/lit/ - Literature

>>21532550
I could read that in 8 months. Not even bragging.

>>21532557
Yea so could I if I read every day for a couple hours. This is about 3 years of reading on average about twice a week. I've barely read at all in the past few months

>>21532550
that huge barcode/price listing on the back
>beautiful book
Oh nononononononono pffftt hahahahhahahahahahahaaa

>>21532550
brainlet
come back in 10 years

>>21532550
I started reading when I was four years old. My favorite day in school was when the scholastic catalog would come around, and my parents were kind enough to buy pretty much any books I wanted from it. I must have read hundreds of kids and YA novels. My love of reading continued into adult life, and I've lost count of the number of books I've read now. It must be several thousand, but probably not more than ten thousand. They'll probably find me dead one day with a book in my stiff claws.

>>21532550
>every book I've ever read
>50
some people live fantastically different lives

>>21533236
yes but have you read GPS

>>21532575
>huge barcode
Actually it's normal in size, and the book is small.

>>21533519
>Actually it's normal in size,
cashiers just tell you that to make you feel better

>>21533540

>>21533236
That's based and neat, anon. I wish I was into it when I was younger but I just wasn't. I remember taking those "ar" tests in school on the computer cause you had to read one book every few weeks and I would just guess

>>21533243
I've only been reading for a few years

worst thread on /lit/ right now.

>>21532550
>Both jaws, like enormous shears, bit the craft completely in twain.
Would this still be 'correct' (as it can) if it were formulated
>Both jaws, like enormous shears, completely bit the craft twain.

>>21532550
Your copy looks like it belongs in the room of a teenage girl that shops at target

>>21534172
*right hooks you*

>>21532550
Was the Kalavala interesting?

after 12 years of reading i got 410 titles

>>21534196
It was. It's pretty much all mythology from finland and the way it's written is pretty neat. I first got it because I heard alot of people say Tolkien ripped it off entirely (not true) and it was cool to see one of the sources he got his inspiration from. It's separated into 50 runes and they're somewhat separate but there is a throughline through them all. Actually one of the main lessons is "bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks"

>>21534208
How often have you read over that time? A few hours a week or every day? I want to reach 5k before I die hopefully

>>21534192
I don't get it...

>>21534172
If you remove what's between the commas you get
>jaws bit
And
>jaws completely
I dont care if the both "work" grammatical because the second one sounds bad aesthetically (this is a worse crime than not following proper grammar)

>>21534292
some years have 10-20 books, in 2021 ive read 71 books. i dont force myself to read, i can spend a week without reading a word and can spend 6 hours in a row reading something that i find really interesting
on average it is probably 1,5-2 hours a day

>I want to reach 5k
the more time passes the more i want to reread something rather than search for something new

>>21534306
"bit" is not an infinitive, so its dual splitting is not strictly ungrammatical, having looked at it a while longer. The "completely" is an adjective modifying "twain." I presume that is the source of your aesthetic disgust, that an adjective is so far from its brother? Otherwise, your frustration makes little sense. The big reason is that I find it appealing when "twain" is alone. Ex: When I finally heard she was gone, my heart rent twain. Falling on the floor, I drowned, nearly, in sweat and slobber and tears and aches.

>>21533519
It's still ugly as fuck.

>>21534418
Don't like it
Simple as

>>21534326
Do both you have pleanty of time

>>21534164
Thanks

>>21532550
Those tags are painfully retarded and useless.
Why are zoomers like this? Is it all the microplastics?

>>21535442
What tags?

>>21534172
It would change the meaning at the very least. In the first sentence, "completely" refers to "in twain" (it isn't semantically necessary, perhaps, but it functions well as a sort of a cliffhanger until the sentence ends with the catastrophic imagine of a boat destroyed). In the second one, it refers to "bit", which doesn't make much sense, you either bite something fully or you don't. Also, in the second sentence the "in" is missing, so the lone "twain" doesn't make sense, but I assume that's just a mistake.

op is the print hella tiny on that edition? it looks cute but i bet it has bible paper with some dinky ass typeface that's gonna kill my eyes

Oh come on, Lovecraft's Complete Fictions counts as 3 books at least. Took me a whole summer to finnish. Divine Comedy kinda does too as well as BoTNS. You could read 300 books a year if all you read are novellas.

>>21536381
"In" is *not* missing in the second. The removal of "in" is the entire construction. The position of "completely" isn't the primary question, the removal of "in" IS!

>>21536528
Then it's definitely wrong. "Twain" means "two", you can't "break X two", you have to "break X in two", and "twain" syntactically works the same.
>The position of "completely" isn't the primary question
In that case, I don't see why you would have moved the "completely".

>>21536397
Yeah it's a really small book and the print is small. I didn't realize how little it was before I ordered it I guess it's a travel edition. I got used to it tho

>>21536457
I deliberately counted botns as five to cancel out the fact lovecraft and the divine comedy I counted as one. I had them each at one becuase most of Lovecraft's are short stories and the divine comedy I only read a direct translation and it was printed as one book, but I've also got a separate translation with annotations and stuff that separate the three and each of those are three times as long as the plain one
It's weird, but it makes sense in my head to count them like this

Here is my current shelf incase you want something else to make fun of or compliment

>>21536604
Nice zippos bro :)

>>21536015
Anon is projecting his online permanence, don't mind xim.

>>21536604
>all that wasted space
>all that shlock beside legitimately good fantasy
>the lack of variety
>knick-knacks

>>21536709
Thanks fren
I try to collect them from places I visit but I've missed a few

>>21532550
Those editions are uncomfortably small, and the text size can be alright, depending on the book - other times, too small.

The first 2 books I bought from that publisher were sewn, but my copy of Dubliners is glued, and so I've never bought another since.
I would be curious whether other people's books by them are sewn/glued.

I now just go with Everyman's Library. They experimented with glued-bindings briefly in 2013, but all 7 of mine are sewn.
Better 7/7 than 2/3.

>>21534172
You still need "in" in the second example. There is nothing grammatically wrong with the second example (if you bring back the "in") but now "completely" modifies "bit" which doesn't mean much. Of course, you could say "completely" modifies the WHOLE of "bit the craft in twain", but that's an odd style to use in written english. That sort of formulation is more common in spoken english. English rules of grammar are flexible enough that spoken and written english can be pretty different in terms of preferred word order, but some choices that are more common in spoken english sound weird in written english and vice versa.

>>21534418
>rent twain
works poetically but isn't really "proper", especially by contemporary standards. (Twain means "two", after all, not "in two".) But I've noticed that contemporary english demands more words, particularly prepositions, that weren't considered necessary before. Seems like a kind of regression.

>>21536604
Why don't you pit Narnia in order godammit

>>21537483
Anon, I think you may be retarded.

I'm 2nd year at Ox doing English Lit, and we are meant to read that much every term lol

>>21536732
>legitimately good fantasy

>>21536604
The absolute state of /lit/

>>21537743
You know what i mean faggot.

>>21536604
>lewis
>tolkien
I'd be your friend, no homo.
>>21537483
I'm going to beat you up.

>>21532557
>>21532582
>>21532575
>>21534164
Do you know you're an insufferable faggot?

>>21537483
It is in order, silly. Reading them in any other order is just wrong

>>21536907
Can you really tell the difference between them? How can I tell if mine is glued or sewn? Even if they're swen dont they still use some glue to help hold it together?

>>21538402
Do you have eyes, nigger?

>>21538402
>Sewn
Look for signatures (collections of pages, folded together). Look close to the spine for signs of picrel.
When closed, you should still be able to spot a collection of upside-down arches, likely with a bit of glue between them.

>Before doing the next step, note that if it's a (solely) glued book, opening wide might cause damage.
Then open the book to the middle of a signature, and open it fairly wide. Right in the middle you should either see string (appearing & disappearing in a dotted-pattern, maybe 1-2cm each)

Will post pics of mine soon, hopefully.

>>21539047
Dubliners, glued.
This isn't showing you 'how to identified' a glued/perfect binding, but just showing the damage that was done by merely opening the book fully.
On the corner there, you can see that the pages are misaligned forevermore. Thanks, not-sewn bindings.

>>21539047
>>21539111
This is how you can see that a binding is sewn. Around the World in Eighty Days, I opened to the middle of a signature and found the string (hence the white/dark alternating pattern going up through the middle of this pic).

>>21539120
Oh, and it took a few page-turns to find the middle of a signature.
If you open to the wrong page, there's still signs of where the string passes through the signature.

>>21539047
>>21539111
>>21539120
>>21539128
Thanks for the info
I just checked my copy of moby dick and I did see signatures and found the stitches in the middle of one of them, so I'm pretty sure it's sewn. Also I read it all and opened it pretty wide sometimes when I did and there was no damage afterwards

>>21539219
Less than 400 pages = glued

>>21532550
Entry-level core but the Kalevala is a very nice touch and most people are illiterates so well done.

>>21536604
Jelly of your Dante desu

>>21540410
Don't be. Purgatory is about 1cm smaller than the other two, so when you put them up next to eachother they're not even. It's infuriating. The publishers should go straight to the 10th circle for that bullshit

>>21540347
Any recs to improve my list?

>>21540560
>Any recs to improve my list?
lurk, keep reading, follow your interests

>>21532550
what'd you think of Silmarillion and Till We Have Faces?

>>21541859
The Silmarillion is wonderful! It's like reading a history epic only better because it's the result of one man's unrelenting autism. It is peak fantasy and the highest tier of worldbuilding ever achieved. What I love the most about it is that you can zoom in on specific chapters and get even more detail out of them, like children of Hurin and fall of Gondolin, which I'm planning on reading soon.
Till We Have Faces is my favorite book of all time. I've only read 50 books so far, but I seriously doubt any book will even come close to matching it ever again. The characters, the story, the themes, I love them all. There are pleanty of books that you can read that don't have a single beautiful line in them. In TWHF, you can't go a chapter without finding a line like that; what's more is that there is so much weight behind all of the lines. It's hard for me to actually talk about the book because I have so many thoughts on it that it's hard to keep track. Since I read it, I'm not sure there's been a single week that's gone by since I haven't thought about it. Donna Tartt said
>It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
I agree, and for me, it's Till We Have Faces