ZombieLenin posted:To read literature correctly, you cannot rely on translations. Therefore, I call shenanigans on all recommendations in this thread for literature not originally written in the English language. Unless, of course, you are recommending things written in non-English languages to people who already speak (or can at least read) them. Yeah I want to know how many people here singing the praises of Voltaire and Mishima have actually read Voltaire and Mishima and not some  translation of them.
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Jun 19, 2014 21:13
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Smoking Crow posted:That's good because Tolstoy is a breezy writer that makes long passages seem shorter than they actually are. Most people don't read Tolstoy off of page count and reputation, which is unfortunate. Learning Russian would be pretty hard though.
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Jun 19, 2014 22:21
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ulvir posted:I've literally never read a "High Literature" book that's even close to "navel gazing" and I have no freaking clue where that sentiment would even come from. Never read any John Updike then. http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/observer1.html
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Jun 20, 2014 17:06
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Iamblikhos posted:I hate it when people say poo poo like that. Anything can be literary if it's written well. That's not the same as advocating or even admiring it. Thomas Mann and Nabokov sure as hell made pedophilia "seem literary", so what? Also, "the same way" means wtf knows what - here it's a phrase used pretty much to make you form certain associations through Pavlovian conditioning. You don't know a whole lot about John Updike do you. e: Iamblikhos posted:i second that, actually the fact your uncle was wearing a bandanna when he touched you does not actually bear on wallace's merit as a writer Clipperton fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 18:25
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A Rambling Vagrant posted:RealTalk: Imo Martin Amis is one of our two or threw greatest living novelists & London Fields is a better book than Infinite Jest. I don't know why goons aren't over Amis' dick: he's unbearably snobby, has terrible teeth, is a turbo-feminist-social-justice-nerd who is simultaneously obessed with machismo and male violence, writes about fat miserable sacks of poo poo coming to their inevitable tragic ends(like E/N), & passionately hates all popular things that aren't pub sports or board games. He's like the goon Moses. If the anti-"literature" goons in this thread came up with a really mean-spirited parody of a "literary" author it would look exactly like Martin Amis. Also apart from being a massive pseud he likes to go off about Muslims so that's not going to fly with D&D.
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Jun 21, 2014 11:05
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Burning Rain posted:I have that impression, too, and that's why I haven't read any of his books yet. I want to give him a go this year, though. Which one should I start with? extension du domaine de la lutte is the only houellebecq worth reading e: oh and his essay on lovecraft
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Jan 8, 2016 05:11
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blue squares posted:I'll start Aquarium if it wins otherwise I'll go chronologically Anathem is by far the least annoying of Stephenson's books for what it's worth
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Apr 18, 2016 22:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I feel like the universal human experience argument is always used to defend the hegemonic perspective but never less represented perspectives James Baldwin posted:You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:12
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noted defender of the hegemonic perspective, chinua achebe:quote:Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do —it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle. I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:40
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Squashing Machine posted:Twitter is the best current case against the common human experience argument what are you talking about, everyone on twitter is mad in exactly the same way
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Jun 7, 2018 17:20
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