/lit/ - Literature

Looking for a good Blake biography, any recommendations?

>>17740307
Books that will make op post Gura next thread?

How do you spell egilvalence

Oh look, another /sci/nigger general.

>>17740307
I DONT FUCKING GET IT
the more i read about land and langan the more i realize their metaphysical systems are remarkably similar. why the fuck isn't langan an accelerationist? his use of generalized utility (which should be pretty much identical with omohundro drives lol) to try and justify why humans should try and cooperate makes only superficial sense. sure, destroying telic operators might be bad to God, but what's wrong with having humanity replaced by more advanced telic operators that are far more intelligence (=binds more telesis) and cohere far better with God's identity? humans eat other telors all the time, langan even admits that??? he complains about how with a technological singularity, a ruling elite class will parasitically diverge from lower classes, but i have no clue why that is a bad thing innately (the best i can think of is that systems are more anti-fragile if there is more ergodicity)! maybe some sort of holon-based view or something like hegel's concept might help him, but he never explicitly explains how generalized utility can be connected to these things! it just seems arbitrary?

Best decellerationist lit? I need something that's slow and comfy.

>>17740307
Recommend me a good short story to read before sleep please

>>17742311
Try
>tale of the strangled figurehead
>the white satin gown
>the ones who walk away from omelas
>i have no mouth and i must scream

>>17742363
Read only the last one, gonna try one of the others, thank you

>>17740307
I honestly wish I could enjoy vtuber shit since I like almost all their designs, but I already couldn't stand regular youtubers and it seems they being 2d girls isn't enough.

>>17742383
If it makes you feel better, it seems all of the girls from Vtubers are /lit/ and redpilled.

>>17740342
There’s this, but it’s more of a literary criticism

What’s a good poetry anthology that everyone should have in their library? Also what’s your favourite collection of short stories

>>17742686
>that save
Kek, what made her mad that she always said nigger.

What books do you recommend about influencing people and understanding people's behavior?
I read Cialdini's Influence: the psychology of Persuasion and I liked it. I've been eyeballing Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends... but it seems kinda old, I guess?
Also I don't know if the 48 Laws would be kind of a meme?
The only other one I've ordered so far is Rules for Radicals.

>>17740342
cant think of a biography, but if you're interested in William Blake, you should read Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry.

>>17742311
read a Ibsen play you havent read yet

>>17742750
Complete Collections of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and W. B. Yeats

>>17744219
Sun Tzu's Art of War

>>17744244
>Sun Tzu's Art of War
Alright, anon, but I swear if its a meme book. I'll burn it.

>>17744244
>you should read Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry.
Some time ago I read Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I started to look around for other texts which offered a different viewpoint from Frye to see if my dissatisfaction was justified or not. The more I read the alternative views the more convinced I became that Frye's account was seriously deficient. I do not think he is entirely wrong or that there is nothing of value in his book. However, I strongly recommend that readers interested in Blake's poetry read alternative views. The ones I have found most useful and interesting include the following: The Four Zoas (Photographic Facsimile (Magno & Erdman), Narrative Unbound (Donald Ault), The Dialectic of Vision (Fred Dortort), Dark Figures in the Desired Country (Gerda Norvig), The Traveler in the Evening (Morton Paley), Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Molly Rothenberg),Blake's Critique of Transcendence (Peter Otto) and some of the articles in Blake's Sublime Allegory (Curran & Wittreich Eds.) I might note that after doing all this reading of the poems and about Blake I am convinced that the unpublished The Four Zoas is the central and most significant poem Blake wrote and that both Milton and Jerusalem suffer in comparison with it. The problem that Blake may have realized with the Four Zoas was that it could never be published in its authentic form due to the graphic (for the time) psychosexual content of the illustrations (the subtitle of the poem is The Torments of Love and Jealousy).

Is there anywhere to find recommendations of books in longform which isn't bluepilled as fuck? I'm sick of seeing anti-white jewish propaganda and pop-lit toilet paper everywhere I go for sensible news and reviews.

Bump

Books on sufism?

>>17745523
Anything in particular?

>>17745538
Just a general intro, maybe the most important works.

>>17745549
Sufism: A Beginner's Guide by William C. Chittick

>>17745131
You need to get off /pol/

Somebody make this thread for me, I'm rangebanned:

Why is it that we're often so different in the way we text and in the way we speak? How to close this gap and appear the same as we seem on text? It's not like everyone's doomed to be a different person in real life because I've met people from online who truly were the same expressive selves they came accross as on text. How do I achieve this?

>>17746986
No.

>>17746986
It's up

Boys, I think Im a brainlet. Im only realizing this now at 23. Tell me, what do you experience when you read or do math?

>>17748229
Boredom.

>>17740307
I'd want to learn more about philosophy in literature but don't quite know where to start and where to follow from that point, starting off with something like Kant or Hegel feels off

>>17749285
Start with the Greeks.

>>17745116
Good effortpost, thanks. I love Frye so this is hard to hear but necessary.

>>17745523
Mystic Dimensions of Islam by Schimmel is the classic starting point. I also recommend Hodgson's unfinished Venture of Islam. But I also recommend reading Sedgwick's book, Western Sufis, and even his other book on Traditionalism, before you consider converting. Muslims are a dangerous fifth column and their way of life and thought is completely alien to European consciousness. They pray on whiteys who are interested in them as one of the apparently few remaining conduits to authentic tradition. They will brag about how they converted another baka gaijin to their cult, and treat you like a second class citizen within it.

>>17749285
What do you mean in literature?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSzzuYDEQ4KBjMaqwqeYEiLxrRr83xwpi

What would be in Joshua Grahams library?

>>17749690
The book of Mormon

Anyone know any books on this guy that aren't complete dramatised garbage? He said even his chess books were fucked with and edited.

>>17747825
I don't see it, did it get deleted? Link me if not

I decided to order a Bible. I don't think of myself as a Christian but I feel compelled to read it, for various reasons that are hard to explain. I wanted the KJV and I got it from the publisher "Holman" (ISBN 1087702658), is this a good / reliable publisher? I've seen that reviewers complain a lot about missing stuff or changed translations fairly often while browsing.

>>17749597
It's why this thread is here for, anon. And I'm happy that I could help.

>>17749728
Why were his book dramatized?

>>17740307
Book rec on writing dialogue

>>17750871
Search it up.

>>17750871
JR

>>17751235
Who?

>>17751253
John Ruskin

What should I read next frens?
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/114222014-sugna?shelf=to-read

>>17751320
>Catcher in the Rye
>Brave New World
>Siddhartha
>On the Road
>Great Gatsby
>The Prince
>Don Quixote
in that order
walk before you run buddy

I've been obsessed with bondage lately. Any good books about it?

>>17751472
50 shades of grey.

>>17750721
He was antisemitic. I think that anon means biographies make him out to be crazy ora monster because of it

>>17752158
So they slander him?

>>17752158
Indeed, he had redpill tourettes.

>>17752320
Yep, usually in the vein of comparing him to John Nash even though antisemitism =/=schizophrenia, and in hindsight he was 100% right on 'paranoid' shit like the soviets fixing matches. He said that even shit he wrote like his chess books (which are apparently GOAT) were edited to make him look bad.
I'd love to read a good biography but I just know it'll inevitably be the John Nash shit.

>>17740307
Is there really any point to reading? Or is it all about writing?

Best collection of short stories/essays? I’ve ordered the wall by Sartre

Books that have characters living with a chronic illness?

>>17752843
The fault in our stars

>>17752843
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75779.Fiction_Books_With_Chronically_Ill_Main_Characters_Not_Cancer

>>17752870
Good books*

>>17752587
damn, he doesn’t deserve that.

>>17752875
Thanks.

>>17752822
Read to get how modern writing is.

I've been looking for works on political fundamentals that aren't ancient but aren't post-modern either.
Any recommendations?

I'm gonna try tackle Ulysses soon, what am i in for and what do i need to know?

>>17753995
Keep an open mind.

>>17753958

Why is it that we're often so different in the way we text and in the way we speak? How to close this gap and appear the same as we seem on text? It's not like everyone's doomed to be a different person in real life because I've met people from online who truly were the same expressive selves they came accross as on text. How do I achieve this

I came to this thread for the slutty anime girls. I wanted to save some for my fap session tomorrow. So can you guys post some of that purple haired slut in the OP?

Books to stop caring about what other people think about me?

Good evening /lit/. I'm very interested in mysticism and genuine spiritualism, unfortunately my priors don't square very well with most of it. I'm a moral anti-realist, not convinced by libertarian and compatibilist notions, overall materialist/functionalist and open to techno-optimist and utilitarian/rationalist/bayesian thought, i.e. completely opposed to traditional spiritual dogma, be it religious or not. Believe it or not, I actually do give a high chance to the existence of a god, but it's a very materialist and anti-transcendental conception. I want to bridge the gap between this cold and uncomfortable way of thinking and the seeming warmth of spiritualism. I've read of major religions, but they seem either life-denying or requiring an uncomfortably large leap of faith to me. Are there frameworks that work within or a complementary to my beliefs?

>>17754552
Thanks lad.

Is it weird to be confused about the wiki classifying Silence of the Lambs (and likely by extension the other Hannibal Lecter books) as 20th Century Horror?
I just finished rereading them and was looking into finding some similar books to read, but the titles I recognize listed in the same category seem vastly different from the Hannibal Lecter collection.
Although it's not exactly like the others listed in Mystery/Crime wouldn't it fit better in there as well, or would giving a perspective to the criminal negate the mystery aspect too much for that classification.

On an unrelated note, does /lit/ have a similar disdain for casual readers akin to /v/ and /mu/'s apparent hatred for casuals in their respective genres?

>>17755585
No

>>17752843
Martin Luther's biography. That man's life seems to have been hell and he soldiered through.

>>17753958
Cropsey and Strauss on political philosophy.

>>17753995
Most people don't fully enjoy it or embrace it. Most people remember their favourite fragments and flashes of brilliance but may not have a perfect sense of the whole. It's enough worth reading for the experience and for bragging rights that it outweighs the tedium of reading it that, frankly, most people experience.

>>17755585
Your views kind of sound like Spinoza's, and some modern adaptations of Spinoza to materialist/physicalist naturalisms, like Haeckel's atheistic-naturalistic monism. Or even sounds like Leibniz's a little bit, with the rationalism-determinism but still ultimately optimism. I don't think these would satisfy you much if you already have that worldview baked into you, but I mention them because there is another school of thought that took up their static, mechanistic, materialistic, pantheistic visions of nature's "being" and turned them into cosmologies of "becoming," where instead of the primal reality being a static rational system, or cosmic machine, the primal reality is an organism, a living being. So the primal metaphysical terms descriptive of primal reality are no longer metaphors of clockwork cause/effect but metaphors of growth, creativity, freedom.

Herder is an example of this, Schelling is a much more complicated example, but a thinker you might be especially interested in is Bergson. He's a little hard to get into, but his thesis is basically that our intuitive inner experience of our selves, if all abstractions and concepts are stripped away and the pure stream of "being there" is actually intuited, is a form of "pure time"-process that cannot be reduced to geometrical, mathematical, spatio-temporal abstractions amenable to a machinic vision of the world. These latter abstractions are actually evolved ways of "freezing" little "bits" of the (really irreducible) processive flowing of pure experience, so that they can be handled as atemporal entities (concepts). But we should always return to the pure intuition of the process itself and remind ourselves that no abstraction can freeze it, because simply put, flowingness and not frozenness is its actual primordial character. The leap Bergson then makes is to suggest that what we are in fact intuiting at the base of our souls is a subset of the great world-process itself. Our minds evolved the capacity for rationalist, geometrical abstraction out of the flux (we are "born geometers"), but we evolved as part of the larger process, and so too did matter evolve from the original state of pure free-creative-flowing of nature herself. What's interesting is that Bergson joined this with mysticism and was deeply inclined toward mysticism. His final great writing was on the problem of religion in relation to this fundamental intuition. You might like the book, The Philosopher and the Physicist.

>>17756016
>>17755585
I don't say all this because I think you should bceome a Bergsonian. His system is not complete or completely satisfying. It's just a high example of how that school of becoming-oriented pantheists sublated the rationalism (not denied it) of Leibniz, Newton, and Spinoza and turned them into a form of nature worship, and how this nature worship is then conducive to mysticism. Fundamentally Bergson's ideas are based on confronting our abstract physicalist perception of the world with that primal mystical intuition.

Fichte, also in this tradition, says something similar in the Wissenschaftslehre introductions: When you begin to do philosophy and science (they are two sides of the same coin), you can start from one of two positions. You can start by taking as axiomatic some determinate entity out there in the world, whether it be atoms (like Democritus) or a primordial matter (like Thales and others) or a core set of self-evident rational concepts (like Leibniz and Spinoza), and then unfold everything else in the world from these inanimate concepts. Or you can start with the direct, irreducible intuition of the Self that posits concepts in the first place, the "I" for which such determinate entities existed as "given" to begin with. Fichte says that if you begin with the former, you will always end in a "Spinozism," which for him means some kind of deterministic, rationalistic, dead pantheism, where the initial conditions explain all subsequent positions. (Bergson describes this "mechanistic" view of the world by saying that in it, time has no real meaning, because the operations of the system are the same whether you go backward or forward; a machine can be unwound or rewound.) But if you start with the Self, you become a philosophy or freedom and idealism. (Incidentally, this is where Schelling took his inspiration.) Again, not to say Fichte is a complete system, since he himself lapses into a kind of pantheism of a super-Self and he doesn't really clarify how the creativity of nature actually plays into this (Schelling tries to do this, but he has his own problems). But the dichotomy he draws and the way that he, like Bergson, directs you to the pure and inescapable intuition of something that is NOT a determinate entity, is valuable.

>>17756027
>>17755585
The question is, where do you go from there? If you are a dyed in the wool "spinozist," you will say "well that pure intuition is just a fiction in the brain of a being that is really just a bunch of atoms obeying causal laws etc." You will end up with Newton's brilliant but dead and sterile clockwork universe, proving Fichte right. And if you have been trained to find comfort in this mediate certainty, you may stop there. But if you have what Plato called eros, the longing-yearning-loving-desire for something beyond the manifest even when your conceptual mind doesn't know the "what" that the longing is "pointing to" (because it is by definition pointing beyond the present, conceptual cognition that is trying to figure that out), you will feel torn between the two possibilities, spinozism and freedom, and oscillate between them. And you will of course be surrounded by people insisting that you follow common sense, stop being a flake, and embrace spinozism, usually with some fallacious appeal to utility: physicalism makes such great amenities for us humans! (whose nature is the very thing we are trying to understand in the first place). But again, if you feel the eros, you feel it. And I can tell you from personal experience, it gets stronger and stronger the more you entertain it, the less you suppress it with guilty feelings of being irrational or flakey, or for the sake of peer pressure.

The more you let your mind look at the primal intuition of your self's own integrity, freedom, and creativity, no matter how imperfect these are formulated by a Fichte or a Schelling or a Bergson, the more you will prove Fichte right by simply being unable to accept that the foundation of reality is a dead, determinate entity, from which a bunch of other dead determinate entities unfold, for no reason.

From things like this, you can begin to understand what actually went through Plato's mind when he contemplated the transcendent realm. Plato and others like him were not primarily spinozist system-builders, they were not seeking an "idealist materialism" in which forms rather than atoms are the fundamental "things," and they were not flakey mystics who simply denied the manifest world because it felt good to do so. What is now difficult for us to even reach as a philosophical end-point, namely the standpoint of the philosophy of freedom described by Fichte, was their STARTING point. They did not have centuries of physicalist bias making them feel guilty for even considering that reality might not be a meaningless dead clock. They perfectly well accepted that material and determinate factors were important parts of nature, and then they passed over to the elements of nature that were NOT (or at least not necessarily) explained by these, or by a hypertrophied materialist over-determination of everything apparently non-material.

>>17756043
>>17755585
Where we are "greedy reductivists" by habit, they were "oh shit, what's this? a new phenomenon? I'm going to meditate on that" by habit. And the chief phenomena for them were the irreducibility and integrity of the human soul and its desire for transcendent or unmediated knowledge. Just like the physical scientists they were fundamentally experimentalists in this regard. They would read and speak with Bergson and Fichte and other mystics, as grist for the mill, without necessarily seeking a complete counter-system to materialism (because they didn't feel like eliminationist materialism was the overbearing default, against which everything had to be checked).

That point, to me, is when you really begin to understand the value of mysticism, and even all the crazy shit like Schelling wrote. They're all attempts at getting at a reality that is greater than, not opposed to, the beautiful nature we have been exploring at a manifest and "physical" level for the last few centuries.

Also, it allows you to understand the open-minded experimentalism of thinkers who straddled the boundary between our obligation to science and scientific thought (we cannot overcome it by being irrational or whimsical, our worship of cold hard truth is as much a part of us as our freedom), like William James (a great friend of Bergson), Gustav Fechner, etc.

Sorry for this wall of text, also that it may not have exactly spoken to what you wanted.

>>17755914
Shane.

Does anyone else feel like there should be a separate board for religious discussion?

>>17756763
No.

Just noticed azw3 is smaller than epub. Why is this?

What filters do you have for this board?

Is the bible worth reading if you are not a christian and have zero interest in becoming one?

>>17757842
Yes of course. It has a ton of cultural and literary value, and you can even walk away with certain beliefs in the views presented without converting.

>>17757842
Not directly related, but close enough. My dad's an atheist and he got a Quran and read through it and seemed to enjoy it. Not sure WHY he did it but he does read a bunch of weird shit so hey

>>17757925
Thanks, can you recommend a version?

How do I leave this den of pseuds behind?

>>17757556
none

>>17754616

I got the collected works of Aristotle recently and I was wondering what order I should read the books in?

>>17758009
I dont really get into version autism but that's because I only ever read the bible in a churchy way. Like, the church will maybe be discussing a certain concept or chapter or whatever. So the key verses involved I'll just check across a couple of different translation, and if i'm realy interested i'll read a little essay on the greek terms.
So if you're reading the Bible as literature and dont have the background or desire to check the greek and whatever, its extremely tough to say which version would be superior.

>>17758253
>>17758009
If you're reading it just to read it/for literary merit, the best choice is the KJV. Ignoring any discussions of theological purity or translational perfection, it was the translation of the Bible used by basically all Western Christians for a long time in the Anglosphere. It was incredibly influential, which is why it's the best translation for people reading it just to read it for cultural and literary value.

>>17757842
I'm >>17750023 I'll tell you in a while if you ask the question again but I have been reading bits of it. My idea is that even if you don't value religion it is important to value the past. The Bible was a foundational text to Western civilization and it's inexorably tied to you if you are European or American. Your core values are still those of Christianity, more or less.

>>17754616
Her name is Okayu and she is not a slut. She's been saving herself for marriage.

>>17758336
I have no idea where this cleft lip shit came from but it's fucking horrid

>>17758216
Watch some lectures from Arthur Holmes and Bruce Gore on Youtube to help you cope and then try reading the most important works of the Organon like Categories and Prior and Posterior Analytics. From there, read the Physics and De Anima (or just start with them if you want), and from there either biological writings or the Metaphysics. This is a vague itinerary you don't have to obey, but it starts you off with the earlier logical writings and then shows you the middle empirical period, before throwing you right into the Metaphysics, which is much harder.

Four things make Aristotle difficult:
>1. He is often in dialogue with previous Greeks (try reading book 1+2 of the Metaphysics just to see) so you sort of have to know these points of reference (not hard but can feel overwhelming initially)
>2. He proceeds extremely logically, that is, by logical division and subdivision, and if you are unused to it you may feel overwhelmed
>3. He is often (and particularly in the early logical texts of the Organon) ambiguous about whether he is being descriptive/cataloguing things, or whether he is actually saying "this is how these things are/how they work" (are the categories all the categories he's heard of / thought of? or are they THE categories of thought)
>4. He uses Greek very deliberately to tease out the phenomenological content of his core concepts, and if you rush ahead of him and try to interpret them, you will get confused when he uses them in peculiar ways (for example, for him "movement" means something NOT quite like our idea of movement as purely spatial-temporal)

1 can be solved with some side study, 2 can be solved by reading Plato and being annoyed by the logical sections until your brain loosens up and learns to submit itself to the logic rather than rushing ahead and expecting tidy answers, 3 can be solved by just saying "yeah he's mostly being metaphysical, anyway this has been ambiguous for thousands of years so you're not alone on being confused by it," and 4 can be solved by reading slowly and carefully after learning to read logically.

All four can be aided by reading annotated versions and using secondary literature to help. Rist's Mind of Aristotle is good but probably too much. That's why I recommend starting with some lectures just to get yourself thinking Aristotelianly.

The moment of truly appreciating Aristotle comes when you fully understand the subtlety and carefulness with which he is trying to define a concept as primordial as "movement" or "change," and you realise all the slowness and carefulness is deliberate, because he's trying to pin down concepts we use in many different concepts. The additional difficulty in doing this comes from the fact that the words are Greek, and translators are usually afraid to give you the Greek, so they make it worse by giving you English equivalents that are far too "ready-made."

>>17757842
Yes, check out Frye's Great Code

any recommendations on articles or books that relate loneliness to the urban space or architecture?

>>17758376
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte and Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl

Any books that tackle this quandary? by “right” of course, i mean right in your eyes, but I was wondering if anyone went into the topic of how to go about this. is it fine that people agree with you but for reasons you don’t understand or find dumb, or is it better to understand their reasoning, but disagree with their end conclusions? the former allows you to actually organize and work towards whatever ends you agree upon, but is is hollow if its only an ends by correlation rather than understanding? and otherwise, is simply the fact of respecting someones position and logic, but coming to an impasse ephemeral if no concordat is meet to enact a goal?

thoughts and books about the topic. is this an epistemological concern? sorry, not good with terminology.

(Reposting this here since someone's interesting thread died before I could bump it)

>>17758376
Maybe Koolhaas' junkspace:
>If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built ... product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory…

>Rem Koolhaas has invented the concept "Generic City," associated with the notion of "Junkspace." This is where presentism is really at home, eating up space and reducing or banishing time. The Generic City, freed from its enslavement to the center, is without history, even if it goes to great lengths to advertise its pseudo-historical district, where history is a service provided, complete with quaint trains and horse-drawn carriages. And if, despite everything, a center survives, it has to be a tonce "the most old and the most new," "the most fixed and the most dynamic." .. Junkspace never ages: it knows only self-destruction and on-site rebuilding or else almost instantaneous dilapidation. Airports, completed or (constantly) under construction (the ubiquitous "Work in progress. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused") have become emblematic of the Generic City. They are forever transforming and mutating, while imposing ever more complex trajectories on their temporary inhabitants. As bubbles of expanding, transformable space, they epitomize Junkspace, and are its principle producers. Such spac eleaves no trace in our memories, because "its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia." But can one actually live in a presentist city?

Maybe Byung-Chul Han, either Burnout Society or Shanzhai.

>>17751270

>>17758369
thank you this is a great start, here's another okayu for your effort

Anyone know where I could find translations of Christian Wolff's works (literally any) or Schulze's Aenesidemus? I've searched long and hard and only found excerpts in the rare anthology and such....

>>17758496
The pickings are pretty slim
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/#PrimLiteEnglTran

I don't know of any translations of Schulze other than the Between Kant and Hegel version of the Aenesidemus bit.

There might be more in French if you read that.

>>17756016
>>17756027
>>17756043
>>17756058
>Sorry for this wall of text, also that it may not have exactly spoken to what you wanted.

Don't be sorry. I'm not the anon that asked the question but I enjoyed this.

>>17758420
>>17758441
thanks, Ive already seen the social life of small urbans spaces and I dont think its very related to loneliness, but Ill have a look at the other suggestions

I've read half of Iliad in 3 months. Is this exceptionally slow? I've read Crime & Punishment in like a month, so I'm reading the Iliad 6 times as slow.
I'm thinking about changing the translation from Fagles to Lattimore