Have you ever started a good book, but realised that the translation is pretty bad and while not destroying the original work entirely or even making it bad, it makes it significantly worse? It happened to me with my translation of Byron's Don Juan.
>that feel when my english isn't good enough to read the original, but It's good enough to compare two fragments and notice the gap in quality
>inb4 massive pleb reading translations from fucking English out of all languages
Take some time off from reading, and intensively study literary English. Even native speakers have no idea what the fuck
>Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence
means unless they've read poetry before. Lord Byron is also a perfect example of an author who liked to write in intentionally archaic language, emulating the Faerie Queene in particular.
Your post sounds 100% native, by the way.
>>8436372
Good annotated editions for difficult works anon. That does the trick. English isn't my first language but there's no way I'm reading a translation. No reason neither.
>>8436372
same goes for aristotle in german
Is this the most entry level book of all time?
>>8436368
good one, OP
>>8436368
Literally on my desk right now
>>8436368
No I believe its this
Anything I should before I kill myself?
>>8436351
Learn to spell.
Play Umineko.
>>8436351
Man's Search for Meaning, by Franklyou have purpose
>>8436351
watch leafyishere, the popular youtube internet celebrity
Did you guys read Steven Pressfield's Nobody wants to read your shit? What did you think about it?
Also, would you guys have an epub of it?
Cliff pls go
>>8436327
I really wanted the epub though.
I don't want to read his shit.
Opinions?
>>8436312
BEE's best by a long way, good but not great. it can seem like it's got a lot of filler, but everything is there for a reason, to immerse the reader in the mind of a psychopath. it's effective at that, which makes for a sometimes disturbing reading experience, like a poor man's Lolita.
>Excited to read it after the movie
>bought it
>started reading it
>expected passages of him detailing what people are wearing
>know that there's a point to it all
>carries on into page 100
>a hundred pages of judging people by their clothes
>he scooped a black hobo's eye out(or stabbed him im not sure) and he killed a dog
May sounds cute, but gets so tiring. I admit, I watched human centipede and enjoyed the torment, but I actually cringed hard at the description of him killing the hobo.
I have wanted to figure out how to make a writing which is nothing more than playing around with words, it's difficult for me to accept that with something as, say, a drawing, you can make something which has entirely no meaning, but when you're writing something there has to be some sort of objective with what you're writing. I wish that I could find a way to make, say, abstract writings, writings which have no clear purpose but instead just play around with words, in a rather beautiful way if possible.
>being this underage
>>8436250
have you tried glossolalia?
>>8436274
>glossolalia
by who?
You have read the Summa, right /lit/? Don't tell me you skipped the greatest theological work to ever exist.not including the Holy Bible of course
I would guess that I've read more of the summa than anyone else on this board. somewhere between 40 - 60 pct of it.
I fell hard for the Dante memes.
>>8436182
Augustine > Aquinas
Augustine carried forward the Neo-Platonic tradition to Christianity that we still bask in the light of.
>>8436247
This
what are some good pieces of literature that will help me become a better man?
>>8436140
The Bible.
>>8436140
>look up philosophers that had their shit together
>read their works
it's not hard senpai
>>8436140
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the GOAT for this purpose.
A lot of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway is good for this too.
How does /lit/ manage to read so many books at a time? Is there trick/method, or do you all just have no lives?
>>8436017
i read books while iam waiting, i.e. in public transportation or in parks.
try to always have a book on side while you are waiting for someone or travelling
>>8436110
this. never get on public transport without a book, even if you're going to be reading standing up crushed between other commuters in rush hour. obviously that shouldn't be the the bulk of your reading but it trains you to use otherwise dead time.
How do i get into Philip K. Dick?
>>8435980
Unzip his pants and use lots of lubrication.
>>8435990
Don't be such a Dickhead.
>>8435980
You don't, you let the Dick into you.
>reading any Christian religious text other than the complete, infallible, and perfect word of God which is only to be found in the King James Bible
How can you plebs even justify reading any other version?
So all Christians who existed before the king James version got it wrong?
>>8435971
King James is cool. Most poetic. Also the first to give name to Lucifer after the Vulgate.
NRSV is my jam, endorsed by CS Lewis, and also the most scholarly translation.
>>8436196
What do you have against Lewis?
>“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
FUCK
>>8435931
>a condition that was invented
what?
>>8435944
He's saying that by the intelligence and will of the heart, over a period of time, a condition is invented that one experiences, which is commonly called 'love'.
>>8436047
>a condition is invented
sounds like scientifical bullshit nonetheless.
"a condition took hold of him" would sound better
by the way, who wrote this?
hey, this is only 80 pages, this won't take lo-
>>8435913
i read it in one sitting
i think you are supposed to. it gives the "life in a second" afterbook vibe
>>8435918
I don't like doing that at all, I need to contemplate what I'm reading to make sure that I'm understanding it before I go on. A lot of times when I read something I feel like I don't really understand it, so I have to re-read a paragraph multiple times, just so I feel confident in the absolute that I have fully understood what I've read and wouldn't need to go back and re-read.
>>8435922
Same here. I need to digest the prose itself or else... why not just sparknotes book, you know?
I fucking hate how time consuming it is tho. 15 pages per 1hr is fucking slow.
Apparently, Sorokin is a big name when it comes down to contemporary russian authors. He has been nominated for the Man Booker and the Nobel Prize.
I read The Ice Trilogy and I liked it, but the last 300 pages were pretty boring, as things were pretty repetitive back then.
I've heard Day of the Oprichnik is pretty good.
Which other contemporary russian authors are worth checking out? Igor Vishnevetsky?
>>8435893
Haven't personally read anything by Sorokin, but I'm hearing from all sides that he's great and also that his style is sometimes difficult to translate: styles of old russian legends, tales and stuff like that. Days of the oprichnik and Telluria are the ones I'm hearing mentioned the most: Telluria is apparently in some way using po-mo citations of Howl by Ginsberg.
From my own perspective I can tell that Sergei Lebedev is really great. He hasn't published much so far, but everything is great. He's dealing with the russian history, especially gulags, this might sound boring, but his writing skills are great. He spend some time in taiga, like a geologoist etc. and it can be seen. Overall the books read like if you were watching Tarkovsky's movie, bnut with more detective plot; the disintegration of borders between reality/present time and memories/past times.
Not that new, but another name is that of Leonid Tsypkin: he didn't write much, some short stories and a novel. The novel is about Dostoevsky (his summer in Baden-baden, hence the name of the book), but about much more and stylistically it's masterpiece (so long sentences, if I'm not mistaken there is like 37 senteces in the whole book or something like that). The story about Dostoevsky is told by unnamed narrator (probably Tsypkin himself), travelling through the Russia by train into Petersburg.
Another name of burried author: Pavel Ulitin. So called russian Joyce. Spend huge parts of his life in prisons, his manuscripts were taken, destroyed. he wasn't allowed to publish. His life, literally, was destroyed, for the most of it he suffered from injuries caused by interogation, from the ilness he got in prison etc. There are stories about him, about his soliloqiues in prison cell which were lasting for 48 hours, and that's basically what his book were when he was able to publish something.
Another name is that of Andrei Bitov, russian post-modernist. Next: Sasha Sokolov, another postmodernist, his first book praised by Nabokov, about his second book critics are telling that it's russian Finnegans wake; his third book is response to Lolita - po-mo set in future about a guy who has obsession of fucking old women; since then he's refusing to publish more and lives in Canada. And so on.
What about Mikhail Shishkin?
>>8435893
I really liked Ice Trilogy. I agree that parts dragged, especially the repeated conversions/awakenings, but I can see it's deliberate to create an incessant, nauseating kaleidoscope that gets as many cross-sections of Russian society as possible.
I thought the ending was super lackluster however, and was very much a cop-out. I don't even necessarily mean in a plot sense but that it felt thematically empty and unsatisfying to the stuff he was trying to explore regarding faith, chaos of modern life, technology, and illusions/reality/projections.
I still really liked it though, and I thought how he varied his style was fun. The opening, which was a parody of the kind of 19th/early 20th century Golden/Silver age Russian novel opening was really funny.
I recenty get into David Lynch movies and I was wondering where did he got the inspiration for his work
Is it from some books?
Kafka and Kline are major influences.
he's gone pretty firmly on record as saying that all of his ideas originate while practicing transcendental meditation, and that he doesn't try to think about things in a conscious manner along the lines of what you seem to be suggesting
>>8435899
What about his decision to fuck up twin peaks?