/lit/ - Literature

Anna Karenina, Brideshead Revisited, Diary of a Country Priest, Brothers Karamazov, and Stoner all permanently changed me on a fundamental level. I still think about these five stories regularly.

In a second tier of books that blew me away and influenced me, but in an aesthetic sense, discovering how the English language could be used in ways I hadn't before realised, I would place Portrait of the Artist, Lolita, Mrs Dalloway/Lighthouse, and Moby Dick. When I first read Lolita at like 19 I actually ran up and down the stairs shaking a little because I was so blown away by the language, it was the first book I'd read after lots of stodgy older Russian stuff which is great for life's truths but not so much for sheer aesthetic pleasure. I took no moral lessons or real introspection from Lolita, but just bathed in the wordplay. It was almost hedonistic, the literary equivalent of a no-strings-attached fuck with a stranger, full of lust, full of pleasure, enjoying it for what it was then letting it go. The 5 books I listed first are more like marriages, I'll go back and re-read them throughout the rest of my life, whereas I don't have much desire to go through Lolita again.

>>21990261
> Fascists were also "progressive", both in the sense of state-revolutionism and scientific rationalism.
Of course they were and I despise fascists. Every movement that calls for "progress" is to be looked at with scepticism.
>>21990289
> It may have lead to it but I think it’s a mistake to equate the two.
Here's a quote from a 19th Century book about sociology
> Africa still has a considerable amount of strongly organized military nucleii, but that is not going to last; soon they will have to cease fire and succumb to what the Europeans call progress and Muslims the law.
> Impulses at least comparable to those we saw in the Enlightenment and immediate centuries (barring the revolutions) can be found in other historical examples.
Such as?
> This tech hell world we live in even appears like something that’s hardly even related.
But Europe was like that in the 19th Century already, see the picrel.

>>16062631
Based

Is this really what LOTR is about?