/lit/ - Literature

>>12399111
Writing some of the translated works' titles in their original language like that is pretentious as fuck.

I like a lot of those books so he gets a pass from me

>>12399133
>Scruffy is pretentious

no shit

>>12399111
All of these books are individually good but having such a copy paste list of ‘good books’ as your favourites with nothing derivative from the norm of ‘intellectually acceptable’ books is a true sign of midtellect. Scaruffis music taste is trash, why would you assign any merit to his opinions?

>>12399326
I came to post this

>>12399111
>Kafka
What a shit taste.

This nigger is the biggest pseud of all time. I like how he pretends that drug fueled hippie drivel rock music is somehow comparable in artistic value to Mozart and Haydn, or how he shills for every bullshit "deep" Anglotrash opera composed after WWII

>>12399111
One gave me a pleasant surprise.
By two I'd realised that something was wrong.
I stopped reading at the third because I was incapable of holding back the torrent of laughter.

>>12399133
Isn't he a polyglot? He may be able to read them in the original version.

>>12399326
>liking things that everyone knows are good is bad
You should go back to your Radiohead and Grimes r8ing subreddit, faggot.

>>12399133
yeah especially when u consider he didnt do the translation of the red and the black, ostensibly the easiest title to understand in the original language

>>12399111
The only book I haven't read from this list is Insatiability. He says in the page that this list isn't to be taken seriously and people should focus on the language pages for a more accurate list.

Some choices are odd, like Ada for Nabokov instead of Pale Fire and Lolita, and having Mann in the top 5 with Buddenbrooks, but his literary choices does compose some really great works and anyone that follows it will find stuff of great value.

Still, the full list in this page its ways better than /lit/'s list, Scaruffi, being a pseud or not, he is way more well read than anyone in this thread, composed basically of monolingual anglo-incels, certified pseud that will say non-sense like >>12399326, >>12399362, >>12399346, you can see from this posts that an individual list from this kind of people would be a product of insecurty and dishonesty. At least he keep things like American Psycho, Catch 22, Gene Wolfe, etc away from his "serious list". That being said, I doubt he have read everything he lists, his early recommendations are all non-fiction, most focused on technology, AI, politics, etc, and his poems are really bland.

>>12399396
>certified pseud
>this entire post

>>12399351
Whenever he talks about classical he embarrasses himself. Obviously someone who doesn't really like that sort of thing, but wants to appear that he does. His list of symphonies where he doesn't mention the conductor or orchestra is hilarious. Which Beethovens 9th? Cobra's?

>>12399396
Scaruffi's list is very close to many charts I've seen floating around on lit.
His choices make no sense as a list, especially as a "greatest novela of all time " list.
Kafka in the first place is unacceptable.
I couldn't care less what you think of us, calling people incels, monolingual, insecure, all based on few lines criticizing a pretentious list.
Why are you even doing here ?

>>12399489
>having opinions different to mine is unacceptable

>>12399371
It's the "only liking things that everyone thinks is good" that's problematic.

There's no way to tell his personal taste from this list, it's soulless.

utterly memetic shite

>>12399516
Even for /lit/ standards this is the most retarded argument I have seen today, it reeks with insecurity. Eversingle list in this site is soulless according to this, every single literary critic top 10 is soulless because it contains certified great books?

>>12399489
Show me one top 10 list that makes "sense", can you see how retarded you sound? There is no way to make a 100% accurate list of bests novels, nobody has ever done and nobody will.

>Kafka in the first place is unacceptable.
Because an illiterate on an anime board says so? Show us your credentials fucko

>Bratya Karamazovy/ Karamazov Brothers (1880) is a philosophical novel narrated by an "omniscient" invisible character. It is overlong and several episodes seem to have been improvised just to make it more convoluted. The final speeches at the trial are redundant just like many other lengthy discussions.


>Characters proliferate to the point that the book feels like a collection of loosely-related short stories. Most of them deal, directly or indirectly, with drugs and/or alcohol. Many of them are written in a vernacular language borrowed from drug addicts. Wallace also indulges in the habit of using abbreviations, acronyms and nicknames. It's an avalanche of bad English that distracts from the meaning (if any) of the story. Many of the characters are irrelevant. Wallace keeps exploding the cast, perhaps because he doesn't quite know what to do with the cast. Once he introduces a character, Wallace doesn't know how to make him or her interact with the others. Dialogues are, in fact, the weakest part of the novel. Vast sections of the book are irrelevant. They don't add anything to the story, they are not particularly well written, they contain no major meditation. "Verbose" doesn't even come close to describing Wallace's style. Most of the book is a chaotic heap of details that are both redundant and poorly written. It is not only verbose: the verbosity is stubbornly and endlessly about drug addictions, alcoholism, murder and all sorts of freak accidents. It is a veritable overdose of the same kind of scene played over and over again, until the reader becomes numb and doesn't even smile anymore. You just turn the page towards the next drug addict and the next freak accident.

>Joseph and His Brothers (1943) is by far the most boring of Thomas Mann's novels, an endless retelling of the Old Testament from Jacob to Joseph that Mann wrote between 1926 and 1943, wasting 17 years of his life.
>As far as fiction and chronicle goes, the Old Testament of the Jews is a bad book, full of contradictions, of implausible claims, of unexplained coincidences. Plenty of Jewish theologians have made a living out of trying to provide rational explanations for the hodgepodge of stories contained in the "Tanakh".

Better than Harold Bloom

>>12399704
>I don't know if this book had anything to say or it was merely a giant bluff, but i know that it doesn't prove anything. Heidegger provides no proof whatsoever for what he claims. Even if he is saying something, he doesn't prove it. So it becomes a little pointless to try to figure out what he said.
>To me Heidegger's convoluted and unscientific style seems to have more in common with psychiatrists than philosophers. I shudder at his grotesquely naive analyses of existence, fear, anxiety, the uncanny, conscience and death.
>If you pick up this book at a library or at a second-hand bookshop, you will notice that only the first few pages have annotations and bear signs of having actually being turned. Virtually nobody had ever read this book to the end. But it is routinely listed as a milestone of philosophy. I personally think it represents a milestone of everything that gives philosophers a bad reputation: unscientific, incomprehensible, incompetent, and, ultimately, just plain silly.
>Be suspicious of any philosopher who hailed this as a great book. Heidegger stated that Sartre had misunderstood most of his ideas, and that's the biggest compliment ever paid to Sartre.
Then again any summary, written in ordinary language, of this book constitutes a misunderstanding of his "ideas", because those "ideas" depend entirely on being written in a convoluted and unscientific language.

Is he right?

>>12399704
>>12399716

>Full disclosure: the first time i read Nietzsche i felt that his books were just a ridiculous collection of nonsense, written in poor German, and largely based on an embarrassing degree of ignorance about anthropology, sociology, art and science; and i haven't changed my mind since then. I still have to understand why he became so famous. I am not sure that he also became influential because i think the century that followed had little use for his philosophy and/or his method (assuming he had one).

>In general the book is annoyingly vague and pretentious while containing precious little meaning. We never learn what the Superman is or does. We never learn what is the thing that died and that Nietzsche calls "god" (my feeling is that he is simply referring to traditional morality and the traditional way of life in the Christian world). We never learn what kind of morality should come next.
>I have rarely been so utterly bored reading a book. I think that Nietzsche had nothing to say and, in fact, didn't say it.

>This is another extremely confusing book. If i didn't know how famous the writer became, i would think that this book was written by an ignorant idiot who didn't study history, and didn't study philosophy, and was simply a verbose, delirious individual.
>What he lacks is erudition: he talks of things that he blatantly didn't study or didn't understand. His books are random collections of highly opinioned and poorly justified statements about historical, philosophical, scientific, anthropological and psychological studies that he only superficially understood. He is not confusing because he is a bad writer: he is confusing because he was confused.

>This is not the most delirious of Nietzsche's books, despite the fact that the chapters are titled "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Excellent Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny". What is missing is the chapter "Why I am so Modest" :-).

Better than Jordan Peterson

>one famous work on your list
>"loool fucking pseud bitch"
>less known book on the list
>"that makes no sense he should have this famous book on there that is more critically acclaimed"

never change you gais

>>12399704
>>Bratya Karamazovy/ Karamazov Brothers (1880) is a philosophical novel narrated by an "omniscient" invisible character. It is overlong and several episodes seem to have been improvised just to make it more convoluted. The final speeches at the trial are redundant just like many other lengthy discussions.
Then why is it on his top 10?

>>12399111
The authors are solid enough but some of the titles are wrong, and omitting Tolstoy, Flaubert, Melville, and Proust is just laughable.
Chartehouse is a better novel than R&B
C&P is Dostoyevsky's cleanest novel and for my money his best- to me, Karamazov is a frightening mess.
Absalom is Faulkner's best, either The Gift or Pale Fire is Nabakov's --Ada's too Nabakovian, almost self-parodic.
Finally, I prefer James' Wings to Bowl- but this is perhaps just a matter of personal taste..
The one I haven't read is Instability. Any opinions of it out there?

>>12399620
An illiterate board on anime site made charts and lists close if not identical to Scaruffi's and didn't need to call them The GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME BECAUSE I SCARUFFI SAY SO.
To make it into the " greatest novels of all time" it takes more than being some overrated existentialist novel on bureaucracy becoming the last contact remained to the modern, non religious man with the dimension of the divine. The little faggot came to be well known only in relatively recent times.
Even the ones that influenced him like Dostoevskij are lower, and some don't even make it into the list like Blake .
Whom did he influence? How long will his message remain relevant ?
Why is he not pretentious ?

>There is no way to make a 100% accurate list of bests novels, nobody has ever done and nobody will.
It is fairly easy to make a better list.
and why are my credentials required you clueless pissant.
Where are yours? What difference do they make ?
Where do you think you are?

Fuck off.

>>12399111
10/10

the list is mediocre
the man is a retard

>>12399802
>An illiterate board on anime site made charts and lists close if not identical to Scaruffi's
wrong faggo

how did piero scarrufi got famous? because i´ve never heard of him before

THE FACT THAT

>>12399833
Beatles pasta triggered all the boomers

>>12399833
He got famous on /mu/ because of his opinions on music, specially his Beatles review (>>12399842: The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worthy of being saved.)

>>12399818
Go back to mu or something

>>12399802
>The GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME BECAUSE I SCARUFFI SAY SO

He never said that

>>12399851
felling intimidated little girl?

>>12399111
it's good but also a bit boring as a list

Doubt he's read most of them. Reading Gargantua and Pantagruel now and it is fantastic so yeah. Also Wuthering Heights is a nice choice because it is genuinely an incredible novel that is popular for the wrong reasons but still deserving

>>12399795
>Nabakov
Kill yourself, turbopseud.

>>12399859
by who ?
A faggot on an anonymous anime image board?
Oh yeah I'm shitting my pants.

How about you prove me that list is legit when you're done playing cool, you little shit.
Assuming you even read

>>12399872

His website's filled with summaries. The guy is well read.

>https://www.scaruffi.com/writers/index.html

● Professor Kobayashi's mobile e-mail such as my teacher's master's teacher Mikami
· Is it related to disgusting? ! Is Leu Bajato (Persia's four-line poetry) also involved? ! 2019 / January 13 19: 27 ●
● In my Codex (Beast Belt), Root Bend (Left Bottom), Akasha (Vacant), Shikohage (Food Demon, Bald, Arabian Girl, Suppon)
There! 2019 / January 13rd 23: 16 ● Shikohage is made using part of the omen! 23: 17 ●

It was 23:40 on January 13, 2019 (Kanbun Genba?)? Shikohage
23: 03 Codex (Beast Belt)? Root bending of left butt! red? Rubaiyato? 23: 16 Momomi?
22:50 Undecided Soilbirds? 22: 53 Shikohage * Multiple? Shikohage = manly devil! = Turp! What? Akasha
22: 22 Pachinko = root curvature? Sunrise (Gundam?) Shikohage * 2? Dull smell!
22: 16 ● Have my poor bad smell of k relationship with my left butt root curved in Rubayat? !

>>12399880
you belong on reddit and /b/, not /lit/

>>12399880
>prove me that list is legit
What is that even supposed to mean? It's Scaruffi's personal opinion.

>>12399847
but what is his endgame?

>>12399888

He is probably very well read but he has also proclaimed to have heard unreleased and very rare material by artists (ex Boards of Canada) which I find very hard to believe

>>12399898
He asked me to prove Kafka doesn't belong there.
I did.

His response:
>Faggot, go back to b. Reddit. Show me your crediantials.

If he criticizes me at least he should bring forth an argument or shut the fuck up and stop being a pissant.

>>12399937
I don't think saying something is overrated is a "proof". You seem quite autistic and unable to comprehend that people might have different valuation metrics with different weighting.

>>12399957
>To make it into the " greatest novels of all time" it takes more than being some overrated existentialist novel on bureaucracy becoming the last contact remained to the modern, non religious man with the dimension of the divine. The little faggot came to be well known only in relatively recent times.
Even the ones that influenced him like Dostoevskij are lower, and some don't even make it into the list like Blake .
Whom did he influence? How long will his message remain relevant ?

I didn't just say that's overrated, I precisely explained why it is.

>people might have different valuation metrics with different weighting.

Still you refuse to tell me what they are.
You speak by abstractions and generalities .
Did you even read The Trial ?

>>12399516
It's a list of what he considers the greatest novels of all time. Any "greatest X of all time" list is going to prominently feature well known works because while yes, sure, there's always great stuff that falls through the cracks, generally speaking, the best stuff is going to have some sort of impact and gain recognition. If you asked Dostoevsky what he considered the greatest works of literature, he might say Don Quixote, Faust, The Iliad, Anna Karenina, etc. Oh, those aren't very obscure. Too many canonical works. Guess he's "soulless". Nabokov's favorites? Oh, he likes Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Kafka. What a pleb! These guys should be self-consciously curating their lists so that they tick off all the right boxes with the list connoisseurs of 4chan's /lit/ board.

>witkacy
based

>>12399972
Providing The Trial's summary and stating that Kafka's fame is relatively recent compared to Dosto and Blake is not in any way an explanation of your position why it's entirely undeserving to be where it is in this list.
>Still you refuse to tell me what they are.
I have no idea, those are Scaruffi's idiosyncrasies, not mine.

>>12399972
do you even read, retard?

>>12400006
>Providing The Trial's summary
Not what I did.
>stating that Kafka's fame is relatively recent compared to Dosto and Blake
...

>I have no idea, those are Scaruffi's idiosyncrasies, not mine.
Why did you start this shit then ?

Don't worry anon, let's end it here.

>>12399716
>>12399722
looks like something straight out of a goodread review coming from someone called "TheRationalistXxx420"'

>>12400014
I don't care anymore.

>>12399111
>Insatiability
Based Scaruffi

>>12399111
Boomercore. Yeah, I'm sure The Golden Bowl changed your life you bland little shit

>>12399396
>monolingual anglo-incels
brutal

>>12399716
goddamn he is absolutely right about this one

>>12399722
lmfao I love this guy so much

>>12400050
Why wouldn't it? The Golden Bowl is the best book on that list

>>12399817
wtf this makes even less sense than Heidegger. What is this guy doing

>>12400030
I didn't start anything, my replies are only the last two. Just wanted to point out how retarded it is to critique someone else's list based on subjectively weighted criteria for not conforming to yours.

Master and Margarita is shit

>>12399875
>wigs out over a typo
Read a book, idiot.

Looks like the lost of a fake stooge

Why do you guys think this guy is cool? Because he’s a liberal that acts like a conservative? Fuckin die

>>12400092
>how retarded it is to critique someone else's list based on subjectively weighted criteria for not conforming to yours
I dare you to find a different way of critiquing it.
Everyone else did it, and not only in this case.
Why is it retarded only in my case ?

>>12400119
its retarded in every case, /lit/ is filled with teenage pseuds that can barely talk about the books they have read. People here can't argue against things they don't agree with, mostly because they don't agree ebcause if hurts their fragile sense of culture.

Scaruffi as cringe as he is the guy did read more than anyone in this shit board, and he at least put into words his opinions. Here on /lit/ all I see is:

>implying X author is good
>implying Y works is good

no arguments, not even a semblance of a decent analysis. Reminding everyone that this shit board put the fucking Bible in the top 10 works of literature, this is the place where people can barely talk about philosophy without resorting to memes and frog faces and still Hegel is in the top 50


fuck /lit/, and above all fuck pseuds

>>12400217
>this board put the Bible in the top 10
It’s literally the most influential piece of literature ever written. Empires were founded on it. Wars were fought over it. Not to mention the entirety of western literature stems from it.

>>12400260
wow, what a hot take, I didn't even thought about that perspective
We all know that, do you really think this is a top 10 favorite book from people in fucking 4chan? Do you think anyone but religous people read the bible for fun or aesthetics? Readint to unersting fucking PAradise LOst or MOby Dick is one thing, but that doesn't make it one of the best books of all times

If influential is your parameter why not putting Beowulf or Gilgamesh's Epic in the fucking list? You know why and I know why, because people here are a bunch of pseud little fucks. The same people putting Gene Wolfe in a top 50 read the Bible for fun? KYS my man

It looks like a pretty standard list honestly. Just wish he would add more variation to his list instead of just having a copy&paste list that is no different from any other. But, then again, he is primarily a music reviewer and that’s a large indicator of being a mid-wit

>>12399414
I'm glad someone else has noticed this. His list of essential classical recordings is hilarious, it suddenly blows up around 1960 listing every single obscure literally who you could possibly imagine while literally skimming over Bach, Chopin, Debussy... Absolute prole

>>12399111
Gargantua and Pantagruel is not better than Don Quixote by any stretch of the imagination.

>>12399133
Not to mention inconsisten. Gogol's Dead Souls? lol

>>12399833
His website is one of the first private websites if not THE first

>>12401371
You don't understand anon, Scaruffi loves classical music, and it just so happens that Vivaldi's Four Seasons is one of his faves. Along with the usual firetruck symphonies.
He's full 'omg I used this to help me study' core

>>12400102
>Nabakov
>Nabakovian
>i-it's just a typo
Tell me more how high-school tier C&P is the best Dosto novel, pseudtastic mongoloid.

>>12399351
he actually claims the opposite, though he and you are both wretchedly wrong

>>12401496
>"yeah bro, just keep playing those two root position triads over and over again while I ramble on about my feelings and shit, it'll be so deep"

Rockist niggers need to fuck off and die.

>>12399111
>The Master and Margarita in top ten
how to spot a pleb

>>12400566
Let’s have you top 10 anon

>>12399111
The kind of list I parroted around when I was 18 and had read exactly two of those novels.

>>12401929
I'm not a /lit/ard enough to make a top 10, sure I could just list a bunch o canonical works like Orlando Furioso and Gongora's poems, or make it about some less talked authors in here like Doblin and Grossman, but what's the fucking point? So you retards can judge me based on absolute nothing since people here don't even read read?

>>12399751 perfect summed this shithole of a board, bunch of teenagers hypocrites that can barely form a decent analysis without resorting to memes

>>12399326
>Scaruffis music taste is trash
his taste is pretty good and eclectic tbqh

>>12402107
>so you retards can judge me
You caught me I wanted to make fun of your taste
You seem like a person who reads books you don’t really enjoy and then say they’re “revelating”

>>12402562
>You seem like a person who reads books you don’t really enjoy and then say they’re “revelating”
>projecting by a person in a board that put the Bible in a top 10 literary works of all times

>>12399704

Savage as fuck, goddamn.

>>12402633
I’m not projecting, I’m being honest. I literally just want to antagonize you.

>>12401464
It's the cleanest- no 40pp monologues expressing an Ivan's pained intellect, or a Mitya's dark, passionate blah blah blah. Neither contribute a thing to the progress of the novel. Not that I'm averse to what many consider 'padding'. For instance, I think the dominant cetology in Melville's classic mirrors Ahab's obsession wonderfully well, i.e. brings it forward in a very effective manner. Karamazov, by contrast, is a boring mess- although I did rather like it (ironically enough) when I was in hs. ..But then I read alot of books.
There. Answered the question.
Now tell me, what's your favorite Nabokov and (in a sentence or two) why?

>>12399795
you are that faggot from reddit who complained at the top 100 list

>>12399111
I doubt that anyone bar a very select few on /lit/ have actually read all of those books. I’ll admit myself I’ve only read 5 of them.

>>12399111
can you please keep this faggot in /mu/

>>12399795
>Chartehouse is a better novel than R&B
No way broseph, scholars like Carpeaux and Bloom, for example, all have prety good reasons to put R&B above Chartreuse de Parme. Unless you have some hot opinions to give a statement like that is less than a fart in the wind

>>12402816
Not at all. Note that I was in tune with the authors selected for the most part, and at least half the titles as well..
I've been here for a long time, pal..
Of course I understand the unwillingness to answer a simple question. Both of [us] know who the 'pleb' is....