/lit/ - Literature

>>12882628
>Call me Ishmael.
three words that signify a ton.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

In the beginning God created the heaven for the earth.

>>12882628
>This is the story of a bloodstained boy.

Buck did not read the newspapers

>Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
First time I’ve read a sentence by Kafka in English. The translation doesn’t do him right.

>>12882788
what does it miss? I quite liked the opening

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold

>>12882628
Bubbles over a dead body.

>A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.

Who else /Esoteric Jahanism/ ?

>>12882697
this
the entire opening passage is beautiful

>>12882939
>A fourth human pinata was strung up over the table. Short, ginger and cute, I felt an instinctual urge to protect her. She said “Hi” and a tentacle whipped upwards and tore out her lower jaw and tongue. After that her death was relatively quick as the Contravoxai at the table whipped their tentacles up in quick succession to tear something off her until her organs spilled onto the table and her legs too were snatched away.
What is the metaphysical significance of this passage in the Book of Jahans?

>>12882832
What book?

>The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Only one enemy remained; two if you counted god.

>>12882628

>>12883032
John Fowles, The Collector

>>12883300
Was about to post this, that first page really hooks you up

>>12882655
it really is perfect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq5LDSZDr2E

>>12882655
Based

>>12884403
Based comment guy

>>12882743
What book?

For a long time I went to bed early

>>12882628
It was a dark and stormy night.

>>12884507
Why does this "work"? It should be less interesting than lines with more dramatism, but it feels very captivating.

>>12882628
What book?

>>12882697
>another NTR book

>>12883970
P E R F E C T

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.”

>>12882939
I certainly am, Anon? Which one of his literary masterpieces are your favourite?

>To write the history of one's life, one must first have lived it; and so it is not my own that i write.

>>12882655
I'm convinced that Americans pretend this is "great" because they want their own "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

IHAVE,alas! Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

>>12883300
Does that mean dark green or peppered white?

>>12882831
based

>>12882832
Is it about cuckolding?

Probably
>> RAGE

It birthed the entire western canon.

>>12882628
>Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

>>12884403
What's the Moby-Dick/Herman Melville red pill?

so far I've listened to the Dreyfus lectures and read Hershel Parker's biography

today i will sing a song.. a song of ice and fire

>>12886773
This is so beautiful. I haven't read that book though.

>>12884507
Lovely. What makes it interesting, though? Anyone care to dissect it please?

>>12883970
absolutely BASED

this faggot is so disturbing, he's at his own tier beyond even chris-chan even during this tranny episode

I think it's the lower-level high functioning autism of chris-chan that is endearing while Jahans is extremely conceited, maybe it'd be better also if he didn't have the snobby angloid accent

The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

>>12886909
honestly unironically based

>>12886858
I take it you discovered the only and true prophet just now. Why immediately resort to heresy? Blasphemer!

>>12886909
Nonsense. It's the birth rates!

>It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

I can't believe I've known about Jahans for five years now, where does the time go?

>>12884998
Pretty bad. Never start a book with the word even.

As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of a lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head. I really didn't need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot of the time anyway, and still drunk and crazed and ghosted from the plane.

>>12882655
desu one of my favorite novel openings. Moby Dick as a whole is a masterpiece and anyone who says otherwise is a brainlet

„Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch, auf dessen Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte. Seine vielen, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.“

Paris hints of sacrifice.—But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaïde that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows. They are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.

Points for naming the novel.

>>12887329
I looked it up, I've never really given him a chance but that is a finely written paragraph.

>>12887337
I’d highly recommend him anon, Lewis is fascinating even only for the fact that Vorticism is the first and only truly radical modernist movement to come out of Britain in the early 20th century. Would highly recommend The Apes of God, as well as The Wild Body.

>>12886792
I think the real red pill is to read it as a sixteen year old and enjoy it purely as an adventure novel

>>12886811
Don't. Garcia Marquez is a hack and I fucking despise him.

>>12882697
Top 10 for me
>>12886773
This one is my all time fav, was hoping someone else would post it.

I used to think my life was a tragedy, now I realize it's a comedy.

>>12883300
based

>>12885318
when it was written it would have been peppered white, but now you get to choose

>>12888577
WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY

>>12882628
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZgO2AkPXc

https://youtu.be/mKDzzhtYPxo

>>12885114
these are all full length novels...
what the fuck is his problem?

>>12882628
>riverrun

>>12886749
... You mean 'wrath'?

>>12889992

>>12882628
Today I will remind them.

>Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
i guess it's a little boring answer but i love it too much

>>12884507
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY SUCH A BORING LINE MAKES ITSELF MEMORABLE? THANK YOU

>>12883986
Based

>>12890262
CUZ IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO READ THE BOOK

>>12890001
Rage is the opening line of the Iliad. I am not aware of any translations of it to 'wrath'.

>>12882743
Is he a qt bloodstained boy? That's my fetish. Sauce.

>>12890970
Oh wow, I've recently seen a podcast using 'wrath' and it reprogrammed my entire memory of the Iliad for a while. Holy hell, it quite obviously is Rage, yes.

>>12882628
It's never CRASH - mom made the pancakes

>>12891663
holy...i want more...

>>12882628
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.

>>12883300
So black?

>>12882697
Sounds like some cringy shit GRRM would write