mallamp posted:

I think most people find it pretty stressful to read pages and pages of text that they don't get at all though
My #1 advice is to skip parts where you are getting lost, there's no shame in skipping, even my professors admit doing it

Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:

Also let me know how King Leopold's Ghost is. I have it on my shelf and plan to read it at some point.

Boatswain posted:

I'm mostly interested in Deconstruction as a historical movement and right now don't have the time for of grammatology/pharmakon/disseminations usw

good clip though

Franchescanado posted:

My next read will be To The Lighthouse, and it's my first Woolf.

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

Anyone have a recommendation for a French author or two who use really stripped-down prose? I'm trying to slowly re-learn all the poo poo I forgot in school and I figured reading some stuff in French is probably as close as I'm going to get to immersion anytime soon. I'm at a super basic level right now so ideally I'm looking for something that isn't too long or full of complicated grammar structures, etc.

CestMoi posted:

Aleister Crowley

derp posted:

This, that they were not to have, they were having. They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; and on and always please then always now, always now, for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one, is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one kindly, is one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now on earth with elbows against the cut and slept on branches of the pine tree with the smell of the pine boughs and the night; to earth conclusively now, and with the morning of the day to come. Then he said, for the other was only in his head and he had said nothing, “Do not drink soap! OK!” -- Doctor Bronner

fridge corn posted:

idk i kinda want to write about a bunch miserable neurotic gently caress ups being miserable and neurotic while everything around them collapses catastrophicaly (literally?? metaphorically??)

i havent come up any characters yet tho

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Oh great yeah post it here and *curse the whole drat forum* sounds great

chernobyl kinsman posted:

everything written after the Reformation cuneiform was a mistake

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

It's a combination of a few things:

1) I don't know if y'all ever look at the "users browsing" number for this forum but I do pretty regularly. It's . .low. We're one of the lowest-traffic forums on this site. That pisses me off because I non-ironically believe this is the best subforum on the site. The "recommend me a book please?" posts are the #1 way new people come into this subforum, so dropping sick burns on new book-requesters might be the only time I actually care about trolling, because it chases people away and hurts the subforum. I actually re-wrote the specific rules of the recommendation thread a few months ago to specifically clarify that if you were in the "recommend me a book?" thread, and you were not either asking for a book recommendation or recommending a book, you should be treading very carefully, for this reason. I probably need to incorporate this into the general forum rules, so it's spelled out explicitly and visibly, but I need to think about the wording -- I don't care all that much about veteran posters/readers trolling each other but I don't want people taking a giant poo poo on the Reading Rainbow types. It's hard enough leading goons to culture as it is. To use a metaphor goons can understand, it's spawn-camping newbies.

2) More generally, this forum serves two functions 1) goons recommending books to each other, and 2) goons discussing books with each other. Most of the threads in this forum are a lot of #1 and a little of #2, some cut the other way. As long as the discussion is substantive -- as long as people are actually discussing books -- a little bit of trolling mixed in isn't necessarily harmful; "your book sucks and this is why" can sometimes spur people to read better books. On the other hand, if it's just empty threadshitting with no content ("your book sucks, lol") , then everything devolves into personal squabbles and bullshit that everyone else reading the forum gets really sick of really fast, and nobody gets to discuss actual books any more. This is why I consider "content-free" posting such a big deal -- it leads to a downward spiral.

3) Most of the time this is a low-report, low-strife forum. I like it that way because I have a lot of things to do and generally speaking I view dealing with reports and complaints as the headache I have to put up with in order to do the parts of the job I enjoy, i.e., make sure I have a place to recommend books to people, talk about books, and run the Book of the Month. The corollary, though, is that when I start getting a lot of reports in a short period of time -- and especially if those reports and complaints are all focused on the same post(s) or poster(s) -- I take those reports seriously and listen, in part because if a lot of people think something's a problem then it's definitionally a problem because I have to spend time I don't have dealing with those complaints.


That's the rough outline of the thought process anyway. I try to defer to the sub-culture within particular threads where appropriate because that's the easiest way for us all to avoid headaches. I enjoy trolling and shitposting as much as anyone else here, but I care more about preserving the recommendation & BotM threads as friendly environments for new posters than I do about maintaining a general troll playground.

Nostalgia4Ass posted:

I hesitate to post here because I am not super cultured and don't really know what defines literature with a capital L and what is just popular fiction. I lurk and try to read some of the short stories that are posted and pretend I'd have funny or insightful things to say about stories.

I've read some Steinbeck and like Vonnegut's writing style (I don't have fancy words here but I like that his writing is sometimes about what's not said instead of spending a paragraph describing a single thing). I am looking for modern literature recommendations that have a similar minimalist prose and aren't so obtuse that I won't understand.

Shibawanko posted:

I always say Wilhelm Busch whenever a child asks me what my favorite comic is.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Shibawanko posted:

I'm reading Lem's Fiasco. It's great. Lem is a poet of inanimate matter.

What do you guys think will succeed the novel form as a literary vehicle? Most 21st century novels feel anachronistic to me. Probably my favorite book I read written after 2000 or so has been Remainder by McCarthy, but it feels like a lot of the form of the novel in that book is no longer needed, like it functions great as a novel of ideas expressed in a symbolic form, but a lot of the narrative feels a little tacked on purely to adapt it into a publishable form. Things like a plot, a protagonist (the protagonist is nameless because really, you're actively discouraged to identify with him, so why have a protagonist at all?), a beginning and resolution. This is a conversation I have a lot with professors but none of them ever even hint at a good answer to what should come after the novel. I have no idea either except that it should somehow be less focused on the actions of an individual, and have a great focus on the inanimate, on non-living processes.

Krankenstyle posted:

poo poo, anything can hit you in the gut if youre in the right/wrong headspace at the moment. no shame imo

but thats a really lovely poem though, and my tastes are at best pedestrian

Ras Het posted:

Who's the first literary feminist? Anything before Euripides?

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

Missed marginalia discussion by a few days but every time people talk about it I just remember my copy of Confessions of a Mask where next to one of the passages where he's meticulously describing a bunch of young dude's muscly, glistening chests giving him a boner, the reader wrote "gay???"

On an unrelated note, anybody here read any Mario Bellatin? Just picked up his Illustrated Biography of Mishima and I can already tell I want to check out more of his fiction, but it sounds like there was some dispute with his publisher and now most of it is out of print / never got translated to English. Curious if anyone happens to know another source for any of it, since buying ratty "collectible" paperbacks for $50 on ebay is not particularly enticing.

Mr. Squishy posted:

Is babbit underrated i thought people love it. Morte d'Urban is also very good in the same vein if you can stand papists.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Wrote. He's dead now.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

It's super frustrating as a critic to see deconstruction misused to mean "referential" by hacks

Cloks posted:

Finally read Aquarium. It was good and the negative events in the book aren't as bad as I feared they would be. I've already read Lincoln in the Bardo so I think I'm caught up on "thread favorites".

Foul Fowl posted:

i'd give a lot to be able to read her novels for the first time again. enjoy.

Tree Goat posted:

all forum posts are meticulously constructed with a firm authorial intent behind every word or phrase, and to suggest otherwise is to malign the poster's craft.

packsmack posted:

It's funny that you mention that about Gravity's Rainbow. I'm listening to that now and I was starting to wonder if I was just dumb. There's something about the constant perspective shifts that is making it hard to follow.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Thanks, Hieronymous.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

like, oh boy the new 800 page book full of tedious overlong descriptions and hundreds of pages of irrelevant fluff

I can't wait

Oliver Reed posted:

potentially posted before or already familiar to you, here are nabokov's thoughts on various authors

quick & amusing read

Burning Rain posted:

I honestly find it weird that BotL spends so much time and effort making GBS threads on things he doesn't like