/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19606005]

So what did you guys read 2021? I know 23 isn't exactly an impressive amount of books, but I enjoy my pace. Some of the highlights.

>Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
His plays are better than anything else he wrote and only his early plays. That being said The Importance of Being Earnest is a perfect play. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was amazing though and De Profundis was unintentionally hilarious and profound.

>If on a Winter's Night a Travler by Italo Calvino
This was just an incredibly smart and well written book. It's also exactly the write length given it's premise.

>The Gormenghast Novels
The first two books are perfect and Peake's prose blew me away. It was like reading a painting being made one brush stroke at a time. The third novel is definitely weaker, but still good in it's own way.

>The Savage Detectives by Bolano
Standard /lit/ book. Not much to say beyond it's worth every bit of praise it gets.

The only book I read this year I wouldn't recommend would be the Bonfire of the Vanities by Wolfe. Felt like reading the slowest Law and Order episode in existence and dragged the second half.

[Anonymous No.19606064]

Exactly the write length, you say?

[Anonymous No.19606173]

>>19606064
lol I just realized I made that typo.

[Anonymous No.19606187]

>>19606005
Only book I read was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Such a pleasant read full of joy and some dickensian personages. Wish I had read it as a kid. Starting Beowulf as we speak (Burton Raffel's cool translation, love that guy).

[Anonymous No.19606199]

>>19606187
Well if you haven't read Gormenghast I would give it a try. A common descriptor of the book is it's the Addam's Family if Dickens wrote it. Peake was also a great lover of Dickens and you can see it in how he named characters.

[Anonymous No.19606223]

>>19606005
i'm at 29. there just weren't a lot of books i wanted to read this year. i started more books than i finished. i did read some cutting edge philosophy, and classics like bros k and world as will, so it was good year over all

[Anonymous No.19606235]

>>19606223
How was Roth?

[Anonymous No.19606236]

>>19606199
Now that you mention it, I actually have Gormenghast sitting on my shelf. I started flicking through it and was impressed by some of the first lines of the first book, how the narrator describes an old dark tower as "a finger in a hand, pointing blasphemously towards heaven." (I'm paraphrasing terribly but this was the idea). I liked that. By the way, my edition of Treasure Island is illustrated by Peake! Such a nice coincidence. Definitely will read Gormenghast next year.

[Anonymous No.19606247]

>>19606236
That's really cool. Makes me want to read Treasure Island and find a copy with his illustrations.

[Anonymous No.19606258]

>>19606235
really good, i should read more of his work. have only read portnoy's complain and the dying animal. good way to wash down bros k desu. dosty is all about love in this high-minded way, and you're like, "well, what about sex?"

[Anonymous No.19607637]

>>19606005
I've only started reading again in September, but I'm very happy with what I've managed so far. Top left is my most recent read, right now reading Eugene Onegin.

[Anonymous No.19607807]

Fiction/literature:
>The Bible
>Nibelungenlied
>Decameron
>Richard II, Cymbeline, & Othello by Shakespeare
Non-fiction:
>The Ancient City (by Fustel de Coulagnes)
>Selections of Aristotle
>Essays of Francis Bacon
>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in progress atm)

Plus about 5 shortish technical non-fiction books related to my degree/jobs (too specific to post), and maybe 5-6 shorter less serious more juvenile fiction that I read in the evenings (incl. a reread of The Hobbit, and some Sherlock Holmes).

Of everything I have read this year, The Ancient City was the most memorable. Highly recommended. Nibelungenlied was memorable too, although the ending was a literal mess. Decameron I was less impressed by. Aristotle seems half-based, half-retarded. Gibbon is amazing and honestly at the rate I am reading him I may be done with this before the end of the year even though I have over 600 pages left (reading the full unabridged Everyman's editions).

So that's it, my reading this year. It's not very much but it's still a respectable year of reading I think.

[Anonymous No.19607818]

>>19606005
>>19596684

[Anonymous No.19608008]

>>19606005
I notice from Greek Lyrics to Western Wind it's all books on poetry. Which was your favorite? I assume you recommend all based on your post, but what if you only had to pick one or two? I'm particularly intrigued by the Mary Oliver one since she's a poet herself.

[Anonymous No.19608398]

>>19608008
Western Wind is more of a text book and as such more in depth. It has the benefit of having an anthology of poems in the back. Oliver is written for people who already have a basic understanding of poetry. If I were only to pick two Western Wind and Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.

[Anonymous No.19608510]

>>19607637
Did you also find Dostoevsky hard to read/understand?

[Anonymous No.19608527]

>>19608510
I have previously read Brothers Karamazov, Idiot, and Crime and Punishment (3+ years ago) without many problems, but the first part of Notes from the Underground was difficult to get through. Really long sentences about pretty abstract stuff made me have to reread lines a few times.

[Anonymous No.19608625]

I started 2021 at the tail end of my religious phase, the last of those books i finished in early January, the brilliant Islam & the Destiny of Man by Gai Eaton. That along with Martin Lings's bio of Muhammad are the best works of literature I've read from a religious perspective. From January to May I read some mediocre to okay books on meme topics and by meme authors, as well as by some local authors. The meme author Miguel Serrano blew me away with Serpent of Paradise but after reading some more of his books I quickly lost interest. Thanks to Serrano, I read Jung's memoirs, a great read, a very likeable man, but I felt no desire to investigate further. About this time I randomly picked up Okuda's Lala Pipo, which remains one of the funniest novels I've ever read.

In May I began with the Powys brothers: with JC's A Glastonbury Romance (which had set on my shelf for years, after learning of him via Hugh MacDiarmid) and Llewelyn's Pathetic Fallacy. The former being the best thing I've ever read, perfectly capturing everything I had been looking for in literature. Llewelyn is far less appreciated than his brother (the other brother TF I've yet to start on), little of his work remains in print, but ultimately I'm closer to him as a personality than his JC, or any other writer. Together they've introduced me to so many writers I'm excited to get started on. Easily the biggest positive influence on my life I've had from books to date. The Powys bros influenced reads so far include: Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte, Henry James... all writers I want to keep reading.

Other stuff: I found Carlyle to be an astonishingly good prose stylist. I feel I've a little bit of his John Knoxian spirit in myself, I don't think he really comes thru in the short excerpts people often post on /lit/, he needs time to build. Shame there's so few affordable editions of his work out at present. I read a lot of Knut Hamsun, and I enjoyed seeing how he changed as a writer over time, become far more traditional and embittered as time went on. Kipling's Kim was a real masterpiece, a genuinely moving story featuring some beautiful prose passages, reading this I can't comprehend how Kipling has the reputation of being a boorish and jingoistic type, his love of India and its people was overwhelming.

The final thing I'll likely finish was the Selected Letters of Larkin, which starts off funny but soon become very sad. A tragic life as all lives are. Following him from college to the grave was an experience I won't soon forget. I was also amazed to discover he liked Hardy & Llewelyn Powys as much as I do, literally never seen LP's name mentioned in another book, what are the odds...

Anyway, thanks for reading this blogpost. I'm not re-reading it for typos, so plz excuse 'em. Have a merry Christmas.

[Anonymous No.19609029]

In no particular order
>Aristotle's Metaphysics
>Spinoza's Ethics
>Twilight of the Idols
>Ecce Homo
>Antichrist
>Philosophy of Redemption
>Discipline and Punish
>Totem and Taboo
>Three Essays About Sexual Theory
>Don Quixote
>Madame Bovary
>Keeper of Sheep
>Story of the Eye
>Tao Te Ching
>Confessions of an English Opium Eater
>Eclogues. Georgics - Virgil
>The Flowers of Evil
>Emily Dickinson Complete Poems
>What is Cinema? (still reading)
>The Stranger (currently rereading it)

[Blarty Hongo !H0lVGXJNm6 No.19609033]

Best to worst, very roughly:

Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Odyssey, Homer
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
Silence, Shusaku Endo
Richard II, William Shakespeare
The Piazza Tales, Herman Melville
Dubliners, James Joyce
Kiss Kiss, Roald Dahl
Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Raymond Carver
Discourses, Epictetus
Enchiridion, Epictetus
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Ersatz Elevator, Lemony Snicket
The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket
Someone Like You, Roald Dahl
Carmen, Prosper Merimee
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
Switch Bitch, Roald Dahl
The Wide Window, Lemony Snicket
The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket
The Wendigo, Algernon Blackwood
Factotum, Charles Bukowski
Troy, Stephen Fry
A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver
That One Should Disdain Hardships, Musonius Rufus
The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket
The Contender, Robert Lipsyte
The Miserable Mill, Lemony Snicket
Flappers and Philosophers, F. Scott Fitzgerald
South of No North, Charles Bukowski
A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peters
My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl

[Anonymous No.19609061]

>filtered by Roald Dahl

[Anonymous No.19609108]

Quiet and the girl with the dragon tattoo were really bad, otherwise I enjoyed my reads this year

[Blarty Hongo !H0lVGXJNm6 No.19609150]

>>19609061
I like Roald Dahl, but "My Uncle Oswald" was obnoxious.

[Anonymous No.19609161]

>>19609150
I thought it was quite comfy.

[Blarty Hongo !H0lVGXJNm6 No.19609220]

>>19609161
Oh, god no. So much wind-up for such lame punchlines, particularly the bit with Proust. Have you read "Kiss Kiss" or "Someone Like You"? My expectations for "My Uncle Oswald" were way overinflated after reading those two collections. The one Dahl short collection I haven't read is "Over To You"; I'm saving that for a special occasion. it looks good.

[Anonymous No.19609323]

I've read four volume collection of legendary sagas (fornaldersaga).
Notable mentions here are the Hervarar saga, Frithjof's saga, Gautrek's saga, saga of Rolf Kraki and the Hrafnistumannasögur.

I read some Icelandic family sagas, like the saga of the Sworn Brothers.

I read some historical works like Agrip, Sverris saga, Sverris speech against the bishops, the Danes journey to Jerusalem, and the Bagler sagas.

I read some Edda poems like Hyndluljod and also the prose Edda.

I also read a reconstructed saga about Hakon Ivarsson.

Next year my mission is to read the complete Flateyjarbók.
I also want to read Saxo, but that has to wait.

[Anonymous No.19609904]

>>19606005
Lolita
Elementary Particles
The Rings of Saturn
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Master and Margarita
The Screwtape Letters
Silence
No Longer Human
Stoner
Ficciones
The Great Divorce
Waiting for the Barbarians
Confessions
Paris Spleen
Kafka on the Shore
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Norwegian Wood
Metamorphosis
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Kokoro
The Sound and the Fury
The Brothers Karamazov
The Magus
Snow Country
Paradise Lost
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Iliad
Theogony + Works and Days
The Odyssey
Fathers and Sons
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
The Oedipus Cycle
Red Sorghum
2666
Invisible Cities
Mythologies
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Foucault Reader
Fragments
Protagoras
Five Dialogues
War and Peace
The Republic
Vertigo
Whatever
Submission
Serotonin
The Loser
The Passenger
Ghosts of my Life
Discouse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Slow Days, Fast Company
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[Anonymous No.19609926]

>>19609904
What were your favourites?

[Anonymous No.19609981]

>>19609926
Great would be: Lolita, War and Peace, 2666, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Iliad and Odyssey, the Brothers Karamazov were all top tier.
Honorable mentions for exceedingly good would be: Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Invisible Cities, Stoner, Kokoro, and The Savage Detectives (current read).

[Anonymous No.19610015]

>>19606005
>This was just an incredibly smart and well written book. It's also exactly the write length given it's premise.
Check his other "combinatory literature" AND his sci-fi.
Skip the political short stories if you're not interested/knowledegeable in the Italian postwar situation

BONUS: A song written by Calvino (et al.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqv-XEqPzhc

[Anonymous No.19610019]

>>19610015
Do you recommend Calvino? I want to read his Book of all Books at some point but I've been told by my friend I should read his other books first.

[Anonymous No.19610064]

>>19610019
>Do you recommend Calvino?
Yes
I didn't really like his first novel (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), but, eh, it was his first, after all.
The Ancestors' Trilogy (The Cloven Viscount - The Baron in the Trees - The Nonexistent Knight) is also great.
But I'm quite a fanboy for him, so take it at that.
>I want to read his Book of all Books at some point but I've been told by my friend I should read his other books first.
A quick search tells me that one is from Calasso, not Calvino.

[Anonymous No.19610142]

>>19610064
I'm sorry, I mixed them up. It's the second time this week. Calasso is apparently extremely complex I hear. Regarding Calvino, I really enjoyed Invisible Cities, so I may read his other works next year.

[Anonymous No.19610181]

>>19610142
>Calasso is apparently extremely complex I hear.
Probably true, I personally never read him. To be honest I had no idea who he was, but he made news when he died.
>Regarding Calvino, I really enjoyed Invisible Cities, so I may read his other works next year.
As I mentioned, that one falls in the "combinatory literature" fase, so check "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" and "If on a winter's night a traveler". You might also like his sci-fi ("Cosmicomics" - it has nothing to do with "comics" as in "pictures with bubble dialogue", btw- and "t zero")

[Anonymous No.19610193]

>>19609108

curious why you didn't like Quiet?

I read it in high school and got a decent amount out of it but

[Anonymous No.19611247]

>>19606005
I failed my goal

[Anonymous No.19611575]

>>19606005
Here's all I read this year, I still have time for two more books. Reading "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, might read one more.

[Anonymous No.19612512]

Plain Tales From The Hills
Der Geist der Science-Fiction
Chilenisches Nachtstück
Die wilden Detektive
2666
Roberto Bolano Fragmente
Reise ans Ende der Nacht
Die Krise der modernen Welt
Holzfällen
Wittgensteins Neffe
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der mechanischen Reproduktion
Universalgeschichte der Niedertracht
On Writing
Dubliners
Der Mantel und andere Geschichten
Nach dem Bankett
Teatro Grottesco
Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß
Der unerträgliche Gaucho
Leben zu verkaufen
Der Prozess
Wenn ein Reisender in einer Wintersnacht
Das Blau des Himmels
Telefongespräche
Inferno

sadly cba to translate

[Anonymous No.19612528]

>>19612512
>Telefongespräche
Rodari? Impressive
>Wenn ein Reisender in einer Wintersnacht
Based

[Anonymous No.19612631]

>>19612528
No, bolano. But im intrigued now, tell me about this rodari fellow.

[Anonymous No.19612675]

>>19612631
>No, bolano
Ah, my mistake
>But im intrigued now, tell me about this rodari fellow.
Not sure you would like him: he was a left wing dude who, after wwii, wrote mainly children's stories and poems to promote peace, friendship, attention to nature, etc.

One of his books is called "Telephone Tales", and with my poor command of German I mistranslated your title

---

The planet of truth

The following page is copied from a history book used in the schools of planet Mun, and speaks of a great scientist named Brun (note, all the words over there end in "un": for example, you don't say "the moon" but "thun moon", "pasta" is called "pastoon," and so on).

Here it is:

"Brun, inventor, two thousand years old, currently stored in a refrigerator, from which he will awaken 49,000 centuries from now to begin life again.

He was still a child in diapers when he invented a machine to make rainbows, which ran on soap and water, but instead of ordinary bubbles released rainbows of all sizes, which could stretch from one end of the sky to the other, and served for many uses, including hanging the laundry out to dry.

In kindergarten, playing with two rods, he invented a drill to make holes in water. The invention was much appreciated by fishermen, who used it to pass the time when the fish weren’t biting.

In first grade he invented: a machine to tickle pears, a frying pan for ice, a scale to weigh the clouds, a phone to talk to stones, a musical hammer that while pounding nails played marvelous symphonies, and many others.

It would take too long to recall all of his inventions. We’ll mention only the most famous one: the lie-telling machine, which ran on tokens.

For each token you could hear fourteen thousand lies.

The machine contained all the lies in the world: those which had already been told, those that people were thinking at the time, and every other that might be invented later.

Once the machine had recited all the lies possible, people were forced to tell only the truth.

For this reason the planet Mun is also known as the planet of truth.

[Anonymous No.19612736]

>>19612675
interesting, i have always had a penchant for "weird" childrens tales; i think ill grab a copy.

my favorite compilation of such stories is "das große buch". here is a link; its written in fairly plain german, im sure you will enjoy it:

>https://www.morawa.at/detail/ISBN-9783446233126/Heidelbach-Nikolaus/Das-gro%C3%9Fe-Buch?bpmctrl=bpmrownr.31%7Cforeign.248043-1-0-0

[Anonymous No.19612820]

Faserland
Death of a Salesman
The Death of Iwan Iljitsch
Nine Stories
Stiller
Ansichten eines Clowns
American Psycho
The Stranger
Franny & Zooey
Die Ringe des Saturn
Of Mice and Men

Only got back into reading in October. I think I'll read two books until NYE (reading The Trial right now and maybe I'll read Housekeeping by M. Robinson afterwards).

[Anonymous No.19612836]

from pincher martin onwards (ignore the sideways ones at the bottom, they're in my to read pile)

[Anonymous No.19612889]

1-Classical Music: 101 fundamental questions- Annette Kreutziger-Herr & Winfried Bönig
2-Gandhi: An autobiography
3-Crime and Punishment-Dosto
4-The sociology book: Big ideas simply explained. DK
5-The Denial of Death-Ernest Becker
6-The Magic Lantern-Ingmar Bergman
7-The things they carried-Tim O' Brien
8-Ways of Seeing-John Berger
9-Writer's guide to Character Traits-Linda Edelstein
10-Documentary:Hostory and Style-Eric Banouw
11-Confederacy of Dunces-John Kennedy Toole
12-The Noonday Demon-Andrew Solomon
13-Robot Dreams-Isaac Asimov
14-The Musical Brain-Daniel J. Levitin
15-Ubik-Philip K. Dick
16-Led Zeppelin: When the Gods Walked the Earth-Mick Wall
17-Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan-Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (about to finish)

Books I didn't finish.
1-Guide to English Literature: From Beowulf through Chaucer to Medieval Drama-David M. Zesmer.
2-The Germans-Erich Kahler
3-The Folklore of Sex-Albert Ellis

[Anonymous No.19612891]

>>19606005
not a complete list but some notable entries that spring to mind:

>crime and punishment
didnt much care for it, although i do admire how dostoevsky refuses to stand above his characters and instead deeply lives the lives and thoughts of characters he disagrees with.
>canterbury tales
very enjoyable, especially the way the different tales interplay with eachother. did get a bit tiring near the end
>the souls of black folk
such an incredibly empathically human book, mixing the individual struggles, mistakes and errors with larger historical trends. i wish more history was written like this
>invisible cities
i loved the scattered philosophical thoughts and the rich way they were explored. could be a bit up its own ass sometimes though.
>letters of van gogh
probably my favorite i read this year. i can with decent certainty say that Van Gogh's fame is a weird double success since he only really became known after his letters were published. hes both an incredible intense painter and writer and his writing should not be underestimated. The intensity of living, his affirmation of life despite the tragedy of it, and his refusal to compromise make him often more nietzschean than nietzsche muster up himself.

[Anonymous No.19612905]

>>19612891
>although i do admire how dostoevsky refuses to stand above his characters and instead deeply lives the lives and thoughts of characters he disagrees with.
I've watched like 5 Peterson videos in total and that notion was something he said in a lecture. Did you just copy that?

[Anonymous No.19612926]

>>19612905
no? I really dont like Peterson and dont watch his lectures. i disliked the book and what i usually do when i dislike a major work is look up some essays or critical editions to see what other people find in it. The norton critical edition has Dostoevsky's notes he made while writing the work, and in here he consciously makes this choice to refuse a godlike narrator and instead use one immersed in the perspective of the characters. Multiple essays also notice this fact. one famous one i like said that 'many writers scare can their audience, but dostoevsy is the only writer that can scare himself'
please do not attribute this line of thought to Peterson.