/lit/ - Literature

yeah you're fine. you already want to read so you're doing better than most people. I didn't make this image but it's pretty good stuff to get you back into reading or into reading in the first place

>>5648495
Double major in English and math here. There's no set way to "learn to appreciate poetry and literature better" other than to just read a lot and think about what you're reading. There are plenty of fictional works that offer good inroads for STEM-types into literature. Vonnegut (a chemistry major at Cornell) is probably the most common and most recommended, and some people dislike him here for being too easy and simplistic, but I think he's great. Try Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan.

Pynchon (a onetime physics major at Cornell who later worked for Boeing before becoming the patron saint of /lit/) engages science and math concepts on a deeper and more poetic level than Vonnegut ever did. Try The Crying of Lot 49, which has a whole chapter on Maxwell's Demon.

Or, if you're not looking for something that specifically connects to your math background, just pick anything from the starter kit. They're all very readable and fun. Personally, I like Huck Finn, Catch-22, and Lolita best.

Most of the stuff in the "starter kit" image would be good for you. I would recommend in particular:

1984
Lord of the Flies
Huck Finn
Catch-22
Lolita

Pick whichever of those sounds most interesting to you, they're all great and very readable and active.

Sup guys, I haven't been on /lit/ for too long, but I'm a few years out of college with an English major, still read a couple books a week, got a lot of stuff on the backlog, etc.

I took a look at the Starter Kit (pic related), expecting it would be all or almost all stuff I've already read. But it's not! There are 6 books on there I haven't touched:

A Clockwork Orange
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Invisible Man
American Psycho
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Siddhartha

Are they all still worth reading even if you're not an entry-level reader? I'll probably make my way around to all of them eventually but I'd like to have some priorities--for instance, I'm pretty confident Invisible Man will be good, but I doubt I'll like the HST book...I've read a few of his more famous journalistic dispatches and didn't care much for them. If it helps, my favorite authors are Nabokov, DeLillo, Le Guin and Pynchon.

Also, some more topics of conversation so this thread isn't all about me: which books from the Starter Kit have you not gotten around to reading? What do you think the best one on there is? I think it's a tight race between Lolita, Catch-22, and Huck Finn with an honorable mention to Slaughterhouse-Five as the best gateway book to get people into literature.