/lit/ - Literature

Blood Meridian. The Bible without God, salvation, heaven or forgiveness. Just brutal humanity and the mysticism of evil. Not to mention the most memorable villain in literary history and an ending that will haunt you for a long time.

Teh Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Name of the Rose. Because it is a work of genius. It contains some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read, including one chapter that induced in me a state of euphoria such that I have never felt since. It is also compelling, delightful take on the traditional detective novel, with a rich atmosphere and interesting characters, entwined with myriad references to literature, theology and history. In addition, never has a book-or anything else for that matter-made me question my beliefs and perception of reality, in the way that this book did.

It is truly a masterpiece.

The Fault in Our Stars, because it's just- there's no way to describe it.

Siddhartha. Introduced me to spirituality outside of god and changed my life.

>>2903292
Yes, yes it. As an historian i was mesmerized at the lengths Ecco went to immerse the reader into another era.
For example, during the novel the monks refer to the non latin speaking masses as "simples". There's not a single seres of historical evidence to suggest the monks used those kinds of words. It was all imagination on Ecco's part. He imagined the medieval monks as very arrogant fellas, how could it not be so? They had all the knowledge their world had to offer.
It is all those little things that make The name of the rose a completely engrossing experience.

The Great Gatsby, because it is written in prose that I find incredibly beautiful.

>>2903269
Forgot the 'why' bit.
It's an epic on the scale of the Iliad, with hundreds of memorable characters and dramatic scenes. There's no allegory here; it's not a pretentious read or one that will challenge anyone intellectually. It's decidedly a "commoner's" read, literally and figuratively, but that's what makes it so enjoyable and refreshing, esp. if you have had to take modern lit classes.

It's a true romance, about a chaotic time that transcended the banal aspects of human existence and saw heroes and villains at their best.

>>2903371

Forgot my favorite book. It's Mario Vargas Llosa's La ciudad de los perros (the city of the dogs). I dont know of there's an english translation, but if you know spanish, then man, you HAVE to read it.

>>2903374
I loved that book. What a flawless style Fitzgerald had. Every passage in that gem of a book just springs from the page

Money, I've never laughed so hard at anything in my life.

The Little Prince.

Lovely and sad in every way. I just can't describe why I love it, maybe I like it because it's disguised as a children's book but it has more depth into it. I used to read it a lot as a child, but until I was 9 years old I realized that the Little Prince dies, I cried buckets in that moment.

Count of Monte Cristo

great story. super long, but not dry, just a lot of characters and a LOT of depth. every action is for a reason and everything is tied together someway or another.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Made me so fucking depressed and definitely made me rethink my views on war. Cried like a bitch throughout the entire second half of the book.

I personally like the entire Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell. I read it all as an early teenager and it has probably significantly affected my subconscious in multiple ways due to the cumulative length of the work and my recollection of having evocatively experienced the books resplendent with images and firm perceptions. In all honesty I would find it difficult to deny the notion that this is probably one of my favorite time periods as a result.

The Stranger, because at the time I felt a similar feeling of feelinglessness. That, and it's short and sweet and to the point.

Because:

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”

1984

I'm not a fan of the characters too much, but the message behind it is wonderful.

I think "A River Runs Through It" is probably the most beautiful American prose ever written, so I'd probably have that as my favorite book if push came to shove, but there are so many great books out there just picking one is a fool's errand at best.

>>2903566
... what a wonderful passage. I really want to read some Faulkner now. Whats a good place to start?

Treasure Island. The book that made me truly realize the beautiful of literature.

>>2903627

Not the guy you quoted, but... "As I Lay Dying" is a decent place to start, as are some of his short stories. All his works take place in the same universe and have recurring characters, so you really just kind of have to dive in there.

I would wait for a while before diving into Absalom, Absalom! though; it is probably his best, but it is hard.

Soldier X by Don Wulffson
Short book but it touched me on so many levels

The Catcher in the Rye. fantastic book

Titus Groan

Nothing comes close to the prose Meryvn Peake produces in this book (except, perhaps, in its sequel, Gormenghast), but also no other book has given me such an amazingly strong emotional kick as this one. It is dizzying, amazing stuff, like a taking a bath in treacle. I wish I knew a single other author who could approach Peake.

Here is the fucking first paragraph:

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.

Riddley Walker

You will never read a book more powerful.

Taras Bulba

Surprised this hasn't been said yet. Brothers Karamazov. That book is just fucking perfect. The philosophical questions posed and the discussions surrounding them are amazing. The ending will never leave me. I just sat there and thought. The feels of the end just attacked me. I can't even explain how much I loved it. Even though I am an atheist and do not necessarily agree with Dostoy's answers to philosophical questions, it is still my favorite book.

>>2904133

If the whole book is like that, no thanks.

>>2904230
i actually like it, not poster, and obviously the whole book wouldnt be, it's called a fuckn expository

The Corrections. so detailed and so twisted in a relatable middle class white person kind of way.

brave new world

les misérables

A tie between Pseudo by Romain Gary...

First I identify with Romain Gary so much that I'm in love with is dead wife. Romain Gary used an alias, Emile Ajar, to write some books and used one of his cousin as an avatar. He won two Goncourt thanks to that trick (it's a one time only awards). Pseudo is about the fear of reality and of hope, the fear of being definite, about paradoxes and some sort of multiple duality. It's also really funny.

... and A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) Where Pseudo is something like my heart book, La Recherche is my brain one. Everything is so right in this book. It's the book which makes me decide I wanted to be a writer.


And let's add my favorite English written one, which I guess is the whole Gormenghast Trilogy, the atmosphere of it is one of the reason I think it's the most important tool of a writer (I even have a tattoo of Lovecraft " I will tell the audient void " to emphasize on this, in case people don't understand I'm an atmosphere obsessed writer).


(sorry for the awkwardness, non native speaker)

Petersburg, because I have a thing for authors who just openly fuck with their readers via style.

I cannot decide. Nowadays, it would be Notes from the Underground, but Steppenwolf comes to mindo, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man too. Then there is, of course, Siddartha.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The movie version is decent, but it'll never compare to the book.

>>2903264
same here

100 Years of Solitude. I know it's translated and that I'm surely not getting the whole experience, but I just love it anyway. I like how it purposefully confuses the reader by repeating names and shit. Other than that, it just kind of appeals to me in a way I can't understand.

A close second is Catch-22. So damn funny but poignant at the same time.

>>2903252
It's a tie between either:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
They both gave me some serious feels, and I love the way they were written. I don't really know what else to say about them.

>>2903398

I've heard that name before.. isn't he a Peruvian writer? I'm learning Spanish so I'll check it out, but it's probably too advanced for me at the minute.

>>2905078
Yeah he is peruvian. Do not try it unless your spanish is really advanced. Hell, even I had some problems even tho spanish is my flirst language. It's full of peruvian slang on some parts, and most of the book is written in stream of thought, so it can be very difficult to read

Watership Down.
I just never get tired of reading it. I love all the background information Adams went into, like the rabbits having their own language and folklore. Bigwig is also one of my favorite fictional characters.

Other two favorites are The Count of Monte Cristo and Demian.

Stoner

Although I finished it just recently, this has to be the best book I've read so far. It's because it focusses with so much love and detail on its main character and therefore the fact that it's basically just about a life of an average man becomes completely irrelevant.

>>2905296

I'll put it on my list to read in a couple of years then haha

>>2905331
Love that book aswell.

>All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies.

>>2903304
All those feels...

>>2903304
Hells yes. Made me cry like a bitch. Looking for Alaska is quite good too.

The Pillars of the Earth. One of the greatest books I have ever read. Long, but definitely worth it in the end. Fell in love with the characters like a book has never made me before.

House of Leaves. It's incredibly detailed and you get sucked into the suspense of the story and also poses deep philosophical questions.

>>2903252

The Long Walk by Stephen King.

The narrative is easily relatable as we've all experienced intense physical exhaustion from running but to imagine being forced to move beyond that wall of tiredness several times, without sleep from the fear of death created an extremely immersive story for me.

>>2907307
So, you're a teenager?

>>2907318

No. Why do you ask? Is King known for attracting a teenaged audience?

>>2907325
"The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis"

>>2907406
Look at all the fucks I give. Under the Dome by King is one of the greatest novels I've read, and no one can convince me that King isn't one of the best writers of recent times.

>>2907429
I may be missing something, but I can't see any fucks.

Wait, you couldn't possib--! No, that would be absurd! You're not telling me that you... that you don't give any fucks, are you?

>>2907456
Ya catch on fast, I'll give ya that. There may be hope for you yet boy.

>>2907406

I didn't really care that King's prose was extremely simple when reading The Long Walk nor does King's lack of resemblance with Edgar Allan Poe diminish my enjoyment of his fiction.

>>2903252
Stephen Kings books are quite trashy really and I doubt most people have read them. Quite a lot of people who tell you they have read the books actually have probably read one and then just watched the films. The film adaptations are often far better

Compare him to the British writer Iain Banks, whose novels are about as strange and detailed as Kings books but Iain Banks is far more surreal and strange and no film adaptation even comes close to the intensity of the books

>>2907478

I agree with your opinion and yet, I still greatly enjoyed The Long Walk. His prose and style may be shit but it was still a great book for me.

>>2907486
just slightly off topic but do you think theres any comparison to what King wants to portray society as, and what Martin Amis portrays society as
I personally think both writers find some sort of disgust at the decadence within society but write as though thats the only way society can exist

>>2907503
I'm a big fan of Amis and I don't get that from him at all. He writes about a section of society that lives in decadence and without culture, oft-times one that has separated itself from more civilized society, but that does not mean that he thinks that is the only way for society to exist. In fact, he often includes characters that are prove that other lifestyles are possible.

Of course, there is always going to be an amount of people who want to live in the underworld. This class of people has existed since the beginning of civilization. That does not mean that everyone has to live like them.

Blood Meridian probably, followed by Dune and The Long Ships

Leaves of Grass. Whitman is the only author who completely understood what being an individual is like for me. When reading Song of Myself, I felt a connection with him that I can't rightly explain. Whitman just gets it.
Ulysses is a close second for similar reasons. Leopold and Molly think like a real person thinks. Joyce doesn't write about his characters' thoughts, he writes his characters' thoughts. I've never read a more perfect representation of how humans actually think, and it's deeply moving for it. Whitman perfectly captured me, and Joyce perfectly captured humans in general.

It's a tie between A Clockwork Orange and A Women of No Importance. I'm actually just a huge Oscar Wilde fan, though.

To the Lighthouse, because of those long flowing sentences that describe the characters' thoughts with such beautiful images.

It's difficult. Someone mentioned The Brothers Karamazov earlier and I completely agree, but I simply feel like I struggled too much with the book at certain points that calling it my favourite would be a lie.
I think it's probably Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. I was incredibly engrossed in the story and the protagonist was hauntingly similar to my self.

Catch-22

I most enjoy comedies when they're not compromising the important qualities of story-telling (plot, theme, character development, etc.)
yet simultaneously forcing me to piss myself with laughter.

Joseph Heller's characterizations were psychologically complex, absurdly ridiculous, and spot-on. The novel's absurdities defied the arbitrary usage of absurdism that most other novel's previously employed. It was a statement about the absurdity of war and the human "logic" that it seemed to have.
Catch-22 makes a dark comedy that is over-matched by it self. He delivered a typically sober (anti-war, anti-death, etc.) message across in both a humorous and sad way whilst controlling a non-linear plot that completely developed through the eyes of different characters that made anachronistic re-appearances in different chapters.

How often does a piece of modern literature create it's own word for a fucking concept that transcends the novel in which it was created?

Catch-22 is AT LEAST the most influential novel of the 20th century.

>>2908035
>How often does a piece of modern literature create it's own word for a fucking concept that transcends the novel in which it was created?

Nineteen Eighty-Four did that with...well most of the concepts used in the novel.

It was not my intention to implicate Catch-22 as the only novel to have done this. I was only attempting to highlight Catch-22's universal contribution to literature. 1984's profound influence on American culture is just as profound, if not more profound, than that of Catch-22.

The Great Gatsby. The story is presented in just the right sort of detachment that really gives it a dreamy quality that honestly, helped me have more feels for it. And, of course, having the primary characters act in ways that make them seem like shallow people to readers is also a nice take. I loved the prose and style, as well. Pleasant on the brain and eyes to read.

>>2908035
>Joseph Heller's characterizations were psychologically complex
No.
>The novel's absurdities defied the arbitrary usage of absurdism that most other novel's previously employed
No.
>Catch-22 is AT LEAST the most influential novel of the 20th century
Fucking Christ, no.

Ah, hyperbole...

>>2908035
Do I need to read Catch's 1-21 to be able to understand what's going on?

>>2908174

How were they not psychologically complex?

Nately was fucking spot-on. He's the attractive spoiled kid that's incapable of overcoming his fear of rejection so he can only go after that whore, the one girl who won't deny him. He doesn't pay attention to those 2 other girls that want to fuck him due to this fear rejection. That once these 2 girls see the reality of who he is, pathetically unoriginal and boring, they'll no longer be interested in him. This completely conflicts with his traditional morality which would never approve of such a thing.

Extreme characterizations that are also accurate like Nately's occur in every fucking character.

Way too many to pick only one book. But I'd say The old man and the sea. I read that book a couple of time and I'm not quite sure why but it's one of my favorite.

The Stand

pretty pleb I know, but I've never been so absorbed by a book as I was while reading through that beast. King's imagining of one of literature's most enduring scenarios is the finest the genre has ever seen. No book (except perhaps The Road) has ever painted such a vivid portrait of post apocalyptic Earth. King drenches you in the sights, sounds, and feelings of the wasteland until the battle of good vs. evil literally becomes a personal investment. I don't even give a fuck about the deus ex machina ending, by that point I was so absorbed and enthralled that nothing short of a "it was all a dream" ending could have swayed my opinion of the novel.

This is my desert island book.

>>2904230
Titus Groan is Prolix: The Novel. I mean, it's an excellent book, but he gets carried away sometimes.

Either The Road, No Country For Old Men, or Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy has mastered the art of storytelling, paring his narratives down nearly to the bone, giving us just enough meat to chew on amidst the chaos and violence. Reading him is like reliving a short period of the distant past. He has a true vision.

>>2908208

Part of why I couldn't get into catch-22 was because the characters were not realistic people. Just too much wackiness for me to take. I acknowledge that the guy is a talented writer and all, but meh...

>>2908406
You are a pleb, and you missed out on one of the funniest, saddest books to be written in the last 100 years.

>>2904126
>Catcher
does the kindle store not have it?

>>2908406

You couldn't even remotely see yourself in Yossarian? You weren't putting yourself in his predicament and wondering how the authority figures could put your life at stake for the good of a cause?

>>2903634
>As I Lay Dying
not the guy you replied to, but going to read this soon, is it really difficult? that quoted text really encouraged me to start some Faulkner

>>2904133

Norwegian Wood is my personal favourite. I like the melancholy atmosphere established within the novel. It was the first tragic romance I read and the last of its kind that I have had the pleasure to read; it is a genre that I find all too lacking in quality. Now, anything that has to do with love is drowned in hormones and grossly abused mythological creatures and folklore.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (I got a signed copy!)
The most beautiful prose about panties and science I've ever read. It's the kinda book I read real slowly to drink in everything.

Catch-22, lolita, the collector. brideshead revisited, The magus was pretty enjoyable too

>>2908433
No, it's not too difficult.

Definitely Toaru Majutsu no Index, the characterizations are spot on, impeccable simile, and one of the most brilliant settings ever built.

>>2908786

Hahahaha, how endearing!

But seriously, please leave.

Anna Karenina because Tolstoy. I could have picked War & Peace but it's overly long and uneven. This is my true pick.

But I'm going to hype Mason & Dixon cause I fucking love the shit out of this book. Not as crazy about Pynchon's other stuff. This one is fantastic because it has Pynchon doing real characters and it has gorgeous prose. Really moving stuff. Not only that, but it's a page turner. At least it was for me.

>>2908280
>I don't even give a fuck about the deus ex machina ending
While I agree on The Stand being an excellent book, and one of my favorites, the ending did piss me off. But in reading many of King's books I realized that the man doesn't know how to write a proper ending. There are a great many books of his that have really good concepts, only to reach the end and go 'That's it? Fuck, I could've written a better ending than that.' Still love to read his stuff though.

As for my favorite book, I have to say Contact, by Carl Sagan. If for no other reason than I liked that the aliens weren't just slimy bastards that have nothing better to do than be dicks to humanity. And even though I think religion is a crock of shit, I do like how he meshed science and religious concepts together. Plus it's an interesting take on the Hero's Journey in a modern setting. If I had one problem, it was that I wish some of the concepts that he brought up were even more fleshed out. However I can see why he didn't, as he probably wasn't looking to write a 1,000 page book. Still my #1 though.

Pale Fire, by Nabokov

incredible work of poetry and prose, all trapped in the most insane and beautiful puzzle of insanity ive seen
the sheer complexity of it is almost James Joyce-worthy

second place for me goes to Cloud Atlas, for the imagination, breadth, and meaning behind every story, it was just really beautiful

A Confederacy of Dunces. I just loved it, don't know how else to explain it.