/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23515228]

I dropped out of school at a young age, so I never read any of the books you are forced to read in high school. What are some essential books I should read (even if you view them as pleb shit)?
I'm only 19 if that matters.

[Anonymous No.23515234]

>>23515228

[Anonymous No.23515889]

Read any literature whatever that interests you, as long as it isn't mass-produced genre slop. Follow your curiosity and read as much and as widely as you possibly can. That's all.

[Anonymous No.23515935]

>>23515228
I dropped out of school at 14 as well (27 now), but most of the curriculum that I missed wasn't very interesting. Just look up strong authors and pick books that look interesting to you if you want to get into reading. Interest is paramount. If you want to read comprehensively then start with the Greeks I guess.

The gateway book into reading for me was Blood Meridian, but now I don't like McCarthy at all. I find his appeal adolescent.

What kinds of shows or movies do you like? It may be easier to rec you engaging stuff if you tell us more.

[Anonymous No.23515978]

>>23515889
This is the best advice.

[Anonymous No.23515985]

>>23515228
Most of the books you read in school aren’t very good. They are just bullshit they know any 15 yr old can read so they assign them because they are so easy. Here was our curriculum for sophomore English

>Scarlet Letter
Only full novel we read iirc
>Walt Whitman poems in excerpts (Leaves of Grass)
>Harlem Renaissance/ Langston Hughes
>The Awakening by Kate Chopin
>Yellow Wallpaper*
*We might not have read this. I just got it confused with Awakening because they’re both feminist horse shit you have to read.

[Anonymous No.23515987]

>>23515234
The catcher rapes the rye btw

[Anonymous No.23515988]

>>23515228
Oh wait. yeah, we also read Billy Budd by Melville

Scarlet Letter, Billy Budd and Awakening we definitively read in full. The rest were just excerpts.

[Anonymous No.23515991]

>>23515228
The only two texts of value I read in school were ONE short story from Joyce and ONE Shakespeare play. All else was straight sloppa.
Anyway read the Iliad. It's one of the oldest stories of all time that set the foundation for western culture and is still discussed to this day. Not a difficult read at all as long as you haven't tiktok-brained yourself.

[Anonymous No.23515993]

>>23515987
The catcher rapes the rye
The catcher rapes the rye
Hi ho the derrie-oh
The catcher rapes the rye

[Anonymous No.23515996]

lord of the flies is a great one
great for teaching teenagers but i reread it recently as an adult and it's still fucking amazing

[Anonymous No.23516023]

>>23515228
My school read a lot of dystopia novels: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World. That and a lot of contemporary racial minority goyslop that's better served as firestarter. Shakespeare as well, but that's a given

[Anonymous No.23516032]

>>23515228
No book is essential, but I recommend checking out Jesus's Son by Denis Johnson, purely because I suggested it to a coworker who's barely read anything and he was really into it.

>>23515991
>the Iliad
Come on man. I love reading detailed descriptions of shields and alien martial customs, but I don't know why you would suggest that to anyone unless you're 100% certain they're also fascinated by that very remote and specific world.

[Anonymous No.23516229]

>>23516032
Lol what? the Iliad may very well be the most influential work of art of all time? Are you a philistine?

[Anonymous No.23516303]

>>23516229
I think a basic problem here is the vagueness of OP's use of 'essential'. But that aside, The Iliad influential in the sense that it's one of the first works of literature. I think it would be extremely hard to trace a coherent, meaningful thread of influence between the Iliad and even something as old as, say, the earliest English novels, Defoe and Fielding and the like (but I'd gladly be proved wrong on this). So why read it unless you actually enjoyed reading it and were interested in the text itself? If you wanted to understand the sources of modern literature, you'd be better off reading people like Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. What's philistine is reading books purely for their cultural status. I mean, what did you personally get out of reading the most influential work of all time?

[Anonymous No.23516312]

>>23516229
The Iliad is influential in the sense that it's one of the first works of literature. I think it would be extremely hard to trace a coherent, meaningful thread of influence between the Iliad and even something as old as, say, the earliest English novels, Defoe and Fielding and the like (but I'd gladly be proved wrong on this). So why read it unless you actually enjoyed reading it and were interested in the text itself? If you wanted to understand the sources of modern literature (assuming that's what OP meant by 'essential' - and to be honest I don't think even he knew what he meant), you'd be better off reading people like Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. What's philistine is reading books purely for their cultural status. I mean, what did you personally get out of reading the most influential work of all time?

[Anonymous No.23516331]

>>23516229
The Iliad is influential in the sense that it's one of the first works of literature. I think it would be extremely hard to trace a coherent, meaningful thread of influence between the Iliad and even something as old as, say, the earliest English novels, Defoe and Fielding and the like (but I'd gladly be proved wrong on this). So why read it unless you actually enjoyed reading it and were interested in the text itself? Which, as I mentioned above, is the product of a very weird and remote martial culture that most people can't fruitfully project themselves into. If you wanted to understand the sources of modern literature (assuming that's what OP meant by 'essential' - and to be honest I don't think even he knew what he meant), you'd be better off reading people like Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. What's philistine is reading books purely for their cultural status. I mean, what did you personally get out of reading the most influential work of all time?

[Anonymous No.23516395]

>>23516331
>The Iliad is influential in the sense that it's one of the first works of literature.
Do you not understand how many of the following greats of literature (as well as society as a whole) admired Homer and reread and analyzed these works, even learning a new language for this one writer alone? This passionate admiration of a work seeps itself into the life and works of those admirers.
You only see it as "just one of the first works of literature and nothing more" because you've taken its influence for granted and have become blind to it.
You take numbers and math for granted, imagine what kind of epiphany it would take to make something out of nothing. Now that special something is everywhere and we take its profundity for granted. A fool would look back in history and say "Numbers? Numbers are everywhere. Everyone uses math. The creation of number systems and mathematics is not an impressive nor influential feat."
>I mean, what did you personally get out of reading the most influential work of all time?
It's a straightforward story that still leaves plenty of room for natural analysis and predates many shitty concepts and practices (ie. getting paid for word counts, the neurotic desire to one-up the previous generation of writers). Ancient epics are the only form of story telling that I feel the desire to go back to.

[Anonymous No.23516420]

My school was shut down by the government when I was 11 or 12 years old, so they gave each one of the students some boxes like pic full of books. These are the titles I remember:
>Don Quixote part 1
>selected poems of Wallace Stevens, bilingual
>selected short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa
>selected short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti
>Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
>Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
>manga Gunnm/Alita (the four tomes with the first part of the saga)
>The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpentier
>Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
>Pentamerone, Giambattista Basile
There were some other writers like Lope de Vega, Naipaul, Thomas Mann and Goethe, but I don't remember which the books. There was a book about architecture too.

[Anonymous No.23517608]

there's nothing essential reading books is like watching movies or tv shows dont let them fool you into thinking its an intellectual activity if thats what you are thinking