/lit/ - Literature

>>7922063
France - The Gods Will Have Blood
Borges - Labyrinths
Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Thomas Molnar - The Decline of the Intellectual

John Hawkes's The Beetle Leg probably belongs to the 2deep4me category. I hated that 'novel.'

>>7924396
I don't even think it could be called a book. FW is 3deep5me that it's borderline impossible to understand.

2deep4u books that make sense to me include Absalom, Absalom!, Boll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Bely's Petersburg, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus.

>>7896069
Woah. Dude.

>>7895679
1. Faulkner
2. Dostoevsky
3. Kawabata

>>7924209
I want to finish reading all his novels someday. I still have 9 novels left. The rest are short fiction I've read.

My favorite authors are the authors whom I have read the most books from.

I've read 18 works from Faulkner, seven from Dostoevsky, and four from Kawabata. I've also read the four great works of Joyce, but I didn't like his latter work much.

>>7922772
Congrats!

I wish we'd have something like this in the Philippines but most people here don't even read.

Faulkner's novels:

Absalom, Absalom! - 100/5
The Sound and the Fury - 95/5
The Unvanquished - 5/5
The Mansion - 5/5
Mosquitoes - 2/5
As I Lay Dying - 4/5
Sanctuary - 4/5
The Wild Palms - 4.5/5
The Hamlet - 4/5
A Fable - 1/5
The Town - 4/5
Pylon - 2/5

>>7924114
Dubliners: A++
Portrait: A+
Ulysses: B
Finnegans Wake: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner- F

If I were to rank his works among the books I've read, my top five would probably be:

1) Absalom, Absalom!
2) The Sound and the Fury
3) The Unvanquished
4) The Mansion
5) As I Lay Dying

>>7924020
Definitely agree, it was the novel where he was at his narrative and creative peak for me. The Sound and the Fury was equally great, but everything coalesced beautifully in Absalom, Absalom! It's probably my favorite novel of all time.

Among his novels, I think I like this third after The Idiot and Crime and Punishment.

I liked Brothers Karamazov the least among his great novels, probably because it was the most didactic to me. The episode of the Grand Inquisitor was a great piece of literature, however.

Hi there!

>>7922075
I've read the book five times, and I try to read it once every year.

With regard to Benjamin, every change in font format (normal to italic, italic to normal) signifies a different event. By the statements and the characters present in that vignette one could situate the different occurrences within that chapter. There are a lot of different timelines within the chapter. Benjy's is the least subjective among the different chapters, but his needs the most deciphering.

You'll figure it out, anon.

>>7913554
38/100 are American novels. You've got a point, at about 40% of the classics in there, that's a substantial number. I included Nabokov, since he's also American.

>>7913378
I read that it was Hemingway who looked to create a spat with Faulkner. Faulkner was often gracious and quiet, but he replied to Hemingway's consistent jibes. This is from what I read.

Hemingway had an inferiority complex, because a lot of critics during their time ranked Faulkner as the great American writer with him either next, or below Thomas Wolfe.

I prefer Faulkner, given my trip, but separating my partiality from the matter, I'm still leaning towards Faulkner's side. While you don't need complex words to illustrate most things, there are some ideas or concepts that only a complex word or complex words could address.

Anatole France, a fellow Nobel laureate, also searched for the mot juste, or the right word. He may have sent some of his readers to the French dictionary, but that's a little discomfort to the fluidity of his prose because he sought that right word.

Faulkner, as manifested in TSATF, uses complex words to complement the personality of the person he writes about. Benjy or Jason never used highly complex words, but the genius Quentin used them a lot.

Besides, Hemingway's prose tends to be a little repetitive. This is most manifest in his longer works.

>>7912247
I apprehend that it's more of your personality and beliefs than it is literature's fault. If you're homosexual, then that's understandable, but I absolutely did not like Alan Hollinghurst's Folding Star. It's one of the few novels I dropped. In this regard I vehemently disagree, because repetitions of 'penis' to me seems a lot more gauche than any work of Kawabata's.

>>7912404
The few friends I talk literature with all have postgraduate degrees, so it's not really much of a problem for me. Granted, the girls aren't really physically attractive to me.

>>7910818
I read both Lime Twig and Beetle Leg. The latter was unbearable, but the LIme Twig was pretty good.

>>7906555
I'm actually reading it right now. It's nothing major that good friends can't provide. It should actually just be titled 'how to be a decent person,' although it probably won't sell as much. It's a good reminder to be human to others, but I prefer Schopenhauer's Basis of Morality for a more epiphanic read.

>>7909271
This was what Molnar said in Decline of the Intellectual. Intellectuals are anachronistic in this day and age. They're too moderate to effect change, and too intelligent to pander to the masses.

>>7908407
He's definitely better as a novelist. I mean, Finnegans Wake was barely a novel.

I've read GR, and while I liked it I didn't like the excessive peregrinations and circumlocutions of Pynchon. I did enjoy what I could understand from the story, but I've read other authors since then.