/lit/ - Literature

>-- Money, in a voice that rustled.

>See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

>The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

>a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

"Sing to me of the man, O muse, the man of twists & Turns
driven time & again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy."

>>2662051

Hah, I read the first sentence and everything came back. That book stays with you.

>Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old.

>>2662062
That's one crappy translation you have there boy.

>>2662081
>"German girl"
>Not familiar with Fagles

Go back to /pol/

>>2662085
I never post in /pol/
>Implying Fagles made the best translation

>>2662085

ITT: Pompous people doing their best to slap down others with a subjective argument

>>2662092
let the blade do the work, keep a steady hand, there will be no pain

>tfw the book was within arm's reach, and you type the paragraph rather than copying it from an online source.
It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn's sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music... but no, of course there was no music. In fact, there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly
mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed
the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of
boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been
nothing in the world more important than that wall.

>>2662098
>Anon thinks I'm pompous

But...

Okay...

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy."

Robert Fitzgerald (1961)

"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel."

Richmond Lattimore (1965)

Wow. No. They may have their good spots within, but going by the opening line, Fagles doth win me over.

"Sing to me of the man, O muse, the man of twists & turns
driven time & again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy."

>>2662105

and such a shitty book too

>>2662388
O Divine Poesy,
Goddes-Daughter of Zues
sustain for me this song of the various-minded man
who after had plundered
the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy."

Lawrence of Arabia's take on it.

>>2662388
>O muse
>'Muse' isn't capitalized

>>2662388
Richmond Lattimore isn't as close to the language but is is more readable it seems.

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupper-ware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

- first sentence, the paragraph is over a page long.

ALL THIS HAPPENED, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I know really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed the names.

If you don't know this by heart you need to gtfo.

>having a favorite book

Are you guys retarded? Have you read so few or so many of the same monotonous books that you're able to clearly discern the best?

That's as dumb as asking someone what their favorite song is.

>>2662434

this is the dumbest thing i've read in a long time.

>>2662422
The Things They Carried?

>>2662438
What a nice pointless comment. Anymore asinine things you want to say?

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

Understated simplicity.

My god, I want Scarlett Johansson as she is in OPs pic.

>>2662441

You're clearly being an ass-head, sir.

>>2662441
You're not any less asinine than his post.

This is the only board where we have people who sperge at something as trivial as "WHY DO PEOPLE HAVE FAVORITES"

>>2662441

sorry. it's just that what you said was so absurd and stupid that i felt compelled to comment.

My name is Ahmoud Hussein.
I am a sculptor.
My giant block of marble had arrived the afternoon before. It weighed thirty-seven tons, leveraged, and rolled into my studio.

>>2662444
Smelly and ginned up.

>>2662449
Are you trying to aggravate me? If you don't like what I said, why don't you actually say WHY instead of continuously throwing out childish insults.

The concept of having a favorite book among the vast works there are in the world seems incredibly foolish to me. The only conceivable reason is

1) You haven't read nearly enough
2) You recently read this so called "favorite"

I'm inclined to believe the latter. And besides, the former might insult your intelligence and we couldn't have that, right?

Choosing a favorite book is a capricious affair. You can't consistently hold one book above others while continuing to read other books.

>>2662443
Might just be trolling, but my nigga.

>>2662456
*unless you keep reading the same 10 books overs and over again were only 1 isn't complete crap

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Refer to me as Ahmed.

>>2662434
>>2662456

I have a favorite book. I also have a favorite piece of music. I assume you're young and confused and don't know what you really like. You have no voice of your own so to be safe you need to remain neutral and objective. This is made apparent by how you've lashed out in this thread over something so silly.

You're acting like you're being reasonable, but you aren't. You think what you're saying is right, but it isn't. As a human it is natural for us to favor some things over others. Liking one thing the most does not mean you must sacrifice the things you like less, like you apparently seem to believe. That makes no sense. You're making a fool out of yourself. Honestly, I would be embarrassed if I was you.

>It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

"all people living or dead are purely coincidental"

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

"A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday."

August 30, 1933

The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories. This young woman who had stood in a garden at the turn of the century was like a ghost at cock-crow. His mother, Anthony Beavis recognized. A year or two, perhaps only a month or two, before she died. But fashion, as he peered at the brown phantom, fashion is a topiary art. Those swan-like loins! That long slanting cascade of bosom--without an apparent relation to the naked body beneath! And all that hair, like an ornamental deformity on the skull! Oddly hideous and repellent it seemed in 1933. And yet, if he shut his eyes (as he could not resist doing), he could see his mother languidly beautiful on her chaise-longue; or, agile, playing tennis; or swooping like a bird across the ice of a far-off winter.

>>2662388
>The first word isn't "Rage" or "Wrath"
>2012

All the translations suck, clearly.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

>Scan entire thread for Fear and Loathing
>Not found

You people disgust me.

>>2662579

why cause it's about drugs and drugs are coooool?

>>2662579
>Delivered
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

>>2662452
What's this?

>>2662626
get out of my head johnny depp

The grass-green cart, with 'J'Jones, Gorsehill' painted shakily on it, stopped in the cobblestone passage between 'The Hare's Foot' and 'The Pure Drop'. It was late on on April evening. Uncle Jim, in his black market suit with a stiff white shirt and no collar, loud new boots, and a plaid cap, creaked and climbed down. He dragged out a thick wicker basket from a heap of straw in the corner of the cart and swung it over his shoulder. I heard a squeal form the basket and saw the tip of a pink tail curling out as Uncle Jim opened the public door of 'The Pure Drop'.

>Not the best, but whatever

>Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

>>2662051
Based McCarthy.

>>2662422
Slaughterhouse Five?

The triumph of philosophy would be to reveal, amply and lucidly, the means by which providence attains her ends over man; and, accordingly, it would trace those lines of conduct which might enable this unfortunate biped individual to avoid, while treading the thorny path of life, those bizarre caprices of a fate which has twenty different names, but which, as yet, has never clearly been defined.

>>2662662
who said this and wtf is is he referring to - that which hasn't been defined. sounds nice and gets lost in nonsense.

>who said this

de Sade in Justine

>wtf is is he referring to - that which hasn't been defined

Fate.

>If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

>Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four day's beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing Along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit upnon them, the San Francisco symbol of 'bar'-thousands of neon-magenta martini glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we're in, their white face erupting from their lapels like marshmallows-streaming and bouncing down the hill-and god knows they've got plent to look at.

>First the colors.
>Then the people.
>That's how I usually see things.
>Or, that's how I try to see them.

I see there's an "Opening paragraph to your favourite book" thread on here,
and I was wondering, what about the END to your favourite book, or the best endings to books?

I'll start.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning -
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Seriously the prose in that last chapter is so beautiful I could read it over and over.

>>2662744
mah nigga

"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.
This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat,
insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received."

THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.

I first met Neal not long after my father died. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father's death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road

>>2662039

>Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

>>2662928

>dat childhood favourite's book, even when I didn't "get it"

"I told my dentist all this."

I
always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and
hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid. The ship's
psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was
asleep and he tells me that it isn't fear, it isn't anything important -- it's just like the
trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, and in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.
>Book of Disquiet - Pessoa

The actual paragraph is much longer, but this will probably suffice:

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions.

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of Cancer, to be exact, on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much farther west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii—and as the port of Tzucox to the east on the Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very much farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.

>ctrl +f
>don't see this
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

>>2662039
>first paragraph of your favorite book.

b-but my favourite book is the Melancholy of Resistance...

"And then say what? Say, 'Forget you're hungry, forget you got shot inna back by some racist cop–Chuck was here? Chuck come up to Harlem–"
"No, I'll tell you what–"
" 'Chuck come up to Harlem and–' "
"I'll tell you what–"
"Say, 'Chuck come up to Harlem and gonna take care of business for the black community'?"
That does it.
Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didn't have to go but I did. I sure didn't want to. He'd killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasn't no passion to it. He'd been datin' this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin' to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was goin' to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. I thought I'd never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin' if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin' to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I've thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I've thought about it a good deal. But he wasn't nothin' compared to what was comin' down the pike.

>>2662843
>>2662500
These - what are they from?

>The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district.

>Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.

The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.

And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.

And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap . . .

And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.

And then the eagle lets go.

And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There's good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there's much better eating on practically anything else. It's simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

As close as I can come to a favorite novel:

>The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.
>He remained leaning against the door for a few seconds, and lit a cigarette. On the bed to his right lay two fairly clean blankets, and the straw mattress looked newly filled. The wash-basin to his left had no plug, but the trap functioned. The can next to it had been freshly disinfected, it did not smell. The walls on both sides were of solid brick, which would stifle the sound of tapping, but where the heating and drain pipe penetrated it, it had been plastered and resounded quite well; besides, the heating pipe itself seemed to be noise-conducting. The window started at eye-level; one could see down into the courtyard without having to pull oneself up by the bars. So far everything was in order.

>ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on it's side blocking his view, but Price is who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

I really like these first few words;


Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K..

Translated, but still

>>2665052
I much prefer "spreading slander".

A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but
there is nothing to compare it to no.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are
no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an
iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day
through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will
be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout,
without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

>It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer's apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

>>2663712
This. Everyone else go home.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

"Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead."

>>2663712

>"although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate"
>Scenes with Fyodor Pavlovich are either in his estate or at the church
>He arranged orgies at his house
>What the fuck, Dostoevsky?

>There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

> It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo. By the time international affairs returned to their normal cold-war level, some wits were calling it the most tasteless April Fool's joke in history. I happen to know all the details about what happened, but I have no idea how to recount them in a manner that will make sense to most readers. For instance, I am not even sure who' I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal. Worse yet, I am at the moment very conscious of a squirrel-in Central Park, just off Sixty-eighth Street, in New York City-that is leaping from one tree to another, and I think that happens on the night of April 23 (or is it the morning of April 24?), but fitting the squirrel together with Fernando Poo is, for the present, beyond my powers. I beg your tolerance. There is nothing I can do to make things any easier for any of us, and you will have to accept being addressed by a disembodied voice just as I accept the compulsion to speak out even though I am painfully aware that I am talking to an invisible, perhaps nonexistent, audience. Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises.

>>2665006

I didn't particularly enjoy the rest of the book, but I do have that first analogy hand copied in one of my note books. There was just something ridiculously pleasant about it.


As for me, Karamasov was already calledo ut twice, so I'll post my second favorite.

On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

>>2662059
I'm reading that right now
jesus it takes some getting used to

>>2665410
What is it?

>>2665397
Why so much /vp/ nonsense on my /lit/?

>I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me from Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also, there was talk that he had just married a girl named Marylou.

>>2665412

Murphy, by Samuel Beckett. It's less than 300 pages, somewhat, so it's it's not a bad way to tustle through a free day.

>>2665413

Images bump threads, right? I just clicked on something from my desktop. So long as I'm not quoting shit from that, it should be fine.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They call me John. Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I
AM
SAM.

>>2665420
It's just weird to see /vp/ stuff on /lit/ when I have both boards open. You wouldn't think there would be much crossover between them.

>MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.

>>2665493
>tfw the power of that sentence was wasted on you because the translation you read used the word "maman" instead of "mother" and you had to look up what maman means

>>2665497
Actually the translation I read used the word mother.

>I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot ‘pay out’ the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!

>>2665425
Cat's Cradle my nigga

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

>>2662645
Anybody?

>>2662434
>>2662456
Well-read people can have definitive favorite books, you blowhard.

Nabokov's was Ulysses. Cormac McCarthy's is Moby-Dick. Einstein's was The Brothers Karamazov. Ian McEwan's is the Rabbit Angstrom series.

Now imagine those four writers backhanding you for your stupidity.

>>2665395
thank you.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency." It's a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.

There are better books of course but I have this one memorized.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

>>2665554

I remember reading that for the first time when I was about fifteen; and I realized immediately in a cold sweat during an infinite stretch of time that he in fact wrote all my nightmares and subconscious apprehensions and I was always wayward.

>>2665562
Same here. Which is why I can't help but go back and reread it every once in a while

>>2663707
The sombrero thing is Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan.

>>2665562
A bit off topic here,but what's the best book to start on lovecraft?

>>2662422
slaughterhouse 5?

>>2662422
>If you don't know this by heart you need to gtfo.
I actually didn't finish reading it because it wasn't a very good novel.

Not my favorite one, but the closest book I have to me from my favorite series:

>The rumor spread through the city like wildfire (which had quite often spread through Ankh-Morpork since it's citizens had learn the words 'fire insurance')

"I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.
This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat,
insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received."

>>2662439
looks like someone must now GTFO. do not pass go. do not collect $200.

>>2663707
Sorry for the late reply, I was at work, I hope you are still reading this thread. Mine is>>2662843 it comes from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

>>2662649
spoiler alert: 42

>>2665576

He wrote mainly short stories and brief novellas so you can find a rather consummate digest of his work usually prefaced by a horror writer payign homage or something.

I personally own the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

PS - Best story? The Colour Out of Space!

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

>>2665618
>>2665571
Thanks guys! Looking into these

Madam de Saint-Ange: Merhaba kardeşim. Mösyö Dolmancé nerede?

>>2665576

Lovecraft never really published a book on his life, so most of what you'll find are assorted compilations of his short stories are novellas, but the selection is always at the discretion of whoever is doing the compilation.

There is a collection published by none other than the Library of America simply titled "H.P. Lovecraft: Tales" (pic related). It's as good a place to start as any and should be easy to find. If not, any compilation will do.

Or, if you're a bad enough dude, here, knock yourself out: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/

Make sure you read

The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
Pickman’s Model
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Out of Time

>The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

>>2666681

>no dunwich horror

Well I never...

>>2666685

It's the fourth title from bottom to top, you doofus.

Караибрахим изкачи превала и спря коня си. Пред краката му се простираше долината.

>>2663684
this is good. don't recognize it.

>transcribing a whole paragraph.

i have neither the time nor the inclination for that. how about just first word? The.

>>2665553
Neuromancer. just starting it.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan blah blah blah

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality, because it’s now like the pot calling the kettle cracked. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.

>>2668070
i love that book

>>2668016
1 Download the pdf in less than 30 seconds.
2 Copy and paste the paragraph.
3 ???
4 Profit.

>>2662456
>>2662441
>>2662434

Deluded and arrogant people like you are the cancer of /lit/ and /sci/.
You are the proof that a person can read tons of books and still being an utterly idiot.

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neady shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The odier, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

Plus the title of the chapter is Never Talk to Strangers, which tells us pretty clearly that some shit is about to go down.

>>2668012
No Country for Old Men, by McCarthy. Doesn't get damn near the credit it deserves. Probably because it depicts a criminal as the antagonist, which is a reversal of the role commonly employed in literature today.

The woman pushed on the baby's stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth, it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish. She was testing to see if the baby would cry, but the little arms and legs were still, so she peeled away the plastic wrapping over its face. She lined a cardboard box with towels, laid the baby inside, and taped the box shut. Then she tied it with string and wrote a made-up name and address on the side in big print.

>Friday 1 January 2021
>Early this morning, ! January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days. If the first reports are to be believed, Joseph Ricardo died as he had lived. The distinction, if one can call it that, of being the last human whose birth was officially recorded, unrelated as it was to any personal virtue or talent, had always been difficult for him to handle. And now he is dead. The news was given to us here in Britain on the nine o'clock programme of the State Radio Service and I heard it fortuitously. I had settled down to begin this diary of the last half of my life when I noticed the time and thought I might as well catch the headlines to the nine o'clock bulletin. Ricardo's death was the last item mentioned, and then only briefly, a couple of sentences delivered without emphasis in the newscaster's carefully non-committal voice. But it seemed to me, hearing it, that it was a small additional justification for beginning the diary today: the first day of a new year and my fiftieth birthday. As a child I had always liked that distinction, despite the inconvenience of having it follow Christmas too quickly so that one present-it never seemed notably superior to the one I would in any case have received -had to do for both celebrations.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy

I was stealing saltshakers again. Ten, sometimes twelve a night, shoving them in my pockets, hiding them up my sleeves, smuggling them out of bars and diners and anywhere else I could find them. In the morning, wherever I woke up, I was always covered in salt. I was cured meat. I had become beef jerky. Even as a small, small child, I knew it would one day come to this.

We were in class when the head-master came in followed by a "new" boy, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work.

>The Count of Monte Cristo

On the 24th of February, 1810, the look-out at Notre-Dame de
la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from
Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

>>2665497
That's the best translation, nigger.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/camus-translation.html

It should be pretty fucking easy to figure out what "maman" means.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know, I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, one fine morning he was arrested.

Snagged on a floating piece of wood, two-hundred and twenty one miles from a New York harbor, rattled along a little scrap of paper. It was considerably wet, and the ink text was indecipherable - save for two words: "sorry Jessica". These two words, devoid of context and printed so indifferently, refer to over one million events that, when compiled and branched out to observe historical consequence, can argue that "sorry Jessica" is one of the most important phrases in recorded history. But the tale of this specific instance is not in that number; is far more irrelevant. This Jessica was not the secret lover of the king or a Mitford; nor a killer or a villainess, nor a saint or a heroine. Jessica Gray was an anomaly - she was devoid of identity, and thereby left out of memory.

>>2670417
That's the worst translation I've read so far.

>Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of in nity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or
ee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

>>2671565
This

>>2671616
Call of Cthulhu

>>2671625

>implying there aren't superior Lovecraft tales.

>>2671634
>implying there are

>implying 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'The Color Out of Space' and 'The Shadow Out of Time' don't exist.

'With strange Peons, even Plebs may die.'

- H.P. Lovecraft.

Oh...that's a hard one...

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time. I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time. The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine. Now I am in the lowlands at the southern part of the island, where the aquatic plants grow, where mosquitoes torment me, where I find myself waist-deep in dirty streams of sea water. And, what is worse, I realize that there was no need to run away at all. Those people did not come here on my account; I believe they did not even see me. But here I am, without provisions, trapped in the smallest, least habitable part of the island- the marshes that the sea floods once each week.

It's not technically the first paragraph of the book, I guess. But it's the first paragraph of the story, and my God is it a glorious one:
>In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.

Utterly glorious.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say
that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last
people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious,
because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

>The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret hear is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.

My second favorite, since I gave my first favorite to my friend and can't remember the whole of the first paragraph.

>>2662039

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, we hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

"How happy I am that I am gone! My dear friend, what a thing is the heart of man!"

>Now these ashes have grown cold, we open the old book. These oil-stained pages recount the tales of the Fallen, a frayed empire, words without warmth. The hearth has ebbed, its gleam and life's sparks are but memories against dimming eyes - what cast my mind, what hue my thoughts as I open the Book of the Fallen and breathe deep the scent of history?

>Listen, then, to these words carried on that breath. These tales are the tales of us all, again yet again.

>We are history relived and that is all, without end that is all.

In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of Digne since 1806.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

>>2669024
umm... what book?

>>2662388
I know it's late, but I remember my favorite translation to go like this:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus; rage that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans; many brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many heros did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures -for so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

>>2672457
>>2672457

Those few lines are the most interesting thing I've read all week.

This stuff letters awesomely!

>>2675254

Library of Babel by Whorehay Borhes

>>2663709
>paragraph

"LOLITA, light of my life, fire of my loin. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the pallate to tap at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Tah. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing 4'10" in one sock. She was Lola in slacks, she was Dolly at school, she was Dolores on the dotted line, but in my arms she was always Lolita."

From memory. How'd I do?

>>2675287

Is that how you pronounce it? I've been calling him "George Louis Bordges". No wonder people snicker at me when I try to talk about him.

>>2662051
What book?

He wished the phone would stop ringing. It was bad enough to be sick let alone having the phone ring all night long. Boy was he sick. Not from any of their sour French wine either. A man couldn't hold enough of it to get a head this big. His stomach was going round and round and round. Fine thing nobody'd answered that phone. It sounded like it was ringing from a room about a millions miles wide. The hell with that telephone.

>>2675888

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

>>2675890
Brofist. That's an awesome fucking book.

>ctrl+f "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit"
>no results
I'm sad.

>>2675890
Goddamn, that book is like a punch to the gut.

>>2675895
I wish more people would read it when I suggest it. Most people seem to pass it off for some reason, and that makes me sad, because like you said, it's such an amazing book.

>>2671808

>>2675901

what

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

>Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la forêt vierge qui s’appelait Histoires vécues. Ça représentait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve. Voilà la copie du dessin.

>>2662886
>>2663684
>>2665493
>>2665554

Winners, all of you

>It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

On a certain day in June, 19--, a young man was making hi way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn't ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went through the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

there you go
capcha: awkward thense

I don't really have an all time favourite, but I'll quote my favourite from the last year or so. It's also more the series as a whole than the first book in particular.

>If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.
>—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

Yes, fantasy is not literature, and I am a pleb. I know.

>>2677045
Forgot to include pic.

1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

>All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Or, if that doesn't count as a paragraph:
>Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

2001: A Space Odyssey

>The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. In this barren and desiccated land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive.

It's a shame that this wonderful book was soiled by its film adaptation. The film should only be watched after having read the book. The only way to enjoy and understand the film is through context, then soak up the visuals and meditative experience.

>>2677075
They were made alongside each other, as far as I understand - it wasn't so much an adaptation. Also, I agree that reading the book helps enormously to understand the film, but I can't see how it sullied the novel.

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.

>>2677075

The film isn't based on the book. The book was written concurrently to the film, and as a companion to the film. In fact, the book wasn't published until after the film was released. Both are based on a previous Clarke short story called The Sentinel iirc.

>>2677075
lol

>>2662575
My nigger. Titus Groan represent. This is my favourite book too.