/lit/ - Literature

>>20928612
>Give me hope /lit/
How can I give something I do not have?

>>20928617
By telling me you at least read

>>20928612
No Longer Human. Better than expected, thought it was gonna be a meme.

Call of the Crocodile. Better than expected, thought it was gonna be a meme.

>>20928612
action park book
i'm not that far into it, only 1 chapter (which is like 40 pages) but i really like it so far

>>20928612
Georg Simmer - Conflict And The Web Of Group Affiliations. So far its interesting but a chore

I'm reading journey to the end of the night.
It's okay so far. I like the humor and some of the message, but it seems like it's very pro poor people, which is a little cringe. I'm struggling to see what the point of it is. I guess it's just a biography of this guy so there isn't a "point" persay? Idk how much of it is real or fictional, idk but idk if I care

>>20928926
That place sounded crazy. I bet it was fun to work there as a teenager though

>>20928929
Meant *Simmel

>>20928612
My Ishmael. Not as good as the first two books, but I'm only one third of the way through. I'd highly recommend Ishmael to everyone here.

>>20928612
Rereading The Rainbow by DH Lawrence. The psychology and fruitless struggle of man and woman to understand each other is first rate. Lawrence can turn a simple relationship to an almost mythological struggle. I relate to many characters and Lawrence has voiced many of my feelings and beliefs

>>20928612
Just finished the Buried Giant. I liked it, but it did have a melancholic ending.

>>20928625
You must be 18 to post here

The Odyssey

I was hoping that the one I bought was a verse translation and it turns out it isn't. I guess I'll just have to make do.

>>20928612
The Hebrew Bible.
What can I say, it's the best book I have ever read unironically.

>>20928612
TBK
Ivan is literally me for better or for worse

>>20928612
Just finished Max Havelaar.
Living under colonialism and a hybrid of feudalism and capitalism sucks.
Too bad some people are getting rich of it and don't bother changing the system.

>>20928612
Absalom Absalom!
THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN!
t. Not even american

I just got done with Conquering Berlin. I liked it alot, fun read but it’s kinda like a nazi fanfiction rooted in reality. I recommend it though

>>20928612
Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s my favorite book, and I’ve read it every year around this time for the last ten years.

>>20928612
Fall in the House of Usher

>>20930485
Not sure how you would translate the Odyssey in verse, the greek doesn't rhyme or have stanzas. It's dactylic hexameter, and the poet plays loose with the meter. I had a little greek in college, but this is archaic greek and it's HARD. It would be a major undertaking to read it in the original, something you'd have to put years of your life into. It would probably be worth it, but yeah, definitely not something you could do easily.

I just finished Genesis, the first book of the bible.
The NIV is easy to understand.

>>20928612
rereading god emp o dunc. Wishing a big booty fish speaker would hand wash me right about now. I'm fucking lonely.

The Lucifer Principle, real page turner, it has some very interesting information within it and I can feel myself getting radicalised against Muslims.

The Descent. It's good but it's not what I thought it'd be; it'd be way better if there wasn't so many time skips. At one point it's done so abruptly that it feels like you're reading the opening of the second book in the series because there's so much shit that happened between chapters

>>20932619
>what is blank verse or free verse

>>20928612
The Brothers Karamazov. Im more of an Ivan but I really want to be an Alexei. Indeed, I dont have an issue with God, I just dislike His creation.

I'm reading Maiden Castle, it's definitely among the best books I've read. It's hard to read other writers with the same enjoyment I used to after discovering Powys and getting used to his style of writing, psychologically they seem so lacking. Anyway he's good at writing and getting into the minds of not just "literally me" male loners but a whole diversity of people, e.g. in this there's a really well-written 3 year old, who in other books would've been barely mentioned or considered.

Kenzaburo Oe complete works and Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island

Houellebecq is alright, some very touching shit mainly when he speaks about dogs and cuming inside a juvenile mouth, but Oe is so goddamn fucking good jesus fuck. That novel with the black GI prisoner and the one with the dude that gets humiliated in the bus, brutal stuff.

>>20930485
First reading? Don't worry, sperging about verse or prose or whatever the fuck is nerd shit. Focus on the message. To me, The Odyssey is about loyalty.

>>20928930
The point is: everybody sucks. Poor or rich, left or right, white or red. I always loved the Africa part.

>>20928612
Currently reading "Fall; or: Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson. Was pretty happy with the first 1/3 of the book, maybe a little more. I enjoyed reading about the legal and ethical back and forth and the near-future tech involved in preserving/reviving someone after they die. I even enjoyed the description of Dodge "waking up" as a neural map inside the simulation, and recreating his MMO world from memory. What I am NOT enjoying is Neal's weird little story in a story where the MMO world has existed for digital eons and now a Tokien-esque band of adventurers are going on what seems to be a non-sequitur of a quest through this MMO world. It sucks, it's not relevant, it's generic fantasy at this point. There doesn't seem to be a real-world payoff coming so I'm close to dropping it 80% in, and the depth that I'm at is the only thing keeping me reading. Did this dude really manage to write Cryptonomicon and Seveneves? Yeesh.

>>20934719
Also wanted to add but forgot about it since the book also forgets about it: Stephenson sets up near-future America as a hellscape destroyed bny AI-dominated social media. Describes vast swaths of America (Ameristan/Ameristani) as having entire populations "check out" of reality and subsist entirely on memes delivered to them by AI curators, which informs their lives and realities. It seems like he did this to take a swipe at middle Americans without much regard for his own pet characters, since they, without a shred of irony, do the EXACT same thing... but they subscribe to the "right" curators and the "right" memes. Then goes on to describe the process of waking up as a brain in a jar, in a virtual world, as if this virtual existence didn't have some parallel to the hell he described on planet Earth. So, essentially, everyone in the future stops using natural appendages to perceive the world, but some are good and righteous (the super-liberal, super-rich, neurodivergant techies) and some are stinky and evil (rural middle class white Americans). Weird that Stephenson went so far out of his way to describe and shit on Iowans for example when in the world he set up, some place like Baltimore would be much more interesting to see. I'm sure black Americans in the Stephenverse are dealing just fine with AI-memes taking over reality? But he drops the description of "Ameristan" and then never uses it in the story afterwards... Also would have been nice to see more about what the fuck people do when the afterlife is just another retirement scheme? People literally "tuning in" to watch afterlife adventures like it was Twitch dot TV, wouldn't that really fuck with you? And notable was the overall theme that only the super rich are worth talking about... the "afterlife processes" take trillions to run and at one point a character just has "money bots" make more money to run this shit. Insane. Really, really shit the bed with this one.