/lit/ - Literature

On chapter 6 of fathers and sons
The uncle seems faggish
The 23 year old his father is fucking sounds hot
The father is sweet
The boy seems chill
His friend sounds hot

>>18122892
What is this book about?

>>18122938
Anon I just said I started reading it, but it's a Mexican novel about a man on his deathbed, recalling various parts of his life during the period in and around the Mexican Revolution.

>>18122956
Sowwy

>>18122980
Hey you bumped my thread fren, reel it in

i just started but its pretty good so far. the characters are compelling, and the way she's detailed the history and culture of the setting is very fair yet compassionate and pretty anti-Western, like how the tradition of burying live slaves with their owners is considered cruel by the women but necessary yet the patriarch still condemns his son when he maims an unwilling slave for transgressing the barbaric custom. it's probably this respect for tradition and culture that vexes any traditional feminist readings of the book.

>>18122892
halfway through. so far it's been ok, but maybe i just thought it would be different, more "profound". there's still lot of pages for it to develop more so i'll just have to wait though

>>18122892
Really enjoying it, but it is a bit frustrating at times considering how esoteric most of it is in relation to Irish history and religion.
The prose is amazing imo. I think the book would benefit from a re-read and it might end up being one of my top 20

pic related. about a kill buy horse bought by a dutch immigrant in the 50s that made it to international show jumping. fantastic read.

expected it to be a leisurely account of his life, how wrong i was. it strongly reminds of Sebald's rings of Saturn, the way there's a chronological narrative that drifts off to explain the bits it stumbles upon, pieces of trivia you'd assume to be boring, but they are lively and captivating. the prose is great for such a niche book as well.
strongly rec if you're looking for an unexpectedly comfy read, it explains all the equestrian specifics smoothly so you'll get it even as a non-horse person
t. you know who i am

just finished war of the end of the world last night. not technically currently reading, but its still very fresh and I haven't picked out a new book to read yet. those last twenty pages are powerful, and that ending is truly something to admire. all the characters were well developed and interesting and even though the book was slow at times it made up for it.

>>18123075
was just looking for another non-pozzed, so to say, book from a third world country. thanks a lot, broski
how do you find the prose?
>>18123357
>i just thought it would be different, more "profound".
it is profound but watered down. dosto was struggling at the time and paid by length, you can see, especially in russian, where he desperately shoehorns filler into the actual text. it's well-written, of course, but still filler.

>>18123418
I'm about to read this. And yeah, I was afraid to miss alot given that I'm not familiar with Irish history. I already had that situation when I was reading Dubliners but some notes on the web helped me with some context.

Have you been using any aditional material to grasp the Irish stuff and so? Any tip to have in mind?

>>18123463
I've got the penguins edition which does help a lot; it has so many notes but you don't need to read all of them, just consult them every know and then when you feel like you might be missing context. I think you could get by without knowing any history before it and it won't affect the plot (for lack of a better term since there really isn't a plot, it's just following the growing conscience of Stephen Dedalus), but you might feel lost in a few parts.
There is one section where it helps to know that the surname Dedalus comes from the name Daedalus, the father of Icarus.
Also, this is quite important for parts in the beginning:
"Around the time Joyce was born, the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was spearheading the movement for Irish independence. In 1890, however, Parnell's longstanding affair with a married woman was exposed, leading the Catholic Church to condemn him and causing many of his former followers to turn against him. Many Irish nationalists blamed Parnell's death, which occurred only a year later, on the Catholic Church."

>>18123463
>>18123542
Bit more context:
"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also makes a number of references to the politics and religion of early-twentieth-century Ireland. When Joyce was growing up, Ireland had been under British rule since the sixteenth century, and tensions between Ireland and Britain had been especially high since the potato blight of 1845. In addition to political strife, there was considerable religious tension: the majority of Irish, including the Joyces, were Catholics, and strongly favored Irish independence. The Protestant minority, on the other hand, mostly wished to remain united with Britain."

bump

>>18122892
Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel and some of Borges's essays

Sabato's book is fun so far. The protagonist is such a loser.

As for Borges I'm not well read enough to read all of his essays but the ones I do understand are very lucid. Highlight was him getting pissed at some guy that wrote about the "decay" of Buenos Aires's spanish

bump

I finished "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones today and it was the first book that was able to command my interest since I suffered a TBI almost 10 years ago. I've been trying to read a book a month since reading is still hard for me but I finished that one in 3 days.

>>18122892
I'm half way through Life of Galilei, by Brecht, and just finished The Caucasian Chalk Circle, also by him. Great books, way superior to 99% of all politically-driven art we have today.
He s basically the opposite of today's oscarbait-y political commentaries. For example, in Caucasian Chalk Circle, he presents us a judge that favours the poor and week every time he fells they are being abused, then the situation is made so ridiculous and implausible that we laugh at him for being so fair — with the intent that after we finish the book/leave the theatre, we realize "damn! this society is shit if a judge doing their actual job is ridiculous!"
And it's all very funny, as well.
They're all theatre plays, so one could read them in 1 to 2 hours. And they aren't difficult to read in German, if your are learning it as well (but then it takes way more than 1 to 2 hours).

>>18125143
>Highlight was him getting pissed at some guy that wrote about the "decay" of Buenos Aires's spanish
Which essay was that? I'm sure I read it, but I can't recall the name and don't want to go through the struggle of skimming all the books to find it.
In any case, Borges' essays are great. I read most of them way before I started browsing lit and I was very surprised when found out that many thinkers/ideas that I at the time had almost exclusively heard from him were so popular here (eg Spengler, Gnosticism, and many anglo/american authors, like Chesterton, I wasn't aware of).