/lit/ - Literature

>>19720985
Pre-requisites
>Ulysses
The Odyssey (which needs The Iliad), Hamlet.
>Gravity's Rainbow
Having read V. and Lot 49.
>Infinite Jest
You don't need anything.

>>19720985
For Gravity's Rainbow you can just slug through it. Being a postmodern novel means you understand more the less you understand. Look up the names of people so you understand who does what, but thats pretty much all you need to do.
Fuck trying to understand every word, you are reading postmodernists, every second strange word is made up anyway.

>>19720985
Just read them, Don't expect to understand everything on your first read and don't even try, you will just get lost since you need the full picture (finishing the book) to understand. Just expect to read them more than once if you want to understand.

>>19720997
Idiotic, especially GR.

>>19720999
Have you actually read any of them? Only GR is post modern and it has very few made up words, and I think they are all proper names.

>>19720985
Yes. Read with a dictionary. Infinite Jest is entry level, and V. can provide entry into GR.
>I never touched a literary book in my life
Don't bother with Ulysses until you've read Dubliners and Portrait Of The Artist As A Yound Man, have some understanding of Homer and the Three Tragedians, are well-versed in the classics, have a solid foundation in philosophy, and comfortable judging works on your own than filtering with the opinion of others.

why does this fucking board only discuss the same shitty 3 or 4 books. Why doesn't it want to branch out and try something new? FFS

>>19721015
Yeah GR, as can be read from my post

>>19721008
>Idiotic, especially GR.
Not really. What's more idiotic is thinking this guy will read IJ more than once.

>>19721145
Entry level people are more likely to want to discuss their new hobby. It's like that everywhere.

>>19721145
Because they would rather complain about the lack of discussion of other books.
>>19721146
Your post suggests you did not read it, there are very few made up words in it, i can not recall any that are other than proper names. I would guess there are at least a few.
>>19721151
I never said I expected him to read any of them more than once, just said that he is not going to read them once and come away with full understanding, you have poor reading skills.

Ulysses is the only one of those worth reading.

>>19721173
I don't need to look up that many words in the first place, and if I do its probably some bullshit that is made up. Also I refused to decipher those words where pynchon decided that spaces are unneccessary, and just slammedfifteenwordstogether. That's how German works, it is not cool in English.

I had the massive advantage of having German as my mother tongue tho, it was quite funny when Pynchon started a sentence in English and ended it in German, a bit disorienting, but I could just read on.

In general Pynchon becomes much easier to read if you don't meticulously wax over every wall of text of him describing the winter snow in an anarchist zone or bdsm orgies in a German fuckshed, if you read him enough it becomes clear which sentences hide meaning and information, and which are just waxing to fill the page.

He was not the first postmodernist I read, at least as long as Vonnegut and Faulkner are postmodernists, but he was the first one where I got this whole "books (all things) are subjective, take out of them whatever you want" element from postmodernists.l

>>19721187
Well, you are just the bees knees, king literature himself. Faulkner is not post modern.

>>19721245
Not him but you're being needlessly pedantic, i haven't read Faulkner but Doesn't The Sound of Fury have multiple narrators? we don't need to distinguish between quasi-postmodernism and postmodernism when making a point. Even Diderot, an 18th century frenchfag in Jacques le Fataliste has the narrator addressing directly the reader in many pages

>>19721265
Multiple narrators does not make something post modern. Faulkner is modernist through and through.

>>19721245
and you are genuinly retarded, utterly failed to read from my first post that I was talking about GR, utterly failed to see that I formulated it like this because Faulkner being postmodern or not is a debate.
God why do people waste time on this board again...

>>19720985
Thats the best Ulysses cover art

>>19720985
Wtf is the big three? Get over yourself and pick a book you want to read

>>19720985
>I've never touched a literary book in my life.
What have you read so far, coloring books?

>>19721177
goes without saying
they're not heavy hitters, they're memes

>>19720985
>the big three
The first thing you need to do is get rid of the stupid notion that these are the "big three".

>>19721626
Great expectations, Gulliver Travels. But those were in School. And I don't think they were difficult to read.

>>19720985
read every text ever written chronologically from the earliest stone tablet to the latest e-book

>>19720985
More like the three trash memes I wish I never wasted money on

>>19721680
THIS

>>19721173
>just said that he is not going to read them once and come away with full understanding
So maybe at least prepare? Especially with Joyce. Nothing really can prepare you fo GR.

Good topic, bad discussion.

First of all, these books are only the "big three" as far as /lit/ memes are concerned. They are great books, but I don't know why they would be a significant goal for you.

Second of all, what level of reading are you at? Theres a number of literary classics that I'd suggest before just jumping to the notoriously difficult

>>19721145
because they're the good ones

If you aren't into literature yet, consider spending this year reading shorter novels. There are enough shorter quality novels to fill many years, so you are not missing out. Reading does get easier over time, so do not start with a marathon.

>>19721309
You wrote a blog post just too say how great you are and then laughably called Faulkner post modern. If you had actually said something of worth that contributed to the discussion I would have ignored it.

>>19722017
It is not going to help, there is just too much in them to understand in one reading.

>>19720985
Infinite Jest is not that hard to get through without secondary literature. Ulysses I took a class on on college and we used the Gifford annotations which really helped. For GR the weisenburger annotations are really nice. You don’t have to go back and forth on every page but they really do help clarify some stuff especially in the end of GR when it gets really opaque. Also the leaf by leaf video on Gravity’s Rainbow is really nice intro or maybe watch it when you are done to get a better sense of it. Overall start with Jest it’s really fun. But there’s a ton of stuff you can read to help you with Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow just take those two slowly maybe 20-30 pages at the most

>>19722994
Here’s a link to the vid.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8sERtP1W4kY

>>19720985
Do not read the anglos. For your own safety here is a list of convulsions commonly experienced by anglos on /lit/:

# Do Not Pick Up Judeo-Anglo-Communist Excrement
Kafka, anything
Shakespeare, anything
Hemmingway, anything
Vonnegut, anything
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Paradise Lost, Milton
Stoner, William
White Noise, DeLillo
Catch 22, Heller
2666, Bolano
Lolita, Nabokov
Pale Fire, Nabokov
The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
war and piece, tolstoy
anna karenina, tolstoy
The Bible
Confessions, Augustine
Nausea, Satre
Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard
The Recognitions, Gaddis
The Sound And The Fury, Faulkner
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
Ulysses, James Joyce
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
Dubliners, James Joyce
Molloy, Becket
Malone Dies, Beckett
The Trilogy, Beckett
East of Eden, Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
The Crying Of Lot 49, Pinchon
Mason & Dixon, Pinchon
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez
In Search of Lost Time, Proust
Siddhartha, Hesse
Steppenwolf, Hesse
Jerusalem, Moore
The Savage Detectives, Bolano
American Psycho, Ellis
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Sterne
Infinite Jest, Wallace
The Pale King, Wallace

>>19721145
name some more shitty books if you want us to read more

>>19721187
>words where pynchon decided that spaces are unneccessary
Can you give some examples?

I haven't read Ulysses or GR, but Infinite Jest can be done with a dictionary and some of DFW's essays. Pick up Brief Interviews with Horrible Men or Consider the Lobster and just pick a few pieces at random. Should be enough to get you familiar with his style and themes.

i'll drop my favorite Wallace essay here too. Very accessible and gets you familiar with his use of footnotes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/

>>19722841
>oh nooo I acted completely retarded because there wasn't something of worth to say
kys

>>19723003
He rapes his sister, Phoebe.

>>19720999
Very stupid post. Why do people who don't read act like postmodern novels are indecipherable nonsense?

>>19720997
You don't need to read V.

>>19720985
Literally just read them. Don't listen to any sweaty gatekeeper telling you you need to read The Entire Western Canon before beginning any of these. Having said that, I am continually amused by the type of person who reads very little in general but is invariably attracted to the same handful of long, complex novels and if they actually manage to make it through one they never shut the fuck up about it and make sure everyone they meet is immediately made aware that they have read it.

This is especially true of Infinite Jest. I have met several people who cite this as their favorite novel and talk about it constantly but don't seem to have read very much else at all. I also know a stemlord who has read exactly zero works of philosophy and very little else but decided to pick up Being and Time.

Anyway, it sounds like you want to read these books for the wrong reasons and will probably get very little out of them, but do as you wish. If you actually want to get into reading pick something more approachable. I recommend The Trial.

>>19720985
Infinite Jest is a US publishing industry psyop: it's a mirror that a "sensitive young man" puts up to himself and sees whatever he wants to see, because it's that vacuous.

>>19720985
I have a bit of a weird relationship with big books like this. I just open them up and read a random passage or two. It especially works for Ulysses.

>>19721245
kek

is Confederacy of Dunces worth reading if I'm like OP and have never really read fiction

>>19720997
Read Dubliners also for Ulysses

>>19725783
No. Read it if you want to have fun, but you aren't gonna gain anything from it. In general the only Americn arthurs that ain;t just junk food are Henry James, Tony Morrison, and Tupac Shakur/OFWG. Read Plato and his friends if you want to uprade,

>>19725910
>listens to rap
opinion discarded

>>19725923
Nope. Reads it and recasts it to the fantastic melodies of Sousa. Read The Republic. Elevate yourself.

>>19725929
I've read much of Plato I'm asking about fiction

>>19721533
False

>>19725934
You didn't take Plato seriously. Read it again.

>>19722819
nice joke

>>19724108
Why are you quoting yourself?

Not OP but can someone actually explain why The Odyssey, Iliad are so popular?

>>19720985
you've never touched a book and yet you want to read 1000+ pages novels. I don't know a better way to get disgusted by literature. As some ppl said here, there is no such thing as three final big bosses of literature, such childish thoughts could only be considered serious by /lit/ fags who don't actually read.

Find some books that actually interest you, that you feel like you could finish and gain something from. Literature is way too vast to waste your time aiming to read meme books. And whenever you feel like pynchon or joyce could click with you, read them, not just because some fags told you they were the pinnacle of high literature.

>>19721145
>I've been filtered by a board discussing books I haven't even read.
Oh dear. Oh dear, indeed.

>>19726534
They're the starting point of the western literary canon. All good writers have read these or at least have a passing knowledge about them

>>19720985
The path to Ulysses is the entire western canon