/lit/ - Literature

Yes, go past the first page and you will find it. People ask for it EVERY day...

>>1013776
ERRY ERRY DAY

Does anybody on 4chan remember the phrase lurk moar? Those were the fucking days.

>>1013778
wow, really? I lurk /lit/ for months now and I honestly have never seen one before.

>>1013783
You fail at lurking.

>>1013780
CONSIDERING PEOPLE STILL USE IT, SURE, I THINK MANY REMEMBER IT.

>>1013782
I was thinking more of a list wthat doesn't put the books into a subjective tier. Just a list of a lot of good books that are worth reading.

>>1013790
Oh. I'm sorry my list doesn't fit YOUR needs.

>>1013782
>HIGH TIER: The Sound and the Fury
>SHIT TIER: The Lord of the Rings
>ohgodwhatamireading

>>1013787
I've seen a lot of god tier, mid tier, shit tier bullshit lists, or fantasy lists, but never a somewhat complete list of awesome books regardless the genre.

(would be awesome if someone could post it if such a list existed)

>>1013797
Ask your English professor?

>>1013790
You want an unsubjective list of the best books? I`m sorry, I misspoke, you fail at failing. Go back to /b/, perhaps they are more your speed?

http://lit-essentials.blogspot.com/

You're welcome.

>>1013782
More like, let's list a bunch of books that my high school and college classes have required me to read and rank them by my personal enjoyment.

>>1013804
thanks man!

That should really be in a FAQ on the front page if this question comes up as often as everyone ITT said.

>1013782

How in the nine hells is The Great Gatsby god-tier? High tier, certainly, possibly even middle. But God? You sir are crazy

>>1013782
Has anyone here ever tried reading The Sound and the Fury? It's a clusterfuck of italic paragraphs, trains of thought, untrustworthy narration and inconsistency. People who love Faulkner say it's a masterpiece, but that's assuming they're not lying about actually finishing the damn thing. I tossed it after 110 pages when, even after going back and taking careful notes of who was speaking and what was said, I still couldn't figure out what was going on.

>>1013818

If I remember right, that was one of the few books that begin to make a bit more sense about fifteen minutes after pushing yourself to the final page. Sort of like Finnegan's Wake, only more annoying.

>>1013818
>criticizing a book he hasn't finished

http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading
this has fucking every chart ever made
look at it
love it

>>1013804
lol, why is Stagolee's troll list on here?

>>1013833
Sorry, but I shouldn't have to read through hundreds of pages of nonsense in order to for a book to make just a little bit of sense. That's called bad writing, and I have no reason to finish a book written like that.

>>1013833
By the way, have YOU tried reading this book?

>>1013840
yes indeed i have i'd say it's one of my favorites

>>1013840
lurk moar

>>1013843
Well you have weird taste. Or you're just some angsty teenager who thinks that different = good.

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's best work, I think. But really he's a fabulous author overall, everything he's written is worth reading.

But of course I must only say that to try and look cool/because I read it for college/I'm a hipster.

>>1013853
>implying everyone who enjoys Faulkner is an angsty teenager
that's just a dumb statement.

>>1013853
>implying that the sound and the fury isn't praised by many as one of the best works of the 20th century

>>1013853
Or he actually understands the book, and you don`t.

>>1013863
>sean bean is disappointed.jpg
You go on /mu/ a lot, don't you?

>>1013859
>>1013860
>>1013863
>>1013866

feels samefag

>>1013853
>You have different taste to me, therefore you are weird

Maybe we should burn him as a witch, guv'na.

>>1013868
Those 4 posts were made in a one minute timespan, and one post was by a tripfag.
Quit being a cunt, more than one person disagrees with you.

>>1013868
Because we disagree with you?

>>1013867
?

>>1013873
>implying tripfags don't have multiple proxies open simultaneously so they can samefag threads and troll under different names.

>>1013882
Yes, I am implying that, since I'm definitely not the same person as Stagolee.

>>1013884
The whole ridiculous filenames thing has always seemed like a /mu/-meme to me.
Also I saw you go on /mu/ in the chatroom yesterday.

>>1013885
Nor am I. Face it, you fail.

>>1013887
It's insanely popular on /v/ too. Just about everyone has an entire folder of them.

>>1013887
there's a mu chat room?

>>1013892
no, in the lit2 chatroom.

>>1013896
oh whoops i misread it

yeah i go on mu sometimes i'm no /mu/tant though

>>1013888
>>1013885
>>1013874
>>1013873
>>1013869
>>1013866
>>1013863

None of these people have actually addressed >>1013818's criticisms of the book, which just means that they are valid criticisms and people are defending a highly flawed novel.

>>1013906
WILL YOU GIVE IT A REST?

>>1013909

In my day, having weird taste was a good thing.

>>1013921

>>1013909

So I guess I win. The Sound and the Fury is a shit tier book.

>>1013936
2deep4u

>>1013936
Yep, that's how it works.

>>1013943
>>1013936
My samefaggotry sense is tingling

>>1013940
>2deep4u

Wow, that's the best response you can come up with? I am impressed!!!

>>1013951
my opinion is right it's great you're wrong

>>1013951
You haven`t managed to read the entire book. Therefore you can not tell someone who has that is sucks. When you have grown up, and learned to read properly, you should give it another go, and see what happens.

>>1013966
That's not how it works in real life, bro. I already stated it in >>1013838, but nobody has any obligation to read bad writing. Just admit it. The Sound and the Fury is badly written and incoherent. If this is not a fact, then disprove me.

>>1013986
From wikipedia:

Literary significance and reception

The novel has achieved great critical success and a prominent place among the greatest of American novels. It played a role in William Faulkner's receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The novel's appreciation has in large part been due to the technique of its construction, Faulkner's ability to recreate the thought patterns of the human mind. It was an essential development in the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.

Like much of Faulkner's work, The Sound and the Fury has been read as typifying the South as a whole. Faulkner was very much preoccupied with the question of how the ideals of the old South could be maintained or preserved in the post-Civil War era. Seen in this light, the decline of the Compson family might be interpreted as an examination of the corrosion of traditional morality, only to be replaced by a modern helplessness. The most compelling characters are also the most tragic, as Caddy and Quentin cannot survive within the context of the society whose values they reject as best they can, and it is left to Jason, unappealing but competently pragmatic, to maintain the status quo, as illustrated by the novel's ending.

There are also echoes of existential themes in the novel, as Sartre argued in his famous essay on Faulkner. Many of the characters also draw upon classical, Biblical and literary sources: Some believe Quentin (like Darl in As I Lay Dying) to have been inspired by Hamlet and Caddy by Ophelia. Benjamin may derive his name from the brother of Joseph in the Book of Genesis.

>>1013996
You can't defend the book on your own and had to go to Wikipedia for help? Sad.

>>1014013
I haven't read it, but I'd trust the author that won a Nobel prize to be good over the random guy on the internet telling me he's bad.

>>1014021
Did you even read the Wikipedia entry? He won a Nobel Prize because his book was an accurate representation of human thought. Not because it was a good work of literature with convincing character development and a compelling plot. I'll trust you to make up your own mind if you ever read the book and not open to the first page with the expectation that you're reading something good because someone else said it was good.

>>1014061
You're trying to convince me that I should open it expecting it to be bad. Once again, I'd rather believe the Nobel prize guy.
And something that does accurately convey human thought is a good book.

>>1014061

>He won a Nobel Prize because his book was an accurate representation of human thought

god this is so fucking dumb i hrgrngrdas

>>1014061
Implying that doesn`t take a good writer to do.

>>1014074
>You're trying to convince me that I should open it expecting it to be bad.
I'm trying to convince you that you should open it without strong expectations.

>Once again, I'd rather believe the Nobel prize guy. And something that does accurately convey human thought is a good book.
Accurate human thought =/= a compelling narrative. Human thought is scattered to shit, not consistent, not coherent and doesn't contain all the elements of a good story. Again, he won the Nobel Prize because writers simply hadn't done this too well up to that point, not because he was able to write accurate human thought and a good novel came out. A novel came out, I'll admit that. It's not for everyone. Maybe some writers will get a geeky pleasure out of it the way a guitarist might get a geeky pleasure out of listening to jazz, with the guitarist playing a bunch of random notes that don't follow regular patterns, but are somehow pleasant to listen to. Maybe not.

>>1014079

See: >>1013914

lists are for people who are lazy, and it encourages them not to seek out anything new and interesting

this makes the board boring

>>1014100

That's the first smart thing you've said yet.

>>1014100

It's not an "accurate representation of human thought". It's a dramatization of the fall of the southern aristocracy with an attendant disintegration of narrative around the last person who actually believes in the morals and nobility that the best of them believed in. Note that the only person capable of moral decisions is Quentin, whose section becomes the least coherent and disintegrates as the writing focuses more and more on his inability to reconcile old southern morality with the reality of the present. Benji is the final product of that culture--castrated (no future), incapable of moral judgment, existing only in name and memory (his thoughts are almost only of Caddy) and his cries are meaningless bellows that acquire a sense only from outside ("might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets"--that is, the author gives them sense, makes something of the confusion and meaninglessness), and at the end peace is achieved in name only--they get Benji to shut the fuck up by driving the right way around a statue. Jason, being everything that was bad about the south--the racism, the sexism, etc.--is fully coherent, being the only person left to carry on the family name--and it is in name only that he carries anything on. Dilsey's section is the resurrection of the south (blood of de lamb etc.) and by extension the way by which the world in general can recover from the sense of destruction of all foundations you find in a lot of modernist lit--hers is the only part with objective narration, ergo the most "coherent". The word "accurate" has no place in this--human thought is always and only jumpy, incoherent, full of loose threads, no matter what is happening, but the "incoherence" of The Sound and the Fury is used to dramatize things, not just for simple mimesis.