/lit/ - Literature

Try "Legacy of Ashes". A history of the CIA. Really long, and not that exciting, but if you're into history you'll get a kick out of seeing how CIA had a hand in certain events.

I actually liked "The Rum Diary" the best. He really destroyed his talent with chemicals in his later years, and you can see this when you read through collections of his newspaper articles. By the time of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" he was already going downhill.

Most magazines are now indistinguishable from advertising. RIP traditional publishing.

My favorites are Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated. I still think those have the most consistently good writing of any magazines out there. My theory is that musicians and sports players can always find common ground without lapsing into political duckspeak like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Think Neil Young talking about guitars with Ted Nugent, or Hunter Thompson talking about college football with Nixon.

>>2672471

I would agree with this. There are good stories separated by a lot of boring parts (that kind of describes Tolkien in general, I guess). The origins of Angband, and the story of Beren and Luthien, were my favorites. I think those are the ones you mentioned.

Also, it gives you a kind of hipster satisfaction in knowing the backstory to all the cultural references the characters make in LOTR.

http://spaghettilogic.org/dropbox/nomoremrniceguy.pdf

OP, try this book. I don't know if there's anything in there for you, but I see a lot of guys on this site that could stand to read it. It was really helpful in getting my life together.

Also, this book has probably positively influenced my life more than anything else:
http://judoinfo.com/pdf/hagakure.pdf

Just reading a book won't solve everything, but it can make you aware of problems you might not realize are going on. Good luck, and I know what you mean about people being too lost to help...it feels kind of hopeless sometimes.

These people have never actually read any ghetto books. "Whoreson" & other books by Donald Goines are pretty good, but they're set in the 70s and earlier. Eric Jerome Dickey's novels are more modern, but the stories are a bit more ridiculous. That might actually be a good thing though, not sure what you're looking for.

I still haven't found anything as good as Boyz in Da Hood.

I always thought that Machiavelli's "Art of War" was more applicable to modern conflict than Sun Tzu's. If I read Machiavelli's book and then read the news, I immediately see connections, but that doesn't happen with the older book.

Caslon, it's on my business cards.

>>1645008

Yeah, although it's not strictly related, his book "Class" will also blow your mind. It's the kind of thing every American should read once in their life.

LOLed my ass off at OP's picture. Pic semi-related, it's the African Tom Wolfe

Yeah, I am always surprised that people consider it anti-Semitic. I guess some people will complain about anything. The first impression I got was "Wow, Antonio's really a douchebag".

There are a lot of aspects of WWII you could read about. But let me suggest one. Whenever I talk to people who were actually in combat, the thing that strikes me is how they didn't see it as really heroic or tragic, but just as not making any sense. The kind of thing that would have been hilarious if people weren't getting killed, almost like a Three Stooges episode.

The only thing I've read that really shows that side of the war is "Wartime" by Paul Fussell. "Saving Private Ryan" comes close, but only in certain scenes.

There's a difference between art and "ART". There are always going to be talented people of all political persuasions. The ones that maintain the status quo, talented or not, are more visible because they get time in galleries, magazines and coffee-table books. People who appreciate talent will still find it, regardless of how hard the merchant classes push their pathetic definitions of art (pic related).

The Art of War. Especially if they pull an Alex Trebek and take great pains to pronounce the author's name correctly.

>>1628581

Ralph S. Mouse terrified me. For some reason, there was something deeply disturbing about a sentient mouse and a magical motorcycle in an otherwise realistic world. Same went for Stuart Little. I couldn't shake the image of that slimy motherfucker slipping out of a human birth canal.

Maniac Magee was pretty good at the time. In retrospect, it seems a bit like fan-wankery to have the weird outcast kid be the hero that can do no wrong and becomes loved by everyone. But, hell, what is Harry Potter then?

What was your favorite book to have read to you as a child, /lit/?

Pic is unrelated. My favorite was actually "The Twits" by Roald Dahl.

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody." --Oscar Wilde

>>1610637

I was going to mention Michael Chabon, but someone beat me to it. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is good too, BTW.

Stephen King recommended that people try to write 1,000 words a day. There are some people who can do more, but it's debatable whether it's an improvement (take King himself for example).

It is easier to write when you feel like it, and giving yourself the freedom to never finish something can be very motivating. But I find that writing daily helps me get over the inertia of inactivity, and sometimes gets me in the mood to write when I wasn't before. If I have complete writer's block, I'll just write in my diary.

>Book about WASPS
>Sittenfeld
>mfw

>>1608004

Oops, I didn't even realize that. I guess that explains it. It's not like his face is everywhere, he's just mentioned more often in the mainstream media than I would expect.

I want to know why DFW is being viral marketed to hell and back everywhere I look. I don't think anyone ITT is a marketer or has bad taste, I'm just curious. It's as if some media conglomerate paid a little too much for his copyrights and is now flogging the shit out of them to try and recover their investment.

Read it, but read between the lines. Keep in mind that Hoffman is Jewish, and therefore comes from a group that have never been fully vested members of a society until recently. So he has the mindset of being in a hostile environment where survival is tough, the authorities don't care, and you have to get stuff by stealing, cheating, begging, or scavenging.

If you're a member of a minority group, and/or are too antisocial to fit in with the majority group, you definitely should read this book. Otherwise, you can get greater rewards by building a society instead of chipping away at it.

http://spaghettilogic.org/dropbox/Abbie%20Hoffmann%20-%20Steal%20This%20Book.pdf

>>1588907

What if this is as good as it gets?