/lit/ - Literature

David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon Commencement speech.

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
-The Stranger
-The Metamorphosis
-Ubik
-Crime & Punishment

personally I started with books whose film adaptations I enjoyed, like 'A Clockwork Orange', 'American Psycho', 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and 'Fight Club'. Good books for beginners, imo, though some e/lit/ists will inevitably sneer.

lovecraft

>>2284323
>lives of men
MISOGYNIST PIG

siddhartha if you're a young bro. all quiet on the western fron. brave new world. 1984. look for books they typically make you read in late high school or early college. they use them for a reason.

>>2284334
>-The Metamorphosis
>-Crime & Punishment

these two for sure. if none of the above excites you try different shit on your own. there are more books than you'll ever become familiar with in a lifetime so try to enjoy yourself too. which btw isn't a bad approach to life.

but if you really mean
>I want to understand the world around me, I want to be moved, I want to learn more about the lives of men, and perhaps, mine in the process.

i want to tell you to leave the internet but the pros and cons are probably infinitely debatable.

1984
As I Lay Dying
The Big Sleep
Brave New World
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
Crime & Punishment
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
Lolita
Metamorphosis
On the Road
The Sun Also Rises
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse

Charles Dickens - The Pickwick Papers.

I wish people would stop salivating over Brave New World. The ideas behind it are intelligent and creative, but unfortunately it's also really monotonously written and not a book I'd suggest to someone if trying to introduce someone to decent literature.

>>2284452
Yes, rereading that I am aware of the hypocrisy in my badly written post.

>>2284455
>dat feel when you are so over conscious of looking like an illiterate retard with bad reasons for not liking a book because you are on /lit/ alongside countless geniuses

>>2284459
>>2284455
>>2284452
wut

Infinite Jest
Gravity's Rainbow

Roald Dahl

>>2284459

>dat feel when you realize most people on /lit/ are pretentious bores who do little more than parrot back what their professors have told them

If you want classics then try something like:

Tale of Two Cities (it's fun)
Two Years Before the Mast (a bit tough, due to the technical sailing stuff, but pretty interesting and exciting)
Marcus Aurelius (non-fiction, thought I'd throw it out there)

If you want anything then try:

Dune
Lord of the Rings
Foundation

The key here is to read books that you're going to enjoy. Don't just read things to read stuff, don't try to impress people, read because you like to. There isn't some quota that everyone has to fill, if you hate the book and it's a slog then you'll hate reading and never do it.

1. Find something you like
2. Read it
3. Finish it
4. Goto 1

>>2284323
Keep it simple.
Start at the basics, I recommend reading the Odyssey, Metamorphoses(Ovid), Paradise Lost, and then branching out.
Norton critical editions are great, and the essays in the back will aid you in learning a method to digest and synthesize the book.
It sounds to me that you want to branch into humanism, and the epics mentioned above are seminal books to the humanism we have today.
Not to mention, alot of literature has derived from the epic genre, notable examples include the Tempest (Shakespeare) and Ulysses(James Joyce). Shakespeare for one, prided himself on never having created an original plot. By the same token, by gaining a solid understanding of the precursors of modern literature, you will only be setting yourself up for success.

Good Luck.

>The key here is to read books that you're going to enjoy. Don't just read things to read stuff, don't try to impress people, read because you like to. There isn't some quota that everyone has to fill, if you hate the book and it's a slog then you'll hate reading and never do it.

OP, take this guy's advice; it is good. Literally anything you choose to read will be considered plebeian by some and pretentious by others. Also, be excited. There is a shitload of knowledge and wisdom out there for you to get. Go forth.

>2284513

>simple
>basics
>read epic poems
>lol

All of these books are pretty accessible and very enjoyable. They're not at all related but I'd recommend them to anyone. In no particular order:

The Old Man and the Sea
The Invisible Man
Hard Times
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Where I'm Calling From
The Outsider (also referred to as The Stranger or L'etranger)

Some of the stuff that's being recommend in this thread is pretty fucking heavy. If I hadn't picked up a book in years I wouldn't want to start on something like Lolita. I suspect a few of you are either trolling or just showing off.

>>2284547

>I suspect a few of you are either trolling or just showing off.

Those things do not happen on /lit/ my good sir!

>>2284513

>>Odyssey
>>Paradise Lost
>>Simple
>>lol

sure, if you get a prose translation of the odyssey it will be a simple read, but holy shit will it be boring. And most of the poetic translations are shite. Start slow, bro. Rape of the Lock, Song of Myself, Descent of Allete, Dream Songs, Howl, etc if you want to read poems. Otherwise give start with prose. Not everyone enjoys poetry, especially not longwinded stuff like virgil, homer, chaucer, and milton.

>>2284547
OP, if you're still reading this thread I definitely second this guy. For men in their early twenties, the fictions of Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and John Cheever are indispensable.

The people who are telling you to start with David Wallace and Thomas Pynchon are trolling you. Those authors write discursive navelgazing for literature nerds.

Good luck.

>>2284566
>I want to understand the world around me, I want to be moved, I want to learn more about the lives of men, and perhaps, mine in the process.

He finished college, I'm assuming he's literate up to a high school level.

Moreover, I mentioned epics not for their literary tradition, but rather for their implicit semantic tradition. No other work deals so closely with the relationship between classes, and of those between gender. The question of identity is central to the epic tradition, and therefore germane to the OP's desire. In the three epics I mentioned, we can see the rise of proto-humanism, proto-feminism, and empiricism in the form of social constructionism.

>>2284581
holy shit, i remember that pic from a battlestation thread a year ago, the person that lives there must feel like he rules the world when he looks out the window. Shit i want that apartment.

>>2284581
From the guy you just seconded, thanks for mentioning John Cheever. I read a few short stories of his in an anthology and thought they were great, but he hasn't crossed my mind for years. Any particular books of his you'd recommend?

>Some stuff I enjoyed early on:
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev

>Some other stuff I'd recommend to someone in your circumstances:
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

As for poetry, you may wish to begin with the collection of poetry entitled The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks).

bump for some good suggestions.

The Hobbit
Shogun
Ender's Game
Neuromancer

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (only if you haven't seen the movie)

Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius

Then Socrates, and Plato.

Then Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Marlow

Then Dickens, Gibbon, Kant, Nietzche

Then >>2284384

At that point, you will be well read in the western canon, and should be able to formulate your own taste.