/lit/ - Literature

>>5073278
>using goodreads
hidden

Finished the last one earlier today. Not sure what to read next though.

>>5073279
>on /lit/
>doesn't read
reported

>>5073356
>doesn't use goodreads
>then he must not read
your induction is shite, faggot

>>5073326
>2014
>Haven't yet read Lolita

A shame indeed

Just joined /lit/ this month. Read 12 stories so far this year:

>5/5
Macbeth, The Metamorphosis, Oedipus Rex, Crime & Punishment

>4/5
Early Greek Philosophy, The Rats in the Walls, She: A History of Adventure

3/5
Dracula, Le Horla, The Dunwich Horror

>2/5
The Color Purple, The Call of Cthulhu

Going to read Herodotus's The Histories and Sister Miriam's The Trivium next. Will probably find some other fun narrative to read in between studying philosophy and language.

It's been a mixed bag so far. Mainly been reading playscripts I haven't bothered to put up.

>>5073365
Are you trying to say read it every year? I mean, I am yet to read it, but you either don't understand what my picture was trying to show or have an opinion of that book far higher than anyone I've ever seen.

what are some books that only a /lit/fag would have read? this information will help me identify anons

>>5073389
There is pretty much nothing that is /lit/core that would be exclusively read by people here.

God, it sucks realizing how few books you can actually read in a year.

>>5073386
>implying I'm not a troll.
But seriously though you should have put more detail into your comment before assuming we know everything yo mean.

Also, its a highly favored classic along with George Orwell's books.I usually mention Lolita since it is deviates from society norm and yet is still regarded by many as the best books ever published.
>Look up goodreads more thoroughly or look at the /lit/ starter kit.

>>5073415
Oh, fair enough.

I know Lolita, own a copy, and plan to read it later this year. I've also read Orwell before and have a collection of his, also on my list of stuff to read this year.

>>5073278
I deleted my Goodreads this month due to the absolute terrible nature of their reviews.

I would finish a book, scroll down to see what people were saying and the top comment was always some shitty opinion.

There are too many mothers on the website.

>>5073439

Same. Books will have 14000 five star reviews and the website will show the 10 one star reviews by default.

+ As you read you start thinking about "how many stars you'll give it" which is the shittiest way to read.

Life has been so much better since I started tracking it in a journal.

>>5073439
I know exactly what you mean.

>>5073458

>>5073466
>>5073458

yeah, fuck Goodreads

>>5073466
holy shit lmao

>>5073439
They aren't as bad on less popular books.

>>5073278
Here.

>>5073278
I had a baby last year, and Crusader Kings 2 and a new /fit/ obsession takes up a lot of my spare time, but im doing well this year.

>>5073279
>Using a website to push yourself and track your hobby is bad

Not all of us use it as a social platform like some old woman.

>>5073521

mirin

I don't use goodreads because I feel like rating classic lit. out of 5 stars is a completely pointless exercise

>I give the divine comedy 4/5 stars because the ending was disappointing hurr durr

Written reviews I can understand

>>5073732
The way I use it, which is probably completely wrong, is to give a value from 1 to 5 of how much I want to read something similar to optimise the recommendations it gives me.

>>5073732
Yeah, i stopped rating things because the difference in my ratings seemed arbitrary most of the time. Also, now that i'm pretty much solely reading literary fiction, i mostly like everything i read which adds more pointlessness to me rating things.

Here's mine from five years of use. It's nice to track the progression of my reading moods.

I read lots of novellas. The pagecounts for each year are:
>11,853
>27,558
>21,316
>18,246
>11,179

>5
The Crossing, Train Dreams, Journey to the End of the Night

>4
Child of God, Monte Cristo, Butcher's Crossing, The Trial, V., Hunger, Dune, Watchmen, The Son

>3
A Moveable Feast, New York Trilogy, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Dead Zone, Neither Here Nor There, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Dog Stars

>2
The Illustrated Man, The Big Sleep, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

>1
Running Dog

i just use it to keep track of what i've read, i don't really care about the reviews or ratings

Why are you using Goodreads instead of Librarything ?

>>5074163
Its what I started using first. also, challenges

>>5074167
>hallenges
pleb detected

>>5074163
>why are you using a site that catalogs your books
>/lit/

>>5074163
Clearly they arent all that different

>>5073372
>Early Greek Philosophy
All of it?

>>5074212
Yep. I took over 50 pages of notes. Any questions? I was actually going to finish the Histories and the Republic soon and then do a Q&A about the Greeks on this site to test how much of the knowledge I've retained.

>>5074187
What I meant is why would you prefer Goodreads over Librarything

>>5074243
goodreads has a bigger db. what does librarything offer?

>>5074249
You can personally add every book you want, I didn't find this feature on Goodreads and this is why I changed sites

>>5073439
>>5073446

You two must only read 1) shit or 2) super-popular shit. Because on the books I usually read there are tons of fantastic and insightful reviews.

And if it was really so awful then why don't you guys write reviews and make it better instead of silently act like you're supeior? Of course I can't know for sure but I'm fairly certain it is because you guys are equally incapable of writing decent reviews and formulate your own thoughts beyond "I liked it" and "I didn't like it," and yet you attack goodreads for their star system. Like any other site on the internet there is a lot of crap on goodreads, because it is relatively popular, but there is a hell of a lot of good shit too. Users like Manny, Kalliope, Kris, even Hadrian, etc. These are professors, researches, people who have read all their lives and are at 2000+ books and read 200+ books a year, and write good reviews about it -- especially Manny.

But of course you idiots will sit on your high horse and feel superior because hurr durr someone disliked a book I like or hurr durr there are too many YA novels here and too much this or too much that. Feel free to be retarded, but you're missing out.

Currently reading Vineland, and Manny was kind enough to send me a copy of his book as a thank you for a favour I did him, so I'm reading that too. His reviews are hilarious a lot of the time.

>>5074259
You can do that in Goodreads too. Do a blank search and look on the right-hand side for "Manually add a book".

the moral landscape 4*
anti oedipus 1*

>>5074292
Thank you for telling me

>>5074137
do you use some kind of "1 = didn't like it 2 = liked it" system?

>>5074418
I think he's said as much in another one of these threads.

Skews things badly for those unfortunate works with few ratings anyway, but people can use the site how they want.

i made it my goal to read 100 books by this time next year, how easy/hard will that be

>>5074442
two per week
read 2 hours a night and you can do it quite easily

>>5074442
Easy if you already like reading. It'll be difficult if you're forcing yourself.

>>5073278
Congrats on being a massive pleb op

Is there any way on Goodreads to indicate that I'm rereading something?

>>5074488
>Number of times I've read this book:

>>5074490
I mean that for example I've read Anna Karenina last year, and if I start rereading it I have to change it to currently reading which means the date of the first reading will be lost.

>reading for quantity
i want everyone in this thread to kill themselves
>>5073278
a pleb of amazing proportions

thanks for proving my suspicion that people only have goodreads accounts to inflate their egos and show off to strangers

follow me on twitter and subscribe to my youtube channel, everyone

>>5074265
>butthurt

>>5074503
so we shouldn't read a lot of books? we just just read a few and call it good?

>>5074442
Two a week is okay I think.

But you can't have too many infinite jests or ulyssesses

I do the 52 challenge and i think it's fairly easy.

>>5074442
Difficult if you read more than one or two 900 page books

>>5074651
>so we shouldn't read a lot of books?
i am amazed - how does your diminished brain make such a dumb conclusion out of my post?
would you be so kinldy to reveal that peculiar magic trick to me?

>>5074669
>reading for quantity
>i want everyone in this thread to kill themselves
"READING LOTS OF BOOKS IS BAD!!!"
That's all i got out of that. So please explain what you really meant because clearly i didn't understand.

>>5074651
He is saying that Goodreads Challenges make you a pleb because you are just ploughing through books to hit the challenge so you can wiggle your dick to your friends; if you like to read you will read alot anyways.

That said >>5074669, >>5074503 is an obnoxious cunt, since the goodreads challenges can just be used to light a fire under your ass if you are like me and "forget" to read for a week or so because you go out alot or play video games or catch yourself watching too much netflix. There are many kinds of neckbeards that wear many different stripes.

TL;DR, try to read alot for readings sake and use the goodreads app to track them, but reading just for the challenge is pretty pleb

>>5074667
There aren't even really that many books over 900 pages out there.

This was the in-progress doorstoppers chart and we were having trouble finding too many recommended ones even just over 700 pages, with top ones real doorstoppers and bottom dubious.

>>5074683
well i was just scrolling lit in an idly manner and than i saw this hateful thread of yours and thought "those plebs are massive plebs and don't even know about it" so i kinda decided to enlighten your half-witted arses and made a post - you know which one - so i what i really meant was like why should anyone give a fuck about the quantity of books they read?

>>5074692
No Cryptonomicon there. Also, if you are into non-fiction there are tons of 600-700 page books. I just know that I always find that my goals are cut short by massive tomes like Les Mis etc.

>>5074702
Pretty plebish behavior in and of itself. The patrician response would have been to hide and close the thread, or note that several people had already commented that reading for the sake of touting your quantity isnt a good reason to read.

>>5074702
i wanted to start reading more, i wanted to give up all the hours i waste on mind numbing tv and shitty video games. so i decided that i would pick an arbitrary number, 100 sounded good, that i would read in a year.
not because i NEED to read 100 books, but because i want to read more and having a goal to get to will motivate me.
and the list of what i intend to read would put you into such a violent rage you would rape your own mother.

>>5074692

I'd say 1500 pages of Clarissa is a bonafide doorstopper.

>>5074717
Truth, but as we're on /lit/, it's usually fiction literature being recommended.

>>5074212
it's a book called that you dolt

>>5074717
>The patrician response
but i'm myself just a self-aware pleb who wants to entertain himself
why the fuck a patrician would hang around in a place like that?

I'd like to use Goodreads but it doesn't have much support for my Chinese comics

>>5074778
I was scared away from using Goodreads because the thought of trying to manually catalogue the hundreds and hundreds of books I've read made my skin crawl.

I should have just used it to keep track of new stuff I read yearly when I made the account but it's too late for that now.

>>5074778
stop reading shit

>>5074791
I did the later and only started with what I read from then on.

Way too difficult to add everything I read in high school and college, and I've forgotten a lot of them anyway.

>>5074486
>implying I want to be an e/lit/ist wine sipper

>>5074442
pretty easy, I just read all dresden files novels while on a 2 week vacation

>>5073278
I feel bad for people who think being well read means 'reading a shitton' and not 'reading the books that you do read very well'. I could 'read' 300 books a year but I wouldn't get shit out of them

>>5073439
>too many mothers

Gee if this isn't your subconscious psychology coming out...

>>5075009
No one in the thread even has 300 books per year on their list. Your exaggeration doesn't apply here.

>>5075036
Im talking even about the ones who have read 100 books. What are they reading? A bunch of short, junk novels that can be passively read? Like I care. Are they trying to read serious works? Haha. It would take two months of serious research to get in-depth with just Kant, people who just casually read philosophy aren't learning. Are they reading pop sci or general nonfiction? I don't know!

>>5075099
Have you seen reading lists for graduate students in the humanities? Generally you have forty or more books per semester to read. Two semesters a year, plus a bit of fun reading in the summer, and you have the average reading year of someone who reads for a job.

>>5075132
>tfw you double degreed in law and english lit

my Goodreads account is a mess and untended
here's a pic I whipped up for 2014 reads though

>>5075132
The discourse is much different in a college setting. Often you're reading for a particular end

>>5075099
https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/423733

Im not saying that I read 78 tomes of great length, but its not that hard to read 75-100 decent books a year

>>5075215
I suppose, but I guess the point is you can only do that if you read the books at face value. I don't, I like to make connections and do research into the author and whatnot to find what cultural implications are in the book and so forth. But I think that's my point; reading books at face value is often boring and meaningless. Which depends, of course, on what you're reading

>>5075213
Now, I'm not who you're responding to, but I've noticed that you (yes, you in particular) have this nasty habit of continuing to post long after you've run out of things to say. An easy mistake to make, but in the future please refrain from substance-less posts; they both drown out valuable discussion and degrade the communal estimation of your trip-identity.

Thank you, and we appreciate you helping us in our quest to make /lit/ a better place.

>>5075243
Today I started a new book, sat by the pool and knocked out 300 pages, and I will definitely finish the book tomorrow. Granted it was modern fiction (Pirate Latitudes by Crichton) and def not like Delilo or Roth or something, but I would think anyone who is a serious reader does this at least 2 or 3 times a month assuming they have a reasonable amount of spare time.

Google Play books isnt that bad

>>5075246
Thanks for the concern, but no thanks for the Schadenfreude.

>>5075248
Sure, but Pirate Latitudes is something you can passively read and not miss much now, isn't it? It's written simply, flows well and is very literal. It doesn't make you think about any large concerns in depth.

>>5075251
I like the design. How is the actual interface?

>>5075213
I'm not sure how that changes the fact that you're deeply reading 100+ works per year.

It's possible, and grad students pretty much live by that fact.

>>5075275
Because for a grad student that's basically their entire life...

>>5075270

>>5075264
Sometimes books are just fun stories that don't need to be over analyzed.
Sometimes the Fox jumping over the log really just means a fucking fox jumped over a log. No need for in depth research on the author, no political or psychological statements.

>>5075287
Looks good. How much memory does it have?

>>5075297
That reading is a waste of time, usually

>>5075329
>rejecting a work as a waste of time because there is no meaning requiring time intensive interpretation.

By that logic any biographical or non-fiction work is a waste of time, to say nothing of entire genres of literature like mysteries, fantasy, sci-fi, romance, historical fiction. If this is expanded on, any art or architecture that is created purely for aesthetics is a further waste of time.

Not to mention the fact that there is a lot of fiction where you can "get" the authors allegory or purpose on a single reading, like dystopias ala darkness at noon or on the white cliffs, and a lot of "pleb" lit that requires a second read, like Stephen King novels from the 70s

>>5075341
That's not my logic, so I don't know what you're going on about

>>5075302
32GB, but that's irrelevant since the books are stored on google's servers.

>>5075286
Yeah, that's exactly my point.

There are a lot of grad students here, and people who make reading their life. We even have professors.

I'm saying for a number of people here it's reasonable to read so much, as it is a major aspect of their life.

>>5075329
Taking language seriously and trusting that it can mean something profound is the biggest waste of time there is.

I bet you're the type of guy who tries to talk to people about "big existential questions" but ends up coming across like a guy in Slacker, which is a great movie about the ramblings of pseudo-intellectuals, by the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9l7K7LftQ

>>5075352
Yes, but somehow I doubt they are posting in goodreads threads.

The point I originally made still stands, the quality of reading matters more than the quality.

>>5075367
I know of at least two who do, and myself. Not every thread can be analysis and information dumps. People enjoy attention.

I never disagreed that quality means more than quantity. Just your assumption that there's no one here who can read a few hours per day.

>>5075359
Is that what I said?

What makes a book good is complex. A book like "Pirate Latitudes" is not good because it offers nothing challenging, in any respect. It has no prose, no allusions, no cultural narrative (at least not one that's powerful), no philosophy, no lyrics. It doesn't try to change your view. It offers nothing but momentary escapism.

I'm sure there are people who read over one hundred books in a year and read them well, and these books may be good books, but that doesn't justify the people in this thread. It doesn't justify reading a hundred junk novels.

>>5075378
I read a few hours per day and I read fast. I spend time dwelling on what I read and write out thoughts on it. What sort of reading do you do as a grad student? I'm more interested in that really than the subject of this debate

>>5075381

So Hemingway a shit?

Yeah I'm a pleb so what wanna fight about it?

>>5075384
I'm out for summer and doing fun reading now, but I actually made a post of my daily reading in a currently reading thread a while back that I'll copy back over.

>100 pages of various essays out of Franco Moretti's first volume of The Novel - "Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture," "The Novel in Premodern China," "Monogatari," "Xiaoshuo" and "Drifting Clouds."
>50 pages/two essays out of The Norton Book of Composition Studies: "The Essay Canon" by Lynn Bloom and "The Phenomenology of Error" by Joseph Williams
>a short book (100 pages) on Japanese Netsuke
>50 pages out of A History of Illuminated Manuscripts by Christopher De Hamel (Books for Monks and Books for Students chapters) - pretty heavily illustrated though
>50 pages, Introduction and Theoretical Preliminaries out of Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction by Geoffrey Sampson

That's with a rhetoric class, a paper on medieval paleography and preliminary research on the history of the East Asian book trade. I took notes and quotes from all of it, since it's stuff I needed to know. For me it's a lot more of essays and articles than full books, and excerpts and chapters in that area. This is from a comparative literature major, I'd bet history ones do a lot more full books.

>>5075408
That seems to be quite a bit of technical reading, which you're well-practiced in, right? I mean yeah, essays aren't "easy", per se, but you already understand the goal and discourse in reading them so you have an easier time with it. Far easier than, like I said, trying to understand the Tractatus.

This reading you're doing though, is there a reason for it?

>>5075438
Well yeah, I mentioned my reasons. Medieval paleography and Japanese book trade research. If you mean why research those, are you asking why I'm interested in them or what use they have? They're pretty damn useless areas of study that only four or five other people will care about. A lot of PhD research is that way. I'm interested in it for various reasons - book trade in general has always been interesting to me, but Europe already has a lot of researchers on that. There aren't as many English works for the Asian side of things, and as Japanese is my concentration and Meiji my favorite period, it seemed like a perfect combination of interest. I was inspired to study medieval paleography by a succession of interests, from going to our rare books library and getting to touch all the vellum stuff, then an interest in monasteries generally. Kind of spread from there and my prof said to go with it, gave me some recs.

Most reading on composition and rhetoric ends up at the back of my mind to pull out for when I compose an assignment or syllabus. In general it's just to get a better grounding in the massive in-crowd of the CCCC.

I'd be well-practiced in it, since I've been at it a lot of years. If you're jumping into high level theory, you'll have to pause a lot just because of that "discourse," sure. I struggled with composition studies due to being thrown so many names with theories attached that I had never heard. I don't see how being well-read in what you're reading diminishes anything though. I imagine for anyone who has been reading several years, they'll begin to have "an easier time with it."

>>5075487
It doesn't diminish. I just have nothing really to say, you are the exception to most of /lit/

>>5075533
nah, we have had a lot of great people here - the philosophy recommendation charts were made by a philosophy adjunct, for example. There was a posh classics major who used to absolutely kill in all the Greek literature threads.

>>5075543
Okay, you have a point.

>>5075487
What a fucking nerd

>>5073278
holy shit all that genre fiction

>>5075675
>being this jelly
>2014
You can read it too anon, no one can judge you when they don't know who you are... I know you want to.

Any rating lower than 5/5 means you wish it was some other book, that you have understood authorial intent much better than the author himself.

I couldn't bring myself to do it whether what I am reading is a clapper/twilight crossover fan fiction, a posting on 4chan or one of the great epic poems of yore. I used to be strict when I was in my early teens browsing imdb but then I've read the tale about the naked king retold by H.C.Andersen. I recommend this tale. It's 5/5.

>>5074234
Just as a personal project? I think we'd get along, dude. Go for it.