>What's your most loved book of all time.
>What's your most hated book of all time.
Here's your template ladies and gentlemen.
Ubik is pretty damn fucking good.
>>8874303
>GOAT cyberpunk sci-fi lit.
I fucking love it, it's better than sex.
What is the most optimistic book you can still recommend?
The Conspiracy Against The Human Race
>>8874226
>What is the most optimistic book you can still recommend?
Anything by Derrick Jensen or Ted Kaczinsky.
Vicar of Wakefield
The only merit of Orwell's work is its political relevance.
His writing is atrocious
>>8874179
This isnt false
On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I
decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the
dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay,
of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping
round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs
and mean grievances. The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is
the way they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling
that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the
same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker’s self-pitying talk–always the
same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine
of ’It does seem ’ard, don’t it now?’–revolted me even more than her habit of
wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people
like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For
they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic
by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the
civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism
has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered
into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo,
the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their
pockets; and this is where it all led –to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens
with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It
is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell
them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to
stay there too long.
Mostly agreed, but read some of his essays, they're not bad. Killing An Elephant and A Hanging.
Is there any good book regarding martial arts ? Not anything fancy, just a book that accurately describes techniques, training methods and the ideal mindset for a certain martial art.
James Joyce has a good book on marital farts
The History of Boxing
I don't remember who's the author though
The Book of Five Rings
Post /lit/ feels
>when you can see you've passed the halfway point of a book and you know the ride will be coming to an end quicker than it took to get there.
>>8874126
>When you see you still have half the fucking book to read and you just want it to be over because every other book in your backlog starts to look more interesting and you wonder if you even enjoy reading as much as you think you do or if you just like the idea of reading.
>>8874144
t counter that feel
>when you find a book so engaging that it totally reaffirms your love of literature and you look forward every day to reading another chapter or two.
>>8874144
>when you finish the book anyway just to see how things turn out, and it ends up being a plodding anti-climactic pile of shit
Can we have a serious discussion about the New Yorker / New England / PoMo / MFA writers that seem to have been heavily promoted by the academia-media-publishing industrial complex? And how people who don't aspire to be like those people or dislike their work are denigrated?
They are awful pretentious unfunny windbags. Fuck off, I will never find Pynchon funny, ever.
One of the key problems with them is that they turn up and feel entitled to take the "royal road" to profundity / meaningfulness. You can literally tell within a few pages what they are trying to do and it is excruciating. It reads like 13 year olds. But 13 year olds are laughed at / lightly scolded and can be forgiven. These PoMo fags are heavily promoted by publishing companies and the zombie hangers on and they just keep repeating the same shit.
I think the British equivalents aren't quite as entitled but they are pretty bad.
>>8874081
What do you mean "royal road" my guy?
>>8874081
So like that unoriginal idiot Ben Lerner?
>>8874081
do you really find Pynchon unfunny or is this a cultural/political stand? Hard for me to imagine someone reading GR without finding it funny at all.
Can anyone recommend good books for a history pleb? I've taken a keen interest in politics and history recently but am struggling to find a good starting point. I'd like to begin as early as possible.
Going to need to specify an era anon.
If not Guns, Germs & Steel would at least be better than nothing.
>>8874072
Meditations
Almost 100 pages into Dialectic of Enlightenment and all they've done is prattle on about the classics.
I 'get' the connection they're making in that early human sacrifice to the gods was man's way of manipulating the gods and such acts that try to subordinate nature to the whims of man are to form the kernal of later of enlightenment thought. But when the point of the book is to analyze how enlightenment thought eventually degenerated into a society that produced modern capitalism, totalitarianism and fascism I feel actually engaging with the world as is, i.e. drawing concrete connections as to how this happened, would be more beneficial than masturbating over the myth of Odysseus. I'm guessing it picks up in quality when he starts talking about the culture industry.
Is Minima Moralia similar to the Dialectic of Enlightenment or is it more readable?
Also when is he going to hurry up and get to the part about weaponizing trannies to destroy the white race.
Adorno is an elitist. The worst of the Frankfurt school, a hack. Read Walter Benjamin or Erich Fromm, just don't bother with Adorno...
>>8874100
Not a fan of humanism senpai
I wanted to read this book but maybe I should stop with listening to /pol/ memes
I just finished writing the first draft of my second novel. How should I celebrate? I have no friends to share this with, hence asking you guys. I'm thinking of getting blackout drunk just to say I marked the occasion.
kill yourself piece of shit
>>8874032
Congrats anon. Share a passage with us. Has your first novel had much success?
>>8874032
>>8874078
Also on the blackout drunk part, its certainly what I would do. I suggest a good bottle of rum. This one's bretty gud.
How did Dostoevski come up with the narrator's personality? That guy's thinking process is top-notch autism. Was Dosto a bit of a sperglord himself?
>>8874029
>gee how did a guy who literally got exiled to siberia figure out how alienation felt?
>>8874029
>gee how did a guy who got severely emotionally and possibly physically abused by his father in his childhood learned about bitterness, narcissism, rage, and depression
>>8874111
I feel like if that Jordan Peterson guy were to browse /lit/ this is what his shitposts would look like
Did Nietszche ever write about what to do after you become an ubermensch? I've been an ubermensch for a few days now and am feeling a bit stuck.
You eat a lot of fruit and contract syphilis.
>>8874006
Either this is a suber septic bread or a le ebin misunderstanding
in either case, go read more secondary material on nietzsche, because nobody's laughing
>>8874006
Deja vu
Just thought you should know that this is in fact a great book. Thanks for reading
>>8873990
that wasn't me.
>>8873968
This book completely fails to hold my attention for whatever reason
/lit/, we need our best and worst writers on the job. We're writing a new novel to insult and pander to YA literature. Working title: And Every Bomb Drops
The story so far:
An unnamed US president who will obviously be Trump has sent the world into catastrophic war
17 years later, our hero (who was born on the day the wars started) lives in a society in which novels are currency, and being a writer is the most highly regarded profession in the country.
Only white men are allowed to be writers, but writing in secret with the help of her aunt (she's orphaned) our young latina protagonist begins to harness her writing skills and begins to show exceptional promise.
The writers have always talked of a prophecy foretelling an author so perfect at his job, he ends the turmoil the world is in through his writing.
Our young protagonist realizes she is the writer the prophecy told of (she has a birthmark in the shape on a pen, just like in the prophecy) and has to overcome adversity to establish herself as the greatest writer in the country and save the world.
Talk and discuss the story here, write here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bm9cM9trwRjfMCBxXJM29QhtBD0yxJ_1nj36CwweFds/edit?usp=sharing
>the font of the title
fucking kek
>>8873954
why don't we just make a YA doorstopper about all our favorite classic authors except they are all teens/ early adults and somehow all exist in the same world at the same time together
>>8873954
This is gay. You should stop.
>reading fiction
>>8873936
Basically all the literature around all time that has been written is fiction
>>8873936
Poetry and fiction are read by lofty men of refinement and sensitivity. Non-fiction is read by proles who think only in terms of utility.
>>8873947
Sturgeon's law
Should i read or write more if i want to be good writer?
>>8873907
both.
>>8873907
Being a good writer is about having the right genetics more than anything else desu.
I am a triple major at a prestigious university known for its writing program. My senior dissertation is coming up, and though I sometimes write well, I'm still not 100% comfortable in always nailing the effect that I want.
My advisor (published in Harpers, NY Times, others) has told me repeatedly that reading a shitton is the most important thing to do. It's a tricky balance, but if you're as underread as I am (or hopefully, WAS at this point), reading many different books from a writer's perspective is crucial. Writing is important too, of course, but I think there is a threshold of reading that must be met first.
I'm not going to try that Malcolm Gladwell "durr 10000 hours of reading!" bullshit, because it is bullshit. But my intuition tells me to read pretty fucking voraciously until I feel comfortable talking about a solid amount of great writers-because if I can creatively talk about American lit from Dickens to Wallace, I probably have a pretty good fucking perspective on writing-and at that point, the reading:writing ratio should be changed in favor of writing. But if you're still in the stage where you read On the Road and say "Wow, I want to write a stream of consciousness novel about fucking around through America!," you gotta read more.