/lit/ - Literature

>>7905614
Go Down Moses, I think.

Not as good as Unvanquished though.

Don Juan - Carlos Castaneda

>>7903837
The Hamlet isn't too fun, but The Town and The Mansion in the Snopes trilogy feature this wonderful female character named Linda Snopes.

I like Gavin because I aspire to be both as morally upright and as virtuous as him. He turned down two hot women in love with him just because he couldn't face himself if he took advantage of them.

The Mansion was great closure to the insidious Snopes family. Like kills like.

>>7902038
I absolutely loved The Unvanquished. Drusilla was this heroic bitch from hell who loved being manly, and Bayard was the new South who wanted peace beyond the cycle of violence.

I still fucking loved the unresolved sexual tension between Bayard and Drusilla, though.

It's one of my favorites.

My trip is TSATF, but my favorite novel from him is Absalom, Absalom! It's like he distilled his complex art and wrote both an ode and an elegy to the South he knew.

I was really confused at first, but when everything slowly, gradually, painstakingly made sense by the end of the novel I was just blown away. All the peregrinations, all the circumlocutions, they were there for the purpose of pulling off such a masterful circulation of the story: it ends where it begins.

>>7903771
Ozamu Dazai's Setting Sun is also good. I haven't read Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, although I have a copy of his work.

I'm not familiar with Ryu Murakami or most newer Japanese novelists.

>>7900002
I've read most of Kawabata's great novels, and he's my favorite. He doesn't waste words at all. His novels are often less than 150 pages, yet they speak and say more than most other novels I've read. He's the master of Japanese minimalism, I think.

I also like Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Among his short stories, I like Rashomon best (basis for Kurosawa's Rashomon, too). I still haven't read any Soseki, although I plan to.

I liked Tanizaki as well, but I think he's a tier lower than Kawabata. Some Prefer Nettles is a good work. Finally, Mishima's okay, but he admixes too much perverse sexuality in his works that I won't really recommend him to most readers.

Endo's Silence and Sea and Poison are great works of literature, and more people should read him. Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain is an OK anti-war novel, but I didn't like it too much.

I have Fumiko Enchi's Masks but I haven't read it yet. I don't like Kenzaburo Oe all that much.

>>7901722
I've really only read the weirder Nabokov works. Bend Sinister reminds me a bit of more intelligible John Hawkes in that it's really also a dystopian novel, but unlike Orwell's workmanlike prose part of the novel's beauty is Nabokov's writing.

For more complex literature similar to Nabokov you could probably try Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, or Under the Volcano, but the latter is much tougher.

>>7903387
I would have taken Faulkner in college, but my schedule didn't allow me. Still, I love that list. I only have about eight books of his I haven't read because I couldn't find copies.

Just saw this one. Thank you very much for Bookdepository.

>>7884577
Best one in this thread

Lest I forget, The Three Versions of Judas was a great mindfuck. I have never thought of the Gospels in that manner.

I finally got around to reading Borges, and seriously, shit was SO cash. I wish I knew more about Latin and Greek classics like Borges did, because he weaves allusion and allegory to his short fiction so well. I personally loved House of Asterion, Emma Zunz, and Death and the Compass best.

Which were your favorite Borges stories?

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih is one of my top 10 favorites. It's a short, but great novel.

>>7871439
This. THE ALCOHOLISM BOOK.

>Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

>Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

lol, okay, Nabokov, I like your work, but no.

Absalom, Absalom! really moved me, as well as Cancer Ward. I couldn't read a book for days after those novels, because I kept thinking about what I just read.

>>7867824
Honestly, you could start with the shorter classics such as The Old Man and the Sea, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Of Mice and Men. After you've gotten your thinking legs below you, you could proceed with lengthier, but still intelligible classics, such as A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, or perhaps Watership Down.

When you feel confident and competent enough to read the great works of literature, you could perhaps try Crime and Punishment, Dead Souls, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina.

If you want to exercise your mind by engaging challenges, you could try reading The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, or To the Lighthouse.

Finally, if you think you can read anything, try reading Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Molloy, Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow. Just some suggestions.

I'd prefer teaching 20th Century Modernist literature, so:

Edouard Dujardin - We'll to the Woods no More
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
James Joyce - Ulysses
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Hermann Broch - The Sleepwalkers
Heinrich Boll - Billiards at Half-Past Seven
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear it Away
Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain (arguable)
Wole Soyinka - The Interpreters (arguable)

>>7864246
What do you guys mean by 'comfy'? Because As I Lay Dying was jarring, sad, and at times horrible. Comfy was never in my mind while reading it.

>>7866542
It's in my top five novels of all time. It's a masterpiece.

>Book I last read:
The Fall of Paris by Ilya Ehrenburg
>Book I'm currently reading:
Much Ado about Nothing by Shakespeare
>Book I'm reading next:
The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata

I absolutely loved Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers, although it barely gets mentioned here. He focuses on the lives of three different men during three different times in Germany: he also writes very differently with every novel. I loved both Esch and Huguenau, and I think it should be among 20th century's best novels.