/lit/ - Literature

Mrs. Dalloway

bump for interest

Yeah stop being a child waiting others to do stuff for you and look for the book yourself.

>>3360707
Infinite Jest

Just get any large book with a lot of pages and small letters. This reading shit is like the penis size.

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is about as badass as it comes.

Pic related

Atlas Shrugged

>>3360740

>>3360732
Agreed.

Or read McCarthy's The Road, OP. That book is unbelievably haunting. The most intimate story of the apocalypse out there.

>>3360740
this

>>3360707
If you have dismissed Lord of the Flies and 1984 as 'pussy shit', you haven't actually read either.

>>3360740

Randfags are almost always without a doubt the biggest tools ever. Sorry, anon. I have yet to meet a personable, successful and pleasant person who enjoys her ridiculous scribbling.

>>3360740
>Atlas Shrugged
That's more for people to jerk off to while feeling superior.

>>3360757
I was only pretending

>>3360707
I take you took the literal meaning of 1984 as is.

When you understand that it's not so much about "someone controlling everyone" but more about "how a society that never questions itself is still living under control of an idea that isn't there anymore"... the fact that they are there, afraid and fucking terrifyingly dangerous due to being afraid... Imagine north korea, and that no one in korea is actually willingly following the idea which makes it what it is, that they are only afraid to ask "hey what if" and so they fear each other and that's why nothing changes (of course it's not that way, it's an example).

At least that's one of the many things I got from the book, and scared me as a very young teenager at the time.

>>3360707
Warning: You might can't 'unsee'.

Are you after something 'bad-ass', something difficult, or something that will challenge your worldview?

(By the way, can anyone think of any books that check all three of these criteria?)

>>3360821
>you might can't unsee

But I agree. Fantastic book. Haunting doesn't describe it, abject desolation maybe.

Catch-22. Not difficult but so enjoyable and there's a fair few messages in there.

Take my opinion seriously: i never ever read happy books.

Atomised - Houllebecq
The Idiot - Dostoyevsky
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

Probably the best choice is the last one.

>>3360821
Fucking this. Ligotti will shove your face right in the gritty realities of the cruel joke that is human existence and hold you there.

Hey OP, you want Correction by Thomas Bernhard.

>>3361106
agreed. This and Conspiracy Against the Human Race are the most depressing things ever

>>3361118
>tfw too pleb to understand CATHR

no longer human by Osamu Dazai. Last thing he published before he committed suicide. I think it is what you are looking for. the prologue is bone chilling.

also if you want to delve into theatre (which you should want to do if you want brutal) then get into theatre of the absurd and in yer face theatre. A couple suggestions that are naturalistic but still are dark are sartre's no exit and albee's who's afraid of virginia woolfe?

>>3360810

Nah, he just realised it was shit-tier writing, given unearned props thanks to the Cold War. Well, the Cold War's won - no need, any more, to pretend Orwell's prose was more than journalism.

>>3361176
I don't much care for Orwell but I also don't much care for the way you're denigrating journalism

>>3361180
>There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. - Oscar Wilde

>>3361180

I'm not. Journalism isn't literature, the standards of thought and invention are manifestly lower.

>>3361194

Or rather, to put it another way, it's not built for the same dataflow. Can you imagine a newspaper full of art prose? It wouldn't function properly as a newspaper. In the just the same way, Orwell's prose isn't suited to the novel.

>>3361189
A lot of journalism is manifestly stupid but there are people who are journalists who write really, really well, and who aren't dumb as shit (mostly in the past, but still)

But, I mean, your Oscar Wilde quote is pretty rocking too

>>3361194
Of course it's not literature, it's a different medium, and it's not 'high art' in the way that literature can be. But that's still not a call to denigrate it, or to deny that there can be really skilled prose writers working within journalism, or to disregard it as a way of representing and examining our world. Go back to sucking Bloom's dick, you little cryptofascist.

>>3361212
I like the guys who write for the Onion. That's about it.

Then again in my country journalists are paid off little scumbags who are hailed for their ignorance and outright disgraceful behaviour in front of EU diplomats.

>>3361206
> In the just the same way, Orwell's prose isn't suited to the novel.

I agree with that statement, I just don't think Orwell was bad because he was a journalist. He was a journalist, and separately, he was bad.

If you wanted to say that his fiction was bad because he couldn't adapt his journalistic style to the requirements of fiction, you should have said that, instead of saying that he was "just a journalist"

>>3361212

You see, your inability to understand what was said to you proves the point. I didn't 'denigrate' journalism.

>>3361225
w/e, play whatever game you want to play, it's all good

>>3361229
Are you a journalist or something? You seem pretty touchy at the notion that journalism is a scummy business.

For what it's worth, I read some article of Virginia Woolf's and it was top drawer. Exception to the rule of course seeing as people like Jan Moir are paid journalists.

>>3361217

I never used that phrase. I said there was no longer any reason to pretend Orwell's prose was more than journalism. I'm not here to cater to your insecurity.

>>3361217

He was a journalist and seperately he was bad, yes, but he was bad because he didn't stop being a journalist when writing novels.

>>3361238
No, I'm not a journalist at all. I just think it's a stupid thing to say, and more than that another example of /lit/'s blinders and its poor approach to a lot of things.

Yes, a lot of journalists are idiots or shitty writers or paid political flacks, but that's not inherent to the form. It's not good practice to dismiss the form on the basis of that, to close yourself off to the whole medium and not only that but to the whole way of approaching the written word and understanding the world. The habit of ignoring anything that's not L*I*T*E*R*A*T*U*R*E and using that as the standard for all things.

Why does this book never get mentioned in these threads? Most brutal book I've ever read, especially when you think about how young the kid is.

>>3361257

What's a stupid thing to say? The thing you imagined me saying, or what I actually posted?


> It's not good practice

Literature will be wasted on you if you go through life thinking in phrases like that.

Hello, Journalist here. Journalism and Corporate media is a fucking scummy business. That I can tell you. I dare you to find a journalist who thinks otherwise when they speak the honest truth.

>>3361297
>I'm not. Journalism isn't literature, the standards of thought and invention are manifestly lower.
>no need, any more, to pretend Orwell's prose was more than journalism.
>Literature will be wasted on you if you go through life thinking in phrases like that.

you're such an elitist cunt and your views are so dumb

>>3361128
what don't you understand about it?

>>3361308
well I'm only 20% through it on Kindle actually but uhh I don't feel terrified yet. I get the bit about us limiting our consciousness to hide ourselves from.. well I didn't get what though

Check out the reviews on good reads for 120 days of sodom

>>3361303

Nope.

>>3361212
...I see you don't read any of the good stuff.

The New Yorker still has decent longform journalism IMO, along with a lot of other publications. Just because you don't have the attention span to read any decent journalism doesn't mean you should denigrate it.

>>3360821
Can someone summarize this book? I can't understand radical pessimism. Most people live lives that are more happy than sad. Why end it all?

>>3361289
I read it.

It eventually began to lose it's power when the kid got fucked over at literally every turn.

I can never take these books seriously, because their authors are always clealy biased.

>>3360982
As I Lay Dying is dark, sure, but it also has a fair amount of humor (Anse's teeth, the ending, Addie's chapter, Vardaman).

For what the OP's looking for, I would recommend Absalom, Absalom! instead. It's frustrating, oppressive, and depressing. You get more out of it having read The Sound and the Fury beforehand, though, because they share a central character.

If you want brutal, read Dennis Cooper's book My Loose Thread.

>>3360707
“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

>>3360821
>read this book
>love this book
>whine all day and brood
>suddenly you grow up
>read the book again
>it's trash
feels o-oh.jpg man

“As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

>>3361935

The Celine passage says a lot about what it means to grow up.

"If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you"