/lit/ - Literature

>>20613670
>Ben Johnson but no Shakespeare

>>20613670
From what I read, Joyce was obsessed with Ibsen

>tfw you realize people could really dedicate themselves to reading a lot back in the day because they didn't have online forums and social media and YouTube to hang out and talk with their friends and strangers all day every day

>>20613766
>>20613773
Possesed and read every line of their complete works.

It's not crazy to think he wouldn't have owned the complete works of shakespeare and read every line. I may be wrong but did Ibsen write more or less? He's also easy to read, I read a few of his plays or short story's maybe both in a book you just breeze right through them, just thinking about that now reminded me how plesent the great magical art that literature can be, a rea of special and rare experiences

>>20613780
Reading a book is very one sided, people want to read and write and talk, take place in the building, of a construction, of a conversation, to activate that certain muscles of the mind.

>>20613798
>It's not crazy to think he wouldn't have owned the complete works of shakespeare and read every line.
he didnt he just read the big ones

>>20613773
he wrote him a letter lol

>>20613780
This; my solution was to autisticaly track how many hours of "free time" I had per day (basically all the time spent in my room away from family and friends, not doing basic tasks like showering or eating, etc) and found out that I had been spending anywhere from 6 to 8 hours a day just fucking around in my room, playing video games, jerking off, and basically wasting time. I remember watching this video:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIW5jBrrsS0
The video is mostly pretty gay but there's this one part starting at 2:21 that's pretty interesting; basically, the guy says he reads about one book a year, and at that rate, he will only read 55 more books before he dies. The other guy has him sit down and read a passage from a book and times him. They do some math, and the other guy tells him that, even at his slow below-average reading speed, if the first guy just read for 30 minutes every day, he would go from reading only 55 to almost 1,000 books in his lifetime, all by simply reading 30 minutes a day, consistently.
That was such a fucking wake up call for me; I'll bet I'm a faster reader than that guy, and I have loads more free time (currently, anyways; life circumstances will change eventually); how many fucking books could I burn through reading a leisurely pace for almost an hour a day? Two hours? While I'm wasting all this time on the internet and looking at porn?
So I've been getting my act together, stopped watching pornography, started limiting my internet/screen time and attempting to fix my attention span so that I can start reading more consistently. One thing I did that really helped was to time how long it takes from the time I sit down and start reading to the time my mind starts to wander and I get seriously distracted; for me, it was about 18-20 minutes of reading but for other people it might be different. So instead of sitting down and saying "I'm going to read as much as possible until I get tired," I split my reading time into 18-20 minute sessions and made a goal of at least one session per day. Ironically I started reading more: I had more motivation to read when I knew my time was scheduled, and on good days I could say "Yeah, I'll add another session" and it really helped.
>blogpost over

>>20613859
tl;dr sorry

Reading Orwell's entire oeuvre was a pleasure I wish I could go back in time and repeat again.

>>20613670
>Have you read the complete works of any authors?

Tolstoy, almost.

>>20613670
Poe's poetry, that's about it, I think.

Anyone else ever think that authors could make up the list of authors they think should be read just to fuck with people?

Bump

>>20614058
why defoe do you think? i never would have guessed this

>>20614048
I appreciate what Adler and Bloom did with their lists, and what the top 100 /lit/ list has done for me personally

>>20613670
>>20613773
Obsession is the only thing that makes sense, reading EVERYTHING someone wrote is dumb. Evem Heinlein had garbage books.

You should only read the top 3 or 4 books by any author (not counting series).

no i'm still a pseud. I would have read the complete works of Homer but I only read the first twelve books of the Odyssey.

>>20614006
(x) doцвт

>>20614130
You should also read Homeric Hymns and the Batrachomyomachia :^)

>>20613859
The problem is there aren't more than 55 books worth reading in the first place.

>>20613766
>Shakespeare
Who?

>>20614253
Is it 72pt text?

>>20613859
Based effortpost

>>20613859
Great post, buddy. Forgive me but may i trouble you to ask as to how old you are and how many books you have read so far?

Bolano, Dostoevsky, Borges, a bunch of poets, Poe. Bullshit really.

>>20614048
I sometimes think DFW definitely did.. But then reading more about him, it seems he was honest about this. The guy actually liked Huey Lewis songs back in the 80s alongside Barth, Pynchon and all the other heavyweights of 19th century. But it seems that being around that suffocating self-fellating New York literati killed him. He should have tried to become a master mathematician or something similar really.

>>20618106
>Complete Dostoevsky
Even his early works?

>>20613670
I have read all of Shakespeare except for the Two Noble Kinsmen. I read everything by Hawthorne two years ago. There's an anon here who read all Melville.

>>20613670
no, why would I?

>>20614092
I read that he considered Defoe to represent all the qualities he appreciated in the English.