/lit/ - Literature

I just finished L'etranger in French, and being the first French novel I've ever read, I found it very difficult. I was thinking of attempting 120 Days of Sodom next and wanted to know what francophones thought of the level of difficulty for someone new to the language. I know Pere Goriot is highly recommended for intermediate French learners, but I've been itching to read de Sade.

I need a good biography on Ronald Reagan, preferably on his time spent in Hollywood more so than his political life, & the less biased/ more fact-based the better.

I studied French freshman and sophomore year of college, lived in France for 4 months, then completed the duolingo tree. I'm looking for French books so I can work on my French back home. Of course I own L'etranger which isn't too much of a struggle, but not easy. I'd like something on the level of The Hobbit. I'd also like to read Justine. I'm probably going to go back to France so I can move in with my (future) French girlfriend so it's probably not fruitless.

Jesus said: "For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."
Matthew 19:12

I want a book where the main character is a eunuch. Already read Fiesta: or The Sun Also Rises but I want something a bit more surreal, like Batailles or something.

Eunuch /lit/ general, also

Most times that /pol/ or 4chan thinks women don't like something, they actually do. Most of the people on here who make broad, angry, and vicious accusations and generalizations of women have probably never even felt a woman's bare finger on their body, literally, if not almost literally, and it's a continuous cycle because no woman would ever put her trust or love in a man so bizarrely out-of-touch with reality and such firm belief in strange, virginal theories.

This is a pretty accurate description: http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/william_burroughs_naked_lunch/
Burroughs is not a bad writer, & Junkie is top beat literature, one of the only worthwhile works of the movement. But Naked Lunch itself is like the Fritz the Cat movie: a relic for teens that only served to be edgy at the time, and now is just awkward and dated.
Surprisingly it has decent prose bits but if you didn't read it as a teen and aren't 40+ years old now, it's not that great.

Fucked up & edgy /lit/ that's good:
Story of the Eye
Junkie
Gravity's Rainbow
Tropic of Cancer (so far the least fucked up)
Satantango
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (much more survivability than Naked Lunch but also very dependent, I think, on your age)

>>8915673
?? what about it?

Gonna buy tommy more's utopia peut-être, wondering if Cambridge will suffice or if that edition is for hacks. I don't really like Norton Critical, at least not for a first read, because those wonderful annotations are just out-of-control.

Can we discuss prose poets, like Rimbaud or Baudelaire? Namedrop some good ones and I'll pop it into wikipedia and see if it's up my alley.

>>8878011
Holy... I want more...

>>8878822
Latin or French. German? There are so few German words in the English language. Only a German would be so stupid and naively prideful to believe his language to have any importance in the improvement of English.

The number of French phrases in English, cognates, or the ability to drop French phrases in an English sentence to improve it makes French a close runner.

Latin is a good second too for almost identical reasons-- phrases, cognates, word origins, etc.

OP get used to ignoring German opinion on just about everything. For a country with subsidized education to have so many morons running around is appalling.

"Have you ever done this before?" he whispered.
"Never," answered Hatsue. "You're my only."

The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a moment he waited there, poised, and kissed her—he took her lower lip between his lips and gently held it there. Then with his hands he pulled her to him and at the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum slap against her skin. Her entire body felt the rightness of it, her entire body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her shoulder blades—her breasts pressed themselves against his chest—and a slow shudder ran through her.

"It's right," she remembered whispering. "It feels so right, Kabuo."

"Tadaima aware ga wakatta," he had answered. "I understand just now the deepest beauty."