/lit/ - Literature

Eh, let's face it: Pretty much every book outside advanced STEM books is a midwit book. That doesn't mean the midwit books have no value, just that they're not exactly intellectually demanding. Often obscurantism is a way of artificially making a midwit book more intellectually demanding.

>>18828290
The average midwit of the past wasn't even literate. This 'horror' that you are witnessing in the modern world is a consequence of mass education, ideally one should think about how make it better, rather than turning back into some stupid bs of the past. MOOCs are a thing, self-paced courses and continuous education might be a decent way to remedy what was lacking on regular education.

>>18828290
The true midwit is the one sharing and obsessing over your meme picture while seeing themselves as some true intellectual.

What do you read in US schools?
Here in Poland we read Robinson Crusoe, the Iliad and Odyssey, C&P, the Hobbit.

>>18828594
Most schools make students ready boring stuff like ready player one and perks of being a wallflower.

>>18828290
You haven't earned the nerd cred to disrespect Taleb, Sowell, and Machiavelli. You lost my respect, faggot OP

>>18828606
>Reads ready player one in Highschool

What shit state did you live in kek

>>18828623
I didn't. It's just that many schools let the students choose between a handful of books.

>>18828594
Let me try to remember what we read...The Great Gatsby, The Odyssey but no Iliad for some reason, Great Expectation which was a complete bore to me that I stopped paying attention midway in, The Grapes of Wrath, Things Fall Apart, The Pearl, Old Man and the Sea, The Canterbury Tales.

>>18828623
I live in California and we read Life of Pi

>>18828290
Whoever made this shit meme is cleary a midwit themselves as they can't differetiate between the garbage tier stuff like Dave Rubin and something like Utilitarianism that is taught in almost every university philosophy course

>>18828950
You are right that it is taught, but utilitarianism really does attract midwits forvsome reason. See LessWrong and its offshoots.

>>18828983
>forvsome
*for some

>>18828290
Why do people just assume that the bell curve is just "le blacks are low IQ", when it was actually making a case for the existence classes defined by biological in society.

>>18828540
>STEM
>not midwit
I take it you're not a STEM professional. You won't find more midwits than in a STEM profession.

>>18828290
>Chomsky,Sowell and Singer in the same category as Rogan, Rubin, and Oliver

There's a difference between "everybody's first academic" and "literal retards".

>>18828290
The reason that so many people are midwits is that intelligence is normally distributed.

>>18829018
Yeah I've never gotten the obsession with it, it's 90% how IQ correlates to employment, class, crime and other behaviours, how much of it is inherited, etc.
The HECKIN based and redpilled part amounts to
>"oh and by the way, IQ varies by race as well, this MAY be genetic. Anyway..."

>>18828594
>>18828606
>>18828692

Jesus fucking Christ, in Italy we have to learn greek and latin to read and traduce at least Homer and a shitload of plays.
We also read from Chaucer to Dickens in English literature.
In Italian lit we have at least to read Boccaccio, Petrarca, Dante and Manzoni.

>>18829088
His book is based, literally btfos current historical materialism, they don't understand or place little emphasis on biology. it's why marxist, even through they're quiet smart, and make good observations on society, can never truly understand or find real solutions to the problems they find.

Thanks for reading my blog

>>18828290

I agree with everything here EXCEPT for GEB. That is far more rigorous and difficult than any other book on that list, lol.

>>18829084
Isn't that a tautology?

>>18829435
Ask tautological questions, get tautological answers.

They made us read People's History of the United States in the AP US History class too
Literal pop history

>>18828290
Admit /lit/. You used to like Atlas Shrugged before you saw the cool people on the internet shitting on it. You used to like Steven Pinker. You read The God Delusion and Freakonomics in high school. You never read the Bell Curve, but you know what is in it and is familiar with Charles Murray. You have The Prince in your house. You watched a bunch of videos from the School of Life and you enjoyed them. You shit on all those things now because they hit too close to home.

chomsky is right about the CIA and military industrial complex tho

>>18830025
i liked the school of life but I suspect many of the videos were inaccurate representations

>>18828606
both terrible fucking books

I was once getting dinner with a three friends and we brought up Ready Player One, we'd all read it and all agreed that it sucked. We dunked on it for a straight hour, lots of fun.

>>18830469
you were filtered by it

this chart is nuclear bait

>>18828290
The Prince is midwit and watching people think "mercenaries are bad" is some eternally-applicable rule of politics with significant relevance to the 21st century is cringe. Machiavelli's other major work though, 'Discourses on Livy,' is a masterpiece.

>>18829050
In my experience most STEM professionals never really read a book. If they learned at least the concepts of analysis and algebra they should in undergrad school they would certainly be above humanities professionals. But let's get real, everybody but a chosen few becomes a fucking bureaucrat.

>>18828290
Is it really midwit behaviour for wanting to read some of these books as a primer for the subjects they're explaining?

>>18828692
Doesn't Cali rank in the bottom 5 in education in the country?

>>18830509
no

>>18828290
>art of war
>midwit tier
他媽的愚蠢的黑鬼

>>18830509
No, it's midwit to treat them like Gospel because they're the only books on the subject you've read.

>>18828594
We read shakespear every year, to kill a mockingbird, the Odyssey but no Iliad like >>18828667 , The Great Gatsby, (Night), 1984, The Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible among others. Usually the books are no more than 400 pages. It's hard enough to get the average zoomer to read a book under this length. The way these books are taught are also a big issue. My teachers usually tried to hold your hand throughout the reading of the entire book and make sure you understood exactly what they personally got out of each book.

>>18830025
Only hit the mark on The Prince, but I love the book and the author.
>>18830488
I don't think it's nothing but a simple and good book that says a lot about renascentist Italy, but do you think you should trust mercenaries as much as you do loyal troops? Machiavelli didn't say to never use them, but to avoid using if you can, and he was right and still is in the context it was meant to. You must be thinking of war overseas where a modern country can't fight a war without causing a diplomatic disaster, but Machiavelli was talking about relying on mercenaries to protect your own lands, if you can finance rebel groups in foreign nations you should, Machiavelli wouldn't disagree with that. An example of when using mercenaries a context like Machiavelli talked about in the Prince went bad is when the labour movement in the US used the mafia to fight against the police instead of forming armed workers groups, the mafia made the unions their bitches later and fucked them to death.

>>18830565
how do christians reconcile the practical necessity of realpolitik with the philosophy of jesus

>>18830025
>You have The Prince in your house
I don't have it nor have I read it, but I don't see anything wrong with this

>>18829288
American schools mostly ignore classical literature. Maybe you'll read the Odyssey and a bit of Shakespeare (not even classical but you know what I mean). The rest is all stuff from the last 200 years or so.

All true but I still regard Joseph Campbell as important reading

>>18828290
You forgot zizek and molyneux

>>18830616
bible is big and full of possibilities
you can justify pretty much anything

>>18829288
I don't know, anon, my experience differs and I grew up in a poor Appalachian shithole. We read Shakespeare, Homer, the American canon, etc.

Yes your highschool reading list is designed to indoctrinate you.

>>18831024
None of the teachers in a typical high school are smart enough to indoctrinate anyone, and given widespread illiteracy and stupidity they are clearly not doing their jobs.

Man most of you seem to have read really good literature in high school. At my school in Canada in my four years of high school we read: Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ender's Game, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Kiterunner (which is really underrated and is what got me into literature).
Seeing how much ya'll read in high school makes me sad. 7 books in 4 years and 2 were retarded pop fiction.

>>18830616
politicians are bad, simple as.

>>18829351
>Thanks for reading my blog
My pleasure.

>>18828290
books won't make you smarter

>>18829469
beyond based

>>18831853
Will anything? Or do we just have to accept being retarded?

>>18828290
In training to be an english teacher... my state's book recommendations are a bit worrying to me but I'd like to hear some thoughts.

>Recommended novels
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers — Katherine Boo
• Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
• Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
• Island: The complete stories (collection of short stories) — Alistair MacLeod
• Journey to the Stone Country — Alex Miller
• Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
• Persepolis: The story of a childhood (graphic novel) — Marjane Satrapi
• Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
• Schindler’s Ark (also known as Schindler’s List) — Thomas Keneally
• Short stories by Frank O’Connor
• Short stories by Katherine Mansfield
• Swallow the Air — Tara June Winch
• Talking to My Country — Stan Grant
• The Boat (collection of short stories) — Nam Le
• The Cellist of Sarajevo — Steven Galloway
• The Great Gatsby — F Scott Fitzgerald
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society — Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• The Longest Memory — Fred D’Aguiar
• The Turning (collection of short stories) — Tim Winton
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry — Rachel Joyce
• Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys
• Year of Wonders — Geraldine Brooks

The actual resource is here
https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/downloads/portal/snr_english_eal_prescribed_texts_list_2019-21.pdf

Am I an asshole for thinking that these books are so entry-level that I'd be wasting the kids' time?

>>18828594
We read Crime and Punishment, a bunch of Shakespeare, a ton of English Romantics stuff (Shelley, Wordsworth, etc.), American authors like Capote, Fitzgerald, Morrison, and some excerpts from Chaucer.

>>18828594
>What do you read in US schools?
The problem with this question is that what's taught in one school isn't ubiquitous across the country. It's dictated primarily by the state level and the resources of the individual schools within that state. So what California fags are taught won't be the same as Arizona chads. Any anon that's responded with their curriculum as if it's the same for every American is a retard.

Stirner is really enjoyable literature. Entertaining such notions for pleasure is beyond that of a mid-wit's capacity

>>18828290
That's is very generous to describe this as "midwit". I feel like I'm a midwit because I haven't read Proust and don't really get Leibniz's Monad.

>>18832051
Very true, even if just to understand Marx's takedown. I think op just got pissed at spook posters.

>>18828290
/lit/ seems to forget that most people dont even read books anymore. The fact of the matter is, midwits today are the way they are because they arent reading anything that it is because of the education system no doubt. That makes any reading one could do a step above the average.

>>18828290
I read none of those books in high school,


but yes.

>>18828594
We "read" like 5 books a year so it would be hard to list them all but a few notable ones

most edgy: Animal Farm
most hated: The Awakening
most culturally significant: To Kill a Mockingbird
most surprising ending: Of Mice and Men

the one the pseuds loved: Great Gatsby
the fanfiction: Grendel

Honorable mentions: The Scarlet Letter, Dante's Inferno, A Raisin in the Sun, Canterbury Tales, Frankenstein.

>>18831037
>None of the teachers in a typical high school are smart enough to indoctrinate anyone

Where do you live that the teachers pick the books?

In my 23 years of life I haven't met a single person with consistent reading habits. Most people read short stories to cope with their short attention span and super-social lives. There's been people I've run into at parties which I've discussed lit/sci which but have been disappointed in their depth of knowledge on re-introduction. Most people have just enough fashionable knowledge to intrigue you at first but not longer. This is ultimately to say that if I met a single person who read even half these books I'd be talking to an outlier.

>>18828692
LA here, we read Dante's inferno, Shakespeare, The stranger, and some essays I don't remember.

>>18830616
The idea is that politics is something quite separate from religion - render unto Cesar and all that -, so one can technically justify bringing about a more desirable condition even through somewhat unsavory methods.

>>18830616
The idea is that politics is something quite separate from religion - render unto Cesar and all that -, so one can technically justify bringing about a more desirable condition even through somewhat unsavory methods. Though that is only true, of course, when the situation is so desperate as to require such methods, as Macchiavelli thought the situation in Italy was at the time he wrote the Prince.

>>18828594
Every grade of High School US English can be summed up with
>one Shakespeare play (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth or Othello)
>one 'racism bad' book (To Kill a Mockingbird, Cry the Beloved Country, etc)
>one 'pick a book' project where most of the options are bad ('books that have been made into movies', 'classics from before 1900', etc)
>one 'modern American classic' (Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, etc)
4 books for an entire year, and most are fiction.

>>18834488
Do you not do history of literature?

>>18834693
No. We did an abridged prose version of the Odessy with a few snips of a translated version of the poem mixed in. That's the only work we read written before ~1600.

>>18832027
>had to rush to campus
>Manages to take a photo of themselves eating toast for social media
Clearly not in a rush. Zoomers today are more interested in validation on social media than anything else.

>>18828290
because pragmatism/psychology/etc. are easy to digest ideas and normies hate being outside their comfort zone.

>>18828290
hmm is this really midwit core? some of the choices seem trolish but in general shouldn't a mid wit be a little more advanced than this? this is like brain dead 105 iq core midwit would be more like brain dead 115 iq core

>>18834913
thanks for explaining the pic