/lit/ - Literature

Sons and Lovers
The Fall
The Plague

Don Quixote

One Day In the Life of Ivan Desinovitch
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Hamlet

>>3156685
How does Sons and Lovers fare? I'm about 20% through, and feeling it to be staggering a bit. Please tell me it picks up. I feel nothing for any of the characters, it's almost all dialogue....

>>3156687

It's stale for the first 1/3 or so, but the feels come in droves toward the last half. There are definitely some brilliant moments, but there's a lot of fluff in between them.

Paul's relationship with his mother is pretty fascinating throughout, though, I think.

how are you liking sons and lovers?
-hakas :)

>>3156695
Holy fucking shit it's Hakas

Found anything comparable to CBL yet?

Last three:
Franz Kafka - The Trial (Kind of boring through out but I always get that with Kafka, minus The Castle)
William S. Burroughs - The Cat Inside (Kind of fun to read drunk in one sitting)
Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing (Amazing prose and pretty good)

Currently reading:
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (Amazing so far)
Emily Bronte - Wurthering Heights (doubt I'll keep reading it)

Next three:
Paul McCartney - Many Years From Now
Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
Samuel Beckett - Molloy

Recent Given Up On's:
A Passage to Indian(Not really interesting, would rather re-read Shantaram, amazing book set in India)
Stranger in a Strange Land(Just not very interesting)

>>3156702

CBL?

>>3156817

>ayn rand
>pre-eminent

good one

The Brothers Karamazov
Demons
I, Claudius

Slow Learner - Pynchon

Next is maybe Moby Dick. Or House of Leaves. I've tried to read both before, but put them down. I'm in the mood for something I can sink my teeth into.

>>3156817
I think only Americans care about Ayn Rand.

Sartre has been discredited along with communism.

>>3156773
Carbon Based Lifeforms

>>3156837

>communism
>discredited

Seriously? In what sense?

>>3156702
:D
not really

>>3156938
Why not?

Everyone else is gone, aren't they?

LT: Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis; Norwegian Wood, Murakami; The Mysterious Stranger, Twain
CR: Ulysses, Joyce; Outliers, Malcom Gladwell; Fifty Shades of Grey
NT: Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon; Dance, Dance, Dance, Murakami; Joseph Anton, Rushdie

Last three:
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Murakami
The Secret Sharer - Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Currently reading:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera

Next three:
The Plague - Camus
Stoner - John Williams
???

>>3156728

>Emily Bronte - Wurthering Heights (doubt I'll keep reading it)

I don't blame you, brother.

>>3156964
If you like that one, get more Kundera for sure. He's one of my favorite authors. Laughable Loves and The Joke are really good.

>>3156728
>>3156971
Wuthering Heights owns though.

>>3156728
I'll second
>>3156971
re: WH

And your praise of Grapes... one of those high school mandatory works that really stands out in my mind as memorable.

Stranger in a Strange Land has that fifties vernacular in place as if it were going to last forever. I can never get to a point where I can get past the fact that I hate most of the characters... Have you read any of his shorter fiction? Some good stuff in there.

>>3156682

Last 3:
>On liberty (and other works) - Mill
>Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut
>Ethics - Spinoza

Current:
>Leviathan - Hobbes
>Phaedrus & Symposium - Plato
>Confessions of a philosopher - Magee

Next 3:
>The original skeptics: A controversy - Burnyeat
>Writings of John Jewel
>A theory of justice revised - Rawls

>>3156985

This.

>>3156985
Well I haven't given up on yet, I only have read the first page so far, no way can I judge it by that, I just felt like I had another bore on my hands.
>>3156987
WH just isn't good?
About Grapes, I really enjoyed Of Mice and Men and damn well the prose in Grapes so far are fantastic.

Stranger just really seemed like it wasn't going to pick up. I haven't read anything else by him but I plan to read Starship Troopers, read it?

>>3156991
I liked Phaedrus and Symposium so much I stole it from the library.

>>3156964
I forgot to put the unbearable lightness of being on my recently given up on list>>3156728

I probably give up on books to quickly, it just seemed like a romance and nothing special, was I wrong to give it up?

>>3157026
it probably wasn't going to be read anyway. Get any book that's famous on lit and look at the take out slip, mine usually say last time taken out 1962 and the contemporary ones have never been read.

>>3157037
I would've felt badly, but there were three or four other copies.

>>3157032
Yes.

>>3157022
Don't judge it on the first few chapters, they're very different in a lot of ways to the rest of the novel. Wait until you get into the story proper before making a decision.

Last Three:
Endymion - Dan Simmons
The Rise of Endymion - Dan Simmons
Poems Published in 1820 - John Keats

Current:
The Crying Lot of 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Next Three:
Les misérables (re-read) - Victor Hugo
Infinite Jest - D.F. Wallace
Royal Assassin - Robin Hobb

>>3157140
Ok, will do. I usually give a book 70 to 100 pages to get good,

>>3157348

>hasn't drudged through an entire book, only to see it save itself in the last chapter

Love Is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan
Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey

The Language of Mathematics by Keith Devlin
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

[I don't know what the next work of fiction I read will be. I tend not to decide until right after I finish what I'm currently working on.]
Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart
How to Think Like a Mathematician by Kevin Houston
The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer

>>3157370
I may have once or twice, but there are thousands of books and I have a fuckload of fun hobbies.

Last three:
World Systems Analysis, an Introduction - Wallerstein
Against Method - Feyerabend
Goedel, Escher, Bach an Eternal Golden Braid - Hofstadter

Current:
An Anthropologist on Mars - Sachs

Next:
More Feyerabend and Wallerstein (The local uni library opens in an hour)
The End of Certainty - Prigogine

>>3157026
>>3157037

First date on the slip is mine, I cannot even begin to express my disappointment in my college. Same for Vonnegut and spinoza

>>3157377
I get the impression someone is studying maths

Last three:
At Swim Two Birds - Flann O'Brien
Time Out of Joint - Philip K. Dick
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Current
Tarry Flynn - Patrick Kavanagh (will probably give up)
Ghosts - John Banville

Last three:
>Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
>Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
>Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

Currently reading:
>Vladimir Nabokov - Ada or Ardor

Next three:
>Franz Kafka - The Trial
>Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
>Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

>>3157562
>tfw D&E has been reduced to a common plebeian poster and no longer has any prestige or difference from any other poster anymore.

The Era of Tripfag ended a while ago.
Feels good bro.
Nice Sunhawk style post btw.

>>3157732
Yeah, I'm not getting it.

Does it strike anyone else as odd how the denizens of this board would have you believe they're well-read and won't hesitate to give you their seemingly "well informed" opinion on various books, yet every time one of these threads pops up, everyone is either in the process of, or planning on reading these various books that it would seem, based on the type of judgements and dismissals made in other threads regarding them, they would have had to already read?

>>3157770
If you're trying to attack the pedantry of this board, then yeah I'd agree with you. We're good people, though- better than the rest of the "denizens" of fame & 4chun, I dare say

last 3:
post office- bukowski
the castle - kafka
stranger in a strange land- heinlen

currently:
don quixote- cervantes

next 3:
absalom, absalom! - faulkner
naked lunch- burroughs
hollywood- bukowski

>>3157765
Huge L E
Say it aloud.
If you still don't get it, it's supposed to be you jelly.

In the the context of that post, it is referencing D&E's jealousy of what he used to be and used to mean.

In other words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNnaxGFO18o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT1DdO3SISg

etc and other songs, replace "man" with "tripfag" and such.

>>3157732
>no longer has any prestige or difference from any other poster anymore.
That's why I get posts like these every so often right

>>3157561
I am a mathematics major, but that reading is stuff I'm looking at more or less for fun (though some of it will certainly come up in future coursework).

>>3157848
>In the the context of that post, it is referencing D&E's jealousy of what he used to be and used to mean.
A mildly intellectual, but complete and total jerk? He's still the hero /lit/ deserves.

>last three
Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
Edward Albee - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

>Currently
Albert Camus - Exile and the Kingdom
Jane Austen - Sense & Sensibility

>Next three
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jason Segal - Love Story
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

>>3157559
My library doesn't have.
Pynchon
Kafka
Vonnegut
Wallace
Joyce
Philip K Dick
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky
Faulkner
etc etc, it pretty much has nothing good

Hey guys. Posting from iPhone in hotel. What happened to my drunk troll thread last night about blacks and /pol?

>>3159382
what? how is that possible? where do you live?

>Last
Treasure Island - Stevenson
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Eggers
The Second Sex - de Beauvoir

>Current
Everything That Rises Must Converge - O'Conner
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren - Penn Warren
An untitled manuscript by my best friends' brother
>Next
Infinite Jest - Foster Wallace
Building Stories - Chris Ware (Graphic Novel)
Maybe reread some old Jeff Noon or Robert Rankin

>>3159985
probs got deleted.

The Crying of Lot 49
Jane Eyre
Portrait

Anna Karenina

V.
Les Miserables
Ulysses

>>3160012

>V.

Enjoy the single greatest American work of fiction. I envy you your first read.

>>3160011
But it was such a nice thread...

last
Murakami - Norwegian Wood
Shakespeare - Macbeth
Kant - Critique of Practical Reason

now
Marx & Engels - The German Ideology
Huxley - Island

next
Thoreau - Walden
Orwell - Homage to Catalonia
Capote - Other Voices, Other Rooms

last
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

now
Five Miles Away, A World Apart by James Ryan

next
who knows

Oh look, it's this thread again. How about we post some of our impressions instead of spouting titles like alienated cocoons?

>le Thomas Pynchon guise look at me im so patrishun :DDDDDDDD

>>3160061
forgot my sage

>>3160061

Hide the thread you bitch ass sperg.

>>3160061
Like I'd bother with any shit written post-1950 other than Russian and Japanese... Every time i posted views on shot i read, it went largely ignored. Especially as i continue knocking out the more popular classics

>>3160061

>patrishun

typical /mu/ kid ironically parroting your vacuous buzzwords. you are the problem here, leave this board

Last
>Orphans of the Sky
>The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
>Babel-17

Current
>No Longer Human

Next
>Notes from the Underground
>Cat's Cradle
>The Setting Sun

>>3156991
you might be interested in Death in Venice