/lit/ - Literature

>>23180589
I'm Ivanfag anon from last night (>>23180433), I appreciate you being so understanding. I genuinely admire the near-saintliness of Alyosha and I sometimes am grieved by my loss of faith, but faith is something I cannot artificially conjure up within myself: it's something that must come about from something like what you've experienced, a direct encounter with God.

I think my loss of faith was similar to the one that Tolstoy recalls in "A Confession":

> "S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray - a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you still do that?" They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them."

I really, really did believe in God for some years of my life, from 16 when I converted to Christianity to 20 or even 21. But the past few months have honestly revealed to me that something precious has died inside my deepest recesses, and I have no knowledge of how to retrieve it.

>a girl stared at me for like a minute straight yesterday as i approached and then passed her where she was standing at the bus stop
she was smiling and i think laughing at me inwardly

>>11481265
It took me a long time to get into it though, it's good but not perfect.
Some of it is really flat, like the way Russians, Germans, and French people speak, the deliberate wordpuke that I still enjoyed despite being into tech, etc.

I love the ideas in the book, but I wish there was a book just like it that was a little better.

1. pick a moderately sized book that you think you'll enjoy
2. divide page numbers by 7
3. round up, and read that many pages a day, trying not to stop in the middle of a chapter or story.
4. finish a book a week.
5. if this doesn't work, vote republican and blame elitist for your failings.

>>10298734

I like Shadowrun

My serial number.

What are some good hard boiled detective novels?