/lit/ - Literature

Plato's Republic.

I usually just tweet about whatever book I'm reading (usually on-the-hour updates). When I'm done I write a synopsis (the 140-character limit is fantastic for condensing ideas), and then an overall x/10 rating. I think it's really important and worthwhile. Reading should be a social activity, you know.

Oh, I also keep an exhaustive list of every book I've read in the last twelve years on my facebook, and make sure to write frequent status updates to let people know what's going on in my reading life. If a writer has a page, "liking" them is really important too, since it gives them exposure and shows that you have good taste.

>>3558256

It's probably the CSS the epub uses. There's a "delete blank spaces between paragraphs" option under heuristic processing. You can also output to HTML without CSS and use find+replace to manually remove them, then convert to .mobi.

Not PC and generally overbroad and crude. The fundament ideas are sound to an extent.

I like the aesthetic approach to criticism, but Harold Bloom is an obtuse windbag a lot of times. So, I started reading James Wood's How Fiction Works a few days ago. It's great so far.

Anatomy of Criticism, T. S. Eliot's various essays, and Borges' criticism are all good reads. Most of the critics associated with postmodernism don't really provide tangible benefits to readership imo.

>>3558176

It's historically notable because it delved into the pantheism thing before Alan Watts and Psychonauts Inc really pervaded the zeitgeist. Gotta look at it as more of a philosophical novel imo, although the bathtub scene is great.

>>3558143

>No way is Salinger mid-brow.

Muh subjectivity. I like him, but by your own criteria he doesn't fit into "mid-high brow." There's nothing in terms of theme or content that a smart high-schooler couldn't understand.

>He's a decent writer. Maybe not good. Decent.

Muh subjectivity, encore. You shouldn't include writers who purport to be literary but have few ideas and don't know how to execute them. They are worse than the Grishams of the world.

>Lol @ thinking Joseph Heller and Richard Yates aren't fairly widely read.

Joseph Heller, fair enough, but I'd argue that he isn't notable or important enough to include among the others on the list. It would be easy to pick out a dozen one-hit-wonder authors that would be better in his place. I wouldn't say Richard Yates is very widely read; he only gets exposure here because of Tao Lin. I mean, come on, you didn't include Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, or a couple dozen other writers that would fit the list criteria better.

>This saves space, and a good reader will know who you generally mean.

So this is a list for people who are already familiar with those authors? Then what is it supposed to accomplish?

Going along with this laughable, retardedly fun nonsense:

Move Salinger and Asimov to midbrow. Jorge Luis Borges, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and John Barth could all go in their place. Take DeLillo off there completely. Nobody should ever read him.

Needs more highbrow abstrusity: Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme? Umberto Eco? Italo Calvino? William S. Burroughs? Georges Perec?

Confused as to why Auster, Heller, Selby Jr, and Yates are on there since they're not widely read or all that notable. By "Smith" you mean Zadie Smith? Include first names imo.

I can tell from this that you get the majority of your opinions from /lit/. That's unhealthy. At the very least start browsing some forums or actually read a wider variety of writers. /lit/ has an extraordinarily narrow range and deifies marginally-important writers.

>>3558055

Abbyy FineReader is the best OCR software in most cases. I convert the PDF to HTML using that, then use Calibre to clean up line breaks and fonts, output to epub and use Sigil to do final cleanup.

You don't mean prosody, do you?

>>3531262

Infinite Jest, Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow. Pic related.

>>3531208

Nabokov wrote an essay about precisely that w/r/t Lolita. His short answer was "no," but he drew a sharp distinction between literature and pornography, not based on content, but on intent (porn succeeds insofar as it titillates, which is antithetical to what lit tries to do).

Pessoa is fantastic but a little hard to "get" without a solid background in lit. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a decent book, but quite overrated imo; it's decent plot-wise, but the prose is kind of obtuse. The Stranger is great on all counts.

Because I say so.

Samuel Beckett, John Barthelme, and Lydia Davis are all people who've done amazing things with the short-short form. Read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis if nothing else.

That's arguable at best. Also I don't really care. And Nabokov didn't have "a" mother language; he was a native English speaker as much as he was a Russian.

12-year-olds, dude.

You can't read them...that's kind of why they're famous.

Trying to decipher them would be more of an exercise in cryptography and linguistics, not literature.

Albion's Seed. Its purview is a lot more broad than what you're talking about, but certain parts of it go into depth about the cultural history of the Puritans, what influenced their migration to the US, and how that's echoed throughout our cultural history. You might have to cherry-pick through the book to get to those parts though.

Yes, but read his short stories first. They're pretty abstruse in that it takes someone who's really familiar with literature to explain exactly why he's so great. The TTC History of World Literature, which you can get on TPB, has a really fantastic lecture on the Metamorphosis. Your best bet is probably to read Metamorphosis, listen to that, then tackle the rest of the short stories.

You didn't give us any criteria. What do you want your translation to focus on (critical scholarship, literalness, the "spirit of the text," etc.

A lot of people here are current philosophy majors and will tell you to read the historically "big" philosophers who wrote on the subject, because that's what they've studied and are familiar with. That's fine if you have a lot of time to devote to the subject, but the philosophy of science is completely different than it was 100 years ago, so their thoughts on the subject are mostly obsolete.

Roger Penrose has a fantastic book called The Emperor's New Mind that deals with these subjects from the viewpoint of computability (Turing Machines etc.). It's a little old, but interesting, and is aimed at non-experts without being dumbed down.
Anthony Zee writes a lot about the intersection of physics and philosophy. I haven't read any of his books, but a lot of his essays that I've read are taken from Fearful Symmetry, and they're really good.
If you have a subscription to New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19426101.300-the-flexilaws-of-physics.html is one of the most interesting articles I've read looking at ontology from the perspective of the foundational principles of physics.

Robert Penn Warren

/lit/ I am disappoint.