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I’ve been trying to slowly give myself a great books education too. It’s fun. If you get burned out in Iliad, I recommend taking a break to read The Song of Achilles and play Hades. Epic of Gilgamesh is another good early book, and short.
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Jan 1, 2022 21:28
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I sympathise with the idea of "a great books education", but the problem is that the list of big important books is so long that you have to be very picky, or you burn yourself out right away with too many classical epics and you never actually get around to the stuff you would enjoy. like idk if you would "teach yourself music" by first listening to 100 hours of BachModulo16 posted:Anything specific to start? I feel like they probably meant Goethe's Faust and not the krautrock band but in the latter case it's the debut > So Far > Faust Tapes > the frankly overrated Faust IV Ras Het fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 22:39
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Read Dante (Also Blinding) But yeah like others have said, great literature is fuckin great, but not everything will hit the same for everyone. if you're starting with the really old stuff and find it dry, get some suggestions for something more current before you give up on everything
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Jan 2, 2022 00:19
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derp posted:Read Dante I have the translation of Dante's Inferno. I plan to read that after the Old Testament.
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Jan 2, 2022 01:32
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Ras Het posted:I feel like they probably meant Goethe's Faust and not the krautrock band but in the latter case it's the debut > So Far > Faust Tapes > the frankly overrated Faust IV
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Jan 2, 2022 01:40
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I feel like half my posts in the Book Barn are just recommending the same book, but I'll say it again: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is a really good "start reading literature" book. It's fairly short, with lovely lucid prose, and not hugely challenging but still a very rewarding read.
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Jan 2, 2022 02:04
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hi thread! I have been on a roll lately, reading more in December than for every other month of the year put together, and I plan to keep that up. The Name of the Rose (audiobook version) was enthralling, and a lovely companion during weeks of gardening. I'm listening to A Hundred Years of Solitude now, which I haven't read since a partial high school attempt I think. It's not a bad rendition of it, the author does put his whole heart into it when pronouncing character's names in a way I find endlessly attention-grabbing, but I am considering just reading it instead. I'm on chapter 6 and my memory of the first read is not so great that I can recite my Aurelianos by heart. Oh, and I read Love in the Time of Cholera too. I loved it so much I think I'll make a painting of it some day. After this I think I'll pick up Borges. Any other recommendations for books that are not afraid to get weird with it/romanticize men's powerful pissing and other endeavors? I don't mind tracking down French/Spanish versions of things either For the record I think Murakami is the Moleskine of authors. edit: oh and because no doubt this will be interesting to some: poetryfoundation.org has archives dating preeeeetty far back. I have been having fun just looking through their stuff before going to sleep. not a bad way to get into poetry! Ramie fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Jan 2, 2022 |
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Jan 2, 2022 07:54
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catgirlgenius posted:Any other recommendations for books that are not afraid to get weird with it/romanticize men's powerful pissing and other endeavors? I don't mind tracking down French/Spanish versions of things either my friend you need to read bataille's story of the eye
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Jan 2, 2022 15:22
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catgirlgenius posted:Oh, and I read Love in the Time of Cholera too. I loved it so much I think I'll make a painting of it some day. After this I think I'll pick up Borges. Any other recommendations for books that are not afraid to get weird with it/romanticize men's powerful pissing and other endeavors? I don't mind tracking down French/Spanish versions of things either terra nostra by carlos fuentes
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Jan 2, 2022 17:28
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rabelais, the tain
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Jan 2, 2022 18:19
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thehoodie posted:terra nostra by carlos fuentes Yesssss
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Jan 2, 2022 19:09
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Antivehicular posted:I feel like half my posts in the Book Barn are just recommending the same book, but I'll say it again: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is a really good "start reading literature" book. It's fairly short, with lovely lucid prose, and not hugely challenging but still a very rewarding read. I want to second this. It's a beautiful novel with a wide emotional range and an interesting perspective on an often overlooked period in American history. E: for more content, I'll also add a suggestion to read some Steinbeck, specifically East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is another great source of relatively easy yet still beautiful and rewarding prose.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:46
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in the vein of steinbeck i also very much enjoy camus' novels which are generally pretty straightforward and enjoyable without being stupid
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Jan 2, 2022 21:35
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PeterWeller posted:I want to second this. It's a beautiful novel with a wide emotional range and an interesting perspective on an often overlooked period in American history. his short novels are good too
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Jan 2, 2022 21:41
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V. Illych L. posted:in the vein of steinbeck i also very much enjoy camus' novels which are generally pretty straightforward and enjoyable without being stupid I had a hard time with The Fall because it's in second person and for some reason it was just difficult to stay into it
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Jan 2, 2022 21:49
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Tree Goat posted:rabelais, the tain iirc in the tain it's a woman's powerful pissing
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Jan 2, 2022 22:12
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Modulo16 posted:Hi thread, Read Catch-22 or a Confederacy of Dunces.
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Jan 3, 2022 01:39
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A human heart posted:iirc in the tain it's a woman's powerful pissing last time we came up i believe we determined that it was both piss and menses
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Jan 3, 2022 01:44
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Tree Goat posted:his short novels are good too Agreed. Pretty much everything he's done is worth picking up.
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Jan 3, 2022 01:51
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PeterWeller posted:Agreed. Pretty much everything he's done is worth picking up. the werewolf novel is mediocre, unfortunately
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Jan 3, 2022 01:56
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Tree Goat posted:the werewolf novel is mediocre, unfortunately I thought that was unavailable.
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Jan 3, 2022 02:27
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PeterWeller posted:I thought that was unavailable. i reviewed it pseudonymously here
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Jan 3, 2022 03:18
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FunkyAl posted:Read Catch-22 or a Confederacy of Dunces. Yeah this is your way in, perhaps also Charles Portis. Have fun with it.
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Jan 3, 2022 05:42
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Heath posted:I had a hard time with The Fall because it's in second person and for some reason it was just difficult to stay into it i liked it up until the point that the narrator straight-up tells the countryman "btw i am an unreliable narrator"
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Jan 3, 2022 11:15
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PeterWeller posted:I want to second this. It's a beautiful novel with a wide emotional range and an interesting perspective on an often overlooked period in American history. I really wish I had read east of Eden in high school or maybe college. I needed to hear timshel as a young man.
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Jan 3, 2022 12:25
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Several years ago this thread recommended I start with Coetzee when I wanted to get into reading real literature, and I think it was a great suggestion. Waiting for the Barbarians wouldn't be a bad choice, by any means. My entire reading backlist pretty much consists of books I've found by lurking in this thread and slowly reading it in its entirety, so that would be my second recommendation. You won't find many outright bad books recommended more than once, and the posters' discussions will definitely help you figure out what you're interested in reading. Currently I'm on Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and I'm only halfway through but I'm enjoying it! In a week I'm going to start a simultaneous read of A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven with a friend and it's the first Knausgaard for both of us. Both of these books I also acquired via osmosis from this thread! On that note, I live in Uruguay and have been trying to get more into Latin American lit recently. To this end, I've been trying to track down some Brazilian authors in Spanish because I figured it would be preferable to reading them in English. I thought that, being so close geographically, it would be easy to find any reasonably popular author. Turns out that a lot of bookstores have everything Clarice Lispector ever wrote, but João Ubaldo Ribeiro has been a bitch to track down. I did meet a guy at a bookstore who lived (also working in a bookstore) on Itaparica for several years and had a few funny anecdotes related to my search and told me he would make every effort to track down An Invincible Memory for me because he read it and wished Ribeiro were more popular in the Spanish-speaking world. Seeing that Galeano is generally adored in this thread was also very fun! Tosk fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 13:27
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Read strugatsky bros' 'One billion years to the end of the world', beautiful book, and short
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Jan 3, 2022 15:11
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Proust Malone posted:I really wish I had read east of Eden in high school or maybe college. I needed to hear timshel as a young man. I read it my senior year of highschool but I can't say it made much of an impression. It's one of those messages that doesn't really resonate until you've already gotten past the point where it would be useful I think.
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Jan 3, 2022 16:30
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Not fiction, but I started David Levering Lewis' biography of W. E. B. Du Bois 1919 - 1963. Related to how USA history education is generally bad, every time I crack a book about US history I add a few digits to the "how bad is it really?" meter. Stuff I didn't know about happening practically in my back yard. Also, reading 1900's white critiques of Du Bois, the NAACP, or really any substantive progress at all, might as well be the 2022 propaganda being stumped across the US. Planning to start Nabokov's Speak, Memory for after Du Bois' bio, but may start before because it's such a tome.
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Jan 3, 2022 22:16
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Read and really enjoyed the very short Love by Hanne Ørstavik. I'm a sucker for sentimentalism though.
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Jan 3, 2022 23:56
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 My local bookstore came through for me! Looking forward to getting to this one or two books down the line.
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Jan 6, 2022 18:50
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Tosk posted:
ribeiro is cool
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Jan 6, 2022 19:42
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Sorcerer's apprentice was loving Goethe? The gently caress man, I woulda never guessed
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Jan 8, 2022 07:53
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Goethe also has the rad poem Erlkönig (the elf king)
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Jan 8, 2022 12:41
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A friend recommended that I give Murikami a shot and recommended Norwegian Wood to me. Overall, I felt it was a decent coming of age novel. But for a book about music it's curiously reliant on references rather than description, there's a long list of songs and musicians but little about how it means to play and listen to music. This is compounded by Murikami's difficulty in writing music well. Overall it gave the effect of creating a recommended soundtrack and supplemental reading list which was somewhat jarring and, I think, reflective of a lack of craft. I have trouble making judgement on the prose because while at worst rough, the spare sentences did give a suitable melancholic/detached affect and the book did flow well. And while it's always tricky making judgement on a translation (I read the Rubin translation, don't know if there's others), the American style slang used was jarring at times and I'm curious what the Japanese prose intended. When I was in my late teens I read a few Tom Robbins (like Jitterbug Perfume) and I'm kind of struck by the similarities in mood and horniness. Both authors probably have the horniness dial set roughly equivalently, but that one author has the mood dial turned to melancholy and the other has it turned all the way to joie de vivre.
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Jan 9, 2022 19:18
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Hwæt, someone has invoked murakami in this thread again!
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Jan 10, 2022 04:52
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im considering reading some real literature: are the megami tensei books from the 80s any good?
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Jan 10, 2022 09:57
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Shibawanko posted:im considering reading some real literature: are the megami tensei books from the 80s any good? read and post through the experience
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Jan 10, 2022 10:00
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Shibawanko posted:im considering reading some real literature: are the megami tensei books from the 80s any good? i never realised those games came from a book series, that's funny
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Jan 10, 2022 10:26
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I’m reading Clarice Lispector’s ‘An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures’, which is very good but it’s a lot internal dialogue of someone experiencing a full collapse so can be tricky to read if I am not fully focused.
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Jan 10, 2022 10:34
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