/lit/ - Literature

>>8078376
Maybe more women should write better.

As it stands, I only have Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Iris Murdoch. I'm not a sexist. I just prefer good writing.

>>8088484
I'm no expert on Joyce, but $100 would be a good starting point for that book, since it's not a first edition, but a pristine copy of a 1932 edition.

When it's thick novels like Oblomov or Cancer Ward, it takes me a week or so. If it's really good, though, even 600+ page novels take me two days. I read Gone with the Wind in only two days. It very much depends, but if everything's averaged I read one book in two or three days.

>>8088477
I'm going to get that $90 one if it ever comes out. Money well spent.

>>8088510
I have a girl (SPACE) friend whom I have convinced to read. She barely read anything then. Now she's reading Austen after reading Harper Lee and Chateaubriand.

It's much easier to deal with non-readers who may see the beauty of good literature than YA fanatics who denigrate good literature.

>>8088434
I read this. I think there's a premium publisher (Folio Society?) who published The Sound and the Fury in color, just as what Faulkner had intended. These copies still remain very expensive.

>>8088393
Wait, why is Faulkner placed beside Sherwood Anderson? The only Southern writer I could place proximate to him, to my mind, is O'Connor. Our academia here study him vis-a-vis with Joyce and Woolf, though, so I guess we have that over yours.

Anyway - I agree with you.

SF is one of my least-liked genres in literature. Among its short stories, however, I liked Ted Chiang's Exhalation a lot.

>>8087965
I'd argue that Finnegans Wake is a waste of time, but Ulysses is a great work of literature.

>>8088364
When you pertain to ur-modernist, what do you mean? I admit, that's my first time encountering the term.

>>8088267
I'm from the Philippines, and I internally rage whenever someone educated tells me that Faulkner is 'regional.' The themes he deals with are universal, and I loved Light in August because Joe Christmas is one of the most complex characters in literature and Faulkner utilizes psychology so damn well in creating the monstrous adult that he was. Of course, there was also the allegory of the South behind all that, but LiA was the best Southern Gothic novel I've read especially because the monster was within. While it does still tangentially tackle the idea of miscegenation, as Joe Christmas thought of himself as part-nigger, LiA was also great because it highlighted the fractured identity, not only of the South, but of postbellum America.

>>8088290
I have As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, The Unvanquished, and the Snopes Trilogy. I didn't think The Hamlet was that good, but The Town and The Mansion are awesome.

Decline of the Intellectual - Thomas Molnar
The Fabulous Mrs. V - H.E. Bates
The Cancer Ward - Solzhenitsyn
The Sound of MAD
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Killers of the Dream - Lilian Smith
Chosen - Luke Zimmer
Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee
The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber
Atala/Rene - Chateaubriand
Culture, Language, and Personality - Edward Sapir
Trevayne - Jonathan Ryder
Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
World History - Capino
The Monogram Murders - Sophie Hannah
Elements of Technical Report Writing
Drone - Allan Popa
Your Children's Health
On the Nature of the Universe - Lucretius
Sales Promotion and Merchandising
Oblomov - Goncharov
Commonplace - Arthur Yap
The Gods Will Have Blood - Anatole France
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics - Kant
Understanding the Psychic Powers of Man
The Fall of Paris - Ilya Ehrenburg
Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Capture Perfect Health - Micaller
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah
The Master of Go - Kawabata
Philippine Community Life - Capino
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Carnegie
MAD's Dave Berg Looks at People
The Mouse that Roared - Leonard Wibberley
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Risk - Dick Francis
Requiem for a Wren - Nevil Shute
Light in August - William Faulkner
Comfort for the Jews - JF Rutherford
The Right Word at the Right Time - Reader's Digest
The MAD Morality - Vernhard Eller
Two Hardy Boys books

>>8088224
*white counterparts

>>8088192
It's actually fun how Faulkner was so ahead of other Southern writers in that he humanized African-Americans. Some of them were even better human beings than their human counterparts.

In TSATF, for example, Dilsey is placed in contrast with the dissolute Compson family. If I recall correctly, even the Appendix merely spoke of Dilsey and her family as enduring: 'They endured.'

Faulkner was so ahead of his time as a man of American letters that I honestly think Great American Author is between him and Melville. There could be no one else.

>>8088122
>>8088140
You're right. I didn't write a thesis on the novel, however. It's just what I got after re-reading the novel a few times.

I had no idea that modernism was also something Faulkner addressed. Thank you for raising this point.

>>8088177
I enjoyed Absalom, Absalom! a lot more than S and F, because it had a more coalescent story and I enjoyed the onion-peel revelations that it had. I still have three Faulkner in my top 5.

I think AILD is the worst among Faulkner's masterpieces. Light in August is probably the best Southern GOTHIC novel I've read, Absalom, Absalom!'s my favorite, and SF is near there.

>>8087966
I think he started drinking way before Quentin's suicide. He had a mentally deficient son, a slut of a daughter, and a useless, hypochondriac wife. I'd probably start drinking myself.

>>8087720
I have the same problem. I usually just avoid book shops, and then get rid of the books I've no plans of reading.

>>8087831
I guess I'm with you. As much as I'm maligned here for reading for the plot, I do it because I believe that one important aspect in a novel is the story it tells. Although some authors, like Faulkner, attain that exquisite balance between stylistic creativity and masterful storytelling, it's usually a rarity in most novels. Between hollow creativity and great storytelling, however, I'll choose storytelling all the time.

>>8087831
From how I understood the novel, his father was a lapsed idealist. His father was also an intellectual, but because he could not reconcile his ideals with reality, turned into drink.

Quentin was an even more extreme idealist. He decried the fall of the South, having heard it told to him in Absalom, Absalom!, and he never expected that to happen to his family. Because all he could do were faint rebellions, he opted to end his life.

>>8086905

>>8087015
Hi there. It's actually an allegory to the fall of the South through the lens of the different characters featured. The South featured idiots (Ben), emasculated geniuses (Quentin), and assholes (Jason). All these is the result of the South's defeat during the Civil War. These grotesques (the South itself) result from the South's inability to endure like the black people. All of them pine for the innocence once lost (Caddy's) and all of them make half-hearted attempts toward change. That is why by the end of the novel, the Compson family is moribund yet despite that it's Jason who knew why Benjy cried while going back home.

>>8085236
I have no experience with reading history as intensely as having read those volumes, but I've read The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen, and it's very entertaining. It's also not as thick. Mommsen's the only historian to have ever won the Nobel Prize in literature, too.

One of my top 10 books of all time. Nabokov praises it as one of the great modernist masterpieces he's read. I enjoyed it a lot. It's one of the few novels I've read more than once.

>>8078243
I think you should re-write the sentence in order to put the preposition somewhere not at the sentence's end, because it seems unwieldy. But with the evolution of English nowadays, that seems perfectly fine. It's a stylistic difference, but it's not grammatically wrong.

>>8080054
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves. Autobiographical, and absolutely horrific.