/lit/ - Literature

so classics you like. wow, what a great idea for a thread

I'd agree with that. It's certainly the best English language novel that I've read so far.

Dostoevsky also lived up to the hype and then some for me.

Could you be any more new

All of them because I am a major patrician

>>6439617
yeah me too

>>6439465
THE SOUND AND THE FURY

Moby Dick is the best novel I've read in English. Good taste OP.

To Kill A Mockingbird

>>6439465
War and Peace

It has never been so bittersweet to finish a book.

>>6439465
was genuinely surprised how funny this was (at least at the beginning).

Crime and Punishment. In the Penal Colony. The I Ching. Dangerous Liaisons. 1984.

& Ham on Rye although not sure if /lit/ would consider that canonical.

Paradise Lost, i think, is perfectly fit to stand with the Odyssey, Iliad, and Aeneid. It was great, like the rest of the Homeric epics

>>6440157
Mein negus
>read catcher in the rye
>wow this is easy to read,
>one character with multiple dimensions
>ayy lmao liked it
Also for whom the bell tolls is based as fuck.

>>6440157
Shit on buk all you want but that shit was fire

>>6439621
>classics

>>6440157
>>6440375

Same anon here and whoah dude you misunderstand me I thought Ham on Rye was Fucking Awesome and then some. I will never shit on Bukowski I love the guy.

I was just saying I wasn't sure if the good people of /lit/ would consider him canonical or not, I don't know if /lit/ holds him in high regard.

What does /lit/ think of Bukowski? Or do we need a separate thread for that?

Most of Keats's poetry lives up to the substantial hype that surrounds it

Eliot's The Wasteland was actually pretty good so I'd say it lived up to the hype

Surprisingly Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a great read, I'd assumed it would be overrated because I had to read Achebe's godawful lecture on Heart of Darkness once

Paradise Lost lives up to the hype

the works of Shakespeare generally are as good as they're made out to be

uh

lots of stuff

>>6442103
The Waste Land is phenomenal.

>>6442140
>>6442103
>tfw you realise T.S. Eliot looks like pic related

Blood Meridian

>>6439475
I fail to see whats wrong with that

The Trial
And 2666 if that counts

Moby-Dick surpassed the hype. I've only heard people talk about how boring it is and how they can't make it past a couple hundred pages. I loved every page.

>>6442865
I honestly don't know how Moby Dick can be considered boring. Even the encyclopedia based chapters are endlessly fascinating, even when you take them for face value.

>>6442865
>>6443697
People who also like the encyclopedic parts! Honestly, moby dick isn't really just a fiction novel - it feels like a guidebook to whaling or some huge diary written by someone instead of a straightforward story. Anyway, Moby Dick best english book evar.

The iliad, although I think that his other work, The Odyssey doesn't deserve to be in the canon.

Infinite Jest

>>6439465

Moby Dick is one of the best books that I have ever read.

Also, haven't finished DQ yet, but so far it is incredible. If anyone out there is daunted by the length, and I'll admit it is very long, I promise that it is worth it.

>>6444872

What is your issue with the Odyssey?

All of Dostoevsky's work.

>>6444977
>tfw reading all his works for the first time and it's truly what you thought the best of literature could be.

If only I could go back to the beginning again, anon. If only.

One Hundred Years of Solitude; the prose is worth the ink it's written on times the value of gold devidid ss syuayd ....

>>6440382
>classics
>anything after the Fall of Rome

The Confessions of St. Augustine. Maybe it's because I had a particularly good translation, but it was one of the most profound and moving things I've ever read. I was nearly in tears when Augustine was eulogizing his mother. I was also fascinated and made to think by his conception of time.

>>6445703
what translation?

muh feels

>>6445715
Garry Wills. Good stuff.

does the count of monte cristo count?

>>6439654

Are you 10 years old? You do not belong on this board.

In answer to the OP:

Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
Faulkner's stuff
Lolita

>>6445769
nice maymay books retard

Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.

I won't launch a witch hunt saying which of the Shakespeare famous plays I had read before that did absolutely not live up to the hype, but those did, if not supassed it.

P. S. : Julius Ceasar, Romeo and Juliette and Midsummer are lame, hate me.

>>6447891
>Midsummer
>lame
>meanwhile lists Macbeth as living up to the hype
You're the worst

>>6445759
Of course.

Gulliver's Travels for me, especially the 3rd and 4th travel.

>>6447904
Midsummer night's dream was really boring and unfunny to read while the actual play was great to watch.

Robinson Crusoe
Paradise Lost
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
Faust

>>6439465

>War and Peace (never expected one book to be so great: it is probably the unsurpassable masterpiece of fiction; the “philosophical” appendices and history analysis are, however, as stupid and boring as people said).
>The Death of Ivan Ilyich
>One Hundred Years of Solitude (who would have thought that Gabo, with that candid eyes and crude and simple face would be capable of producing so magnificent a work of art).
>The great Shakespearean plays, like: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Henry IV, A Midsummer Night Dream, The Tempest, Measure for Measure (I have hear that he was one of the best poets of all time; after reading and studying his work I came to the conclusion that the poetry of his plays is the most sublime ever written by any human being)
>Lolita (Nabokov is one of the few writers who can blend an extremely metaphorical and imaginative style with a lot of crude and down-to-earth dialogues and observations; he is one of the few writers who can seduce and entertain even the common reader with his poetry; Lolita is both one of the most touching books I ever read, and certainly the most funny, by far)
>The Iliad and The Odyssey (The first time I tried to read them in an old translation I find them simply unreadable; after a new translation came, with all the freshness and simple language of the original, I couldn’t even believe that so ancient and early production could contain so many treasures).

The Divine Comedy
Don Quixote
Hamlet
King Lear
Paradise Lost
War and Peace
The Brothers Karamazov
In Search of Lost Time
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Iliad
The Odyssey

>>6448142
>the most sublime ever written by any human being
And you have, of course, read all of Pushkin and all of the Tang dynasty poets in the original, so you're (of course!) fully qualified to make a statement of such monumental stupidity!

>>6449083

Great poetry survives even in translation. If the poetry of a determined writer loses everything in translation then most of its effects are due to sound, and poetry whose main merit rests on sound will never be the best one. The most important thing in poetry is metaphor and imagery; those aspects, however, are not very natural and many poets (even famous ones) are only semi-capable of conceiving sublime imagery with real fertility – master of metaphor are very rare, and Shakespeare was the greatest of them.

Also: it is an illusion to think that every language has a major poet and that all those major poets are equal. No, that’s not the case. Goethe, Dante, Camões, Li Bai, Moliére: they are all great, but simply can’t be compared to Shakespeare. They don’t show nowhere near the same richness of poetic imagery, the same range of metaphors (going from simple and daily-life subjects to the fantastically strange and abstract). Goethes love poetry, for example, is full of old Petrarchan images, hardly showing any glimpse of something fresh and strange. There is no poetry in the whole of the Faust that can be compared to the best (and very numerous) excerpts of Shakespeare’s best plays. There is no equality: some languages have better writers; this is a fact.

As for Pushkin, it is known that he is loved mostly by Russians and nowhere else, and the reason for that is that he can’t be properly translated. That shows that he is mostly a poet of sound, not one of imagery and matter, which means that he is not a poet of the highest order, for the top poets of this world are accomplished in metrics, sound, sense and imagery, being imagery the most important aspect (and the hardest capacity to possess naturally). As for Shakespeare, even prose translations demonstrate that there is an uncommon force in his language, a different level of poetic imagination.

Did you ever read all of Shakespeare? If you didn’t then you have no idea of the treasures that your mind did not tasted yet.

Buddenbrooks

>>6449083

Ohhhh... I get it now. You don't like that fact that he likes different stuff to you.