/lit/ - Literature

>>4694071
That's what I prefer, even and especially when it comes to works that support my own views. I can tolerate strawmen and cheap shots if the author makes it funny, though, like Chesterton does, for instance.

Can someone recommend me a biography of Benjamin Franklin? Nothing too hagiographic, please.

>>4642623
In my defense, as I've said, I haven't had that long yet to chew it over.

I also haven't read much literature from the period, so sometimes it's hard to know if there are literary conventions I'm unaware of being used (or subverted).

>>4642613
A little off-topic, but I loved the idea of Don Quixote trying to live according to the tropes adopted by works of fiction purely for convenience.

I think this book wouldn't have made as much sense to me before the Internet.

>>4642591
You think so? If Don Quixote had never gone mad, he presumably would have just spent the remainder of his life reading and puttering around instead of having weird adventures.

>>4642572
That's actually quite a good way of looking at it; I suppose my initial reaction was to view Quixote's sudden death as Cervantes's way of preempting more fanfic, and to view his abrupt deconversion from knight-errantry as making a separate point.

>>4642573
About a month. For reasons too complicated to be worth explaining, I don't know exactly when I began the book.

For the uninitiated.

>>4629739
The movie captured some parts of the book well (like the death of Artax in the Swamp of Sadness) but there are a lot of semi-incomprehensible / existentially horrifying things in the book that didn't come close to making it into any of the films.

Ende grew up under the Nazis, and you can see his distrust of people who want to control people's way of thinking coming out in the book.

Also, Atreyu is green in the book.

"The Neverending Story" is an excellent book. And you need the hardback edition if you want red-and-green text rather than normal-and-italics.

Most of Bukowski's oeuvre.

I read 'Lolita' in public. Then again, I have an edition with the least provocative cover imaginable.

>>4583142
Like many other of my favorite passages in literature, I have this one more-or-less memorized.

>>4585060
If it's amusing, I'd say that has some value. I think that some fics (the ones that are awful more because of story structure and characterization than just because the author is semi-illiterate) can also be valuable in that they compel you to examine why they're awful, and can teach you a but about writing by showing you what errors a writer can make.

>>4584791
No? Okay, I recommend 'My Inner Life,' then.

>>4584759
>Legolas was riding along the woods and one day he found a baby whaped in colth so he got off his horse and went to the baby and then Legolas said"who left you here little one"and then the baby just cryed and then Legolas pick her up and hold her and then the baby stoped crying and then Legolas said"your name is going be Laura"and then Legolas and the baby went onto the horse and went back to the castle where he lived.

Tell me you don't find that amusing.

>>4584764
Yes. Yes, it is. After that I plan to continue my rampage with 'Dracula' and Greg Sestero's book about the making of 'The Room.'

>>4584739
If you can't appreciate the 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' value of truly terrible fanfiction, I feel bad for you.

Relatedly, I'm working on a French translation of 'My Immortal.'

I know how you feel, OP. When I finish 'Don Quixote,' this is up next.

>>4583133
I find Lovecraft's racism mostly funny because it's often so over-the-top, at least in the instances in which it's an intrusion upon the narrative ("So we were looking for corpses or reanimate and we found the body of a black guy [BLACK PEOPLE ARE SCARY] and took it back to the lab...").

>>4581170
I thought 'Cool Air' was pretty great, too.

"That's as may be," said Andrés, "but this master of mine, what deeds is he the child of, seeing as how he refuses to pay me any wages for my sweat and toil?"

I enjoyed Philip Dwyer's biography of Napoleon.

As I recall it, having read it in middle school:
Hester Prynne is persecuted for having an illegitimate child.
Chillingworth suspects that Dimsdale is the father.
Chillingworth tries to find proof of this for literally decades, but fails.
At the end, someone dies. Either Hester or Dimsdale. I think.

OP, I'm planning to read the Bible for similar reasons.

From what I've read already, it seems to vary pretty widely between irrelevant gibberish and engaging poetry/stories from part to part.

'Capital,' Karl Marx
'Les Misérables,' Victor Hugo
'Homage to Catalonia,' George Orwell

'Lolita' and 'The Neverending Story' also deserve a mention, though "changed your life" might be an exaggeration.