/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12482744]

For anyone who keeps a book diary, what are the last 10 books you've read?

[Anonymous No.12482748]

>>12482744
A what?

[Anonymous No.12482749]

>>12482744
What's a book diary

[Anonymous No.12482755]

>>12482748
>>12482749
When you keep a record of what books you've read.

[Anonymous No.12482761]

>>12482755
I have goodreads for that.

[Anonymous No.12482768]

>>12482761
Fine, fine.

Revised OP:

>Anyone who in any way keeps a record of what books they've read: what are the last 10 books you've read?

[Anonymous No.12482784]

>>12482744
What is that, a jpg for ants?

[Anonymous No.12482786]

>>12482768
10? I've only read 4 this year so far. How the fuck did you read 10 books already? Were they 100 pages each?

[Anonymous No.12482794]

>>12482786
Where's "this year" coming from?

[Anonymous No.12482802]

My last ten according to Goodreads:

Billy Budd
Omoo
The Sound and the Fury
The Buried Giant
Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra
Libra
White Noise
The Double
The Complete Prose of Pushkin
Fathers and Sons

[Anonymous No.12482803]

>>12482794
How decidedly old-fashioned. It's 2019, gramps, only books this year matter.

[Anonymous No.12482817]

>>12482802
Why would you actually read LoTiaT

[Anonymous No.12482837]

Michel Houellebecq - Atomised
Reza Negarestani - Cyclonopedia
Giles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
Thomas Bernard - The Lime Works
Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Buried Giant
Charles Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil
David Foster Wallace - The Pale King
Flann O' Brien - The Third Policeman
Samuel Beckett - More Pricks Than Kicks

[Anonymous No.12482845]

>>12482744
I only just started reading, I don't have 10 books :(

[Anonymous No.12482849]

>>12482837
the only good book on here is baudelaire

[Anonymous No.12482857]

>>12482744
Last 10:
"A Confederacy of Dunces," John Kennedy Toole
"Despair," Vladimir Nabokov
"Something Fresh," P.G. Wodehouse
"Unto a Good Land," Vilhelm Moberg
"The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker
"Silence," Shusaku Endo
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius
"The Remains of the Day," Kazuo Ishiguro
"The White Masai," Corinne Hoffman
"Lighting the Way," 14th Dalai Lama

Current:
"Waking Up," Sam Harris
"Three Men in a Boat," Jerome K. Jerome

[Anonymous No.12482863]

>>12482849
Oh, come on. "The Pale King" has some hilariously funny parts.

[Anonymous No.12482866]

>>12482857
Trying way too hard.

[Anonymous No.12482867]

By Night in Chile
Ficciones
Unknown Masterpiece
Kreutzer Sonata
The Unique and its Property
The Elementary Particles
The Sun Also Rises
Death in Venice
On Heroes and Tombs

[Anonymous No.12482872]

I don't keep a book diary.
During the last 6 months, I've mostly been reading dense, thick philosophy tomes like Locke's Essay Concern Human Understanding, Kant's three Critiques, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I've occasionally read a few short works of fiction, like Kafka's The Trial and George Eliot's Silas Marner, and lots of poems and essays by many different people. I've been trying to get through Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji ever since nearly a year ago, but I've been reading a bit for a few days, and then putting it aside for several weeks. The same stuff has happened with other novels I've planned on reading, like Swann's Way and The Book of Disquiet. I probably just don't have enough dedication.

[Anonymous No.12482875]

>>12482866
You reckon? I figured I'd just get called a pseud for touching a book by Pinker or Harris.

[Anonymous No.12482956]

>>12482849
>likes baudelaire and not Schopenhauer
Walking backwards into hell staring into the face of god.

[Anonymous No.12482971]

>>12482744
The House of the Dead- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Gambler- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch- Philip K. Dick
The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories (Family Happiness/The Death of Ivan Ilyich/The Kreutzer Sonata/The Devil)- Leo Tolstoy
Gulag: A History- Anne Applebaum
Faust (Parts 1&2)- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald (first book of 2019)
The Brothers Karamazov- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Nature of Greek Myths- G.S. Kirk
Understanding Koreans and their Culture- Choi Joon-sik
Dead Souls (Books 1&2)- Nikolai Gogol

I just keep a google docs form. I've finished 129 in the last two odd years (and there are another dozen or so that I've partially completed). I'm two thirds of the way through War and Peace, one third of the way through the IChing and almost done with Nichomachean Ethics (the three books I'm reading concurrently currently).

[Anonymous No.12482976]

>>12482971
I never read both parts of Faust in one go.

[Anonymous No.12483002]

>>12482976
It was a slog but I was limited on time because it was a library book. Normally, I don't read plays but I felt I had to give this one a go because of its historical importance and because Jorge Luis Borges name dropped Goethe in an autobiographical essay about the writers who influenced him and Borges is one of my favorite writers.

Personally, I felt it was a little overhyped and it would probably have been much better watched than read. Also, the two parts are just completely different and the expansive Percy Jackson adventures of the second half was a little weird and not at all what I expected.

[Anonymous No.12483013]

>>12483002
>I don't read plays but I felt I had to give this one a go because of its historical importance and because Jorge Luis Borges name dropped Goethe in an autobiographical essay about the writers who influenced him and Borges is one of my favorite writers.

Funny; I was prompted to read the Iliad because of how heavily it was featured in "Faust."

I really loved part one, but then I suppose much depends on the translation, if you're reading it in translation.

[Anonymous No.12483088]

I've read 20 books this month (January) of 2019. I started off strong 1 book a day. But Harry Potter slowed me down. When I realized Hermione was a stuck-up know it all I lost interest. And had to force myself to finish the 7 book series.

The Reaper
No Hero
Dead or Alive
Mafia Prince
Act of Valor
Lord of The Rings
The Black Company
Chain of Command
Harry Potter 1-7
You Only Live Twice
Jack The Ripper
Down Among the Dead Men
Hard Thing About Hard Things
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

[Anonymous No.12483091]

>>12483013
I was going off the Wordsworth Classics edition which I think isn't the best translation (https://www.amazon.com/Faust-Tragedy-Wordsworth-Classics-Literature/dp/1840221151).). While I also enjoyed parts of the first book, I'm very heavily in the "Plays should be performed and not read like a novel" camp which probably dampened my enjoyment of it more than anything else.

The second book was too busy and expansive for my taste. The Illiad is top-tier though. I've read it multiple times from middle school through my second year of college.

[Anonymous No.12483139]

The Old Testament
Death in Venice
Corydon
Hugo's Contemplations
Mes amis
Tao-To King
Macbeth
Mallarmé's poems
L'homosexualité dans l'imaginaire de la Renaissance
Shakespeare's Sonnets

I haven't read in a long-ass time though.

[Anonymous No.12483159]

>>12482744

>book diary
Oh shit, I never thought of this. Used to used goodreads for that but I've just relied on memory since ditching it (a mistake). Good idea anon.
For anyone who keeps track, do you also keep an actual diary of it? Like analyses, thoughts, feelings etc of the book?

[Anonymous No.12483184]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Wolfe
The Captive - Proust
100 Years of Solitude - Marquez
The Gods Themselves - Asimov
Dune Messiah - Herbert
Dune - Herbert
Sodom and Gomorrah - Proust
Rendezvous With Rama - Clarke
The Kreutzer Sonata - Tolstoy
Maigret Has Scruples - Simenon

I don't usually read this much SF, but it's been a nice little streak in the last month or so

[Anonymous No.12483205]

The Crying of Lot 49
Brave New World
The Great Gatsby
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
The Oresteian Trilogy
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Notes from Underground
The Odyssey
The Outsider
Dubliners

[Anonymous No.12483216]

>>12483159
>For anyone who keeps track, do you also keep an actual diary of it?
both but separate
big journal for ideas & quotes
small notepad for book diary

[Anonymous No.12483220]

>>12482755
So a list.

[Anonymous No.12483252]

>>12483091
I really loved the Oxford World's Classics translation, for what that's worth.

Reading the Iliad was a hell of an experience.

>>12483159
>Like analyses, thoughts, feelings etc of the book?
I've thought of doing this. Just writing down the name of the book and the date finished seems to have strengthened my retention of details from the book. (Of course, I've also been at it for about a decade, so, who knows.) Recording impressions of the book might help that.

>>12483220
Yes.

[Anonymous No.12483257]

>>12482744
>implying anyone on /lit/ has actually read 10 grown up books

[Anonymous No.12483282]

>>12482744
dead souls
stoner
ficciones
metamorphoses
storm of steel
journey to the end of night
Notes from a dead house
a hero of our time
moby dick
the sorrows of young werther

[Anonymous No.12483285]

>>12482803
Nice damage control

[Anonymous No.12483809]

>>12482744

I keep a digital log and actual notes in a binde, as well as a Tumblr (I know) of quotations.

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
2. Don Quixote
3. Dubliners
4. Augustus
5. Hadji Murad
6. The Idiot
7. Absalom, Absalom!
8. American Pastoral
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes
10. Blood Meridian

[Anonymous No.12483978]

>>12482744
Most recent to oldest:
The histories- Tacitus
Meditations - M. Aurelius
The Annals- Tacitus
Wind up bird Chronicle- murakami
Pseudolus- Plautus
The Satyricon- Petronius
Cherry- Nico Walker
Typee- Melville
His excellency Eugene Rougon- Zola
Crying of lot 49- Pynchon

[Anonymous No.12484152]

from my goodreads:

1. Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky
2. A Tale of Two Cities
3. Dear Zealots, Amos Oz
4, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde
5. Is Paris Burning, Collins and LaPierre
6. The Sun also Rises, Hemingway
7. Brothers at Arms (France and Spain during the American Revolution), Ferreiro
8. I and Thou, Martin Buber
9. The Way of Man/Ten Rungs, Martin Buber
10. East of Eden, Steinbeck

[Anonymous No.12484157]

>>12483088
that's insane. when I finish my current book (biography of von Braun), I will have hit 8 for January. 8 books a month has been my average for the last 5 months. I can't imagine reading more than 12, let alone 20+. nice work.

[Anonymous No.12484490]

>>12482784
Do you think i khnow hwat a jpeg is?

[Anonymous No.12484513]

>>12482867
>Kreutzer Sonata
>The Elementary Particles
>Death in Venice
>On Heroes and Tombs
How would you grade each of them ? I wanna see if I'd like the one I don't know among the 4 of them.

>>12483159
I only keep track of the titles, but the doc is also full of copypasta from /lit/
and a few info on specific works, like dates or how good were this and that short story

>>12483184
how did you like Maigret?

>>12483978
How is Plautus compared to Terentius? I just couldn't read Terentius, I felt like nothing happened and couldn't even find anything funny. This is perhaps because I had just read Aristophanes earlier.

[Anonymous No.12484524]

Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut
A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
The Double, Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky
Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell
Schoolgirl, Dazai
A People's History of the United States, Zinn
The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood
Utopia, More
On The Road, Kerouac

[Anonymous No.12484633]

>>12482744
Stoner - John Williams
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Mishima
Ada or Ardor - Nabokov
Pale Fire - Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading - Nabokov
Pnin - Nabokov
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Nabokov
Speak, Memory - Nabokov
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
As I lay Dying - Falkner
Herzog - Saul Bellow

[Anonymous No.12484641]

>>12484513
>how did you like Maigret?

It was quite a bit better than I was expecting. I'll definitely be reading some more in the not too distant future

[Anonymous No.12484668]

Aina: Kertomus vuoden 1809 sodasta
Goblin Slayer vol1
Goblin Slayer vol2
Goblin Slayer vol3
American Psycho (again...)
Summerland
Muumipeikko ja pyrstötähti
Taikatalvi
Horna
Jäätyvä helvetti
Kiirastuli

[Anonymous No.12484803]

If this is a man - Primo Levi
The truce - levi
the periodic table - levi
paradise lost - j. m.
crime and punishment - dosto
no longer human - dazai
pnin - nabokov
the noise of time - julian barnes
blindness - jose saramago
woman in the dunes - kono abe
the idiot - dosto

currently reading moby-dick

really only started "reading" reading from about a year ago but man am i loving it

[Anonymous No.12484937]

>2019
>not keeping an autistic spreadsheet

[Anonymous No.12484961]

>>12482744
In order of most to least recent read:
>Youth, by Tolstoi
>Boyhood, idem
>Childhood, idem
>The Death of Ivan Ilych, idem
>IT, by Stephen King (only half of it, couldn't keep reading after they go back to Derry to fight the clown)
>The Shining, Stephen King
>Metro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovski
>Lovecraft's complete Works
>A little of Plato's "Republic"
>Rendez-vous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

[Anonymous No.12484980]

>>12482872

How's the experience after reading more archaic philosophy?

[Anonymous No.12484986]

>>12483088
do you buy books or library?

[Anonymous No.12484995]

>>12484937
does reread means its very good and you will read in future?

[Anonymous No.12485000]

>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
>Cortes and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire - Jon Manchip White
>The Secret History - Procopius
>Blood Meridian - McCarthy
>The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
>The Dharma Bums - Kerouac
>A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
>Tacitus - William Bodham Donne
>Year One of the Russian Revolution - Victor Serge
>The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea - Mishima

[Anonymous No.12485224]

>>12484995
it means that I have read it previously

[Anonymous No.12485232]

>>12484986
you're on 4chan and you don't pirate ebooks?

[Anonymous No.12485279]

>>12482744
I've kept one near 20 yrs (from 16); here's 10 yrs ago late December to late January 2009--
Illuminations Walter Benjamin
Xmas Carol, Dickens (6th time)
Memoirs v. 1 Duc de St. Simon
The Queen's Conjuror, Woolley (mediocre John Dee bio)
Memoirs v. 2
The Sun King, Nancy Mitford
Memoirs v. 3
Madame de Pompadour, Nancy Mitford
Prester John, John Buchan
The Well Wrought Urn, C. Brooks

[Nora No.12485458]

First to last goes in order of most recently finished:

Richard II - Shakespeare

Delusions of Gender - Fine

A World Without Heroes - Mull

The Dharma Bums - Kerouac

Chronicles, Vol.1 - Bob Dylan

Man and His Symbols - Jung

Black Hole - Burns

Richard III - Shakespeare

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Fun Home - Bechdel

[Anonymous No.12485468]

>>12485000
Congratulations, you gradually turned into a memereading faggot.

[Anonymous No.12485506]

A Story of the Days to Come by H. G. Wells
14 German Short Stories
Bahnwärter Thiel by Gerhart Hauptmann
War with the Salamanders by Karel Čapek
The Burrow by Franz Kafka
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Another german collection of short stories but I can't remember the authors name

[Anonymous No.12485511]

>>12485468
that is my goal for this year, I want to be able to discuss all the meme books and the /lit/ canon

[Anonymous No.12485661]

Tranny - Auto bio of lead singer of Against me

Travels with Charley- ﹰSteinbeck

Pastures of Heaven - Steinbeck

East of Eden - Steinbeck

Grapes of Wrath- Steinbeck

A Farewell to Arms- Hemmingway

Dubliners- James Joyce

The Trainspotting Trilogy -Irvine Welsh

[Anonymous No.12485737]

[Anonymous No.12485744]

>>12485506
>Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
>Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky
Are they worth it? I already enjoyed "The Death of Ivan Ilych" and his three autobiographies

>>12485661
>The Trainspotting Trilogy -Irvine Welsh
Will I enjoy the books if I liked the films?

[Anonymous No.12485791]

>>12482755
The MS readathon?

[Anonymous No.12485862]

Into Thin Air- Jon Krakauer -5/5
The Ascent of Money- Niall Ferguson- 3/5
The Three Theben Plays- Sophocles (Oedipus the King 4/5, Oedipus at Colonus 3/5, Antigone 5/5)
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki- Haruki Murakami- 3/5
Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe-3/5
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami- 5/5
Rome’s Last Citizen (Biography of Cato the Younger)-Rob Goodman-5/5
The Inimitable Jeeves- PG Wodehouse-5/5
The Complete Sherlock Holmes V.1- Conan Doyle-3/5
All Quiet on the Western Front- Erich Remarque-3/5

3/5-okay
4/5-Liked it
5/5-really liked it

[Anonymous No.12485997]

>>12484803
How’d you like blindness? I have two books by him, but I just don’t wanna parse through a book with five paragraphs without knowing it’ll be worth it.

[Anonymous No.12486224]

>>12485862

thanks for bringing the Goodman book to my attention. I think I'll pick it up.

[Anonymous No.12486235]

>>12482744
Only counting full non short fiction or collection works that I've read for "pleasure," for lack of a better term (most to least recent)

>The Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir)
>The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard)
>Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard)
>The Idiot (Dostoyevsky)
>The Worm Ouroboros (Eddison)
>The King in Yellow* (Chambers)
>Perestroika (Angels in America Part 2) (Kushner)
>Millennium Approaches (Angels in America Part 1) (Kushner)
>Les Miserables (Hugo)
>Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire)

[Anonymous No.12486247]

>>12482744
Male Feminist Edition

I read:

Getting Off by Robert Jensen
Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon
Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams
SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
The Sympathetic Undertaker by Biyi Bandele Thomas
Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure
The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey
How To Do Things With Words by Jane Austen

And a 200 page official document about the Sandy Hook massacre.

[Anonymous No.12486485]

>>12485997
Not him, I've read it though. Nothing special.

[Anonymous No.12486608]

>>12486247
sounds excruciating, how'd you manage to consume all of that

[Anonymous No.12487268]

>>12484633
> What did you take away from Herzog?

[Anonymous No.12487287]

>>12486247
Jane Austen? Don't be too much of a feminist, son.

[Anonymous No.12487364]

Canterbury Tales
Norse Mythology (Neil Gaiman)
The Death of Grass
The Pearl
The Godwulf Manuscript
Earthsea: The First Four Books
The Other Wind
Tales From Earthsea
A clockwork Orange
-------- 2019
Mythos
The Word for World is Forest
The Star Diaries
Storm of Steel

I've been trying to get back into reading since around November 2018. I've been enjoying it so far.

[Anonymous No.12487430]

>>12482744
I use GoodReads for that as well.

>Jane Eyre
>The Dharma Buns
>Tender Is The Night
>Being and Time
>The Book of Disquiet
>Thirst for Love
>A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
>Auto Fiction
>Language, Society & Power
>Dance Dance Dance

[Anonymous No.12487463]

The Dharma Bums
Hangsaman
Peril at End House
Battle Royale
The Revenant
Angela's Ashes
Almost Transparent Blue
Stranger in a Strange Land
White Teeth
The Dead Zone

[Anonymous No.12487494]

The Gay Science
Sweating Blood
Disagreeable Tales
Marthe
Submission
The Map and the Territory
Platform
The Possibility of an Island
The Elementary Particles
Whatever

[Anonymous No.12487495]

Wyndham Lewis - The Childermass
François Bon - Sortie d'usine
Dino Buzzati - The Tartar Steppe
Blaise Cendrars - La fin du monde, filmée par l'ange N.-D.
Edoardo Sanguineti - Wirrwarr
Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
William H. Gass - The Tunnel
Tao Lin - Richard Yates
Hugo Pratt - Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea
Jan Baetens & Hugo Frey - The Graphic Novel

[Anonymous No.12487661]

I only started logging this year so I only have 6.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea -- Fun but drags on. Could be 100 pages shorter.
Dubliners -- Read half of it about two years ago. Need to re-read Ivy Day after reading more Irish history. An Encounter, Araby, A Little Cloud, The Dead are my favorites. Counterparts is good too.
The Crying of Lot 49 -- Need to re-read. I think it's about interpretation.
Shakespeare by Bill Bryson -- Easy read. More of a sketch of the world Shakes lived in since the facts on his life are so lacking. Shakespeare scholars are literally insane.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- Re-read. Got a lot more out of it, saw the big "picture", able to better appreciate how individual parts contribute to the whole
The Odyssey (Fitzgerald) -- I liked the translation. Argos was a good boy.

[Anonymous No.12487693]

I started reading not to long ago (sorry it's all in french and it's got some german in there too)
Phèdre - Racine
Le quatrième mur - Sorj Chalandon
Les groseilliers - Tchekhov
La fin de la jalousie - Proust
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone - JK Rowling (out of pure nostalgia)
Die Verwandlung - Kafka
Brennendes Geheimnis - Stefan Zweig
Les mots - Sartre
Jacques le fataliste et son maître - Diderot
Antigone - Anouilh

[Anonymous No.12487732]

>>12487693
How's Brennende Geheimnis? It gets bad reviews, comoared to other short works by Zweig. I bought it more or less by chance hut am afraid it's gonna be too boring. I like Zweig though.

[Anonymous No.12488291]

>>12487732
uhm I've read it because I want to get better at German, not because I really by sheer curiosity. Didn't like it very much though, especially the ending that I found to be very boring

[Anonymous No.12488307]

>>12488291
not out of pure curiosity* shit I was tired while writing this

[Anonymous No.12488430]

>>12482744
In no particular order:
Dead Souls - Gogol
Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Hadji Murat - Tolstoj
The Kreutzer Sonata - Tolstoj
Animal Farm - Orwell
A book which contained essays written by Orwell(it had no particular name)
We - Zamyatin
The Thatcher - Helle Maj (original title "Tækkemanden", not available in english)
1984 - Orwell

[Anonymous No.12488437]

>>12488430
How was Dead Souls?

[Anonymous No.12488512]

>>12484513
Kreutzer Sonata > Death In Venice > On Heroes and Tombs > The Elementary Particles

[Anonymous No.12488605]

>>12482744
The Sound of Waves
Stoner
Epictetus Discourses
Blood Meridian
The Way of Men (cringe)
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic
Walden
Butcher's Crossing

[Anonymous No.12488690]

>>12485511
>that is my goal for this year, I want to be able to discuss all the meme books and the /lit/ canon
that's most of /lit/ in a nutshell me included
https://youtu.be/KdieE8ysd40?t=4711

[Anonymous No.12488710]

>>12488690
time stamp didn't show up? 1:18:31
fuck I hate 4channel. can't post webm with audio cept 2 places? /b /gif

[Anonymous No.12488783]

>>12482971
>I'm two thirds of the way through War and Peace
How did you deal with /ourguy/ getting cucked? I'm right there and it's breaking my heart. Fuck Natasha. Cheating on /ourguy/ with Anatole of all fucking people?

[Anonymous No.12488878]

I only started recording recently, so:

>The Rorschach Technique: A Beginners Manual
>The Life of Marpa the Translator
>The Life of Milarepa
>Man’s Search For Meaning
>Zodiac and Swastika
>The Occult Roots of Nazism
>Vagueness
>Gorgias

[Anonymous No.12489877]

The Peregrine - Baker
Eumeswil - Jünger
The Argonauts - Nelson
Storm of Steel - Jünger
Forest Passage - Jünger
Glass Bees - Jünger
Havoc - Kristensen
Forest - In the Shadow of Civilization
Tragedy of Man - Harrison
Posthumous Papers - Musil

[Anonymous No.12490618]

Seneca - Notes on the good death
A collection of essays by Wladimir Bukowski, i dont know the english title
Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner - illusions of brotherhood (again, no english translation)
a collection of essays regarding the liberal revolution of 1848 in central europe
Chuck Palahniuk - adjustment day
mishima - sun and steel
Maurice pinguet - on voluntary death in japan
alain de benoist - the problem concerning democracy
isherwood - goodbye to berlin
tomislav sunic - titoism and dissidence

[Anonymous No.12490896]

>>12484668
Based Suomi poster

[Anonymous No.12490926]

>>12482786
Nigger is reading children's books and posting on 4 Chan.

[Anonymous No.12491002]

>>12485744
>Are they worth it? I already enjoyed "The Death of Ivan Ilych" and his three autobiographies
None of your mentioned books are by Dostoievski, but yes, C&P and notes from the underground are definitely worth it

[Anonymous No.12491049]

>>12482744
1. Look at the Harlequins! - Nabokov
2. Transparent Things - Nabokov
3. Dune - Herbert
4. Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais
5. VALIS - P. K. Dick
6. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
7. Pale Fire - Nabokov
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
9. The Aeneid - Virgil
10. Baudolino - Eco

[Anonymous No.12491076]

Beowulf (Unknown)
The Song of Roland (Unknown)
The New Shostakovich (Ian MacDonald)
The Tragedy of Man (Imre Madách)
Botchan (Natsume Soseki)
Lust, Caution (Eileen Chang)
Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District (Nikolai Leskov)
The Injustice to Dou E (Guan Hanqing)
Dao de Jing (Lao-zi)
Kudrun (Unknown)

Currently reading Testimony (Volkov-Shostakovich)
I also read a contemporary poetic tale for school, but I'm not counting that, even though it was like 200 pages.
Rate

[Anonymous No.12491114]

>>12491002
F^ck, you are right. I have a tendency to mix up their works. Thanks for answering, anyways

[Anonymous No.12491126]

>>12482817
Not him, but The Totalitarian Birds is pure lit

[Anonymous No.12491146]

>>12491076
let me guess , you have read noise of time recently?

also you should probably read hong lou meng.

[Anonymous No.12491161]

>>12482744
Death in the Silent Places
Death in the Long Grass
Horn of the Hunter
Outback Survival (Bob Cooper)
Heart of Darkness
Game Changer (Glen Martin)
Rainbow Six
The Green Hills of Africa
Meat Eater (Steven Rinella)
98.6 Degrees (Cody Lundin)

[Anonymous No.12491164]

>>12491146
>and then they all drank vodka and fell into deep existential crisis.
No, I didn't. Is it any good?
I don't have anything against contemporary stuff, but can I get anything out of it if I already read 2 biographies? (At least on an artistic level)

>read hong lou meng
I actually wrote it down as "To read in 2019", but I crossed it out, because I don't think I'll have any time for it next to reading Three Kingdoms.

[Anonymous No.12491211]

>>12491164
it was decent , a lot of second hand angst tho.

hong lou meng is ridiculously good , but its the chinese classic that loses the most in translation. read Xiyou ji first if you havent already.

[Anonymous No.12491226]

>>12491164
let me give you an example , in hong lou meng there`s a chapter where the main character dreams and reads a couple of poems. these poems reveal the future of a person,

one of the poems is called "a weeding crown buried in snow"

a reader who knoes chinese could guess that this peom refers to the character "xue baochai" (xue means snow. and it forshadows that she is gonna get married and her marriage is gonna be unhappy.

the book is filled to overflowing with this stuff , and youre not getting any of it in translation

[Anonymous No.12491250]

>>12491226
>>12491211
Figured that much.
Especially how my copy is total trash. (Translation of a German edition which was abridged.)(I've read a bit of that and the story was good, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that this isn't the proper way to read it.)
Honestly, the main reason I want to tackle San Guo first is because I started reading it when I was 17 or so, and I dropped it halfway through the first volume because I lacked the attention and maturity to follow a lengthy story like that.
Now I'm two years older, I read some "drier" works of fiction and managed to read War and Peace, so I think I'm ready to take on a 2k page Chinese novel now.
The longest piece of Chinese fiction I've read so far was the excellent Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. That was really fucking good.

>it was decent , a lot of second hand angst tho.
I like that. Thankfully it has an epub up on libgen. I'll read into it when I need a bit of relaxation.

[Anonymous No.12491276]

>>12491250

the ancient herbert franke translation you`re probably refering to is decent , but i dont know how much it loses from german to english (im german)

the recent penguin books translation is supposed to be quite good, it has an appendix which explains some of the metaphors.

still , being able to read the original hong lou meng is what motivated me to really learn chinese , im 4 years in now and still not good enough to tackle classic wenyuan, but im getting there

i only know Gao Xingjian by reputation , supposedly hes great , but i was disappointed by what i read of Mo Yan , so ive lost faith in western critics trying to judge chinese books

[Anonymous No.12491309]

>>12491276
Mo Yan's Republic of Wine was pretty meh while reading it, but it sorta clicked 2 weeks after I finished the book and it was pretty fun in retrospect.
I have his other book, Wa sitting on my shelf, but I decided to take on Red Sorghum this year instead. I don't really want to read about abortions right now.

As for Gao's Soul Mountain, it's pretty good. It has a multilayered narrative and is fun to read because of that. Otherwise I read one short story of his, which didn't leave much of an impression on me. I'm still trying to get a hold of one of his dramas, but I have to hunt down a used copy of a literary journal for that, because they never published that one.
An ideal companion to Soul Mountain would be Krasznahorkai's "Destruction and sorrow beneath the heavens".
I'd wholeheartedly recommend Soul Mountain.

>the ancient herbert franke translation you`re probably refering to is decent , but i dont know how much it loses from german to english (im german)
Nah, I'm talking about the Franz Kuhn translation and I'm 100% sure it loses a hell of a lot of meaning going from German to Hungarian.
At least I paid less than 1 euro for it.

>still , being able to read the original hong lou meng is what motivated me to really learn chinese
Well, I'm trying to learn Chinese too, but I'm advancing very slowly. Managed to learn ~130 characters so far.
I just have too many dumb passion projects I embark upon.

[Anonymous No.12491313]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (good, but the obvious moralising was annoying)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (okay)
Men at Arms - Evelyn Waugh (the whole sword of honour trilogy was excellent and a great description of Britain sliding from imperial power to second rate socialism)
A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov (very good)
Pied Piper - Nevil Shute (heartwarming)
The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson (interminable, almost didn't finish once he was floating around in dream bubbles around the star at the centre of the universe)
Officers and Gentlemen - Evelyn Waugh
Unconditional Surrender - Evelyn Waugh
Shōgun - James Clavell (superior Japanese Game of Thrones)
The Mantle and Other Stories - Nicolai Gogol (I liked the Overcoat, but the rest were just a few steps above Grimm's fairy tales... The Viy was quite good at least)

Reading Flash for Freedom atm

[Anonymous No.12491319]

>>12491313
>Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (okay)
I thought Wuthering Heights had a very refreshing narrator, that alone made it stand out to me. I read her sister's Jane Eyre just recently and that one too is mesmerizing. Probably my favourite from the era.

[Anonymous No.12491329]

sounds great , i will pick up soul mountain then.

Mo Yan really likes his shock value too much sometimes , particularly in red sorghum. might be you enjoy it.

>Well, I'm trying to learn Chinese too, but I'm >advancing very slowly. Managed to learn >~130 characters so far.
>I just have too many dumb passion projects I >embark upon.


i wont annoy you with phrases like "just stick with it , your gonna get better" then.

a real tip: try to completly memorize complete sentences and short texts as a whole. thats how you learn the ability to form your own sentences with the new vocabulary you learned (chinese is very modular)

if you`re not into poetry dont bother to much with tones right now, you should know the tones , but once you speak quicker a lot gets shwallowed anyway. (if you want to enjoy poetry , solid knowledge of tones is a must tho)

[Anonymous No.12491380]

>>12491329
Well, I'm sticking with it. I have three dedicated days a week when I can spend an hour looking through and making flashcards.

>Mo Yan really likes his shock value too much sometimes
Exactly, and the problem is that it's mixed into a giant mish-mash of sex, critique of a communist society, funny little jokes and interesting titbits about Chinese culture/Philosophy.

The good thing is that so far I haven't encountered anything really bad in Chinese literature except for the works of Tashi Dawa and the Socialist Realist period which is abysmal, no matter the country.

[Anonymous No.12491441]

>>12491380

social realism is trash everywhere , (in hungary too i guess) its particularly trash in china because they never even got what it was supposed to be about.

try to find a copy of cat country. thats an early 20th century chinese sience fiction + political analogy book that really is a superior animal farm

[Anonymous No.12491453]

>>12491319
I've neglected all the famous 19th century female authors so I can't really compare with the others. The writing was fine, it was much darker than I was expecting, and I liked the narrative device, revealing the end state of the affair and then uncovering how it got to that point... it's just I found it all a bit soap opera like. Particularly the kidnapping and forced marriage. Just not my sort of thing I guess.

[Anonymous No.12491480]

>>12491441
>Cat Country
Oh, yes. I wanted to ask if you've read Lao She's works.
Teahouse is a fun little drama.
I also read a novella of his about a man being really annoying on a train. That was funny. Though I have no idea what the title would be in English or Chinese.

>they never even got what it was supposed to be about.
NOBODY knew what it was supposed to be. Mainly because socialist realism was never meant to be anything more than "what the party deems good/useful". Same goes for formalism in music.
I asked my literature teacher,
>What is socialist realism?
>Read this essay, you'll know
>80 pages
>Finish it in a day
>With all due respect sir, this is just pure nonsense!
>Exactly!

It's bureaucratic gibberish.

[Anonymous No.12491544]

>>12491480

i think ive read most of Lao She , hes definatly very good, might have left me spoiled when i started on more modern stuff like Mo Yan

Lu Xun is good too, his short stories are haunting and depressing af. Hes a decent example of someone who associated himself with communism but whos writing isent crap

[Anonymous No.12491569]

>>12491544
>who associated himself with communism but whos writing isent crap
Associating with left wing ideas isn't detrimental to good writing.
What's detrimental is when you become a bitch to the party.

Lu Xun has damn good essays too. I had the chance to read a few of them in translation and he knew his shit when it came to classic literature. I think that was the first time I encountered "the Shanghai school of literature", which is quite lovely and almost cosmopolitan at times.

[Anonymous No.12491607]

>>12491569
if you know Lu Xun well, then you should check out his younger brother Zhou Zuoren.

One of my chinese teachers holds a chair for chinese fine arts at the local university , and he recommendet him as a "lesser known, superior Lu Xun"