/lit/ - Literature

>>2508778
>>2508769
>You are taking them off life-support and whatever happens remains to be seen.
Again, this type of analogy only works if the woman was hooked up to life support against her will. Unless she's raped, she's engaging in sex knowing she could be impregnated.

>>2508750
>Fetuses don't have wishes. Therefore, they yield to the wishes of the mother.

So if a human lacks autonomy, it's no longer illegal and immoral to kill them if we wish? What's stopping us from killing the mentally ill or the comatose? If you argue pro-choice through autonomy, you have to draw some sort of line where humans are protected or you can't really punish a mother for suffocating her newborn or blowing away her elderly father with advanced alzheimers. Is there anything significant enough about birth that it changes the situation ethically? Very young children are still pretty much completely reliant upon others and still can't really understand the situation or express their wishes.

>>2508641
Sure, we can look at a classic example used against Kant, the murderer chasing a person running past you. The killer stops to ask you which way his target went, you can either lie and protect the person, a small contradiction, or tell the truth and go on your way with an easily prevented death on your conscience.

I think the difference is that outside of rape, the woman is engaging in sex knowing she could be impregnated. This is where she loses the ethical high ground, she's taking a risk and a human life is at stake. I don't think it's ever justifiable to kill an innocent person (regardless of their state of development) unless their wishes can be expressed.

>>2508591
What are ethics without consistency? If you consciously go against what you might think is the "ethical" decision in a situation, you either have to re-assess your ethical views or self-deceive until you forget about it or rationalize that you made the right decision.

>>2508520
Ehh, again, transferring the words to a document serves as a first revision, lets me catch the errors that we all know slip by spellcheck now and then, gives me a good sense of whether my narrative flows or needs work. Also I have pretty decent WPM so it really doesn't take that long to do and I'm keeping my mind in the story.

Not saying my method is best by any means, just felt like it's worked pretty well for me in the past.

>>2508471
It depends on what I'm reading. I admit to reading a lot of mindless stuff like King and Goodkind, pretty much just lay back and enjoy those. If I'm reading a difficult piece or even the ones with a well-established message that weren't hard (huk finn and the catcher in the rye come to mind for example), I take the book slower and reflect each time I take a break from the book. During/ after reading it, when I lay down at night I usually end up thinking about the book for a while if I'm really into it.

>Brave New World
>sherlock holmes

mmm, seconding these.

I've always liked using pencil and paper as it gets me away from the computer and when I transfer it to a word processor I tend to pick up any spelling/ grammatical errors and I begin editing as I write the story up.

1984
Eeeee Eee Eeee
Catch-22
Naked Lunch

>>2508331
Yeah I have a handfull of old books and I agree that they can age well, oldest is a hardcover of Uncle Tom's Cabin printed in 1912. It def shows its age but I'm looking forward to giving it a read sometime soon.

Honestly I don't think e-readers and traditional book owners need to bicker so much, seems like wasted energy.

>>2507164
Interesting, thanks. I'm going for a BA in linguistics, prob why the book caught my eye in the first place. I wouldn't mind reading synopses and taking my time on the book if it might give me a wider perspective on language. How do you feel it helped you learn Italian?

>>2507140
I dunno, I guess I just want to know whether it's worth my time. Did you take anything from what you read? Do you start to internalize the language more as you go? The way Welsh did accents and phonetics in Trainspotting felt pretty smooth and intelligible, it's just goddamn obnoxious so far in FW.

Anybody here manage to read Finnegans Wake? I've got a copy and I've tried getting into it a few times but it reads slow as fuck and I feel like I should be reading chapter summaries/ synopses and taking notes as I go... I liked Hawthorne more than this shit.

I liked what Ken Follett did in the pillars of the earth. But yeah I agree, probably not really an objective answer here.

Almost finished The Teachings of Don Juan, I'd definitely recommend it.

Is it pretty much a given that reading goes slow as shit for Finnegans Wake? I've gotten like 15 pages in maybe and basically remembered nothing since I was focusing on interpreting the language.

I don't even know how the fuck you can read this in more than like 30 minute sessions.

The shining. Insomnia and the Drawing of the Three I guess I'd have to tie for second.

>>2247704
/thread

good work lads

>Does such circuit of books exist?

maybe, you could always just use the tried-and-true method of asking a librarian or a well-read person, which is probably more constructive in the long run anyway

>>2204313
They were. There's a part in Atlas Shrugged where a character gives a speech. It's 70 pages long. Literally 70 pages of talking. Not fucking making that up. It summarizes the entire book which was like 1200 pages in the edition I read. She could have saved everyone a fuckton of time and just published the speech as a summary of her ideas on ethical egoism and anti-communism or something.

>>2204300
>hey way to bump a thread that's been dead for an hour

this is /lit/ not /b/

p.s. go eat some poop

>Is this book a bit too deep for me or should I go for something different?

The writing isn't difficult. It's slow, the philosophy is retarded, and the characters a little unrealistic but sure whatever. I couldn't bring myself to finish it, personally.

your MOM is the defining author of the 20th-21st century LMAO

BURNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

>>2204231

This. We can say that this book sells better than another book, or that this author writes at a higher level than another, but there's a million examples of classics that were unpopular at the time and/ or were written with a smaller vocabulary

I think it's pretentious and pointless to attempt to classify books on an objective scale of quality

>>2204196
I'll second that. It's pretty approachable-- not terribly long, not overly wordy, very engrossing. One of my favorite books. Go for it OP.