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Reminder it took Joyce 9 years to get Dubliners published
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Makes sense. It's garbage.but seriously, there were some really conservative years in the way
What does /lit/ think about Oblomov?
I got it as a Christmas present but I'm currently reading The Brothers Karamazov and I thought about checking this out after.
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>>7654617
good stuff, sad though. not as emotionally involving as bros k, i would say. it's pretty much a description of the superfluous man, or the NEET.
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I liked it, but didn't think it was great or recommendable, really. I feel like if someone stumbles upon it they'll probably enjoy it, but it otherwise lacks general appeal.
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I try to read as often as possible. I've never been a fast reader. Are there ways to get better, and is there a guilt I should feel when using audiobooks? I love them, but am not sure.
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>>7654541
information is information. Though reading shorter books might help.
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Recommend me the most amazing shit to read /lit/
I'm into that classic, fucks your mind up stuff.
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Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.
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plebmaximus
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Macaulay's review of Boswell is pure gold:
Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know every body who was talked about, that, Tory and high Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. [...] All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.
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That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
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Which do you think the most interesting piece of the Earthsea series (including short stories)? Any observations on different subplots or themes? Discussion about the animation movie is also welcome.
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intrigued. thinking about writing a conference paper about something along these lines. Scholarly works and sources appreciated family.
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Bump. Should extend this to a general LeGuin thread to see how that helps get people interested.
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The theme of Irish heritage is literally the most boring thing you could talk about in any of Joyce's works.
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>>7654134
>And all of the least-boring things about Joyce? Never mind any of that.
Happy Birthday to Jimmy Joy by the way.
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Is this guy worth reading?
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What did the Ainur look like before they took material form?
Did Tolkien every describe how they looked in either state, physical or ethereal?
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Cinnabons
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I have the computer knowledge of chicken, I'm also poor as dirt.
I need to get my hands on Fundamentals of Statistics: Informed decisions using data, 4th edition, by Michael Sullivan
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>>7654100
>How to
use libgen, google
>Fundamentals of Statistics
seems only 2d edition is around
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Couldn't find a pdf of it. Try bookfinder.com for a cheap used copy.
Anyone got the pdf they can share?
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>>7653282
i needed this for my english class but couldn't find it so i read all the stuff online
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How much can I expect to learn? So far it seems to offer more than /lit/.
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it you don't know the basics yet then sure.
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everything offers more than /lit/ you should just be here for the joyposting
Books women will never understand.
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None
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>>7672533
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>>7672571
>Bronte
>Woolf
>Homer
>not women
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Is anybody here surrounded on a daily basis by highly "successful" people?
How do the aspiring writers among you cope with the slow, obscure ambition to get published while people your age are achieving shit?
I work in the same building as people who have attended the top fee-paying schools, the top colleges and are now succeeding in their chosen field and surrounding themselves with people who are doing the same. I feel so inferior and retarded for dedicating myself to writing. It's gotten to the point where I don't even try and talk to girls because I'm at an age (25) where I feel I should have something to my name rather than just being "ambitious".
Are there any novels that deal with this feel?
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what do you do? what does your company do? are you in a bitch role at a successful company? leverage the brand name of the company to do something m8.
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>>7676296
Fuck, this is so relevant. I went to an elite American university and this eats me every day. People like my writing, and I think it's going somewhere, but fuck me if it doesn't feel bad to be friends with people pulling down solid six figures straight out of school for gruntwork consulting and finance jobs while I'm still saying, "I think it's going somewhere."
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>>7676302
Bitch role is difficult to define in my context but yes I'd say I am. There's a girl (not a colleague) here who attended a top college and so on and I feel too pathetic to approach her. I feel too old to be saying shit like "I'm trying to achieve X" because I feel I should have something to show for my time on earth so far. I don't want anything to do with my company or the "brand name", I'm just working on a novel.
You read them? Do you like them? Have you got any rec?
I'm reading Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Pasolini's Heretical Empiricism, which is only partly about cinema but hey, PPP's good anyway.
Deleuze's book is beautifully written and constructed, but I don't think I can give an opinion on his subject matter yet - at the very least is fascinating and unlike any other idea of cinema, at best it may be a grimoire for a true cinema of life. Can't really comment on Heretical Empiricism as I've picked it up today, but PPP's writing is unnervigly alive and jittery, which is always a plus in a non-fiction book.
Also read a monography on Tsukamoto's movies earlier this year and found it intriguing - anyone has recs on other monographs? Would be interested in reading about a specific director, maybe watching his movies meanwhile. Anything good on Herzog?
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>>7674783Is that movie actually worth reading? Appreciate the band but never really got myself to watching the actual film.
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>>7674828It's decent - unintentionally funny, beautifully shot. If you want a better movie about Japanese biker gangs / rebel culture read Burst City, directed by Sogo Ishii
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>>7674847neat, thanks
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If humanity is so small and insignificant in comparison to the wider existence, then why is art, such as literature, considered significant at all?
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>a careful edited record of a person's ideas and stories lives on after our pitifully short lived
Why do you think the epic of Gilgamesh is so bittersweet?
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Because it transcends time.
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>>7674662
What if art doesn't survive our existence?