/lit/ - Literature

Don't get Les Miserables if you can't finish it, you'll be fucking pissed.

Yeah thats what I was thinking, cheers. I've always wanted to read it since having it as a topic in highschool music, just haven't gotten round to it yet

>>805555
err, 1001 that is...

>>805541
Try to find 100 Nights aka Arabian Nights.

>>805555
>>805557
alright cheers, i think they had that there....or could have been lawrence of arabia

whats it about? short stories like the open sesame one? cant remember what its called or what the dudes name is

God damn, dude, there's tons of cheap knockoff E-Readers in China. Buy one, and never have to buy books again.

>>805567
1001 Nights is about a woman who has to convince a man not to murder her (or devirginize her, I can't remember) each night by telling him a story. The book is a series of nested stories that go five, six, seven story-tellers deep. One of the most interesting books every written, really. Postmodern before post-modernism was cool or before modernism was invented.

>>805579

Yeah, NIGHTS really did the 'Story-within-a-story' thing well.

And it did it without being pretentious or hard to swallow. Hell, it's become a children's story now. Stories. It's all one huge story anyway.

Both http://www.bookdepository.co.uk and their .com site (prices differ between them) ship free to China.

So don't let the bookshops around you restrict you.

>>805575
they any good though? i much prefer reading a book, im not too into e-books
>>805579
alright thanks, sounds good. think i remember seeing the start of a movie on it, i remember the bit about a girl having to tell stories for her freedom

>>805588

Sure they're good. You can carry a shitload of books around, you can get tons of books for FREE, and all you have to do is charge it up sometimes. And it doesn't hurt your eyes.

>>805579
I've always wanted to read this, but many of the Arabian Nights books I have seen are condensed. I did see a few Penguin volumes of it and each seemed to be over 1000 pages. The only complete collection I saw was in a bookstore in London and was selling for around $500 USD :(

>>805586
haha yeah i plan on getting some books from book depository, im moving in a few weeks though so im waiting till i do to order books. im stocking up as im really chewing through books atm, not really alot to do here.
>>805593
oh it doesnt hurt your eyes? i thought it wouldve. ill have a look but i havent seen much cheap electronic gadgets around, whata they look like anyway?....how much we talkin here anyway? couple of hundred quai? im pretty poor atm
you rating this thing from experience?

>>805599
oh damn, i think the one i saw was alot smaller than 1000 pages

>>805608

Yeah, I played with a few genuine E-readers that my friends have. My phone also pulls double duty as an E-reader. I can darken the screen so that it doesn't hurt my fucking eyes. It's also very clear.

This is an E-Reader. One of the more expensive ones by Sony, but they all basically follow this form factor. Cheap knockoff E-readers are like one hundred US dollars, I don't know what that is in your currency, and I'm too lazy to go convert it.

>>805622

You have to be careful with the knock-offs. If they don't have a e-ink screen (i.e. one like the Sony one) they usually fucking suck and will hurt your eyes doing book reading.

On the upside you're probably in the best possible place to source one cheap.

>>805622
ok cheers
its about 700/800 quai. think i might look into it when i start getting paid more

any more good classic novels yous know of?

>>805630

If they have display models he should be able to avoid the shitty ones without E-ink displays. He should probably ask to switch it on once before he makes his purchase.

>>805630
whats an e-ink screen exactly?

>>805646
I am sure you can look up what e-ink is and learn more about the technology behind it on your own. There are some heavy technical explanations, but basically, it recreates the look of printed material on a device. because It does not need to be backlit, the display does not consume a lot of power and it does not strain the eyes. It only technically consumes power when it changes the page or when the wifi feature is on (which in some readers, Kindle and Nook notably) allow you to download books on the spot.

>>805646

Tiny cells which switch between black and white.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink

>>805654
ok cheers
is it easy to tell if it has one or not?

>>805658
Your use of "cheers" is making me upset. Once was good enough. Repetition makes my troll sensor jump an energy level.

>>805658

They kind of act like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=wDyDP3gIGW0&feature=related

So you'll probably be able to tell just by looking at whatever one you're looking at.

>>805661
sorry to upset you, i kinda hate saying thanks over and over again
>>805663
ok ill have to jump on the proxy and check it out, youtube is band from china, and b is banned from proxy lol

>>805663
I will now never purchase the Sony because it plays gay background music.

/lit/ tends to rage over what is considered "classic literature".

That being said, find these if you are able:

Don Quixote
Dead Souls by Gogol
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa
Doll's House by Ibsen
Hunger by Knut Hamsen
Jaques the Fatalist by Diderot
100 years of Solitude by Marquez
Noli Me Tangere by Rizal
Sentimental Education by Flaubert
The Red and the Black by Stendahl

>>805681
thanks ill check it out.
think they only had don quixote though, or i might have seen a chinese version i cant remember

>>805691
Dude find another bookstore if they don't have Canterbury Tales. Also, these might be written in ching chong chinese, translated by an 8 year old named Wang.

>>805700
lol i dont speak chinese, just living here
its the biggest bookstore in the city and yeah theres not a huge range, not alot of foreigners here compared to other cities

>>805705
Take a trip to Macau or Hong Kong then.

Don't they have some kind of amazonlike online bookstore that features eng. lit?

>>805718
yes. it is called chingchongchineseazon.com

>>805749

>>805773
oops forgot screen cap

>>805749
Splain to me how one set is $900 more than another plz. Take into consideration that this literature is freely available in ebbok format.

>>805774
For $2500, I would expect the books to be bound in the human skin of the author, with a personalized tattoo dedication and signature.

>>805749
Yet physical print defenders always cite "but I like the feel and smell of holding a real book". Fuck you and your Draconian reasoning.

>>805782
How do you consider that reasoning severe or strict?

>>805782
>>805797

Who cares? The real-book lovers get to enjoy deforestation. We E-book readers can access our library anywhere, at any time, and carry it in our pockets if need be. And we killed no trees.

>>805806
Implying we don't replant what we deforest.

Treasure Island is a good read. While the main character is an adventurous boy, he actively plays a highly beneficial role to his allies and stays far away from being a stereotypically annoying brat that somehow always gets into problems for everyone else to solve. As a pirate book, expect a lot of enjoyably witty banter.

Alexandre Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo" gets thrown around a lot, and it seriously is a very complete novel if you can get your hands on the whole thing. Judging by your presentation on these forums, I would suggest avoiding any of the Three Musketeer books: the series is well written but the morality of all the characters will make you frustrated that the "good guys" get away with home wrecking and betrayal.

If you're going for little girls in bad situations, you can try Frances Hodgson Burnett's "Little Princess," the main character tends to be a bit perfect but this is counterbalanced by being ridiculously screwed over within the first part of the book.

For humor, anything by Saki such as "Reginald." His characters have the sort of witty retort that would fit in with comedian routines these days while all his stories lead up to a relevant, overlying message.

For a more faced paced stuff, try Voltaire's "Candide" or "Zadig," both read roughly the same. Voltaire loves to put his characters in completely random situations and never stops throwing a new, equally random situation every chapter. As incoherent as it may all be, all his work does tie up in the end.

For more adventure, try Rafael Sabitini's works such as "Scaramouche" or "Captain Blood." Sabitini is really good at making empathetical main characters while spinning a very enjoyable swashbuckling yarn. He also likes to span multiple years, so while his novels are of standard length, you feel you've read a lot more because of the timespan within the book.

>>805806

You do realise that the mining of certain minerals to use in the components of e-readers and the poor disposal of electronic products can in fact be just as environmentally unfriendly if not moreso in certain respects than the usage of plantation timber in the production of paper?

The point of e-ink and e-paper are that they take absolutely no power while static, only updating them takes energy. The tradeoff is that they have very low refresh rates. Fortunately, when you're refreshing once every 50 seconds and then staying static for the rest of the time, they're very efficient.

>>805890
Compare that to the process of making white paper and you'd realize that water is polluted at the magnitude of 500 parts water to one part paper in order to make your precious books. Add to that aviation frieght costs, environmental damage absorbed because of it, the fuel to drive your trucks to store deliver, your fuel to drive to the store, the environmental damage of the lead being mined for every single battery involved, the toxic production of colored ink for your book cover, the environmental costs of advertising material, the shelves, the fucking concrete and carpet making each store, and you start to realize that physicals goods are actually exponentially worse than the minuscule mining that produces 10.1000ths inch thin wafers that can do all of this with some plastic thrown in.

>>805835
Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Little Princess are obviously unavailable in China. The ideas of treasure, nobility, and hereditary rule are counter-revolutionary.

>>805959

E-readers are transported to stores in exactly the same manner. Servers that provide ebooks are also housed in concrete buildings, mostly using non-renewable resources such as coal generation to produce power to run them and are also made out of the so-called minuscule amounts of minerals mined to produce them. Then you have the less easy ability of recycling them, lead seeping into soil as they sit in landfills and whatnot.

And besides the international freight of books happens less often because most countries have their own printing facilities as opposed to the primarily East Asian production of e-readers.

I mean I agree that books have an environmental impact - but lets not be blind to the reality of e-readers as well. They're almost as bad.