Books you are interested in

[Anonymous No.23377092]

List some books you are interested in and other anons comment if they’ve read them

>The Lord Chandos Letter and other stories - von Hofmannsthal
>Tales of ETA Hoffman
>Toilers of the Sea - Hugo
>Life is a Dream - Calderon
>Paradiso - Lima
>The Glass Bead Game - Hesse
>La Bas/Au Rebours - Huysmans
>Renoir, My Father - Renoir
>In Parenthesis - Jones
>John Ruskin
>The New Science - Vico
>Willa Cather

[Anonymous No.23377148]

>>23377092
The only feeling i have left for women after interacting with them is disdain.

[Anonymous No.23377227]

>>23377092
i love women so much, bros

[Anonymous No.23377270]

Thread's already off to a brilliant start, 2 thirstposts and no comments about any books (sorry OP, I haven't read any of yours either)

>Super Cannes - JG Ballard
>Of Plimouth Plantation - William Bradford
>Homo Zapiens - Victor Pelevin
>Imperium - Christian Kracht
>The Lotus Sutra
>Dubliners - James Joyce
>Wherever You Go, There You Are - Jon Kabat-Zinn
>The Friendly Persuation - Jessamyn West
>The Origin Of Species - Charles Darwin
>Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington
>The Kalevala
>The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
>The Secret History - Donna Tartt
>King Henry IV - Shakespeare
>The Fable Of The Bees - Bernard Mandeville
>Democracy In America - Alexis de Tocqueville

[Anonymous No.23377315]

>>23377270
The Dharma Bums is excellent. Everyone seems to like it better than On the Road. It has a quest for spirituality in a way that OTR doesn’t. Kerouac’s jazzy, sometimes juvenile writing style always takes me a little to get used to but once I’m adjusted I tend to like him, faults and all. It’s a quick read as well. Easy to blow through in a few days. I’m really unsure why OTR is seen as Kerouac’s most famous. Every other book I’ve read from him has been better.

[Anonymous No.23377317]

>>23377270
>>23377315
And I forgot to say, The Snow Leopard might be something you’d like. One of the best books I’ve read in the last year

[Anonymous No.23377453]

>>23377092
Both the Hofmannsthal and the Huysmans's are great

[Anonymouṡ No.23377650]

>>23377092
My "to read" list is hundreds of pages long, so merely trying to prioritize is hard. Here are half a dozen titles at random anyway:

BOOK: Z For Zachariah
WHY: It's by the guy who wrote Mrs Frisby And The Rats of NIMH which was great.

BOOK: The Golden Fleece (Robert Graves)
WHY: I like RG even though he is mad as a hatter.

BOOK: Autobiography (Cellini)
WHY: Apparently he was a take-no-prisoners kind of fellow. It’s a pretty famous autobiography.

BOOK: Enchiridion (Epictetus)
WHY: Supposed to be a serious book by a serious person.

BOOK: Melmoth the Wanderer
WHY: Heard it mentioned a few times. FUN FACTOID: When Oscar Wilde left prison he called himself ‘Sebastian Melmoth’.

BOOK: Puck of Pook’s Hill
WHY: Kipling was morally sound if a little lacking in human warmth.

[Anonymous No.23378401]

>>23377317
Thanks for the rec!

>>23377650
>Autobiography
Cellini's autobiography is decent if you want to read about a flaming bisexual guy praise the Catholic Church and his own goldsmithing skill for 400 pages. It's not bad per se, just very rambly and self-congratulatory (even though his life was pretty badass)

>Enchiridion
Excellent short book of Stoic aphorisms and shorter dialogues. This one is even shorter than Aurelius' Meditations and it's universally agreed that Epictetus was a "purer" Stoic than Aurelius was, definitely worth reading

[Anonymous No.23378454]

clarel
beyond sing the woods
heather
the federal siege at ruby ridge: in our own words
>>23377092
i've read cather's great plains trilogy as well as death comes for the archbishop. she's the best female author around and one of the best authors overall. she's brilliant with language but not at all showy, only uses her big words when they're absolutely right. she feels very mature compared to other authors for her unabashed faith in human goodness. here's a passage from my antonia that shows the charm of her simple prose:
>After the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his land, too, some such belief.
>>23377270
dubliners is super bleak, the last story most of all. have a strong drink afterwards.

[Anonymous No.23378528]

>>23377092
I am working down my TBR that I have carried in various iterations for 10+ years. 72 remain from 240 a year or so ago, many of which I simply removed after further reflection / getting out of that phase of my life (depressed yet optimistic self help and business retard). After this I want to work from smaller lists of 10 or so, and read more classic and interesting contemporary works.

>Inside the Whale and Other Essays -- George Orwell
>Mrs Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
>The Rifles -- William T Vollmann
>Let Our Fame Be Great -- Oliver Bullough
>The New York Trilogy -- Paul Auster

[Anonymous No.23378536]

>>23377092
Glass Bead Game is a bit tedious. Poor man's Mornington Crescent

[Anonymous No.23378592]

>>23377317
>The Snow Leopard

Speaking of Peter Matthiessen, I remember some years ago was saying that there was a brilliant hidden gem in his body of work, but annoyingly, he wanted to keep it a secret. I’ve only read a couple of his books (they were both excellent) but they were his popular ones. Matthiessen definitely seems like the hidden gem writer type so I’m thinking about getting a few of his books. I’m curious of anyone has read anything from him that isn’t The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country. I’m mostly interested in these:

Far Tortuga
The Tree Where Man Was Born
In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse
Nine Headed Dragon River
Men’s Lives

[Anonymous No.23378646]

I wonder if the Aryan beauty even understood the book she held.

[Anonymous No.23378696]

>>23377270
>James Joyce’s Dubliners
Great but subtle pleasures in it. At first the stories might strike you as plotless, without great and earthshaking revelations (although a few them gather momentum and build up to something great and emotionally moving). It’s a part of what Joyce was trying to do. One modern term that applies is “slice-of-life” stories, and obviously it’s trying to capture that for different ages, social statuses, the two sexes in Dublin of his day, as well as different major phases of life (childhood and some of the disillusionments of it, adolescence, marriage, getting more interested in politics as an adult, etc.) The stories are a very unified coherent whole and very deliberately ordered, as I suggested, generally moving from childhood to adulthood/greater and greater maturity, the whole collection also starting and opening with a death (or the significant memory of a death), and also notice how the motif of “paralysis” reoccurs in it. He thought this was one of the perfect metaphors for what he saw as the parochiality of Dublin and people’s lives there — paralysis. This is Joyce being more gloomy and serious, without as much of the comic spirit of Ulysses. Well worth reading if you want to see Joyce’s style at its most restrained and lucid (although still wonderfully and meticulously crafted), and clearer themes to each story. A few characters here show up in Ulysses, and I forgot for sure if they do in Portrait (I read them all many years ago) but I’m sure at least some of them do tangentially, it fits with Joyce’s M.O.

Another key to his aesthetic philosophy here is his theory of “epiphanies.” He thought the best literature was centered around characters having such epiphanies, or even the narrator leading the reader to them. A striking moment in which one sees the significance of various aspects of life in a new way. So although they’re not necessarily very plot-driven, each story is also majorly centered around building up to such an epiphany. As another poster mentioned, again, this is generally Joyce at his bleakest. I got wonderful chills for a long time upon finishing “The Dead”, the last story and one of his best. Don’t want to say more as not to spoil anything.

>King Henry IV - Shakespeare
It’s Shakespeare, what more could you want? Even his lesser-known and less well-regarded plays are still great for their poetry, typically shining the most in soliloquies and monologues. This has great instances in both verse by various major characters, including Prince Hal, as well as in prose passages by Falstaff, one of his most well-beloved characters, as well as Falstaff’s friends at the bar, so this isn’t even one of his less-known/less-regarded ones like I brought up.

[Anonymous No.23378708]

>>23377092
What about the Elizabethan playwrights NOT named Shakespeare?

[Anonymous No.23378720]

>>23377270
>>23378696
(Continued)
There’s some funny ambiguity here about Shakespeare’s contrast between the lower-class bar-dwellers (Falstaff and co., whom the young Prince Hal hangs out with, at the great consternation of his father, King Henry IV, and the nobility) and the upper-class of royal and noble life, apparently based on real historical fact of Prince Hal being known to have been a bit of a wastrel and spendthrift when younger, before turning himself around like the prodigal son. I don’t want to spoil it but basically Falstaff and co. get shafted, and there’s some interesting subtextual things going on about how much sympathy Shakespeare might have for Falstaff and co.

They’re definitely portrayed with some conventionally bad character traits like cowardice, drunkenness, and the like, but also portrayed with so much character it’s hard not to wonder whether old William is making some class-commentary here (on how the drunken bums at the bar seem more fun and sympathetic than the intriguers of royalty and the royal court). Great depiction of that contrast, and great mixture of comedy and serious situations. Falstaff was so beloved by his audience he even made an (awful, by his standards) comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor” reusing Falstaff, and with much more prose/non-verse dialogue in it if I remember right. It’s a really interesting case of one Shakespeare’s characters being so loved he just HAD to reuse him, which I don’t think he did one other time, if I remember right.

[Anonymous No.23378721]

>>23378708
Marlowe and Jonson are okay, Thomas Kyd and the Spanish Tragedy too. The rest is ballast.

[Anonymous No.23378803]

>>23377092
Some more I’m interested in

>Maiden Castle, Weymouth Sands, Owen Glendower, Porius- JC Powys
>JF Powers
>Selected Writings- Meister Eckhart
>Michelangelo’s poetry (especially which translation to get. I’m leaning towards the Yale University Press one because it is heavily annotated, but a bit expensive)
>Rabelais and his World- Bakhtin
>Hegel or Schiller’s book on art and aesthetics
>Sens Plastique- Chazal
>the Roman and Greek comedian playwrights
>Racine, Corneille, Moliere

[Anonymous No.23378855]

>>23377092
Why is she sitting like this? Is she farting?

[Anonymous No.23379397]

>>23377092
Bump

[Anonymous No.23380098]

>>23377148
Not all women.. some are much better than others. It's unfair to yourself to not give some a chance

[Anonymous No.23380101]

>>23377227
Don't let it cloud your judgement by thirstposting

[Anonymous No.23380105]

>>23378646
It's wild how some tastes fade whilst others arise, eye of the beholder and all

[Anonymous No.23380113]

>>23377270
>>Dubliners - James Joyce
The best way to get into Joyce if you haven't read anything else he's written is Dubliners. Some of the stories can be pretty confusing if you don't have the context so I'd recommend buying a copy with good footnotes/endnotes. Very grim and bleak but also extraordinarily beautiful at times, an absolute masterpiece.
>>The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
My favorite Kerouac book. Not a huge fan of the "we're all drug addicts getting wasted every night" beginning but the sections where he's in nature are beautifully written.
>>King Henry IV - Shakespeare
I was always more of a Hank Cinq guy. Read this a long time ago so I don't remember much but I think I enjoyed it, just not as much as some of his other plays.
>>23378528
>>Mrs Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
I'm a Joyce snob so I see Mrs. Dalloway as an inferior Ulysses. When I gave it an honest, fair shot, I thought it was fine but it didn't blow my mind.

[Anonymous No.23380133]

Here are a few on my list, let me know what you think if you've read any of these:
>War and Peace, Tolstoy
>History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
>Collected Writings, Epictetus
>The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard
>Poetic Edda
>The Idiot, Dostoevsky

[Anonymous No.23380169]

>>23377270
>Dubliner’s
I haven’t read all of them but I’ve read the first half and The Dead. They are all worth reading but I’d consider The Dead essential, though that is entirely because of my bias due to my fully willingly confessed love for his work.
>king Henry iv
Fantastic work. You’ll see why everyone talks about Falstaff. It’s an absolute riot with Shakespeare’s usual small subversions and just overall good humor. It’s been a while since I’ve read it and I’ve only have once so my memory isn’t giving me any lines but I do plan on reading it again pretty soon.
>>23380133
>War and Peace
Absolutely incredible and worth every page. Yes it will bore you at some parts I’ll just tell you that right out the way but any book that long is going to just suffer from the physical drain of reading. But that’s not to say there’s even an actually “boring” or even “bad” moment in there. I’ve read it once and he’s the type of writer where I feel like once I read him again I will see the genius behind those previously less seemingly capturing and drawing scenes. Maybe that’s just being hopeful, but there’s no doubt Tolstoy knew how to write a damn good story or more so stories within a big story. And he composed this in what his 30’s maybe even early as late 20’s? On par with Melville. Yeah, read it.

[Anonymous No.23380303]

>>23377092
Not gonna list my huge wishlist but this is my highest priority books + The Penguin Book Of Hell

[Anonymous No.23380418]

>>23377092
I spend half an hour trying to reverse search the image but found nothing. Someone know the name of this qt (future wife)?

[Anonymous No.23380461]

>>23377315
I couldn’t finish On The Road. I hated it. It’s like the length of a pamphlet and I still couldn’t do it. Jesus Christ it made me angry how bad it was. Fucking main character and his loser ass friends just wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.23380501]

>>23377227
I hate them, but I love em, man.

[Anonymous No.23380606]

>>23377092
>Kant
>William Burroughs post Naked Lunch works (already read Junky and Queer and currently reading NL)
>Harold Bloom How to read and why. I guess because I want to get more out of the fiction I read.
>All of McLuhans work on Media but I'm not sure where to start.
>Anna Karenin
>Turgenyev's Hunter Sketches
>Plato

[Anonymous No.23381428]

>>23377092
sauce?

[Anonymous No.23382071]

Here are some of the books I'm really interested in :

>Clarel - Herman Melville
>The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
>The Riverside Chaucer
>Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant (one of those books I really want to read and engage with, but I'm too afraid to get filtered because of my scant knowledge of philosophy)
>Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
>JR - William Gaddis (already read The Recognitions)
>Women and Men - Joseph McElroy
>The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein
>The Cantos - Ezra Pound
>The Complete Poetry of John Donne
>The Enneads - Plotinus

[Anonymous No.23382267]

>>23377270
>Lotus Sutra
My favorite mahayana sutra. Joyful and almost evangelical feel. Doesn’t get lost in the weeds like lankavatara or some others. Some interesting stuff around universalism, assurances of buddha-hood and duration of pure lands, what happens to a buddha after extinction. Samantabhadra mini sutra at the end is really a visualization exercise.

[Anonymous No.23382359]

>>23377650
>Z for Zachariah
one of my favorites as a kid, but not a lot for the adult reader
>>23381428
daniwashington_