/lit/ - Literature

>>4240023
Along with Alas, Babylon, the Earth Abides is the Post-Apoc must-read.

>>4240235
Oh! How could I forget Fahrenheit 451...
>It was a pleasure to burn.

In the passive voice, and still a throat-grabber

>>4239220
My absolute favorite opening line of all time:
>In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Runner up, coincidentally enough:
>As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

My favorite smartass opening paragraph:
>This is what happened.

Runner-up for smartass opening paragraph:
>I am an invisible man. [From _Invisible Man_]

>>4239008
That's why I'm proud I wrote and finished a novel, if even though it was fetish-fuel smut.

>>4163902
There's the backwoods road short cut from Vassar to the nearest highway with decent hotels and food chains.

So here I am following every twist and turn Tabitha's SUV was making, the only other car in sight, just trying to go to the same Wendy's she's going to, and in my attempts to "drive casual" as if I could telegraph "I'm not following you, I swear" with my headlights I wind up riding her bumper all the way there.

(Joe was in his freshman year, it was a parents visit weekend, the Kings were known to be there, I had followed the SUV from the Vasar visitors' lot, and the SUV had freakin Maine "TKING" vanity plates.)

I went to college with him. Stalked his mother through the Poughkeepsie night entirely by accident once.

Anyway, he's not nearly as Freud and Jung influenced as his father is.

Should have stayed with Rick instead of getting on the plan with Laslo.

I was once asked to write a story about this picture. All I knew of the character was her image, name, and that she meant to be best friend with a pink tentacle monster.

So I did. It was fun.

Carthago delenda est, motherfuckers.

Memory palaces -- the spacial mnemonic technique, not the (several) books of the same name.

I've got the opening line of a sonnet that I love but I can't get anything good to flow from it:

My mistress' ass is nothing like the Moon

This is /lit/, not /database design/, for God's sake.

>>1511064
The monkeys in the Witch's Kitchen, of course.

{He-Monkey}
The world behold;
Unceasingly roll`d,
It riseth and falleth ever;
It ringeth like glass!
How brittle, alas!
`Tis hollow, and resteth never.
How bright the sphere,
Still brighter here!
Now living am I!
Dear son, beware!
Nor venture there!
Thou too must die!
It is of clay;
`Twill crumble away;
There fragments lie.

{Mephistopheles} Stupid fucking monkey.

>>1511045
Yes. Goethe gives the monkeys get all the best lines.

You don't remember the monkeys? ._.

I liked the monkeys.

Every Stephen King Novel - Evil is defeated...or is it?

(Stolen from an old Photoshop Phriday)

Best opening paragraph of all. damned. time.

>>1469615
In the Dark Tower series, the heart of the universe and the engine of creation is addiction.

That's a pretty grim revelation considering the author is a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict.

>>1465182
Yes, since translations of public domain works are copyrighted in an of themselves. PG's translations of the classics are typically a century old, so there's always a risk of the translation being outdated, as paradoxical as that may seem.

Although, newer is not often better...

[SHIT TIER] One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. [Uses "that", and is there such a thing as a bug that is not verminous?]

[OKAY TIER] As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. ["insect" is too far from the original word, and is too technical and dry, IMO]

[God tier] One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

However, German allows the sentence above to end in "transformed" and not read like dictation from Yoda was taken.

>>1464637
The best form-factor for diving into Project Gutenberg while diving onto a couch. Not to mention Amazon's own huge-ass collection of public domain materials.

The first month of my kindle, I read so much Dunsany, Blackwood, Machen, and Hodgson that a Hound of Tindalos corkscrewed out from the corners of my bedroom closet and said, "Dude, enough. You're starting to creep us out."

Also, frees up shelf-space for the books that require physical existence to use.

Plus, I know I am going to get a new apartment in about a year, which would be another horkin' heavy box of books to move or store.

http://librivox.org/

Truly free, not wouldn't-download-a-car free.

I remember when I had haters. I even had a janitor-hater.

Good times, man. Good times.

>>1463208
I think OP means "the primordial reading that made you who you are today," in which case, "Phantom Tollbooth effected me" is a bit poetical, but i think passes grammarian muster.

>>1463168

It depends on whether you were willing to accept that the TJB definition of knowledge applies to empirical observation (which the original TJB users, very clearly, did not), and how much you tolerate smartasses.

What he did was come up with moderately reasonably hypotheticals where the truth of the justified belief was a coincidence, often ironical.

Of the top of my head: A man is walking down a lane in Scotland. He looks at a field, and sees what appears to him to be a sheep, so he forms an belief, justified by apparent empirical evidence, that there's a sheep grazing in that field.

But what he is actually seeing is a straw poppet painted to look exactly like a sheep. So he's got a belief, and it's justified by his observation...but it's not true, so it's not knowledge.

But (and here comes the lololol), hidden behind the faux sheep, in the same field, is a real sheep. Thus, the belief "there is a sheep in that field" is true, yet that cannot be considered knowledge, can it?

As I understand them (and my undertand is limited), the Gottier examples are bullshit, because they make so many presumptions that you might as well call what Gottier is disproving as "naive epistomology", or even a straw sheep.

The trick is that defining knowledge as true justified belief without then defining "truth" and "justification" is opening yourself up to trolldom.