/lit/ - Literature

>>12953717
How is Cioran?
Is the book actually fascistic like all those meme book charts say?

>>12953717
you can skip half of leviathan to get it lol

Leviathan's a big guy

>>12953840
This.
Parts 3 and 4 should have never been included, they just make the book unnecessarily long and tedious

>>12953717
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice (Gonna start Lotte in Weimar after)

Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities (So fucking close to the end of Vol 2 I can taste it, book's fucking great)

Fredric Jameson - Representing Capital (Besides his hyper-academic style that no one enjoys it's a pretty interesting reading of Capital Vol 1, and he teases out a lot of the interesting dialectical categories at play, gives Vol 1 real momentum)

How's America OP? I still need to read The Castle first

>>12953717
Going through the /lit/ book of the month. "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Good read actually, better than 1984 if you look at the context of its existence and if you've read some Jung.

>>12953854
I remember being underwhelmed by We, I might reread it sometime

>>12953857
Please do, it's a good read. Do remember that it was written at a time when mechanical thinking was in vogue. Consider the relationship it creates with the concept of the soul and the idea of absurdity in all forms. The story itself is overdone in our times especially the 'will they won't they' love hexagons.

>>12953717
>spring makes me feel optimistic
i think i have reverse seasonal depression or something. summer and spring make me feel like shit. theres nothing worse than wanting to do indoor activities but its sunny and beautiful outside.

I'll probably finish Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital today, after that I'll probably read a Martin Beck novel as a palate cleanser or something.

>>12953849
yeh def skip part 3 + 4 and even some chapters in part 1

>>12953717
Your selection has me rethinking the "normal" book type to read. I'm currently reading Library of Souls in the Miss Peregrine's series. I'm one that prefers fantasy over most other genres because it feels like the best escape for me. And the Miss Peregrine's series also uses old photos given to the author that dont really have much context or cant really be explained. The idea of the series is really good and I'm actually excited to read the newest(I believe to be newest at least) book called A Map of Days. Honestly, if you're into books that have a fantasy feel to them as well as going back in time to around the WWI era, then these might be books for you.

>>12953717
pic related plus Livy books 6-10 and volume 5 of an 8 part set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall

J.G. Ballard - Crash: Somehow I'm not liking this as much as I expected. Ballard has a great style, even an ESL person like me can see that, and the premise is basically tailor made for me, but I still find myself losing interest. However it's also rather short so I will finish it, maybe the big punch in the face I've been waiting for is coming soon.

Paul Auster - New York Trilogy: Funny private detective stories. Much better than 4321 which I had previously read by him. I suppose these short high concept pieces suit him better than mammoth novels.

Also some Gene Wolfe which I funnily enough started just before his death but cba to write them

>>12953931
How do you get to this page on goodreads?

>>12953717

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (my first Faulkner book, what I'm currently reading too)

Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

Saul Bellow - Seize the Day (friend recommended it to me, premise sounded cool)

pic related

going to read one of these recent acquisitions next, probably jackson

>>12953950
>J.G. Ballard - Crash: Somehow I'm not liking this as much as I expected.

Crash is pretty decent imo. Ballard has such a unique writing style that it's hard to stray from his works, but I think the plot in Crash is a little lackluster. I had a lot more fun with Atrocity Exhibition, but maybe you got overhyped.

>>12953996
>Bellow

Good job.

>>12953717
Confessions of an Italian
#Accellerate

>>12954035
The one about the Shenandoah campaign looks delicious.

>>12953717

I'm reading the Human Zoo and greatly enjoying it. Cities were a mistake

>>12954063
I've read Super Cannes and The Drowned World by Ballad before and enjoyed them, I guess it's just the lack of plot and the fact that I've already consumed my share of hypersexual/-deviant art that Crash doesn't seem as impressive. I didn't even expect much from the plot because this kind of books rarely have it. Maybe there just should be more radiator grills and blood and less vaginal mucus. The opening chapter was really great though and absolutely sold me on his style.

>>12953955
/user/year_in_books/2019/ in the URL then your account number from your profile page URL

>>12954123

Not him but thank you

>>12953717
>E.M CIORAN
>E.M

His name is Emil, why E.M?

>>12954151
Emil Mihai Cioran.
He didn't like his first name so he wouldn't use it.
I know right, I'm romanian myself and I hate my first name...

>>12954165
That's a cool fucking first name though. Would much rather have that than my first name.

It's great actually, I'm not getting anything explicitly fascist from it so far (I'm about about halfway through) it's just a collection of aphorisms on nihilism and the langour of philosophic thinking in the 20th C. It's definitely reactionary, but the values (or lack thereof) are not inherently facsist- probably due to it being written in 1949, after Cioran's disillusionment with the extreme rightist movement in Romania and fascism in general. So I definitely rec.

>>12953840

I read the editor's intro (I know..) and found myself wondering if the book proper was going to be a more verbose and archaic version of what he made abstract in just 70 pages... I'm beginning to think the answer is yes. But I'm still reading it because I'm either neurotic or just stubborn.

>>12953885

Perhaps I should have been more specific - I'm always a cynic and a miser, but the sudden warmth (first we've had around my parts) has been great because I'm a gardener-fag and my peas and beans won't die now. It's a very primal optimism, one that is rooted in the propagation of something which is physical, which I know will one day nourish me; rather than some abstract feeling of joy from the hazy nostalgia of spring and summer.

>>12954367

Sorry, OP here, the first part of that reply was meant for >>12953834

>>12953717
reading Catch-22in English, surprisingly comprehensible. translation seemed like shit, so i've only read like 10% and dropped it, then switched to the original

Pic related
I’m a little underwhelmed so far. Very episodic and soap opera. Another anon compared it to War and Peace earlier this year. I’m only 120 pages in but so far it’s nowhere near that good.
A Russian woman I work with told me I should learn Russian just to read his poetry. She said it’s not the same in translation. Not bloody likely I will take her advice but I believe her for some reason.

>>12953717
I've read the top 3 of your 4-
I actually enjoyed parts 3 & 4 of Levaithan, Hobbes is at his most interesting discoursing on Bible passages, mixing and matching verses, comparing and contrasting them, and delivering strong opinions about Christianity in general. There are also opinions on Demonology, various superstitions, and a How-to concerning the construction of a Christian commonwealth. Great stuff.
Amerika is perhaps Kafka's happiest book though unfinished (right when it gets really interesting too, unfortunately... but forever absent's any further information on the Oklahoma Nature Theater)- he based it on street rumors and cliches about America then making their rounds in Prague, America was a hot topic at the time as many were immigrating. It's a fabulous distortion I really wish he'd finished.
The Cioran volume's perhaps his most famous- rich, dense and thoroughly negative it's very pretty and has a compelling readability. Perhaps its celebratory negativity blinds /lit/ to the fact that it's one giant purple patch, some of the purplest prose in modern times section after section after section. Nevertheless, I liked it.

>>12954445
2bh you can just listen to people declaring it in Russian to catch the mood

A History of the French Revolution by E. D. Bradby
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Probably I will try to read
>The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
next.

>>12953843
for you

What portion of that copy of Amerika is the intro/nontext material? It's not one of those books with like a 100 page introduction by the translator or some shit is it? I've read the Stoker and it makes me curious to read the rest of Amerika (well, whatever he managed to write before he died). Is there a lot more that happens after the events described in the Stoker?

Foucaults Pendulum, it's great honestly, I love how it plays out the thin line between the rational scepticism and believing that the characters emit

>>12953996
How is as I lay dying?

no idea why, but Faulkner appeals to me more than other 20th american writers

>>12953717
Zola - The Masterpiece
pretty good so far, though a bit too many descriptions of Paris

>>12953717
Currently reading Ovid's Metamorphoses
Then I think I'll read a collection of Greek tragedies, the Illiad, Plato's Republic, some Aristotle

>>12954909
I read like 200 pages two days into this book, put it back in a small military library, only to find out a week later that the idiots threw out, by demand of some faggot officer, about 1000 great books into the garbage because it was "taking up space".

I could have had a huge, free library if I was informed of this, I was one of the only people who used the library anyways.

>>12954861

It's an older penguin edition (inherented from my father, as much of my library), and it has little or no introduction. No idea if the translation is any good. Pic related is the cover.
As for what happens after Stoker, it's classic Kafka - he very quickly ends up in his uncle's friend's house outside of New York, and has a surreal yet banal experience there, before moving on again. It's constant movement and urgency, much like The Castle in that aspect.

>>12954861

Sorry, I forgot the pic related

>>12955241
Thank you, I will place an order for it. Probably the Muir translation, those are supposed to be good.