/lit/ - Literature

i know this gets posted a lot here but it does deserve the praise. within 270 or so pages john Williams manages to make William Stoner, an average and modest man, probably one of the most relatable characters you could read in 20th century literature. everything about this book is just perfect and the ending fucking broke me, but reading it a second time that introduction fucking bites hard because you realise that no matter how hard you try, how good you are at what you do, very few people will remember you and there's no real good time for anything to pass away. all the unresolved baggage Stoner leaves behind fucking ruined me.

Crime and Punishment
Moby Dick
Don Quixote
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Outer Dark
Anna Karenina
Wuthering Heights
Les Miserables
Watership Down

Dracula - Bram Stoker. Because it is the most rereadable book ever. Read about 50 times

>>11270916
I'm with you anon. One of the things that struck me was how his understanding of what was happening to him was always one step behind the moment needed for effective action. There was always this sense for me that each time he achieved a level of greater ability to act properly in response to the life's cruelty against him, the moment had passed and he let it go. Amazing how much passion it awoke in me for a crutchedy old man expressing the bare minimum of willpower against the world, because it was so little so late. That's just how I feel about it right now, but yes that book really got to me as well. One of the most gripping books I've ever read.

>>11270916
FPBP. Stoner is one of those books that sticks with you for life.

>>11270911
Heart of Darkness. Everything, from the title to the prose is a work of art. The fact that it explores interesting themes like imperialism and human nature is just icing on the cake.

Moby Dick
Gravity's Rainbow
Light in August
Under the Volcano
Blood Meridian
The Crossing
Far Tortuga
Life and Fate
Invisible Cities

>>11270916
Definitely the kind of book I'll return to multiple times as I get older.

>>11270927
I wish Dracula was talked about more often here. Initially I found my experience reading it disappointing because I expected slow building atmospheric horror and while it does offer that in satisfying amounts, I didn't expect most of it to be written as journal entries and articles, but upon reflection and rereading it I enjoyed it so much more for Mina Harker and the friendships she develops through the book. All the focus on loyalty really won my heart over.

>>11270970
This. Thought I would hate it but it's honestly one of my favourite short reads. Need to revisit it sometime.

Meditations and Letters from a Stoic are personal 10/10s for me. They're a major influence on me and how I feel I should hold myself on a day-to-day basis and the books have also helped me in challenging my daily anxieties too. Would recommend stoic philosophy to anyone feeling overwhelming stress or feeling like they lack direction or discipline.

>>11270920
> Watership Down

my nigga

I need to re-read it but I loved its pacing, atmosphere, ambiguity, thrills, etc. I also thoroughly enjoy the conversations and discussions this book manages to create where different anons including myself are trying to understand the book even more, it just feels very enjoyable and rewarding.

>>11270920
good list for the most part, but wasnt malcolm x a racist mud slime?

I'll always keep shilling Durrell, he's understand both in prose and poetry.

I absolutely love this novel and p. much everything he's written

This book is hilarious. The nonsense and absurdity is so unpredictable you wonder why it isn't more read and talked about, here or anywhere.

>>11271335
Well I just ordered it, so you're shilling has inspired one person to give it ago.

>>11271293
Yes sort of. He actually acknowledges it in the book. While a member of the nation of Islam he strongly believed every white person was accountable for the oppression of black people and many of his experiences with white people seemed to confirm this view (his father was murdered by klansmen, the murder was covered up, he was sentenced for ten years for a crime he committed with some friends and two white girls but the white girls got a slap on the same wrist for the same crime, etc).

His views changed as he discovered true Islam. He became critical of the nation of Islam and grew to believe in the search for peace and that it was clear not all white people were to blame as he came to acknowledge many stood in solidarity for civil rights.

I call the book a personal 10/10 because the man underwent two impressive transformations: prison inspired him to read, to educate himself and to believe in a cause for change. His trip to Mecca was his true spiritual calling and forced him to reasses his previously held prejudices and beliefs. The book is written in his direct and matter-of-fact way that feels like he's right beside you. Genuinely great book.

>>11270911

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Lolita
Memoirs of Hadrian
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The language of Shakespeare
Poetry of Wisława Szymborska
The Book of Job

>>11273062
i have this book and its still unread

>>11273471

Forget the poems of Emily Dickinson

>>11270911
no book is a 10. 10 can only go to actual real performances, like narrated under milk wood

thus spoke zarathustra
various academic lecture series
dubliners & portrait
prose edda
the 6 main dragonlance chronicles
crime & punishment
gravity's rainbow
the road
blood meridian
the tempest

>>11270916
>thinking Stoner a virtuous man

you guys gotta learn to read

>>11273552
and +1 to bram stoker's dracula. what a fucking masterpiece.

Catch-22. I've read nothing like it.

>>11270970
>>11270999
I've tried to read HoD twice but the prose just seems suffocating. I accept I just need to reread it when I am older

>>11270916
the first chapter sums up everything about the novel. his legacy is stuck in a single book for him at the university, which seems sad. but he dies a happy man, willing to live for himself rather than everyone else. the only times he seemed to let his anger get to him was when the two people he was supposed to look after were both being treated poorly. what got to me most was just how personal and honest the writing was. i damn near cried when he was being torn apart from his daughter. its not a novel thats gonna completely answer everything for me, but its like stoner was a good friend of mine that is always there to empathize with me when shit gets hard. and its one of the most fun and fluid novels i have ever read.

>>11270911
the perfect pulp adventure story. you can read the whole thing cover to cover in an evening and be completely immersed. the ending is great, the characters are believable without being too gritty or realistic, the pacing is perfect...it's just lightning in a bottle.

The Count of Monte Cristo

>>11270927
Stoker plagiarized passages and his writing style is off-putting by switching from great literary phrases to textbook passages. Plus, it makes no sense why Dracula wanted to move to England and how he came to be infatuated with Mina. The fact that Mina's vampirism could be reversed while her friend's couldn't was just Stoker trying to win the Victorian reader over by claiming that thots get what's coming to them. Dracula would have become an obscure book except the theater and movie versions were so popular.

>>11273715
>Catch-22. I've read nothing like it.
big braind

>>11275564
4u

>>11270911
>Call Me By Your Name
I’m a sucker for prose like this. Currently displaced A Boy’s Own Story and A Separate Peace as my male bonding favorite — in no small part due to how it speaks to feelings of longing that are universal, in a way.
>Too Loud A Solitude
At times beautiful and at times viscerally disgusting, shocking, sad, beautiful, fantastical, and real. Bohumil Hrabal understood how what we read creates the world we live in.
>Between The World And Me
Again: affecting, emotional prose. Coates channels the anger, sadness, love, and reverence he feels towards the world into his work raw and unfiltered. It’s fiery, stirring, and fiercely grounded in reality in a way that gives each word more impact.

The Book of Disquiet
Persuasion and Rhetoric
Stoner
The Master of Go
Confessions of a Mask
Les Fleurs du Mal
Complete Rimbaud
Life: A User's Manual
Against Nature
Oblomov
Chekhov's Short Stories
Salinger's Short Stories
Invisible Cities
Will to Power
Difference and Repetition

also give me some recs on more short story writers thanks

The Fire Next Time.

>>11275881
Recommendation on short stories: Those Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula Le Guin

Blood Meridian
Duino Elegies
The Brothers Karamazov
Gravity's Rainbow

Moby Dick
King Lear
Brothers K
Though number rating classics are kind of stupid these are the works I would say were the most sublime. I found a depth and expanse of humanity in these I just haven't encountered anywhere else in any art. I'd tentatively add Don Quixote but I've only read it once and a long while ago.

>>11275894
forgot King Lear & The Metamorphosis.

Crime & Punishment, the meme the myth the legend
Grendel
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

>>11271075
Same

>>11271075
How good is Meditations if I've already read Epictetus? I'll probably read it inevitably just to be a Romaboo but I don't see how much more a notebook of daily musings is going to impress the Stoic worldview on me.

I love these threads

>>11273738
Not just his daughter, but the bitterness and oppressiveness of Edith, his affair with Katherine and why he needed her and his friendship with Finch all just made him so human. I remember specifically Finch being furious with Stoner saying "you'll regret this" when Stoner doesn't sign up for the military but then years later they become the best of friends.

One of my favourite parts is when Stoner's schedule is changed by Lomax and is made to teach English basics to first year students so Stoner says fuck it and continues to teach them medieval literature. Stoner at his most alpha.

>>11273552
How is no book a 10 at least in terms of subjectivity? Some readers are going to view certain books as perfections.

>>11273715
Heart of Darkness is definitely a dense read despite its short length. It took me a second attempt to pull myself through it but it's immensely rewarding and you could sit for hours just re-reading passages in attempts to uncover more meaning.

I'll read it again sometime soon and I know I'll get a completely new impression on it.

>>11275843
how is Call Me By Your Name compared to the movie? Really want to see it but the more I hear about the book the more I want to read it too

also worth watching is Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy which is an adaptation of this book

I just love One Hundred Years of Solitude.

>>11273807
Arthur Conan Doyle is pretty cozy to be fair, will check out Lost World

>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce's prose is beautiful and they way he evokes emotions you haven't felt in years (particularly in the first half of the book) is incredible, but to me it became a 10 in the days after I'd finished. The plot and prose lay stewing inside me, and looking back on it everything that made it so excellent became clear, like how Stephens eventual self imposed exile from Ireland is so obvious in retrospect due to his history and upbringing, his treatises on beauty the made me consider for the first time in my life what I actually consider to be true beauty, and a relatable protagonist going through ( as we all do when growing up) fears of death, longing to be older and wiser, puberty and often unhinged lust, and a search for his own personal spirituality. I read once somewhere that this book is the king of motifs and this was the part that really stuck with me, all of them are used so perfectly it makes me want to go back and read it again even though its so fresh in my mind, motifs like birds, flame, identity, country etc, all come together so perfectly

>>11273552
why the road?

>>11270916
>dude let me just rape my wife real quick lmao woe is me

>>11275047
>Monte
THIS

>Melmoth the Wanderer

A late Gothic epic by Oscar Wilde’s granduncle. If you’ve read something like Macbeth or Faust and wondered ‘why would someone believe in Hell and still damn their souls for power on Earth?’ this book takes its story from that question. Melodramatic, overwritten and stridently anti-Catholic, it’s an extremely entertaining book.

>Clarissa, or, a The History of a Young Lady

1500+ pages in small print and a story that could be summarised in two lines, this 18th-century epistolary novel has possibly the most fully-formed picture of masculine sexuality I’ve ever seen.

>>11277516
>>Melmoth the Wanderer
I'm reading this right now and it's overly lengthy and exaggerated. You do need some patience.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin

>>11275881
Guy de Maupassant

>>11271004
Is it written by two dudes both named Kobo Abe?

>>11271233
Blood Meridian
The Road
Suttree
The Crossing
Outer Dark

Even his """weaker""" stories, like All The Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men are fantastic.

McCarthy is a 10/10 author tbqh

>>11278181
what makes the road a 10/10?

>>11277937
all part of the charm for me

>>11276846
I don’t know because I haven’t seen the movie. That being said, it stands on its own. It really helps capture adolescent longing.

>>11277400
I love books that mean more to me the more I think about them. Been meaning to read Portrait and you post was the last push I needed.

>>11278181
Agreed, would also include Child of God. Hope he finishes The Passenger soon. Truly one of America's greatest living writers.

>>11278288
For me it's not a full ten but the authentic atmosphere, the sparse prose, the tensions of both its subtlety and its shocks, its moments of ambiguity and how it manages to speak volumes with what's left unsaid (McCarthy does that wonderfully in each book), as well as its devastating moments towards the end (the thief and what happens to boy's father) manages to create a compelling tale which is an exercise in empathy for male bonding as well as a subtextual warning that we must not allow ourselves to devolve to that extent. It's a beautiful book i m o.

>>11278969
The Road starts out as a 10 but loses a point every time the boy says "I'm really scared".

The Master and Margarita
Steppenwolf
The Idiot
A Confederacy of Dunces

all top tier

>>11270911
Ulysses because I learn a lot more about literature and art whenever I read it, especially with my line-by-line analysis book (new bloomsday) because I'm a pleb

Siddhartha because it got me interested in literature as it was one of the first books I read, eastern philosophy, then eventually western philosophy, which was a life changing experience. Also I think about many lessons I learned from that book every day. A lot of people on here tell me it's entry level, and they may be right in the sense that a pleb can still greatly enjoy it but I don't think that degrades it.

Within a Budding Grove, although I'm only 150 pages in. Swann's Way was awesome but I was much more pleb and didn't pick up on a lot of the artistic elements, but now reading WBG, after reading dozens of more books since SW, I'm more thorough and I contemplate the work a lot more and I love it.

fathers and sons

every single possible theme you could find in russian literature is expanded upon with delicacy and grace that far surpasses its shorter length. Turgenev meditates on god, corruption, unrequited love, the boredom of the province, and the loss of a child, both in physic and spirit. one feels the disease, the humidity and the stricken glances across the wheaten glades. as the characters meet their inevitable ends, we find graves wrapped in moss and age and two forgotten people, comforted in their loss and alienation. yet somewhere now, a father longs to embrace his child

>penguin edition

>>11276275
Meditations has musings on issues and experiences we all have such as struggling to get out of bed. Some parts are essentially are a how to be stoic guidebook. It really is a must read

>>11270911
Albert Camus - Caligula

A relatively short play but the way in which he incorporated one of Kierkegaard's motifs (the emperor for whom the world is not enough) to illustrate the futility of an aesthetic/hedonic mode of living completely shattered my /edgy/ world view at the time

>>11279865
So, like -135?

Jokes aside, it's probably a 9.5/10. Not a perfect 10 but it's extremely close and it's personally my favorite book, along with Fight Club, to give to non-readers (men). People who haven't read a book in years and they are starving for it. I've given The Road to about 8 people, all of whom are self-proclaimed "non-readers", and they all report back to me that they inhaled the thing, read the book front to back in less than a weak. You can't really do that with Blood Meridian or Ulysses or Stoner or any other hi-brow lit

Latro in the Mist
Redwall because of nostalgia
Don Quixote
The Beckett Trilogy
Notes from Underground
2666
No longer human
The children of hurin
Count belisarius
the Philokalia, specifically volumes 1 and 2, because they helped save my soul

>>11270916
Agreed

>>11270920
Good list

>>11273471
>job
My nigga

>>11273552
>prose edda
Nice choice

>>11275893
I wish Le Guin had gotten more attention, she was great

>>11280508
This is true, McCarthy is pretty universally liked.

It being a vehicle for selling it's philosophy is a good thing fags. Literally the best part.

>>11270916
>>11273510
>>11275907
>>11277300
based.

For me, Beware of Pity and The Recognitions.

>>11273402
Totally agree man. I always thought of him as a bad guy, in comparison to MLK etc, but he was truly the result of circumstance. I related very strongly to the way he felt after reading his experiences. Very genuine and I imagine I might have gone down a similar path in his shoes

>>11280520
oh wow 3/10 taste anon

>>11273715
Lame on both counts

>>11270911
The Phantom Tollbooth. It's kind of a kid's book, but it's the best damn kids book I've ever read. I love all the metaphors and allegories, which, at least for a kid, can be instructive. For example, in one part of the book, Milo eats some letters and words. It's not explicitly said but implied that choosing your words is like choosing your food. Every one has a different flavor, and how you mix them determines their taste. Just like food. I think it's clever.

It's probably also why I like the Pilgrim's Progress.

>>11280695
WHIch 3 did you like?

>>11270920
>Moby Dick
when does it get good?

>>11280549
I haven't read The Recognitions, but if Beware of Pity is one of your personal 10/10s, I pity you.

just affected me

Catcher in the rye. It held my attention as long as I could hold it in my hands.

>>11280508
Would this be true for me if I've already seen the movie or would it be a waste of time?

>>11280884
I rejected the novel in high school because this guy who beat and cheated on his gee eff would wear this stupid red hunting hat and had this mindset that he WAS Holden Caufield. How can I like a book if human waste related to it?

Some that are yet to be posted:
-Divine Comedy
-The Emigrants - Sebald
-The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
-Pale Fire
-As I Lay Dying
-Under The Volcano
-Every Book Gaddis Has Written Except Carpenter's Gothic
-The Dying Grass

>>11270911
Book of the New Sun
The Brave Soldier Svejk
Dead Army's General
The Last Temptation of Christ
Memoirs of Hadrian
Heart of Darkness
Lord of the Flies
Blood Meridian
Fahrenheit 451
The Once and Future King

>>11281877
Under the Volcano has been posted.

>>11275888
this is a really enlightening and excellent read. baldwin is great.

>>11282038
A few of his choices were posted earlier, what's your point?

>>11271293
Toward the end he has a change of heart and begins to question if his violent path, and if islam was the right path at all, after he sees the corruption around him is no different.
Too bad he was killed days after this epiphany and before he could do anything about it

For me, it's Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. It's such a masterfully crafted book, with its narrative style and the haunting build-up coupled with a wonderful, layered thematic.

>>11281877
>-Every Book Gaddis Has Written Except Carpenter's Gothic
Even Frolic? Care to extrapolate?

>>11280758
>>11270986
Why do you like to so much and apparently even more than AILD, TSatF and Absalom? I also think Light in August is great but compared with the aforementioned three it stands out as the weakest imo.

Crime and Punishment. It just hit all of my emotional buttons. Something was incredibly relatable about Raskolnikov’s paranoia. One of those books that leaves you with an afterglow for days when you finish it.

>>11275047
seconding this

>>11280233
What do you mean by
>Penguin edition

>>11283189
>leaves you with an afterglow for days when you finish it.

As I Lay Dying did this for me, mainly because once you get a full view of the narrative you realize just how perfectly Faulkner has played with your perception of the characters trough the distinct POVs also the beautiful prose and the biting commentary that came outta nowhere sometimes, Addie's chapter in particular is worth many re reads. Also fuck Anse.

I realize this might be a pretty pleb tier book, but I reread it at least once a year generally over the course of a single day.

>>11281157
I read it after seeing the film and enjoyed it more than the film. Worth reading, the film is genuinely more optimistic.

>>11281877
Yeah The Divine Comedy is sublime

>>11283553
Hey dude its cool if you love it its all about personal preference. Im dying to read it to be honest before denis villeneuve's movies get made