Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4872. page

>>7376758

>I'm so special because I understand how crappy boring life is!
It's that for 200 or 500 pages depending on which edition you get.

It's incredible. Get the edition you posted, not the short one.

>>7376758

It's very good. It could've easily been horrible but the writing is so strong that it becomes something really special.

>>7376764

Different books for different moods.
Don't pretend like this is unfamiliar to you.

You forgot
>twitter

This is some kakfaesque bait here man

>charity fundraising
>freshers week
>buzzfeed
>social experiments

>>7376752
None of that shit would actually attract young readers though. I'd say the way to go would be an easy to swallow, dumbed down intellectual message that can be memed on facebook and youtube, something like Infinite Jest but more capably written.

It would allow young people on social media to brag/post their ideal self image (an intellectual reading type). This makes it go viral. You buy an island next to Stephen King and pork JK Rowling in her boot.

>>7376728
>if you acknowledge that you're worth less than nothing, then God will reward you later!
There, that's it. Christianity is about the catharsis of embracing how much you suck, which is why it goes so well with AA.

>>7376728
Once you recognize you are a sinner, a scumbag, an average human being, and accept Christ's grace into your heart, the kingdom of God opens to you.

>>7376740
>>>/r/atheism

>>7376747
Correct

While I hate Thomas Pynchon I wouldn't classify it as racial hatred, but rather as personal hatred. Perhaps even literary hatred.

>>7376582
>Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time. The best I can say for it now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough. John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading. There had prevailed for a while a set of assumptions and distinctions, unvoiced and unquestioned, best captured years later in the '70's television character Archie Bunker.

>It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as questions of money and power, but have served a useful purpose, often in the interest of those who deplore them most, in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and powerless. This having been said, however, the narrative voice in this story here remains that of a smart-assed jerk who didn't know any better, and I apologize for it.

No it's not disconcerting because he admits to it and has changed. Nearly everyone starts out racist.

>>7376582
Eh, everybody is a little bit racist. And if he's a former racist, then I don't see why anybody should give him shit for it. It's something he's already come to see as wrong and has abandoned.
It's very dull-witted to assault people for things that are no longer relevant.

1 fiction, 1 nonfiction. anything else I read in conjunction w/ this will be super lite reading that doesn't require much investment at all, like right now Live Off the Land in City and Country, which I look at when lazy.

>>7376555
At most 3.

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3

>>7376535
These get worse and worse as time goes on.

>>>/r/books
>>>/trash/

Muh moloch

>>7376535
>beat writers

With a baseball bat, please.

Start with Greeks

>>7376501
Anything specific you recommend to start with?

>>7376508
The Greeks

>>7376491
Check sticky

>>7376509
I had a look, saw plenty of cyberpunk but nothing about steampink.

Gibson/Sterling: The Difference Engine (if you read 1 steampunk book let this be it)
Mieville: Perdido Street Station
short story anthology "Steampunk", edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer

The vast majority of genre books, yes.

What's wrong with a book being for entertainment? And at least they aren't entertaining for the sole purpose of advertising and whoring out shit to you via commercials like television is.

>>7376790
If you're reading purely for entertainment, you aren't becoming a more enlightened person. You're just wasting the time left before you die.

You can just turn it offline forever and load books through USB from a computer. Uses .mobi format. Epub is equivalent but unless you crack it and install a different UI you'll need to convert to mobi first.

>>7376105
was actually just about to research how i could do this. super useful thanks so much.

>>7376096
>Any tips or things I should know about it?
um... it's an e-reader, it does e-reader things, what exactly are you expecting people to tell you here?

I've only read his poetry. This is my favorite of his poems, Bavarian Gentians:

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and groom.

>>7376029 i really enjoy myself while reading his books. Cant put it down

Anybody here read each version of Lady Chatterley's Lover? Through inheritance I've got a copy of John Thomas & Lady Jane and I'm wondering if it's a worthy substitution or if I should just read Lady Chatterley.

No, it's not a genuine endorsement of Islam, he just uses it as a tool to comment upon Western cultural decay.

>>7376010
Yes and no

>>7376012
He doesn't seem to offer another way in which the West can be saved though. I got the idea is that Islam at this point was the only option to cure the ailments of modernity.

>>7375989
Whenever someone uses "vestige" or "vestiges" instead of "remnant" or "remnants" it feels like someone's just grabbed my hand and shoved it into a nest of centipede larvae.

Some based words:
>Binary
>Incandescent
>Nitroglycerine
>Wound
>Apocrypha
>Occult
>Vertigo
>Narcotic
>Centrifuge
>Quagmire
>Viridian
>Rebar
>Carlisle
>Dianetics
>Hagiography
>Plantagenet
>Angevin

>>7375989

I absolutely hate the word "lunch". For some reason it drives me crazy, it sounds so vile.

Also I don't like the word "pretentious". It feels pretentious to even say it, ironically enough.

>>7375943
i am also interested in this question

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sunset

>>7375943
The Three Musketeers
The Dragonriders of Pern
Horns by Joe Hill
The Persian Boy
Shogun
Winter's Tale
Stargate
The City of Thieves by David Benioff

I'm sorry.

>>7375877
I thought Lolita was pretty funny.

>>7375877
Anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus have a great sense of humor

Gabriel Garcia Marquez