So when's the next book out?
>>19 has it. Sorry I wasn't clearer.
I think everyone here will probably agree that the majority of fantasy literature is plain bad. After all, 4-ch hasn't been invaded by preteens in love with Dragonlance yet.
However, I feel that SoIF is a gem for the genre. It doesn't suffer from the flat characters, predictable plot, hilarious devices, and stunted prose that infests most of the other stuff.
Anyway, for the next 24 hours you might find this link of interest: http://wakachan.org/soif/
>>No dragons or anything else like that either.
Um, yes.
But that's not the point of asoiaf. It's good because the author has storytelling and character writing talent - the world and the characters feel real and believable, unlike the comical "characters" of 99% of all other fantasy books.
>>15 really lives in a fantasy world, saves him the time to actually think about what people say.
> Um, yes.
Hah, I completely forgot about them. Guess it shows how peripheral they are.
bump
>Other than some walking dead that you rarely hear about, there's no magic at all for the first two books.
>No dragons or anything else like that either.
>Hah, I completely forgot about them. Guess it shows how peripheral they are.
If only they all knew...
>>27
still largely true, if you discard the show, which you should,
dragons are pretty minor, only one of them serving as a vehicle and that's basically it
the dead are as enigmatic as ever
that being said, the series is hardly fantasy anyway, as has been pointed out, it simply has a medieval setting but the characters and their interactions could take place in pretty much every other period, it's being argued that it is sci fi even but that's a whole nother can of beans
>>28
The idea that there's a clear dichotomy between fantasy and sci-fi tends to be kind of muddled, anyway. One can argue that sci-fi should mean things that make a strict attempt to be scientifically plausible even if dealing with things that are not yet a reality, and I'm pretty sure there's a movement that rejects the term "sci-fi" in favor of their own that they specifically define as such, but often times that isn't the case in actual usage. For instance Star Wars is generally classed as sci-fi because it's in space and has lasers and shit but if you ignore that, a lot of the tropes are much more in line with what's typically classed as fantasy. There's plenty of other "sci-fi" that has stuff that's essentially magic in it (possibly thinly disguised under some other more "sciencey" name like "psionics" or such) and there's been plenty of "fantasy" that involves building machines or traveling between planets or whatnot too.
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.
Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
Las Vegas is in Clark County, Nevada. This story is about Hugette Clark. The woman inherited something like $300M, when that kind of money was a lot more than a Powerball prize. She used her fortune to live as a recluse in a New York apartment for thirty years and thirty+ more in a hospital room. All this while she owned sizable estates on the Santa Barbara and Delaware coasts that she hadn't visited in sixty years. Purely from an accounting perspective, this is a lot of fun!
Man I need to start reading again
>>91
I think the thanking is a good idea. For whatever reason, people get unduly attached or committed to their items. I guess it's the sunk cost fallacy. Making that commitment explicit by "thanking" it, makes it easy to get over and realize it was just a tool that had a purpose which is no longer needed without feeling guilty.
<i>Constellation Games</i> by Leonard Richardson
A disenchanted antihero game developer quickly becomes a pivotal player in a first-contact scenario by reviewing alien video games. I loved this book and I plan to read it again soon. Highly recommended for science fiction fans who also happen to be programmers.
Serotonin, by Houellebecq.
It was bleak. I love this author.
I recently finished The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. It had some really breathtaking prose, and the narrative structure is also fantastic.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney
I fucking lmao when Greg's dad dumped a garbage can of water on teens for Halloween, classic.
I finished Profesor Unrat by Heinrich Mann yesterday. It's about a paranoid nutcase of a teacher and it's beautiful. I've read afterwards that it#s about social critique and changing politics embedded in the historical context in which it was conceived yada yada yada but I think it's quality is vastly increased if you read it like it is. Compared to Thomas Heinrich's style is a lot more funky and interesting but also more light-hearted so it hits altogether differently.
>>95
I liked that one as well, I read Oblomov some time before that and somewhat hoped he would kill himself so I was welcoming the serotonin ending
Anyone else think that it's kind of absurd to post here? I'm pretty sure that at least 85% of 4ch reads nothing that isn't online.
I know right. It's been a while since I've fixed my eyes on a book for more than an hour or two.
It is entirely possible to use the net AND read books. Saying otherwise is perpatrating stereotypes.
>It is entirely possible to use the net AND read books.
Not at the same time though. That ends in nothing but confusion.
Many classical literatures are available online as electronic text nowadays.
OP is wrong. I love books.
umm I find it's better to post on any of these text boards than on imageboards. I'm just so afraid I'll get made fun of by other /b/tards.
I love books. Though I think it's unfair to discount the internet as "unliterate" or whatever. There's the Gutenberg project and stuff, yeah, but...I have been truly amazed by the beauty and veracity of some internet copypasta. Or at least some good writing.
As we all know, smoking is really bad for your health. What a lot of people don't realize is that when you smoke, those few minutes of your expected lifespan are literally transformed into the ash you flick away into an ashtray. Ashtrays, each and every one of them, are constructed by a single group running several dozen front companies.
Basically, unless you're putting out your smokes beneath your heel or in the ashtray your kid made at camp, you're dispensing your ashen life into this group's eager little recepticle. Their ashtrays absorb the life force from the ashes and sends it to a central holding facility. No one knows for sure what these guys are going to do when they've collected all that life energy, but it's probably going to be huge.
Incidentally, there's talk of a rival organization leading the anti-smoking political agenda from behind the scenes. They probably figure removing smoking sections, and thus ashtrays, from restaurants and bars is a good first step towards thwarting whatever it is this ashtray company is trying to do.
"The copypasta" may become the great new literary form of the 21st century, just as "the film" overtook "the novel."
Yes
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:
you can probably go through your whole adult life not reading any books. doesn't mean that you should
Naked Lunch
About one third in.
I can only stand so much graphic gay sex and semen splurging.
I've yet to properly stop, but rather put it on a kind of hiatus. Hoping to eventually forget about it lest my stubbornness dictates I get around to finishing it.
Infinite Jest. I keep trying to to read it again and again but I always give up after the first few chapters. Probably read the first two chapters 5 times now.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
1/3 of the way through
Couldn't connect with the story or the language.
Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari
I want to read it but it makes no sense to me.
Walden by Thoreau.
Given up for a second time, even after skipping the longwinded first section.
Heavy horrible prose. Sanctimonius sarcasm throughout.
3 Musketeers
I got around a third of the way through.
I wound up so lost and clueless about what the fuck was going on and didn't know where I should flip back to catch up. I also wasn't very interested in the first place, hence why I let my mind wander while reading.
Philip Mainländer's philosophy of redemption. I got into it for the cool hyper pessimism but after like 100 pages of convoluted ontology I dropped it. I knew all the juice stuff beforehand anyway. Now I read the original instead (Schopenhauer)
Logic of Sense by Deleuze. I read it after Difference and Repetition but it was a bit boring imo.
Thread to discuss the works of Rene Guenon. Atheist midwits and Buddhists need not apply... or Whiteheadians.
Guenon? How cringe.
Fuck off faggot, go shit up another more active site with your dollar store occultism
Ladies, ladies! Please, let's not fight!
Now, if we can turn to the pressing matter at hand, who's going to bring more /lit/izens over here?
Hey, you retarded mongoloid, you stupid jerk, you know that's not how dialectics work, right? I didn't read EVERY FUCKING HEGEL BOOK THAT EXISTS TWICE to support your pseudo-Hegelian bullshit straight out of Fallout: New Vegas art hoe quality "OH I'M A TEMPORARY DIALECTRIC THINKER: THESIS, ANTI-THESIS, SYNTHESIS" right now. Stop passing Fichte off as a dialectical thinker and equivalent of Hegel; Fichte was a bitch and Schelling was sucking Hegel's dick VIGOROUSLY in Tübingen. If you had READ SOME OF STALIN you would know that Hegel's immanent criticism only goes back to the dialectics ONE PART of the construction of intuitive thought and consciousness. For fuck's sake, you're such a pseudo-intellectual, you're seriously fucking retarded. Do you think Hegel keeps the reflective understanding and academic mentality of "HURRRRRY BEING IS THE OPPOSITE OF NOT BEING" intact, lisencephalus? I bet you think that porn is dialectically turning you into a "volcano" and performing better in class, you pseudo-intellectual sperm-brain. Fuck you. Larpero motherfucker, fuck you and stop believing that Hegel postulates sensible certainty as a complete reality, and STOP THINKING THAT BEING IN AND FOR YOURSELF IS A NECESSARY NOUMENAL FUCK TO RETURN TO THE "UNITED" REASON.
Hitlerism = Guenon + armored divisions
crypto buddhist
/thread
So, um, where to begin? A while ago some Google ads next to a GMail conversation about my reading material (mostly about David Weber and other Baen Books authors) led me to a site advertising a German alternative-history series of military SF called "Kaiserfront 1949". The basic premise is that Germany narrowly won WWI against France and is a major world power with its own military alliance by the year 1949 (WWII did not happen, nor did the Nazi regime or the Weimar republic - the Kaiser is still in power). It is also the only country owning nuclear weapons and wants to keep it that way. The publisher's site provides the first book as a free PDF download, so that's all I've read so far.
Apparently these books aren't self-contained stories, they literally end with a German "to be continued". What I read was not too awful, but a bit boring. The author seems to have decided that German technology roolz, all other tech droolz, so German planes can often simply fly above the maximum range of their enemies, German tanks are unharmed by a direct hit from a Russian shell, but fire one shot at the Russian from the same range and the tank is reduced to molten metal, etc etc. What did annoy me a bit was the way almost all German soldiers were portrayed as honorable people, whereas the Americans like torturing their prisoners, the British lack any troop morale, and the Russians love attacking without any formal declaration of war.
When I looked at the publisher's other offerings, it quickly became apparent that their books are largely aimed at the German-speaking right-wing xenophobe market. One novel set in the mid-21st century, for example, depicts Europe as firmly under the yoke of Islamic oppressors, who have instituted sharia law everywhere but the Vatican, with just a few valiant Germans to resist them.
Or buy them used?
Never. Exposing yourself to opposite yourself would be one of the best things a person can do for yourself.
anyone know where i can download lewis 'scooter' libby's "the apprentice" for free? i don't want to give him any money for it but am afraid if i get it used the pages will all be stuck together with old semen
>>9
I was drunk when I wrote this. I'm sorry.
What I mean is exposing yourself to opposing ideologies is one of the best things you can do for yourself.
not too long ago my mom bought "The Room Where it Happened" by John Bolton despite her being devoutly liberal. Needless to say I was somewhat disappointed but could not help but feel slightly responsible.
Yeah, I don't particulary like (or hate) HP, but I'm not interested in it either, however, a couple of HP fans are kind of starting to drive me nuts while they are waiting (and thay can't read english so they will be like 2 years either waiting for the spanish translation to roll out or learning english) for it so I'd like you people that are reading the book to dump some spoilers =)
I like those guys already.
Hedwig, Snape, Mad-eye-Moody, Dobby, Fred, Lupin and his wife, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Voldemort die. Harry and Ginny get married and have three kids. Ron and Hermione get married and have two kids.
Read the Wikipedia article.
>>8
You could have at least worded it a little more interesting.
OMG HERMOINE AND GINNY GET PREGNANT!!!!
Snape had the hots for Harry's mom since they were like 10.
This is somewhat relevant again.
JK Rowling is heinously anus
Harry's mom has got it goin' on
Snape approved
You ever heard of Snape kills Dumbledore?
I saw it in a bookstore and it seems like a nice read, but I did not have the time to get it. It was pretty cheap. Should I go back and get it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Wood_(novel)
Maybe. I really liked the short story which was its germ, it provoked in me an enjoyable feeling of languor. A lot of other people seem to like the novel. Some people probably dislike it. When a creative work isn't out-and-out terrible it's hard to say what the interaction between the work and the audience will produce, and given I don't know anything about you, this being an anonymous image board, it's even more useless.
Mmmm heh heh mm heh heh heh heh heh hey Butt-head, he said "Norwegian Wood", mmm heh heh heh
heheheheh mmmm heheheheheh
Good thread
My only encounter with this book is as follows:
>working with a colleague, she just brought a grey import car from Japan
>open the glovebox and to her surprise there's a copy of Norwegian Wood inside
>open book to random page and begin reading outloud because we were bored and intrigued by the novelist (I've read a few of his other books)
>it's the scene about the 13 year old girl trying to have sex with the protagonist
I really need to get this book...
It's pretty decent. Nothing special, but I had a cozy time reading it, and there was a good moment or two where some nice feelings crept in. It's a 3/5, but a solid 3/5.
If you haven't read anything by Murakami, a good starter (although it isn't indicative of his other work) is Hardboiled Wonderland.
Post your favorites:
秋深き (aki fukaki)
隣は何を (tonari wa nani wo)
する人ぞ (suru hito zo)
Baka baka bleak dispair
Neko neko everywhere.
Darkness fills the world with wai
Heart of pain is so kawaii.
Soul of anguish on chibi wings
Genki genki evil things.
Tormented heart oh so sugoi
Crushed beneath the dark yaoi.
Neko neko everywhere
Baka baka bleak dispair.
Freddy is a treasure
Ram Ranch
Hey, you retarded mongoloid, you stupid jerk, you know that's not how dialectics work, right? I didn't read EVERY FUCKING HEGEL BOOK THAT EXISTS TWICE to support your pseudo-Hegelian bullshit straight out of Fallout: New Vegas art hoe quality "OH I'M A TEMPORARY DIALECTRIC THINKER: THESIS, ANTI-THESIS, SYNTHESIS" right now. Stop passing Fichte off as a dialectical thinker and equivalent of Hegel; Fichte was a bitch and Schelling was sucking Hegel's dick VIGOROUSLY in Tübingen. If you had READ SOME OF STALIN you would know that Hegel's immanent criticism only goes back to the dialectics ONE PART of the construction of intuitive thought and consciousness. For fuck's sake, you're such a pseudo-intellectual, you're seriously fucking retarded. Do you think Hegel keeps the reflective understanding and academic mentality of "HURRRRRY BEING IS THE OPPOSITE OF NOT BEING" intact, lisencephalus? I bet you think that porn is dialectically turning you into a "volcano" and performing better in class, you pseudo-intellectual sperm-brain. Fuck you. Larpero motherfucker, fuck you and stop believing that Hegel postulates sensible certainty as a complete reality, and STOP THINKING THAT BEING IN AND FOR YOURSELF IS A NECESSARY NOUMENAL FUCK TO RETURN TO THE "UNITED" REASON.
>>7
solid poetic effort, but can't say I'm really a fan of free verse tbh
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
Prove me wrong.
So books in the 2060s will be either totally indecipherable or commercial rot?
Western culture had a good run, I guess.
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.