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/lit/ - Literature

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17395374 No.17395374 [Reply] [Original]

/lit/, need your help. Trying to make up for lost time when I was an illiterate. Recommend me some classics that are only 2 to 300 pages in length.

I bit off more than I can chew with Cicero's collected works and Summa Theologica, tens of thousands of pages put together. Need to finish some short reads to keep me motivated.

>> No.17395388

>>17395374
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_to_the_Great_Books#Contents

>> No.17395397
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17395397

>>17395374

>> No.17395430

>>17395388
>>17395397
but which of these are short reads?

>> No.17395461

>>17395430
Gravity’s Rainbow flies by when you don’t reread a single sentence

>> No.17395484

>>17395430
Wikicunt here. Pretty sure they’re all shorter than 200 pages. Don’t know why you care more about length than difficulty but you do you fren

>> No.17395528

Animal farm is short as fuck.
Lord of the flies is short as fuck.
I don’t remember 1984 being very long.
The trial isn’t very long.
Ubik isn’t very long.
Dubliners is a collection of short stories.

>> No.17395740

>>17395374
>stat reader
>starts with Summa Redditogia
Just pull that stick out of your ass and read what you like faggot. Reading won't solve your problems nor make you seem sophisticated

>> No.17395913

>>17395740
Actually, it will

>> No.17396071

>>17395374
frankenstein

>> No.17396081

>>17395740
What makes one sophisticated?

>> No.17396086
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17396086

>>17395374
Sorry to say but >>17395740 is right anon. Only the most tryhard faggots have actually read the entirety of Summa Theologica; ever wonder why it's structured into nicely ordered chapters, topic by topic, then question by question? Because it's a reference work. Not to mention, reading Aquinas without first reading Aristotle and Augustine (not to mention the BIBLE) is like reading a graduate level math text without learning to multiply.

You don't necessarily have to read fiction, but it will accelerate your literacy significantly; it's easier to read a lot of fiction than a lot of non-fiction. >>17395528 and >>17395397 are god recs. IMO You can't go wrong with Shakespeare's plays desu; you can get the shitty paperbacks dirt cheap ($1-2) at any used book store and in my experience they're just as good as fancy editions. Sophocles, Euripeides, Woolf, Verne, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Bradbury, Kafka, and Nabokov also have many short fiction classics in their corpus. If you want short non-fiction classics, consider Plato's dialogues, some of Aristotle's books, Suetonius, and Seneca for your Roman/Greek fix.

>> No.17396100

>reading 1000s of pages of medieval fallacies

big oofer

>> No.17396137

>>17395374
Harold Bloom's list of books that can teach you to read well.

Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why sets out the following list of books, books which he believes have the power to instil in one a life-long love of aesthetically and intellectually great literature.

Short Stories

Ivan Turgenev "Bezhin Lea" and "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands."

Anton Chekhov "The Kiss" and "The Student" and "The Lady with the Dog"

Guy de Maupassant "Madame Tellier's Establishment" and "The Horla"

Ernest Hemingway "Hill Like White Elephants" and "God Rest You Merry, Gentleman" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "A Sea Change"

Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" and "A View of the Woods"

Vladimir Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters"

Jorge Luis Borges "Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius"

Tommaso Landolfi "Gogol's Wife"

Italo Calvino "Invisible Cities"

Poems

A. E. Housman "Into My Heart an Air That Kills"

William Blake "The Sick Rose"

Walter Savage Landor "On His Seventy-fifth Birthday"

Alfred Lord Tennyson "The Eagle" and "Ulysses

Robert Browning "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

Emily Dickinson "Poem 1260 - Because That You Are Going"

Emily Bronte "Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning"

Popular Ballads "Sir Patrick Spence" and "The Unquiet Grave"

Anonymous "Tom O'Bedlam"

Shakespeare's "Sonnet 121 - Tis Better to Be Vil Than Vile Esteemed" and "Sonnet 129 - The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame" and "Sonnet 144 - Two Loves I have, of Comfort and Despair"

John Milton "Paradise Lost"

William Wordsworth "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" and "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Triumph of Life"

John Keats "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

Novels - Part I

Miguel de Cervantes "Don Quixote"

Stendhal "The Charterhouse of Parma"

Jane Austen "Emma"

Charles Dickens "Great Expectations"

Fyodor Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"

Henry James "The Portrait of a Lady"

Marcel Proust "In Search of Lost Time"

Thomas Mann "The Magic Mountain"

Plays

Shakespeare "Hamlet"

Henrik Ibsen "Hedda Gabler"

Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Being Earnest"

Novels - Part II

Herman Melville "Moby Dick"

William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying"

Nathanael West "Miss Lonelyhearts"

Thomas Pynchon "The Crying of Lot 49"

Cormac McCarthy "Blood Meridian"

Ralph Ellison "Invisible Man"

Toni Morrison "Song of Solomon"