/lit/ - Literature

>>5357711

Jonathan Franzen.

Fight me /lit/

For whom the bell tolls

>>5357768
you wanted to be a scientist involved in nanotech when you were a kid, didn't you?

Master and Margarita

>>5357806

you're 20 years old and have difficulty expressing yourself

>>5357768
Not quite but that would be pretty cool. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid. Ended up wanting to be a meteorologist when I got older and here I am with meteorology degree working a cloud seeding project.

The project ends in the summer though so now I have to figure out what I'm doing next. Part of life I guess.


>For whom the bell tolls
Not to sound too vague or anything but I'm guessing you're someone realizes conflicts are never black and white and that contentious things are usually more complicated than they seem on the surface.

>>5357837
too vague comeon that could describe all of /lit/ hell all of 4chan

Damn if you aint right though

>>5357858
was meant for>>5357806

was it vague enough for you?

>>5357863
haha no thats pretty good at least compared to >5357837 and >>5357859

>>5357711
Moby Dick

>>5357899

You come off as a spunky fellow with a wad of books with pearly prose about sea men and sperm whales.

Okay, I guess.

>>5357899
You're obviously a whale fetishist.

>>5357918

Damn, I was going to post this but I will one up everyone and post my top five instead of my favourite since I don't think I can really have a favourite book due to a lot of others vying for that spot.

Anyway as for the analysis: You are in your early 20s, have a degree in the arts and are trying to make it as a painter or something.

>>5357899

You're a big guy with a small ego.

>>5357837

Russiaboo with a love for magic realism

>>5357806

Spaniardboo with a history fetish

>>5357768

Still mentally somewhat of a child, but Jurassic Park for you is a very comfy book, maybe because something tragic happened to you shortly after you read it like your parents splitting up or a death of a very close relative and reading it brings you back to when everything was so very simple and naive.

>>5357711

know it all mid twenties man or women who is an aspiring writer, you are unemployed, living in your parents house and are paranoid that Franzen is stealing your ideas.

>>5357935

Upper middle class from the southern states of America.

My top 5:
Titus Groan
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
I Am A Cat
Brideshead Revisited
Mason & Dixon

Brother Odd

>>5357711

>>5358565
>that Sound and the Fury response

I didn't originally post the book, but it is definitely one of my favorites and that description is dead on.

Under the Volcano, Lowry
Where I'm Calling From, Carver
Complete Poems, Keats

At the moment it's this.
Probably because I finished it yesterday.
I don't have a solid favorite book, though.

Don Quixote

>>5357711

>>5357711

>>5358693
Let's make children.

>>5357899
Cool smart guy would hang out with
>>5358684
Metalhead or hippie
>>5358700
Would be a cool literature teacher
>>5358717
too much time on /lit/

Mine is pic related

>>5357711
You will subject anyone willing to listen to a rant on what's wrong with Twitter even though you've never looked at Twitter or opened an account.

>>5357768
You think "science" is fascinating and you claim you want to study it, but you find the work involved in memorizing chemical structures to be far too hard.

>>5357806
You long for a time when men were men. Your image of a man is the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.

>>5357837
You get angry whenever someone brings up Hitler as a hyperbolic evil because "Stalin killed so many people people." Your friends do not like discussing politics with you.

>>5357899
When you're reading, you constantly wonder if you're enjoying a book correctly, as much as you're supposed to be enjoying it. When you finished Moby-Dick, you looked at the amount of notes you wrote down during it, nodded, and convinced yourself it was your favorite novel.

>>5357918
You are disdainful of poor people because they do not appreciate the arts enough. You are secretly ashamed of your background.

>>5357935
You think Quentin Compson is "the greatest literary creation in history" and you identify with him strongly, but you are deeply judgmental of anyone who identifies with Holden Caulfield.

>>5358565
You are a cultural omnivore who gets particularly needled when a fellow aesthete dismisses anime.

>>5358570
You get mildly offended when people use the phrase "literary fiction" but you're not entirely sure why. All your favorite books are available for purchase in airports.

>>5358571
You have a constant worry, unfounded but always present, that other people dislike you or find you pretentious.

>>5358652
You consider yourself a "traditionalist." Everyone else considers you a racist and sexist.

>>5358684
You love reading but you hate your English teacher. You think being forced to write essays "kills the joy" of literature. You cannot recall from memory a single sentence from any of your favorite books.

>>5358693
You think that men are naturally more emotional than women, and that it's society's fault that you're an alcoholic.

>>5358700
>>5358701
Whenever you start to laugh at a book, you look it up on Wikipedia to make sure it's considered a "comic novel." You look down on people who watch sitcoms.

Denis Johnson- Train Dreams

>>5358960
shining guy here- pretty much spot on. except for the not remembering lines part; I remember a whole dickload of quotes from my favourites.

Honestly my favorite book I've read is probably GR but I know you guys will call me a huge faggot so I'll go with this

Love in the Time of Colera

Tender Is the Night

>>5358706
You pay lip service to feminist and post-colonialist theory but you couldn't even finish Said's Orientalism. You think world peace could be achieved if everyone just "read more."

>>5358711
You excuse your own bad grades by telling yourself that daydreaming during class was more important anyway. You are correct.

>>5358717
You smoked weed every day for a week once but quit because you were worried about addiction. You are convinced Infinite Jest will always be your favorite novel. Thankfully, you are wrong.

>>5358727
You have been on /lit/ for a long time and it's starting to eat at your soul. You didn't invent the "start with the Greeks," but you pushed it a lot in its infancy and now you regret it.

>>5358732
You romanticize tortured artists.You think the perfect existence would be dying young with a small body of work that becomes highly praised decades later.

>>5358796
You try to give girls books when you start dating them. You get madder than you want to admit when they either don't finish them or don't say what you want them to say about them.

>>5358988
You think people have to read the Bible to be literate, but you've never made it past Exodus.

>>5359019
When you read that Facebook would start tagging Onion articles with the label "[satire]," you rushed to Facebook to share this news with a withering comment.

>>5359027
You consider yourself a true romantic, but your vision of love involves constantly fighting with your significant other. You see no contradiction in this.

>>5359063
You hate it when people say "nothing happens" in a book. You have expended considerable mental energy thinking about whether it is morally permissible to watch Woody Allen movies, given that he probably molested someone.

>>5359081
Ha! To the Lighthouse here, you're not wrong. Even had an argument with a friend about it not too long ago

Either this or The Trial.

Never Let Me Go, I'm a pleb and whatnot

>>5359081
>When you read that Facebook would start tagging Onion articles with the label "[satire]," you rushed to Facebook to share this news with a withering comment.

Holy fuck are you some kind of autistic retard, anon.

Who am I /lit/?

>>5359199
You misuse medical terms like "autism" because you learned them from 4chan. You also forgot to post your favorite book so I could judge you.

Beckett's Molloy.

>>5359081
>You have been on /lit/ for a long time and it's starting to eat at your soul. You didn't invent the "start with the Greeks," but you pushed it a lot in its infancy and now you regret it.
Interesting. I'm new as fuck, though.

>>5359207
Do not reply to him. He is mentally ill.

>>5357711

>>5359207
>Autism

Flatland

>>5359226
That's what you have. I remember when you reset your rooter like 10 times to flood /q/ with furry scat pictures because something triggered your autism. Why do you even have this shit on your computer? How deep is the abyss of your mental abnormity?

>>5359237
Do you often pretend to forget how the internet and search engines work so you can keep up your compulsion or whatever it is you have going on? And yes, the guy who bothers to define actual autism on fucking 4chan and fails to realize that he did in fact review my post gets ">Autism" and nothing else, so that is "what I have" in this case.

Have a good day nice lady <3

>>5359244
>the internet is serious business
>I have to justify myself on an anonymous board
>I literally can't stop replying
>I spend every waking moment on 4chan

Get help, weirdo.

Illuminatus! by RAW and Bob Shea

>>5359225
damn that's a nice cover

>>5357711
You're a _____________pleb

John le Carré - A Perfect Spy

>>5359261
Some days you think you should cut down on the weed, but decide against it.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

>>5357711
The Old Man and the Sea

>>5359408
Not a fan of placing quotes from reviewers on the front, but other than that I would agree.

>>5359513
You're a melancholy pseudo-romantic who wishes he was more masculine than he actually is.

>>5359443
You want to have sex with your sister, or at least a romantic relationship.

>>5359565
Sorry, I'm an only child

>>5359114
You think of your own life as much, much more troubled than it is.

>>5359149
You wish you had gone to a British boarding school, but you live in America and have an insulting nickname for the suburb you live in, like "Shittington" or something.

>>5359202
You are a firm believer in the ability of aesthetics to produce an ecstatic experience, almost to the point of religion. You could get that feeling easily with heroin, but you are afraid of heroin.

>>5359209
You think of yourself as a funny person but no one ever laughs at your jokes.

>>5359225
If a friend of yours bought two puzzles, mixed up all the pieces, and gave them to you saying it's one puzzle as a prank, when you found the fifth corner and realized what they'd done you would like that friend more.

>>5359233
You are disappointed with the level of scientific rigor in both science fiction novels and non-science fiction novels.

>>5359261
You tell yourself you watched "Zeitgiest" to laugh at it, but you found yourself agreeing with much of the content.

>>5359432
You often wonder if you would have had more casual sex if you came of age in the 60s. You have read Gravity's Rainbow, and you were oddly proud of yourself for choosing Lot 49 instead when posting in this thread.

>>5359443
You tell yourself that endless lists of lineages add "dramatic weight" but your eyes glaze over as you read them. You think people who find the word "seminary" funny are immature.

>>5359448
You feel personally offended by people who like books you consider "boring." You don't understand why people choose to write fiction where nothing happens when so much is happening in the world all the time.

>>5359496
You like to think you have accepted the inevitability of old age and death, but really they terrify you. You would describe your personality as "off-putting," but you are more likable and friendly than you realize.

>>5359513
You would describe learning about the "iceberg theory" as one of the five most important moments of your life. You are under twenty.

>>5359526
You haven't had many relationships but you took the breakups very hard. You find guns romantic. You will find true love and die happy.

>>5359572
You are completely insufferable. You have been here forever. You invented "start with the Greeks" and you're proud of it.

>>5357711
The Brothers Karamazov and The Book Of The New Sun.

>>5359994
>You haven't had many relationships but you took the breakups very hard. You find guns romantic. You will find true love and die happy.
Nigga that is some fortune cookie bullshit

>>5360006
are you retarded or do you not get this thread?

>>5359555
>>5359994
Perhaps a bit melancholy at times, but wrong on all other accounts.

>You are disappointed with the level of scientific rigor in both science fiction novels and non-science fiction novels.

Are you a wizard?

>>5358960
>>5359081
lol

My favourite at the moment.

>>5360001

wouldbuybeerfor/10

>>5358960
this is buzzfeed tier. fuck off.

>>5360049

the very concept of this thread is.

plus he's the only one really contributing.

calm your ovaries.

>>5360006
>>5360016
No, he's right, that one sucked. I unironically love that book, it's a lot easier to make fun of stuff I don't like.

>>5360045
You have retained a childlike outlook on the world around you as well as an ironclad sense of humor despite life's inevitable pitfalls.

>>5360054
just picked this up actually, liking it already. So I guess my assessment is you're a cool dude.

A River Runs Through It

>>5358960
>You are disdainful of poor people because they do not appreciate the arts enough.
That's more or less correct, though I'm disdainful of poor people for not appreciating life itself enough, I'd say.
Of course that's pretty snobby and it's not like I'm such a great connoisseur of the arts, either, I just try to live life to the fullest.

>You are secretly ashamed of your background.
Nah. I love that.

>>5360034
I am reading the exact same publication for the first time now

>>5360231
Enjoy the ride.

>>5358960
>>5357768
Well I have a degree in meteorology so I'd argue I'm pretty decent at "science" to be honest. So not quite.

>>5358565
>>5357768
None of those things have happened. I just really like the book, even if I know it's not a literary "classic".

Somebody do me 1752

FreedomTM by Suarez
Permutation City by Egan
Favourite author: Philip K Dick

>>5357711

>>5360265
Oh, I was thinking you were much younger than you must be if you have a meteorology degree. In my defense, most people who really love Crichton are about 13.

Invisible Cities.

murakami's other works i consider to be mediocre but, maybe im overthinking with this novel, this one is amazing.

>>5360336
You sometimes secretly desire to achieve some form of grotesque self-actualization by creating a persona similar to Kurtz's and therein lose all semblance of being "civilized".

Also, mine if anybody cares.

I'm new to /lit/ :(

>>5360042
you are 12 years old

>>5360505
what the fuck piece of shit translation is that

>>5360547
The correct one

>>5360419
a pleb

>>5360516

no fucks to give

>>5360547
fuck you and your maman translation.

>>5360476
I'm not going to try and assume I know who you are because this is your favourite book.

I'm thinking of buying this, why did it appeal to you?

>>5360572
You are either an angsty somewhat angry male with eccentric aesthetics or my type of girl.

>>5360614
Haha that makes it too easy. I would say the promise of satisfying complexity, outrageous humour, historical speculation, general postmodern goodness and my own interest in military history.

>>5360363
He's a perfect author for getting people interesting in reading, younger people especially. I've definitely read "better" books but it'll always be my favorite.

>>5359565
WINRAR

>>5360045
<lowercase highfive>

>>5360063
Southern American college student. Probably in a fraternity.

>>5361954
Cynical but chilled out 20 year old
>>5361088
tries hard to be edgier than he actually is
>>5360968
you read The Wasteland when you were 17 and you've only gone deeper
>>5360700
no clue
>>5360596
you want to have a good time more than a good memory
>>5360573
in college you are/were tremendously anti-war but you didn't associate yourself with the usual far left crowd that could be seen at anti-war protests
>>5360572
grad student or adjunct
>>5360505
picked up "serious" reading recently
>>5360476
you're serious on the surface but into goofy shit
>>5360419
you're either in high school or you've succeeded in willing yourself to stop giving a shit after you dropped out of college
>>5360410
never read any Mura, couldn't say
>>5360366
smart dude

>>5361975
thanks for answering all of these

>>5360410
Though quiet and perhaps even a bit dour in demeanor, you harbor an inner spiritual energy yearning for release. Fly butterfly, for your time as a caterpillar is nigh

>>5361991
I know how it feels to have your post ignored

>>5361088
Masturbates a lot

>>5358960
that was funny

>>5362218
shit
>>5362199
ugh
>>5362195
fucking jap loving weeaboo
>>5362137
cool dude

>>5362222
ugh?

nice quads btw

>>5362222
you're what's wrong with these threads

>>5357806
>For Whom the Bell Tolls
My nigga. I love the way Hemingway writes the Spanish in both senses.

Tragic endings always get me as well.

>>5357711
Arcadia.

I like science but I was never good at it.

>>5357711
A Farewell to Arms

This.
Finally had time to read it this summer and it is easily the best book I have ever read.

have at it

nostromo

Once I'm done Les Mis, that'll probably be my favourite.

>>5362427
You have failed to realize a great ambition, but learned an important lesson in the process.

>>5357711
V.
Thomas Pinecone

>>5362427
While your tastes are not bad per se, I feel like you are a very comfortable individual that always picks the "safe" choice. In private life you are content and unambitious. In literature you may be intimidated by more complex novels where the content and meanings are sometimes nebulous.

>>5362859

You are intelligent, serious, and have managed to pull yourself out of the derelict tendency to have your aesthetic taste determined by the book's association with the kind of people you want to fit in with. You have a sense of adventure and a taste for justice, and value independence in spite of the obstacles to anyone possibly achieving it.

>>5362005

You are a true patrician with a taste for moral ambiguity.

>>5362924
i'll take that

>>5362923

edgy wanker

The heart is a lonely hunter
Or The human stain by Roth

I'll be surprised if no one calls me a trendy band-wagon faggot, or variations thereof.

>>5362999

u need to read sum gud books

>>5362999

You go to dairy queen and order a hamburger.

>>5362458
my negro

I cry every time.

>>5362999
You have a hatred of 'hipsters'. When you're exposed to something you haven't heard of, you assume that only a few bizarre eccentrics have done so. You actively browse Reddit, and have a Facebook account.

>>5363026
Wrong, although I see what you're implying.

>>5363104
The only part of that which was true is that I have a facebook account. I find the hatred of "hipsters" (which is an extremely vague term) unreasonable, I have no problem with obscure literature or other media and those who partake in them. I have never browsed Reddit.

>>5363122
> "hipsters" (which is an extremely vague term)

So you just are a hipster then. It's reminiscent of people from hot topic years ago "I'm not emo man!"

>>5363126
The only consistent term for Hipster I've noticed on 4chan is "someone who likes what I don't like".

No need to get agitated just because you misjudged my character.

>>5363138
I'm not even that original guy, it's just funny to see people acting like the don't know what words mean.

>>5358684
Babby's first /lit/.

>>5358700
A respectable enthusiast of early modern literature and/or Spanish literature.

>>5358727
An erudite intellectual.

>>5358732
Senior in high school.

>>5359443
Atheist.

>>5360054
You can never go wrong with Chesterton.

>>5360154
I adore Hubert Selby. Excellent taste.

>>5360239
firstdayontheinternet.jpg

>>5361954
Probably highly neurotic and don't want to admit your life is just like Ignatius.

>>5362083
Likes to read out loud to understand what's going on.

>>5363144
Please share your definition of Hipster then. Maybe I am one without knowing it.

I wish ol' Pep had lived longer

inb4 pretentious

>>5363155
Are you just like fifteen? Is that the issue here?

>>5363165
>dat kneejerk ad hominem

I bet you're the kind of guy that calls people "pleb" completely unironically.

>>5358570
You have read one book in your life.

>>5363164
You enjoy fitting in, even if that means pretending to like something that you actually don't.

>>5363168
No, I'm really wondering what the barrier is. Are you not from America? I don't know if they exist in europe and probably not elsewhere.
>Ad hominem
Jesus christ dude kill yourself.

>>5363173
rekkkkkt

>>5363173
Daaaaaamn

Masako Togawa - The main key

>>5362427
rusian fanatic

>>5362195
commie

>>5361088
15yo, discovering sexuality

>>5363051
Your mommy did drugs
>>5362999
You like "experimental books".
>>5362923
You'll hang yourself in the next year
>>5362428
You have a scat fetish and wank it to this entire book
>>5362427
You don't like symbolism, you'd prefer your books themes to be blatant and unmasked
>>5362005
You weigh 50 pounds and masturbated before posting this

>>5363235
Moderate weeaboo that believes in "hinding your power level".

>>5363259
*hiding, obviously

>>5363259
what do you mean by hi(n)ding your power level????

>>5362137
You are a child of 12 years.

>>5359994
>If a friend of yours bought two puzzles, mixed up all the pieces, and gave them to you saying it's one puzzle as a prank, when you found the fifth corner and realized what they'd done you would like that friend more.

Yeah, actually. Good job.

>>5363276
Oh, I'd also enjoy sorting the two puzzles from each other and making both side-by-side.

Herzog

>>5363259
But what is it hinding behind?

>>5363164
you're like 19-22y/o and when books come up in conversation, you tell people that you "read ulysses twice" when you were 17. but it's ok though, because you probably have nice intentions and decent taste. you are mostly likable.

I, on the other hand...

>>5357711
1v1 me m9

>>5359994
You're fun. Do me and I'll do you.

It's a tie between pic related and the Divine Comedy.

>>5363309
You're a total bro who would help a friend move and wouldn't bitch about how much stuff they have nor how heavy it is. You say astute things every once in a while, but often just let silence do your talking for you. You pay attention to the kerning in newspapers and logos and advertisements. You'd love to learn German but don't know what for, so you've never done it.

>>5363328
Tried shrooms once and now won't shut up about them whenever you blaze it with your friends. Your favourite film is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

>>5357711
>inb4 "a silent person"

>>5357711
not my absolute favorite but embarrassingly the most telling of my personality

>>5363367
You're a big, fat liar.

>>5357711

Pale Fire
Lookout Cartridge
Gravity's Rainbow
The Public Burning
Valis

>>5363388
A person of excellent taste and great character. People generally enjoy your company.

>>5363381
Spends more money on books than most of /lit/.

>>5363419
Thinks the most important aspect of literature is to be able to identify with characters.

>>5363367
An even bigger fraud than the Ulysses guy. Spends the day trolling /lit/ and calling others for plebs instead of actually reading books.

>>5357711

Watership Down

>>5363291
clearly fasci

>>5363436
So you enjoyed Lookout Cartridge? I'm reading Cannonball and he style is... strange. It's beautiful but I'm just not "getting into it" yet. I'll definitely read at least a couple more of his books, though.

>>5363475
Cannonball is actually more straightforward than most of his stuff– but yeah he likes to move through his plot at random. Lookout Cartridge was written to mimic movie editing, and it's beautifully done.

Don't judge it by the movies.

>>5363343
>You'd love to learn German but don't know what for, so you've never done it.
damn-- spot-the-fuck on.

>>5363367

The Praise of Folly

>>5363511
You don't read much philosophy, but you genuinely enjoy reading as a hobby and don't get caught up in genre fiction vs literature arguments. You'd like to write, and you've got a good imagination, but you only had a few friends as a kid.

GOAT fantasy book by the way.

>>5363381
A girl I had a crush on in high school bought this for me. It's really that good?

>>5363651
Dead on, and what's more; I do write.

>>5363511
You have a vague dislike for america and jewish people, but can't quite put your finger on the reasons for that.

>>5363660
it's pretty shallow but it touches on accountability and self-loathing in an interesting way. if you spent most of your childhood crying, you'll love it.

>>5363694
you love/loved talking to your grandmother

>>5357711

>>5363419
pretentious as fuck, superficial as fuck

>>5363713
>Didn't get it.

>>5363713
How?

>>5363732
Smug personality, but probably justifiably so.

>>5359225
You've been a liberal all your life, but sometimes you stop and wonder, "What if I'm a racist in denial?"

>>5360239
You finished this book just to prove to everyone that you could, and in the process wasted so much time and effort that you convinced yourself that it was your favorite novel to make up for the fact that you wasted 2 - 4 weeks of your life reading a book that you never really had any interest in.

>>5360336
You're kinda rapey.

>>5360572
You wish you were Rimbaud.

>>5362195
"When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world."

- Delillo

>>5363758
Everyone wishes they were Rimbaud.

>>5357915

I giggled out loud at this, well done

>>5363776
No, I wish I had him as my qtpi bf.

D-d-dont be so harsh /lit/

>>5363784
The only bad consequence of your happiness is your taste. In the practical world, you're a good person.

>>5363758
you're smugly unpretentious to the extreme- so unpretentious in your actions that you paradoxically build, like quote-unquote pretentious people, a personal brand focused on ridding yourself and your surroundings of people you deem as posers, hipsters, fakes, bandwagoners, and so on.
you're occasionally catatonic in your thoughts and actions because you suffer from this duplicity in your consciousness that makes you act the way you do, and you don't know if/why it's an unfavorable trait of yours, or if you could ever stop- or even have the power to stop.
posting anonymously on 4chan is a cathartic experience for you, because nobody knows your terrible secret.

>>5363784
you at least know what you like, which puts you above 90% of the lit core teet-sucking dudes here.

>>5363799
Pretentious and insecure, you want to fit in /lit/

>>5363795
Pretty accurate, considering I chose a book at random.

Although that description is a bit ambiguous, but hey, who am I to critique, I'm the one responding with no actual purpose other than my intrinsic need to defend myself and remain superior. But, again, you kinda just described the average pseudo-intellectual. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that you didn't just think of this complex off of the top of your head either, Mr. ProjectMyInsecuritiesOnOthers guy.

>>5363824
Edgy teenager.

>>5363824
You only enjoy literature that makes you lift your shaggy head and say "Whooooooaaaaaah"

>>5363823
Your favourite subject in high school was History.

Bartleby. It is a short story but still.

>>5363824
you're a rotund gentleman with a classy headpiece

>>5363863
People would describe you as detached and emotionally distant. You have a dark sense of humor, though you're often afraid to show it

>>5363861
In elementary school. High school history teachers sucked.

>>5363870
damn straight son

>>5363873
Close, not emotionally distant but simply aloof, I would think.

What say ye?

>>5363732
you're overly reductive

Shantaram- Gregory David Roberts

>>5364529
Excellent. Why isn't Barthelme easier to find? I feel like there's issues with his estate or something but there really needs to be a complete works for him.

>>5364529

Is this really your favorite? I really enjoyed a lot of the stories but there were quite a few that I didn't find all that interesting, especially the ones with disjointed narratives.

>>5364601
it is, my copy is so dog-eared. I bring it everywhere, I think it's just a fascinating object. It's like a modern version of the 1001 nights- an overwhelmingly diverse series of portals to strange logic worlds.

>>5364555
Seriously. I would love an omnibus of his short pieces. 100 stories! 60 stories is my favorite collection but my favorite piece is in 40 stories, some of us have been threatening our friendy colby.

>>5364672

Nice. I'm curious, what's your favorite aspect of his stories?

Also do you like George Saunders?

>>5363254
>Your mommy did drugs

Nah. My mom and her immediate family are normal. But my extended family is Selby-tier dysfunctional.

Rate me, /lit/

the grapes of wrath

>>5364944
isn't this a really shitty anime?

>tfw no one guesses about you

>>5364731
Over all the humor is a big part of it. I do enjoy George Saunders, not to the same degree. He's definitely adopted the affect of Barthelme, a sort of distanced bemusement, that I dig.

What makes his stuff a favorite is that each piece is digestible in size but with a lot of depth. It's casually re-readable. The really out there stuff, like Patagonia, definitely isn't easy to read, but a lot of his experimentation is really successful at revealing the process of narrative writing. The Bodyguard is a good example of this, writing a story using (mostly) just questions yields a writers-eye view of a story about a political coup. I think that's real cool.

>>5363309
>tfw not him
>tfw actually did read Ulysses twice at 17
I haven't told anyone yet so I'm still okay right?

>>5365134
you were constantly praised as a child and thus feel entitled to special treatment and crave unrealistic amounts of attention

>>5365330
Exactly the opposite, but same result.

Perpetual middle child syndrome with neither parent ever proud or caring, despite being the only non-fuck-up child.

>>5358960
>You long for a time when men were men. Your image of a man is the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.
Damn you

This one

>>5363440

You consider your life up until this point to have had an air or fatalist tragedy

>>5360049
nice butthurt, faggot.

>>5366847
shut up faggot

>>5363373
very nice meditative essays, thanks.

All these are great

>>5363445
you're a sociopath

>>5367304
you're Harvey Dent

>>5367321

You may be on to something there

Les Miserables. The Brothers Karamazov. Moby Dick. Number9Dream. The Elephant Keeper.

>>5367233
every time you post this I feel bad for you. It seems like the only thing you're doing with these books is posting them all over /sci/ and /lit/ with hopes of impressing anonymous strangers on an anime imageboard, and most of the time people don't even respond or acknowledge your existence. I'm not sure if you've actually read them but I've never seen you give any sort of insightful or interesting comment on how much you enjoyed reading them; I've only seen you attach a short positive sentence to your image and then lurk the thread as you wait for replies

It's like you're repeatedly putting up some intellectual fingerpaint drawing on your refrigerator and then trying to get all your friends to talk about it when they come over. But they rarely do...

>>5367354
I post them on lit sometimes to remind people not to forget about the importance of nonfiction writing and to stimulate interest in other areas besides the normal dialogue of philosophy and the same 20 or so fiction books that everyone reads and talks about ad nauseum. On /sci/, its mainly just shitposting tho.

>>5361088
Degenerate waste of resources.

>>5362222
>fucking jap loving weeaboo

I keked.

>>5368575

a bit of a try hard hipster (which you're secretly well aware of) but a cooler dude than most people itt regardless

>>5368754
pretty accurate lol

needs more rating

>>5368765

You have a strained relationship with your father, not one of competition, but one of simple mutual disappointment. You are attuned to the symbolic dimension of events in your life. If you buy an espresso, you also get a napkin to put under it, which is an expression of your meticulousness.

>>5367765

You're a gigantic fuckup and you love it.

>>5367765

>favourite book of poetry is by larkin

You're more entry than your elitism will allow yourself to accept.

Another Roadside Attraction

>>5369088
Considering this is an allegorical fable, I'd say you like to have things explained in different ways. You also have a lust for entropy of a system. I'd even go as far as to say you're a bit chaotic.

>>5369159
It's true.

>>5369253
You're not worth talking to and never have been. You like to think you have a lot of insight, but the shit you say ranges from obvious to moot. Some think you're intelligent, but that's only because they don't know your sources, whose opinions and observations you parrot.

McTeague

>>5369659
A person with good taste

>>5363447
You're a rabbit

>>5369660

a very dry intellectual who wishes that he knew how to be a really fun drunk

Either Ubik or 2001

>>5364944
A weeaboo who's in such horrible denial, that he buys the regular editions without Ito art on the cover and sits in the corner snickering to himself at how clever he is for fooling no one.