/lit/ - Literature

>>10246139
Sot Weed Factor (from my cursory glance at a Wikipedia article) was a parody of novels like Tristram Shandy, which was the first parody of novels like itself. I definitely recommend it, it's fucking hilarious, the top of my list of comic novels (just ahead of Confederacy of Dunces). First line:
>I wish either my mother or my father, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:------Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-------I am verily persuaded I should have made quire a different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

22
NY
TS

Pretty much hilarious, I am definitely going to read Don Quixote then re-read this at later date so I understand the humor that isn't just "muh rocinante"

>>10022136
I honestly look forward to understanding all the jokes from TS it's going to take me twenty years to get.

Started at conception

Anyone read it?

I'm not even done but it's definitely going to be one of my favorite books of all time. I haven't laughed out loud so many times while reading since I first read Confederacy of Dunces, probably.

It is a hard book to describe though. The "plot" progresses in a spiral fashion; or maybe concentric circles is a better metaphor. A character will be interrupted mid-sentence by a digression on the character's personality, history, thoughts, etc. Or by a theological dispute, or a philosophical argument, or a fine grammatical point, all tenuously connected with whatever has been interrupted, or with what follows the interruption; or a Dedication, offered by the author for sale to anyone who wants it, with the promise it will be put in its proper place, with the purchaser's name, on the next edition, etc. etc.

It starts not with the hero's birth but with the unfortunate circumstances of his conception, and it is well into the 3rd volume of 9 before you see him born.

Stylistically it's written in what I call in my head (but not outloud because it sounds faggy and is probably inaccurate) the "breathless style" - like Burton, heaps of clauses, long and broken sentences.

It's the sort of book that doesn't just make you laugh. It actually produces joy.