/lit/ - Literature

>>6302570
The short story by Raymond Carver where it starts out a guy meeting his estranged dad and the dad brings a bag of donuts for the grandkids he never met. Hit me right in the amygdala.

>>6302570

Stoner was pretty emotional for me.

Infinite Jest made me cry at many points, read last year.

>>6302593
Yes.

Also passages here and there in Moby Dick, just for intensity and power

>>6302570

couple nights ago, reading DFW's Octet, the part where he's talking about how sincere can he be without being ironic in asking the reader what she thinks about what he's doing, brought me to tears, for reasons I'm having trouble articulating.

>>6302570

Last time I read "Death of a Salesman"

I had read it in high school, but had forgotten about it. When I went to reread it, I was struck by the lines:

>BIFF [horrified, gets down on one knee before WILLY]: Dad, I'll make good, I'll make good. [WILLY tries to get to his feet. BIFF holds him down.] Sit down now.
>WILLY: No, you're no good, you're no good for ANYTHING!
>BIFF: I am, Dad, I'll find something else, you understand? Now don't worry about anything. [He holds up WILLY'S face.] Talk to me, Dad.
>OPERATOR: Mr. Loman does not answer. Shall I page him?
>WILLY [attempting to stand, as thought to rush and silence the OPERATOR]: NO, NO, NO!

I don't know. I just got flashback to the fights I had with my dad, and I just started crying.

>>6302576
>>6302622
Anything about a dad will probably do.

More fucked up dad lit recommendations?

The last book I finished, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The scene where what's-her-face is cutting the legs off the spider. I have severe arachnophobia and loathe spiders, even reading about them is difficult, but for some reason that scene tore me apart. The brutality of it. I actually stopped for a few seconds with each leg and had to force myself to continue reading.

I find nothing really moves me anymore.

Not since Risky Cat left...

>>6302570
probably murakami's norwegian wood because i'm a massive faggot

>>6302607

Surely you jest

Read All Quiet On the Western Front my sophomore year, remember feeling empty for a bit.

"This is why I am writing—this is my last attempt to explain to you what is happening, Marthe . . . make an exceptional effort and understand, if only through a fog, if only with a corner of your brain, but understand what is happening, Marthe, understand that they are going to kill me—can it be so difficult—I do not ask lengthy widows' lamentations from you, or mourning lilies, but implore you, I need it so badly—now, today—just grow afraid like a child that they are going to do something terrible to me, a vile thing that makes you sick, and you scream so in the middle of the night that even when you already hear nurse approaching, with her "hush, hush," you still keep on screaming, that is how you must be afraid, Marthe, even though you love me little, you must still understand, even if only for an instant, and then you may forget again."

I teared up recently as I finished Pnin by Nabokov. For a supposed comedy, it's quite a sad book. It far exceeded my expectations, knowing that it was really only a side project he worked on as he was writing Lolita.

>>6302593
i hear a lot about that book. Would you recommend it?

The part of The Little Prince when the fox talks to the prince about being tamed by those you're close to and why his rose is more soecial than all the other roses. Fuckin gets me every time

>>6303211
From?

>>6303147
Same here bro

Stoner made me particularly angry.

>>6303270
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes 4chan can get me choked up.

The reminiscing of a young widower recently got me bad.

>>6302620
Are you serious?

Wow, I really didn't like his Octet and how it actually wasn't an Octet.

I'd appreciate if you actually could articulate what you liked about it since it seemed so..lame to me.

They have had their moment of freedom...Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death - death in the service of the one species with the knowledge that it will die..."I would set you free, if I knew how, But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different one day - that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive..."

Germanfag here. Hesse's Peter Camenzid brought me on the verge of shedding a tear on at least two occasions. Hell of a debut imo

>>6303298
Thats terrible.

The Sun Also Rises made me tear up a little once I processed the last few lines.

>>6302570
Came back from a 10 day meditation retreat that I spent in complete silence, during which I decided I needed to read more

Same day I came home, I went to the bookstore, bought The Old Man and the Sea, and read it on a bench next to a fountain in the store's large shopping center.

Pretty emotional. I had to try so hard in order to not let a few tears flow.

>>6302570
god damn where is that? love the scenery

>>6303298
Poor guy.

>>6302570
Yesterday.
I read Flowers for Algernon.

>>6303355
Malmö, Sweden

>>6303355
Malmö City Library, according to Google.

Read Exile's Letter by Ezra Pound a few days ago and wept uncontrollably. It's really brilliant.

http://www.bartleby.com/265/299.html

And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end,
confused, whirled in a tangle.

Someone posted this haiku from Issa recently and it has moved me:


露の世は露の世ながらさりながら

Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

This dewdrop world --
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

Composed on the first anniversary of the death of his child

>>6302570
salinger is probably the only one to ever write a character worth feeling anything for. his works still move me, even 10 years later.

>>6303419
This mother fucker right here.

Salinger made characters who seemed to really care, and the way they cared was moving.

Jesus, the ending to Franny and Zooey. I've never read such a satisfying ending besides this.

>>6303419
>>6303443
Read his short story collection a few months ago. Probably the last i read to truly make me feel something.

Particularly For Esmé—with Love and Squalor and A Perfect Day for Bananafish,

>And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying: Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabacthani? Which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

>>6303460
You might enjoy Endo's Silence

>>6303455
Definitely.

As someone who has gone through rolling panic attacks before, he really got that aspect of PTSD down in Esme - with Love and Squalor. A Perfect Day for Bananafish speaks for itself.

Who the hell do you read after Salinger?

>>6303299

ok, i'll give it a go.

basically, it seemed to me that he felt that what he and other metafictional writers were doing was kind of on its last leg, and he saw an "end" of that kind of writing coming. all the while though, he was trying to use that kind of writing to bring about a sincere kind of writing that is honest about itself, and saw in metafiction a way to do it. he saw it, but couldn't quite grasp it, couldn't quite put it down on paper, and when at last he says "well what if i just asked" it struck me as this amazingly naked and human moment that really shook me.

"Again: consider this carefully. You should not deploy this tactic until you've soberly considered what it might cost. What she might think of you. Because if you go ahead and do it (i.e. ask her straight out), this whole 'interrogation' think won't be an innocuous formal belletristic device anymore. It'll be real."

those lines in particular. i should also add here that i saw in it a metaphor for the way courtship works in the 21st century, what with all the meandering around the issue, and it seemed to me DFW was struggling with that in some capacity, and i really felt mournful for a kind of sincerity that i don't think ever existed. and furthermore knowing it may never have existed made me feel even more sad/emotional.

>>6303464
That actually looks like a very good book, thank you.
>“Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

>>6303690
Hmm, I just can't go with it. I can understand the desperation for clear and satisfying communication coming from the author. The real want for sincerity that is good and honest. Sure.

Still, there is something about it that is so flat. What exactly is it doing that every creative writing freshmen last year didn't write to themselves in their journals?

There is definitely the want as a writer to create this connection, but the writer also has to imagine themselves as the reader taking this in. There are no limits to how he could have presented this idea to the reader, and this way really seems to fail.

BUT, maybe I should give the octet another go.

>>6302570
Amsterdam stories by Nescio, it made me feel the calm of an afternoon nap, where you don't know what day it is and the warm sun is illuminating the room.

>>6302916
i miss risky tbh.

>>6303298

>>6303842
It makes me happy to see non-Dutch people read Nescio.

Time Regained.

I finished Camus's The Last Man a week ago and I cried a lot while reading it. Cried a lot too while talking to my father (so did he) about the book, because he lost his father when he was six. It had been a long time any art form touched me so much.

>>6303298
>tfw no /lit/erate gf

>>6303460

>>6302570
>>6304058
I cried tears of joy reading Time Regained

Blood Meridian made my cry tears of joy.

>>6302570
read better books bitchboi

>>6302570

unfortunately after years of being made fun of for crying as a young boy I suffocated that impulse out of me. I've never cried while reading a book. That being said I was very moved while reading Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary recently

>>6304301
Are you per chance an adulterous woman?

>>6304324

I wish

>>6304334
Why? I got from those two books that what leads people to betrayal can be traced to deep character and moral flaws.

>>6304359

I was only kidding but I don't agree with that interpretation at least in regards to Bovary. I mean I suppose her inability to face a reality devoid of the romantic abstractions that she obsessively consumes in the novels she reads is a shortcoming but I also dislike (and I think Flaubert did too) the notion that pursuing an idealistic belief in a more romantic, vivid existence than the mundane one we face is a character flaw.

Anyway, regardless of the flaws Karnina and Bovary both exhibit I found them to be ultimately tragic figures.

Also Levin's path towards finding a way to live meaningfully is very moving

>>6302593

>The breakup scene with Katherine

Poor conquered monarch! though that haughty glance
Still speaks thy courage unsubdued by time,
And in the grandeur of thy sullen tread
Lives the proud spirit of thy burning clime;--
Fettered by things that shudder at thy roar,
Torn from thy pathless wilds to pace this narrow floor!

Thou wast the victor, and all nature shrunk
Before the thunders of thine awful wrath;
The steel-armed hunter viewed thee from afar,
Fearless and trackless in thy lonely path!
The famished tiger closed his flaming eye,
And crouched and panted as thy step went by!

Thou art the vanquished, and insulting man
Bars thy broad bosom as a sparrow's wing;
His nerveless arms thine iron sinews bind,
And lead in chains the desert's fallen king;
Are these the beings that have dared to twine
Their feeble threads around those limbs of thine?

So must it be; the weaker, wiser race,
That wields the tempest and that rides the sea,
Even in the stillness of thy solitude
Must teach the lesson of its power to thee;
And thou, the terror of the trembling wild,
Must bow thy savage strength, the mockery of a child!
[The end]
Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem: To A Caged Lion

>>6303366
Juvenile feels

>tfw no The Fault in Our Stars

I'm not a greenpeace fag, but some of the scenes in Moby Dick are so brutal I felt an emptiness in my tummy for the poor whales.

finished Unbearable Lightness of Being last week, not even just the dog parts, just the gradual, inevitable end to all those characters, the lack of resolution, just a transformation of someone's life into an easily digestible phrase.

Some parts of Hiroshima made me feel sick

>>6303258

>>6302576
The version in "Beginners" or the Gordon Lish chopped up version in "What we talk about when we talk about love"? Carvers original manuscript version in "Beginners" gave me the fucking feels, but the one with Lish's extensive edits just left me feeling cold and empty.

>>6303298
that's incredibly sad

>>6306029

How so?

It's really just a character description.

Brothers Karamazov, like a half year ago.

>>6302570
this bad boy, this morning.

>>6307449
that final scene with the birds and crusts of bread

Not a book but it's close... Alan Moore - Watchmen, a month ago. For many reasons. For example, the picture with dogs fighting over a bone was profoundly disturbing, Rorschach vs Big Figure fight scene was the most intense fight I've ever seen/read... and the whole comic is so ridiculously detailed and well made in so many ways to the point where it leaves me in awe.

>>6303277
Same, I really felt happy for Stoner when Edith left for those months, I felt a huge connection between him and Grace, it just felt so profound and subtle.
Then Edith came and fucked it up, which was done just superbly.
I learnt from that book man, not about literature or anything but just how Stoner found a way to find the simplicities in the little connections he had with people and get a kind of subliminal reaction that affected his life and way of contemplation.
He just found beauty in such profound ways.

That last bit of Anne Frank's diary.

It really struck me that this girl believed more in the deep-down-goodness in the nazi's that hunted her people than I can ever bring myself to believe exists in my father.

It reminded me of what a horrible human being I am.

>>6309576
Mah it's probably propaganda made to make you feel that innit?

my calculus textbook

cried many times going through it

cried when I failed my calc 1 class the first time

cried when I passed it the second time

math can be fucking hard yo

>>6309580

Why would jewish propaganda want to make me think Nazi's were good people deep down inside?

Chekhov's Seagull; first act.
Fuck Arkadina, you joyless parasite.