Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2944. page

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>>8469430
Pls no bully.

Pls halp, guys.

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>>8469401
Have you read any of the classics?

The only way I could see you thinking this is you've read poetry written by people who aren't very good at writing poetry. Or maybe you're approaching it wrong. Poetry isn't meant to be read like prose.

What are some of the authors you've read?

Two Hangovers, by James Wright:

Number One

I slouch in bed.
Beyond the streaked trees of my window,
All groves are bare.
Locusts and poplars change to unmarried women
Sorting slate from anthracite
Between railroad ties:
The yellow-bearded winter of the depression
Is still alive somewhere, an old man
Counting his collection of bottle caps
In a tarpaper shack under the cold trees
Of my grave.

I still feel half drunk,
And all those old women beyond my window
Are hunching toward the graveyard.

Drunk, mumbling Hungarian,
The sun staggers in,
And his big stupid face pitches
Into the stove.
For two hours I have been dreaming
Of green butterflies searching for diamonds
In coal seams;
And children chasing each other for a game
Through the hills of fresh graves.
But the sun has come home drunk from the sea,
And a sparrow outside
Sings of the Hanna Coal Co. and the dead moon.
The filaments of cold light bulbs tremble
In music like delicate birds.
Ah, turn it off.


Number Two:

I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again

In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.

>>8469411
>Or maybe you're approaching it wrong
Mind explaining how I should approach it, all I know is that you should read it aloud.
>What are some of the authors you've read?
I skimmed pretty much every /lit/core from homer to ezra

>>8469371
Britannica's Great Books 54 volume set (complete)
Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica;

The 54 volumes are:
1) The Great Conversation;
2) The Great Ideas I;
3) The Great Ideas II;
4) Homer;
5) Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes;
6) Herodotus, Thucydides;
7) Plato;
8 & 9) Aristotle I & II;
10) Hippocrates, Galen;
11) Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus;
12) Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius;
13) Virgil;
14) Plutarch;
15) Tacitus;
16) Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler;
17) Plotinus;
18) Augustine;
19-20) Thomas Aquinas I/II;
21) Dante;
22) Chaucer;
23) Machiavelli, Hobbes;
24) Rabelais;
25) Montaigne;
26 & 27) Shakespeare;
28) Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey;
29) Cervantes;
30) Francis Bacon;
31) Descartes, Spinoza;
32) Milton;
33) Pascal;
34) Newton, Huygens;
35) Locke, Berkeley, Hume;
36) Swift, Sterne; 37) Fielding;
38) Montesquieu, Rousseau;
39) Adam Smith;
40 & 41) Gibbon I & II;
42) Kant;
43) American State Papers, The Federalist, JS Mill;
44) Boswell;
45) Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday;
46) Hegel;
47) Goethe;
48) Melville;
49) Darwin;
50) Marx, Engels;
51) Tolstoy;
52) Dostoevsky;
53) William James;
54) Freud.

>>8469383
General patrician-core?

>>8469420
You're welcome, fuck off back to /mu/ or /fa/, and come back when you've read them.

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>>8469352
I think a lot about what he would have written if he had lived longer. I once heard it said he was moving from an obsession with Dostoevsky (whose influence can obviously be seen in his early work) and reading a great deal more Tolstoy. I don't know how true that was, but there is the stereotype of Dostoevsky being a "young man's" writer and that we move onto Tolstoy with time (a simplification, which nevertheless contains elements of truth).

As it stands I can't rank him as a great novelist, but for some reason, I get the feeling that, if he had lived longer, and really assimilated the messages of Tolstoy, using him as inspiration in same way he used Dosto, then he would have produced a truly great novel, one undeniably up there with the 20th century greats, and would have founded a stream of literature, which set itself apart by lacking the teenage elements of Dosto (the obsession with nihilism, the constant pervasive sense of drama(Dosto was the greatest playwright never to have written a play)), which plague his earlier work, and following instead the Tolstoyan model.

Instead, the 20th century became a Dostoyevskyan century, every work a lesser fragmentation of his Brothers Karamazov (Not that this is at all dismissive; it's a wonderful book), populated by exaggerated psychology, an unfounded distaste for naturalism, and a subtle conservatism (present even among the most left-wing writers of the modern and post-modern tradition) which reveals itself in the post-modern suspicion of "ideology" and "ideologues".

The death of Albert Camus came too early. As with Keats and Shelley, when we read his work, what is far more dominant than the actual work which stands before us is the tragic sense, which pervades his corpus, of what could have been.

>>8469352
>>8469364
Time is a flat circle.

>>8469367
All circles are flat dumbass

y'see, that's the thing about reading

you're supposed to find out for yourself

>>8469337
>>8469335
This. Do people on 4chan really have no opinions of their own?

>>8469337
>>8469385
you guys, it's a hilarious meme, don't you understand?
the op is satirically skewering the traditional groupthing of this site, drawing attention to the way we tend to assume the opinions of others as our own, whilst also hoping to start an irreverent but possibly fruitful conversation about the book in question they've just read

That's because you're a sheeple, your mind and body just go with the constant stream of advertisement, stupid thoughts and cheap entertainment. You probably can't focus on something for more than 5 seconds.

You don't even realize this because for you, your life is playing on semi-automatic. Do a step backwards and evaluate what the fuck you are doing. If you can't focus on books then something is honestly wrong with you and i'm worried.

You have to build up patience. Keep reading, keep at it- even if you have to re-read a sentence, paragraph, or page more than once. Start (pls no bully) with books that you enjoy, that don't feel like as much of a chore to read. That's how you build patience, that's how you become a better reader, imho. Think of your brain like an athlete thinks of their quads.

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>>8469230
>tfw you don't have the patience to build up patience

fug

one of the GOATs

was really hoping he'd nab a nobel :|

>>8469207
I think the only reason he wrote was to show off,
he's unbearable.

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>>8469217
>he wrote to show off
be that as it may, the books were generally quite a ride.

>>8469105
bump

>anglo-saxon dudebro
>good

Pick one.

Haven't read Farewell, but that's a great novel anyway. Read it op.

>>8469096

Thesaurus is useful in filling your gaps of certain sphere of knowledge. Architecture, for instance. But saturation of your text with witty words has no value.

>>8469127
>this

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It's usually associated with filler

Assuming youre talking about the arguments themselves and not the charisma or personality of the speaker, a basic Systemic Logic textbook is a good place to start.

>>8469051
Classical rhetoric for the modern student

>>8469051
You'll have to talk to people :^(

Oh yes, ""My friend"" you absolutely didn't wrote it yourself.

>>8469053
Ha, ha! I swear it's true.

But really, it doesn't make a difference, I'm still looking for fantasy advice either way.

One thing I’m unsure about is the amount of combat scenes in his novel. He reads a lot of fantasy so I feel like this must be normal with fantasy stories. The fight scenes are well written, but still stood out to me.

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>>8468893
These are the easy reads you should have read in high school. Only a few of them are representative of more involved literature so they're in a middling spot which may be underwhelming for someone who wants more, or boring to someone who just wants shlock.

>>8468945
>should have read in high school
I'm not from an english-speaking country, no such thing as book assignments in my time.

>>8468954
>no such thing as book assignments
so what, did you just learn how to suck each others cocks or something?

>>8468843

I have tried so many times to read her, tried so many different ways in, and every time, i was stopped cold by the first line.

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What was her problem?

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
Every one is always busy with it, no one of them then ever want to know it that every one looks like some one else and they see it. Mostly every one dislikes to hear it. It is very important to me to always know it, to always see it which one looks like others and to tell it. I write for myself and strangers. I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated. There are some who like it that I know they are like many others and repeat it, there are many who never can really like it.
There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it. This is now the history of the way some of them are it.
I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it. At least they mostly do not like it that every one is of a kind of men and women and I see it. I love it and I write it.
I want readers so strangers must do it. Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that every one is a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am seeing their repeating. Always more and more I love repeating, it may be irritating to hear from them but always more and more I love it of them. More and more I love it of them, the being in them, the mixing in them, the repeating in them, the deciding the kind of them every one is who has human being.
This is now a little of what I love and how I write it. Later there will be much more of it.

If you have android, buy Moon Reader Pro app for I think 2 dollars. You can customize it so good that it will actually be better than an e-reader. It also has options to tell you how many % you're at and how many time is left if you desire so. Margins, font, font spacing, background, colors, everything you can set. There is absolutely no need to get an e-reader if you have a decent smartphone. None.

>>8468844
You can do the same on e-readers plus e-ink is far easier on the eyes

>>8468858
Yeah but one is free, the other is not. Also if you're worried about easiness on eyes, you can download Twilight app, It blocks blue light and you can dim it to your liking, set it to black background white text yadda yadda.

>>8468809
Fuck off Cliff We're not gonna donate to your patreon

>>8468817
OP here.

Who's Cliff?

>>8468830
Nice try.