/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7211532]

Books that have changed your life.

[Anonymous No.7211535]

The death of Ivan illych or however it's spelled

[Anonymous No.7211538]

Murakami is basic tbh fam

[Anonymous No.7211539]

>>7211535
really, why?

[Anonymous No.7211543]

>>7211538

Murakami got me to enjoy reading again

[Anonymous No.7211547]

>>7211532
Did this book change your life by making you think that being a weird little autist will get you laid like crazy? Because it won't.

[Anonymous No.7211552]

>>7211547
It will if you're good looking and have low standards

[Anonymous No.7211554]

>>7211547

Whatever his name is alpha as fuck
he fugs his best friends girl
that girl goes a mental hospital
he visits her and fugs her roomate
all while he fugs this other girl on the side and that girl becomes his main bitch

[Anonymous No.7211870]

A combo of Infinite Jest and the Wind Up Bird Chronicle got me to start interacting with people more.

IJ had more of an effect on me, but I'm going to reread WUBC fairly soon.

> tfw you will never fight the embodiment of suffering with a baseball bat while smooth jazz plays

[Anonymous No.7211990]

>>7211532
bad taste fam

[Anonymous No.7212060]

The Brothers Karamazov changed my life, but it changed back pretty quickly.

[Anonymous No.7212188]

>>7211554
That's Watanabe, also he only fugs her roommate afterwards i think, not when he visits the suicidal unfugable girl (ugly in the movie btw, also the movie is terrible), "his main bitch" is cute though.

[Anonymous No.7212215]

Siddhartha tbh, thanks /lit/

[Anonymous No.7212219]

>>7211532
must be a disappointing life

[Anonymous No.7212426]

Dorain Grey got me into reading. I guess that changed my life.

[Anonymous No.7212542]

>>7212215
reading it now. about half way thru. very good stuff

[Anonymous No.7212609]

Reading Gravitys rainbow after it was namedropped in a Neil gaiman book was kind of life-changing.

[Anonymous No.7212652]

>>7211554
>pines over some depressed kunt throughout the whole book

Yeah alpha as fuck

The true alpha is Nagasawa

[Anonymous No.7212657]

300 years on, it still legitimately, genuinely upsets people.

[Anonymous No.7213163]

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
The Dark Tower Saga and IT by Stephen King

[Anonymous No.7213211]

>>7212215
most boring book in the world.

[Anonymous No.7213256]

>>7211532
Do you recommend me this book. I haven't read books in a long time and my vocabulary doesn't really extend that far.

[Anonymous No.7213276]

Every book I've ever read

[Anonymous No.7213278]

>>7211538
What is this 'tbh fam' meme?

[Anonymous No.7213321]

I wish it were as easy as reading a book to change my life. I'd say nothing I've read has really had that kind of impact, or I could say all of them like >>7213276 because everything I've read has had an effect to some extent.

But if I really had to choose one, it would be Replay by Ken Grimwood. That one motivated me even if I haven't been able to materialize what it helped me internalize.

[Anonymous No.7213338]

Heart of Darkness

[Anonymous No.7213348]

>>7213278
to be honest fam.

fam is hip slang for family or your crew. that's not the meme. the meme is this kind of evolving faggotry that gets worse as more white suburban 15 year olds join the /lit/ forum. it takes many forms, anon!

[Anonymous No.7213404]

>>7211870
>tfw will never meditate on life at the bottom of a well

[Anonymous No.7213413]

>>7211532
Don Quixote. But this is probably just because I am crazy. But it really gave me the idea that I have a lot more freedom than I think.

[Anonymous No.7213418]

[Anonymous No.7213422]

Bhagavad Gita
Tao Te Ching
The Selected Poems of E E Cummings
W.S.Merwin's The Rain in the Trees (after I realized it was one extended poem)
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Everything that Joseph Campbell has done

[Anonymous No.7213484]

[Anonymous No.7213551]

[Anonymous No.7213676]

>>7212215
>>7212542

Just finished this after starting it last week.

It's probably my new favourite book.

Fuck, what a journey.

Only real INTJ bros will understand though.

[Anonymous No.7213773]

A Voyage to Arcturus
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Book of Urizen
(as a child) The Neverending Story

[Anonymous No.7213791]

>>7213676
Hesse was INFP.

[Anonymous No.7213792]

>>7213676
if you were really an INTJ you'd know how bad Myers-Briggs is.

[Anonymous No.7213796]

>>7213773
have you read the superior follow-up to Arcturus

[Anonymous No.7213802]

>>7213796
fuck off cunt fore i glass ya

[Anonymous No.7213803]

>>7213791
Death of the author tbh

[Anonymous No.7213806]

'I always wanted to get into meditation but was put off by all the metaphysical bullshit that usually resolved around it, this book helped me open up to it a lot.

[Anonymous No.7213811]

>>7213792
I'm pretty convinced MBTI describes the reality of things pretty well, to a certain degree that is.
It's still a mostly incomplete theory and it doesn't help that 9 out of 10 people who talk about it have absolutely -no- idea what they are talking about.

Your point makes no real sense because Jung was an INTP, and INTPs are better at determining what is and what is not.

[Anonymous No.7213838]

>>7213796

This book is hard to find, but I really want to read it

[Anonymous No.7213858]

>>7211532
Really OP?

[Anonymous No.7213869]

>>7213796

That's not Devil's Tor

[Anonymous No.7213946]

>>7213792
Not the guy you're talking to but I'm an INTJ, I thought I was a sucker for these things because it nailed me 100% accurate - my therapist says that she believes there is negative stigma around it because of how accessible it is to the public - she believes that it is genuine.

[Anonymous No.7213987]

>>7213811

>Your point makes no real sense because Jung was an INTP, and INTPs are better at determining what is and what is not.

3/10.

[Anonymous No.7213993]

>>7213987
What part are you denying?

[Anonymous No.7214028]

>>7213946
But it's ultimately useless. What are you going to do with those four letters? The only actual application I've seen is to brag with it around the internet and sperg out about your own unique-snowflakery.

Funny that you mention your therapist - my ex, a PhD student in psychology, told me it's about as useful and accurate as those four proto-psychological character types (you know, melancholic, choleric, etc.), i.e. extremely generalized and lacking in detail.

[Anonymous No.7214039]

Chomsky you cunt why did you have to sell out

[Anonymous No.7214044]

>>7214028
Not the same guy, it's actually helpful to understand others and yourself better.
How could you deny that something like this could be useful, -if- it is rooted in reality?

[Anonymous No.7214049]

>>7214039
Has he sold out though?

[Anonymous No.7214055]

>>7214028
I agree, it just doesn't feel like your normal cold-reading techniques like say, psychics. "Someone died in your family..." etc, this just feels very specific, too specific to be snake-oil tier.

[Anonymous No.7214079]

>>7214044
So are hundreds of other personality tests and questionnaires. Ask an actual, non-"Jungian" psychologist, preferrably working in academia, what he thinks of MBTI. Psychotherapists will tell you anything as long as you pay them money.

As for "grounded in reality"... Battlefield 3 is also grounded in reality, in the sense that it presents a hypothetical, highly simplified and ultimately useless account of a fictional conflict, only set in some semi-realistic, modern setting. I wouldn't go to war based on my in-game skills, but it's enjoyable.

[Anonymous No.7214100]

>>7214079
I don't think this is true though, no other 'personality test' is as insightful as MBTI.
Also depending on the person you ask you will receive different answers, check out the reddit pages for MBTI sometime, there are many people in academia who think it's highly useful.

It really is not useless at all once you manage to envision the whole canvas of the ''theory''.

[Anonymous No.7214105]

>>7212652
>The true alpha is Nagasawa
this
nagasawa is a fucking sickcunt
i want to be nagasawa

[Anonymous No.7214122]

>>7214100

https://www.recruiter.com/i/critique-of-the-myers-briggs-type-indicator-critique/

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf

http://www.opd.net/abstracts5.html

http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/mbti-flawed-measure-personality

[Anonymous No.7214130]

>>7214100
>no other 'personality test' is as insightful as MBTI

"Unlike some personality questionnaires, such as the 16PF Questionnaire, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or the Personality Assessment Inventory, the MBTI does not use validity scales to assess exaggerated or socially desirable responses As a result, individuals motivated to do so can fake their responses, and one study found that the MBTI judgment/perception dimension correlates weakly with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire lie scale. If respondents "fear they have something to lose, they may answer as they assume they should."

[Anonymous No.7214149]

>>7214122
>>7214130
Oh yes, this is definitely true.
But I said earlier that at least 9 out of 10 people who talk about MBTI are total morons, it doesn't help that the tests are such shit either.

I don't think that says anything about the theory in itself.

[Anonymous No.7214153]

>>7214100
Alls I know is I've taken it a number of times and gotten a number of different results. It is not a scientific theory. It cannot make consistent predictions. It definitely has no basis in neurological or psychological facts (does anyone really believe there are 16 fundamental types of people?).

It's like astrology, which is also often a useful means of anchoring discussions about personalities and how and why relationships between people with different personalities succeed or fail.

Take any person and their behaviors could be usefully described by relating them to any one of the Mysers-Briggs types. Give me any person and any Mysers-Briggs type and I'll describe that person as that type and make it sound sensible and authentic

[Anonymous No.7214162]

>>7214149
The provided links do say a lot about the theory itself, its imperfections, vagueness and departure from diagnostic standards.

[Anonymous No.7214182]

>>7214162
It's probably valid to a large degree as it is a hugely incomplete theory, from anecdotal experiences though I could never be convinced that there is no truth to MBTI.

>>7214153
This is true, it can make consistent predictions under the premise that your type has been determined accurately.
The problem is with the tests usually, it's a faulty test -and- it relies on the person taking the test being honest and self-aware.

>It definitely has no basis in neurological or psychological facts
Check out the reddit MBTI pages sometime, apparently there were some findings in neuro-science that fit well into the framework of MBTI.

>does anyone really believe there are 16 fundamental types of people?).
MBTI doesn't necessarily make this claim, -if- the theory is correct you would have to assume Jesus and Hitler were the same type of person, which is obvious nonsense.

[Anonymous No.7215125]

>>7213256

O.P. Here and yes I recommend it, the people here care more for writing and forgo story or to an extent uniqueness. For the most part the solid pseudo intellectual input from people who talk of philosophies and adopt ideas from dead white men of a bygone time tend to be the worst of this impropriety. Personally, I like that it has a focus on the relationship between characters and tries not to skip a step in this process, coupled with the fact it's easy to read and short means that an afternoon to read it isn't a chore, so just about anybody can. Then again a solid second place choice is "Momo" for me... it's a children's book.

>>7212609
Gravity's rainbow is amazing, people here almost always seemingly haven't read it and probably don't want to when they talk about it. I went into thinking it would be a dauntingly hard read, nope, references weren't terribly hard to get I maybe had to look up something every couple pages, and it is hilarious. 20/10, get your friends high and read on,

>"Why is there an alien organ thing fighting Pirates"
> "Why is there a troop full of midgets"
> "Where did all the bananas come from?" >"Whats with the mountain being so erotic and why do they come for gnomes instead of the sexy mountain?"
>"Whats with the 18th century R4nDum capitalization of nouns"

[Anonymous No.7215130]

>>7212215
Iktfb
One of those books that I just happened to read at the perfect time. If I had read it a year prior, it wouldn't have impacted me as much. Finally felt like I wasn't alone in my beliefs.

[Anonymous No.7215132]

Gotta give it to Gravity's Rainbow.

I know it's a meme book around here to some extent, but man, that book changed my life. I'd grown up thinking reading was just homework. Whenever I had to read any fiction I just thought it was drudgery. This attitude lasted way into my high school years when if I wasn't sleeping in class, I was cutting them and hanging out in a friend's basement doing bong hits. We'd play this game where we would get really high and then make up a random scenario, like, OK, what if everything was very serious, right, like it was a serious place and time and everything was very serious, but what if when everything was at its most serious and you expected the next moment to continue the trend of utmost seriousness, what if, at that very moment, a gorilla wearing a fez on a giant unicycle rode by. My friends and I would collapse into convulsions of laughter, punching each other softy and slapping our knees. "No! Stop it! Fucking stop it!" some red-faced somebody would choke out, wiping away tears. We called it this whole thing The Game. And normally we only played it while we were blazed in one of our basements, but once in a while we would play it in school.

One fateful afternoon a few of us numbskulls had detention together, and so we sauntered in, high of course, and sat down to serve our time. At some point we decided to play The Game, right there in detention. The supervisor, an English teacher who was known for being kind of a hardass, was for some reason being supernice this afternoon. We occasionally got pretty loud with our laughter, but he didn't tell us to keep it down even once. He just sat there at the desk reading his newspaper, and we even a couple of times got a chuckle out of him. When there was about fifteen minutes left of our sentence, he came over and sat on a desk near us and we saw he was holding a book. "Here," he said, "I think you guys might get a kick out of this." We read the cover: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. OK, we said, and took the book skeptically.

I was the first one to read it, and my mind was blown. This guy Pynchon had been playing The Game since the early 70s. You think that since the book's about World War II that it's going to be all serious. But then you're like, wait, whaaaat? Did that guy just go down the toilet? Why is there a pie fight during the serious war? Why is there weird sex happening? Weed? This guy blew all our random scenarios out of the water. I gave it to all the other guys to read, and from that point on we pretty much stopped playing The Game entirely. We decided to leave it to the master. Pynchon, whoever you are, we salute you.

[Anonymous No.7215137]

>>7215132

10/10 Eating that pasta

[Anonymous No.7215815]

>>7215125
Thanks, its my first time visiting this board and I'm trying to get into books again. I'm reading the girl with the dragon tattoo now, that's probably what you guys would call a "meme book", but I just felt I couldn't go wrong with it. That it would be like a high rated movie that you would enjoy regardless of your taste.

[Anonymous No.7215844]

>>7215815

Nope gravity's rainbow is the only "meme book", it's been call the sci-fi version of finnegan wake, which unlike gravity's rainbow, is unreadable, clearly written by a drunk man, and takes an entire book club 20 years to read, that copy pasta is a fantastic description of Pynchon's book. again 300/10 do recommend.

[Anonymous No.7215870]

>>7211532
What's up with this Murukami meme here? He's fucking terrible. Only one notch above John Green.

[Anonymous No.7215878]

>>7215870
its a troll son
we all know haruki is meme tier

[Anonymous No.7217069]

This book legitimately. I love Victorian literature now, and also Eliot genuinely gives advice to live by.

[Anonymous No.7217082]

>>7213338
>>7213338
how in the world

[Anonymous No.7217190]

>>7215870
>>7215878

Really? I bought Norwegian Wood yesterday because of a friend. Is really that fucking bad?

[Anonymous No.7217198]

>>7217190
No hes actually pretty good. but since hes popular and accessible, he must be shat upon.

[Anonymous No.7217814]

[Anonymous No.7218085]

>>7217190


>>7217198
This guy knows whats up.

[Anonymous No.7218298]

Profoundly changed my orientation to my own mortality and finitude for better or worse.

[Anonymous No.7219277]

>>7218298
>>7217814

Thanks, I'm totally reading these based on the cover.

[Anonymous No.7219303]

>>7218298

I have it, and haven't been able to make a dent in it.
At the risk of annoying you, can you tell more about how the philosophy changed you

[Anonymous No.7219404]

>>7213278
It's the new
>iktfb