/lit/ - Literature

>And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
What, now that the dust has ceased to be blown hither and thither by perturbations in the air, did he mean by this?

>>21869347
Are you suppose to sympathize with these insufferable faggots?

>muh tennis
>muh drugs

A couple of chapters in. Haven't laughed yet. What gives?

>muh tennis

i just bought it. is it worth it?

When does it get good?

what are some male manipulater books?

>>21380676
>how long did you say this jest is?

Why are you people so obsessed with this again?

Ah, I remember the Year of the Purdue™ Wonderchicken™ like it was the Year of the Depend™ Adult Undergarment™. It was a much better year than the Year of the Burger King™ Whopper™.

Why was Avril so willing to sell out her son to radicals that were sure to gruesomely torture him

10 times, I counted

I want to read this but I'm scared it will motivate me to kill myself by diving into David Foster Wallace's psyche. Thoughts?

Fucking this. Call of the Crocodile has been the only “meme book” that wasn’t terribly boring.

It's more than 1000 pages long
Is this still worth reading?

This book is the ultimate pleb filter. What are some other pleb filters, /lit/?

>Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

>>20502797
I read Infinite Jest while living together with a roommate who had been through some serious trauma; I'm talking fucked up childhood where he was abandoned by his parents, later addiction to drugs and alcohol, suicide attempts et cetera. He ultimately joined AA and had been clean for four years when we lived together. The book acted as a conversation starter because he would ask how the reading was going, I would share some snippets that I found interesting and he would weigh-in with his own judgement (often commenting how spot-on DFW was) and share an example from his own life.

I think there is a different discussion to be had on whether the book actually changed me, or if it just acted as a catalyst for a change that eventually would have taken place anyways. In the same way that I believe that older generations have overestimated the impact that violence in video games and television, jazz music and so on have in the shaping of the youth, I think there is a concurrent overestimation of the positive influence of literature. I often question the usual things you hear about how literature "teaches empathy", moulds us into better human beings and so on. I have met well-read assholes and I have met incredibly kind people who have touched a novel since high school. This goes both ways of course, I am not saying that being a reader and being a kind person is some dichotomy set in stone. All I mean is that we should question the typical cause-effect relationship of "this book changed me", because the way I see it, the case is more often than not "I changed myself by selecting and making the effort to engage with this book".

Would be happy to hear what other anons think of this. In either case, a change in how I look at trauma, addiction, suicide and depression certainly took place in my while I was reading Infinite Jest.

What are the best books to come out in the last three decades? Fiction or non-fiction.

Is this book actually good or is it just more contrived nonsense like Gravity's Rainbow? Not gonna lie the idea of reading a book written by some guy who killed himself is not particularly appealing sounding.