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/lit/ - Literature

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6275567 No.6275567 [Reply] [Original]

What is on your to-read list for this year?

Pic related for me, along with a million other things on my backlog.

>> No.6275572

>>6275567
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Woman and Men by Joseph McElroy
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
Zettel's Traum by Arno Schmidt
Big Typescript: TS 213 by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Glas by Jacques Derrida
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Zibaldone by Giacomo Leopardi

>> No.6275576

>>6275572
>Finnegan's

>> No.6275612

>>6275567
Grade A fucking choice OP.
My favorite novel.

>> No.6275647

>>6275612
Have you read J R? I ordered the recognitions and I still have to read A Frolic of His own but only those two. I also plan on reading the rest of Pynchon (vineland, against the day, bleeding edge, mason&dixon)
>2666
>a bunch of calvino
>the decameron
>tristram shandy
>pride and prejudice
>some henry james
>portrait of the artist
>a smuggler's bible (McElroy)
>blood meridian
>white teeth
>the pale king

Just started Illuminatus! Trilogy today. It's really light but snarky pomo shit, pretty much exactly what I wanted right now tbh. Fun meta games but not too dense.

>> No.6275656

>>6275612
How would you say it stacks up to his other novels? Not OP but I finished A Frolic of His Own recently and I enjoyed the humor and the writing, though I did find it monotonous at some points and the last act kind of fizzled out for me. I'm thinking of saving The Recognitions for last considering its apparent difficulty. I'm excited for JR, though, because the premise is funny and I like the subject matter.

>> No.6275662

Here are some writers I want to read this year:

Chekhov
Turgenev
Maupassant
Carson
Woolf
Proust
Joyce
Kafka
Beckett
Homer
Nabokov
Pynchon
McCarthy
Faulkner
Dostoevsky
Tolstoy
Flaubert
Dickinson
E. Brontë
O'Connor
Shakespeare
Cervantes
Keats
Murdoch
Welty
Carver
Austen

>> No.6275669

>>6275656
>I'm excited for JR, though, because the premise is funny and I like the subject matter.

That was how I felt and I fucking adore this novel but read Agapè Agape first

>> No.6275683

>>6275656
Far and away his best. I read Recognitions for class and liked it so much I picked up all his other work. In my opinion, none of them are nearly as good as the Recognitions. Surprising, since it was his first book.

I would say JR is more difficult than it. Recognitions has some unattributed dialogue but the majority of it is understandable, and when it isn't it stands out as an important motif. It also has chapters, thank God.

You can read it with the annotations at williamgaddisdotorg if you want to get the most out of it/look up the French, German, and Spanish, but it's not entirely necessary. A good rule of thumb is to just dive in and pay attention to what you DO pick up on rather than obsess over every reference. Not getting the references is a fundamental part of the experience I think.

>> No.6275691

>>6275567

The stuff that is coming up soon includes

Sentimental Education
Middlemarch
Dostoevsky stuff including The Gambler, Notes From the Underground, Crime and Punishment
Independent People
Crash
2666

I also plan on reading Proust this summer

>> No.6275696

>>6275691
Post about crash after you finish it?

>> No.6275702

>>6275696

Sure. I'm pretty confident I'll love it though. I read 3 Ballard books last week and I've really fallen in love with his style. I'm not sure I've been so taken by a writer since I first encountered DeLillo

>> No.6275711

>>6275702
Really? What is he like? Also I've only read White Noise by Delillo, is most of his stuff good? I can borrow or get mao II right now and cosmopolis sounds interesting but I've heard it mostly being panned.

>> No.6275716

>>6275662
>... Russians, Modernists, Classics...
>E. Brontë
VOMIT

>> No.6275739

>>6275716
pleb

>> No.6275746

>>6275711

His style is very detached, almost clinical. I think what's most intriguing about him so far is the ingenuity of his plots, most of which revolve around a bleak dystopian vision. His novel High Rise is about a technologically advanced apartment building that houses a supermarket, liquor store, school, swimming pools, gym, etc, in which less wealthy people inhabit the lower levels and the wealthiest reside at the top. For some inexplicable reason the apartment building begins to fall into chaos as the inhabitants stop leaving the building, have wild parties into the night, and eventually begin splintering into disparate groups that attack one another. It may sound like a cliche concept but it becomes an incredibly potent metaphor and offers a startlingly familiar look at class structure, systems of interaction, manufactured roles, etc. Anyway, he has been extremely interesting so far.

And yes, DeLillo is amazing. I highly recommend you check out his novel Underworld. It is his masterpiece and a massive look at American culture/history in the second half of the twentieth century. It's a huge tome but it's endlessly beautiful, engaging, poignant, and very, very evocative of Mmurica. I also think the majority of his stuff is great, Cosmopolis is one of the few I haven't read but the Cronenberg adaptation is great and it seems like the source material he had was pretty good

>> No.6275775

>>6275746
Check out Ballard's Empire Of The Sun, so much stuff in his childhood re-appears in his fiction, it's crazy

Do you have to be American to enjoy DeLillo? I read White Noise and came out with a "meh", I know it's one of the early books on consumerism etc., but I've now read so many of that kind of book that I felt nothing new was in White Noise.... Is Underworld better?

>> No.6275786

>>6275775

I definitely plan on checking it out, sounds amazing.

I'm Canadian so I don't think you have to be American to like him.

The first time I read White Noise I was also underwhelmed though. I read Underworld for the first time 2 and a half years ago and it's still my favourite book. It's oceanic in its scope, very poignant, and I would say it's rather different from White Noise. You should definitely check it out, or at the very least read the prologue (it's about 50 pages) to see if you have any interest in reading the book. It's extremely worth your time

>> No.6275787

>>6275775
>Do you have to be American to enjoy DeLillo?
do you ask this question about other authors? about other art?

>> No.6275792

>>6275775
>Do you have to be American to enjoy DeLillo?

yeah nah i'm strayan and i like him more than the other murikan pomo authors

>> No.6275809

>>6275787
Well if someone recommends literature with

>very, very evocative of Mmurica

And I have no clue of what America is like, that may be a reason why it may be not very interesting to me personally

>> No.6275841

>>6275716
kill yourself

>> No.6275847

>>6275567
I just bought this book actually. So:

The Recognitions
Stoner
Hard Rain Falling
Amsterdam Stories
House of Leaves
The Broom of the System

What should I read next?

>> No.6275863

I can't really read /lit/ stuff for pleasure during the semester because I have a shit ton of /lit/ for class. Here's my tentative summer to-read list:
Petersburg
Life and Fate
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
East of Eden
Mason and Dixon
A Confederacy of Dunces
Oblomov

>> No.6275908

>>6275847
House of Plebs, get it out of the way.

>> No.6275989

I've been done with the "obligatory reads" thing for a while. Why should I read for anything but pleasure? I like to read science fiction. Generally newer stuff: I've read all the Asimov and Clarke I want to, and now I'm going to enjoy books for which I was always the target audience. I'm finding it a bit hard to get excited about any of the big names from this year (or even the last few recent years) though.
Maybe I'll try Leviathan Wakes. We'll see where that goes. I've still never read The Book of the New Sun. But I just said that I'm done with feeling obligated to read something because it's a classic, so maybe that should apply there as well even though it's sci-fi and not /lit/core literary fiction.

Even though I'm not going to read anything "classic" or otherwise "boring" unless I actually want to, I like to mix it up with literary fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, etc. If I'm going to read mostly high-concept sci-fi, it's easier to engage with the worlds on the page when I empty out that part of my imagination and focus on something completely different for a while. I like books about Asia and modern China in particular. There's some good stuff in every category as far as that subject area goes, but I've read a fair bit of it and I don't really have anything else queued up in that space at the moment, after the book I'm reading right now, at least.

I enjoy pageturners of course, and I don't feel bad about reading them. Long books can be really enjoyable because I grow to care about and understand the characters. It's nice to be immersed for a while in a particular writing aesthetic too, if it's even a half-decent one. Anyone care for The Pillars of the Earth? I might read it, but maybe I've got completely the wrong idea about it. My thinking right now is that it's probably unpretentious, which is what I'm hoping for.

Other than that... I read The City & The City last year, and I'd like to read more China Mieville, but I've heard that his other books are much more difficult, since The City & The City was intentionally written in a down-to-earth detective story style. I was thinking Embassytown, but I have no interest in suffering. There's also Perdido Street Station. No idea if I'd prefer either over the other.

Other than that, I think I should keep my field wide open. It's easier for me to get into a book if I start reading it when I've just heard about it and I'm still excited. "Impulse reads" are more engaging than books I've "assigned" myself. Of course, in order to keep reading regularly, I like to make sure I have another book picked out for whenever I finish the one I'm on. That makes it a little tough. Gotta be on the lookout for new titles all the time so that I'm still hype on one when I'm ready to pick up a new book.

One more thing. I don't resent anyone who still wants to focus on working through some kind of "canon." I think there's value in the classics! It's just that I've read all that I care to right now.

>> No.6276024

>>6275989
>Literary fiction is boring: the essay: the 4chan post

I think you might non-ironically enjoy reddit

>> No.6277445

Moby Dick

for the third year in a row