the only means by which we derive any kind of satisfaction or fulfillment in the absence of logical or reasoned absolutes
Do you guys know of any other books like The Good Soldier Svejk? I've read it 3 or 4 times now and I still love it, it's funny as fugg while not beating the reader over the head with the underlying ideas
gravity's rainbow and catch 22
ps i have not the good soldier svejk or either book i reccomended
Confederacy of Dunces
Oh shit, we've had a soldier svejk bar since forever, I never knew where it originated from.
Top 5 books?
>>9338119
Of the Bible, I mean
>>9338120
I've only read the 1st five so far so
1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Deuteronomy
4. Numbers
5. DUE TABERNACLE LMAO