http://4-ch.net/games/kareha.pl/1206548566/
This is a nice thread. Let's have a book edition.
I just read my first book by Haruki Murakami, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Murakami gets a lot of praise in these parts, and after reading this book, I can confirm that it isn't unfounded. The book to me felt a bit weaker towards the end, but I really liked hearing the stories of Nomonhan, Siberia, and such.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
A couple of my friends had wanted to read this at the same time as a sort of pseudo-book club, so I decided to join them. It was interesting to see a few little references to the events of The Silmarillion, like the mention of the sundering of the elves. Anyway, it's a fun book, but you probably already knew that considering what a well known classic it is.
>>145
omg, shills will be shills. Tolkien books are for total retards, they teach degeneracy, make normies.
>>147
just any. it's okay for you to read bullshit for retards, it makes you funny.
>>132
I always felt that was a bit of the reveal—that AM complains so much about not having the personhood or agency that he clearly does have, in excess even.
Blues People by Amiri Baraka
Some of the black nationalist rhetoric in this hasn't aged well, along with some of Baraka's other weird claims about the blues, but an otherwise nice introduction to great artists and some interesting reflections on them. Pretty nice to listen along as Baraka introduces them.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Branislaw Malinowski
A Polish academic isekai's on a remote area of Melanesia for 2 years and proceeds to describe the local population in autistic detail. A classic work of vintage British social anthropology and therefore a must read. For better or worse, Branislaw made some massive contributions to ethnography and his description of the Kula trading system is very interesting, even if it isn't quite the devasting blow to modern economics the way the author thinks it is. The book would have been better if it had been more focused on the Kula system specifically instead of veering off into a dozen detours, like detailing the folklore, the clans, the artisanal industries etc. but that's the autism of British anthropology. This book is best paired with Malinowski's personal diaries which make for hilarious reading and feel like something you'd find on /r9k/, an urban white dude ranting about how frustrating and alone he is while wanting to hate fuck the local women. Highly recommend it but seriously, unless you're hyperfixated on Melanesia like most anthropologists have been, you should probably just read the intro and the chapters on the Kula system and leave the rest for another time.
Star Wars EU Thread.
No new Disney canon allowed only legends.
What books have you read?
I am currently reading Children of the jedi.
Didn't Disney kill the EU? I would have thought it would have been source material for them but as usual coorperate suits and self-annointed screenwriters think they can do everything better.
If they can de-canonize what is stopping them from de-canonizing the original films? They could get J. J. Abrams to rehash them and give them a Disney make over. I always thought Empire Strikes Back would be better if it had more convoluted plot and characters flatter than a loli’s chest.
>>5
Such a shame, the Old Republic era is so much more interesting than their half-assed replacement 'High Republic'
Disney scrapped the Clone Wars series too?
I remember enjoying the Republic Commando series. All this fuss about the new Andor series, those books managed 'gritty, real war' even within the established rules of Star Wars (disposable clones).
Sadly, most of the novels seemed to revolve around people's OC-donut-steals. Kevin J. Anderson's super-cool Jedi-Sith-hybrid defeated-Luke-twice is just a radical guy. It's Sonic levels of weird.
(Heard the original Thrawn Trilogy is solid, but I never read it.)
Some books seem promising then you start reading and just can't read it because you either don't like the style, it's boring, it's crap.... etc.
Name of book:
How far you got:
Why you stopped reading:
Logic of Sense by Deleuze. I read it after Difference and Repetition but it was a bit boring imo.
i am a heron. i ahev a long neck and i pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. if you dont repost this comment on 10 other pages i will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans
Biological Exuberence. I started reading it for completely childish reasons(wanted to see how many gay birds there were) but got bored of the concept quite quickly.
Mein Kampf. Bought it when I was going through a childish edgelord phase and took it to high school to everyday to piss everyone off. I never managed to read it all because it’s boring as fuck, especially the biographical parts which are just whiny and annoying. It’s just a dude bitching about his life.
>>82
I’ve never been able to get through any of the books he co wrote with guattari, but his books on Spinoza, Foucault etc are a pretty good read
Ai no Kusabi
In my first attempt the first five page filtered me greatly with its cuckold + rape + bdsm combo.
In my second attempt it was the horrible prose, I could not tell what the hell was going on, who is who and why does what.
I think I read the first 10 pages.
The anime was ok.
>>76
Just be glad you got out before the second two thirds of the book, which consist entirely of the main character spiraling stream-of-consciousness style into catholic guilt.
150 days of sodom by marquis de sade. I couldn’t stop fapping and interrupt my reading.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Page 80 or so
Found it kind of boring. Maybe I hadn't gotten to the more maths parts of the book, but it was dry and too autobiographical for me. I'll probably try and read it another time, but there are other books I would read before then.
Simulacra and Simulation.
Read like twenty pages, but it's practically indecipherable. Maybe need some 'background' or something. I didn't spot any kind of insight in those pages that didn't seem obvious.
>>90
Baudrillard has a stream of consciousness style of writing that makes it hard to get through. Its a pretty insightful book if you keep up with it. Remember, he was writing this stuff in the 70s when a lot of his points weren’t obvious. A good background reading would be Borges’ one paragraph short story On Exactitude In Science, which is a good way to introduce the idea of hyperreality. Baudrillard is basically responding to Deobard’s Society of the Spectacle.
Prove me wrong.
So... books in 50 years will be:
>Badoop
>fhgfhdhfdflhdglsadgfqwhuodghdzlfh
>AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA em em em DA!
>ping
>The end
I'm glad literature is still behind
Futurist literature was already there in the 1920s.
Excessive Haste, a play by Verlaine.
Scene I
The curtain rises: a gentleman and a lady are seen locked in a close embrace.
Scene II
A second gentleman approaches noiselessly and shoots them both dead. The corpses remain in close contact, faces down. The killer draws near them, raises the man's head and starts back. He then raises the woman's head and shows even greater astonishment.
2nd gentleman: "My God! I've shot the wrong couple!"
fin.
Leck mich am Arsch
painting is gay
Literature is the only medium besides music that has been in a healthy state for a long time now.
Animation, film and games all gave in to the temptation of commercialization only a few decades in to their existence, becoming trend-driven and losing the ability to have the staying power that works in older mediums can. Once a work in any of these mediums passes the 40 year mark they hit their expiration date and slowly fade out of culture.
Painting and comics on the other hand have both pigeonholed themselves into niche markets where the patrons have very strong opinions on what the medium should be allowed to do, causing both mediums to stagnate heavily.
no one told me it would be this gay
More like the picture of Dorian GAY, amirite?
Speaking of "books you didn't assume would be this gay," Interview with The Vampire.
Amazing book despite - or, possible, because - of it.
I've finished the first chapter so far, and so far I'm not so much put off as I am, for lack of a less confrontational word, unchallenged. If one accepts the Spenglerian idea of the cultural soul, changing in both the material reality it creates and its reflection on its prior stages, if this process is done through the mechanism of great men brought by their internal Destiny to conflict with the facts of their world, living out their possibilities, the material sciences providing the mechanical extension of the cultural direction, broadening the perspective and causality of the religion until Reason and Faith eventually conflict and a new stage begins, what fundamental contradiction is there between that view and the view of the Marxist materialism the text makes such an effort to dissent from?
I just finished the Lolita novel.
It added a lot more context that the movies did not have.
Humbert and Lolita are both awful people but i do feel sorry for them.
It isn't like the movies where my opinion is clear, Humbert is a narcissistic asshole who sees himself as better than everyone else and does awful things like repeatedly touch Lolita when she does not want it or lie to her but at the same time he also does good things like try to be a good father he takes her to movies and out to lunch he buys her a bike for her birthday and lets her hangout with friends.
Lolita obviously loved him at first but fell out of love with him once she hit her teenage years and went from being a typical tomboy kid to a bitchy teenage girl who seduces Humbert to get money from him.
Also, while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well.
>while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well.
This is probably what makes the book controversial nowadays. Since we usually expect victims to be blameless and innocent and children to be asexual. Its hard for people to accept that abuse isn't some night stalker jumping out of the bush or some horrible ordeal that the victim always hates and victims too can have hand in their own molestation. I'm pretty sure most kids who are trafficked or raped on camera for CP fappers don't think they are being hurt or think its normal because of all the positive rewards they get from their adult abusers.
Lolita is a good commentary for why modern sex and relationships suck. We are all Humberts now. Not in the sense of being molesters, but because our approach to relationships is always narcisstic and selfish. A partner is just a means to an end and therapy books, professional relationship advice, and self-help lit all encourage people to be self-interested narcissistic bastards.
Hello 4-ch, I am looking to read a fantasy novel, do you have any suggestions? Of course, I'm interested in less mainstream works, no lord of the rings or narnia.
Other than that, feel free to use this thread to discuss fantasy novels.
What about the Hobbit?
>>2
The Hobbit is dark? Was there a hidden child sex orgy beheading scene I missed in the censored version?
I'd love to read a literature equivalent to the dark fantasy world of Berserk. All the "dark fantasy" novels I have read are about racism and sex and bloodlines and monarchies, and I don't have the attention span for CK2 shit like that. But I'm not very storied, so also hoping for some recommendations.
Chronicles of the Black Company by Glenn Cook
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erickson
> Chronicles of the Black Company by Glenn Cook
This was the first thing that came to mind but then I wasn't sure if it was a bit too much empires and machinations. I guess it is more focused on the down-in-the-trenches "we're mercenaries and we do the job, even if we're hired by fem-Sauron" with the politics taking more of a backseat.
As far as things that haven't been brought up I think Angus Wells' "Kingdoms" trilogy starting with "Wrath of Ashar" can get my mention if not necessarily my full recommendation (the third book I found a bit of a letdown, but not enough to ruin the whole thing for me). It has a villain who's pretty graphically grisly at times but still leans overall more towards the classic fantasy "chosen hero must battle the evil" sort of plot rather than Game of Thrones type stuff. Wells is also kind of interesting in that apparently when he's not writing fantasy shit he writes westerns (under a different pseudonym) and that shows through in his fantasy writing a bit.
Any recommendations, apart from the obvious like Mishima, Akutagawa and Soseki?
Reika Monogatari, The Manyoshu, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and the Heike Monogatari are classics. If you don’t like traditional fiction then try Kobo Abe’s Woman In The Sand Dunes or Ryu Murakami’s In The Miso Soup.
I don’t know if you consider VNs and light novels to be lit but there’s those too.
Start with the kojiki
anything by Kenji Siratori is rather avant garde modern japanese literature
Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the Milgram studies idk when you read enough of it you realize most psychology is actual bullshit pseudo-philosophy. The exception is stuff like cognitive science where they study perception and optics and stuff. Neuroscience is also a load of shit filled with ignorant pseuds.
I'm reading this essay by Noam Chomsky called Language and the Brain. So far I don't understand any of it but I am determined to learn about cognitive psychology and universal gramamr even if I'm a total retard. I wish there were easier intros to this stuff. Also check out Elizabeth Loftus. She did a bunch of studies where she found you can insert false memories into people's heads. Disturbing.
>She did a bunch of studies where she found you can insert false memories into people's heads. Disturbing.
Isn't that a known manipulation/control tactic?
>>4
Yeah, Loftus did a bunch of studies on how "repressed memory therapists" were inserting false memories of sexual abuse and satanism in the heads of their patients to extract moneys from lucrative court cases. To this day, some of those "repressed memory therapists" and brainwashed satanic ritual abuse victims (that is victims of the therapists) are convinced Loftus is either a victim of memory repressed sexual abuse herself or part of a big satanic cult conspiracy. She still stalk her and send death threats to this day.