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>>25317811
Suttree
Journey to the West
Don Quixote
The Idiot
Book of the Five Rings
No particular order. List would probably be different if you asked me in again in an hour. Did not include strict philosophic works on the list because that's a different question entirely
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Holy normgroid prune this thread now
My top 5:
American Psycho
Memories from the underground
Marcus aurelius's journal
A wizard of Earthsea
The movie The Counselor (Cormac wrote it, counts as a book)
Honorable mention:
The Boys (both show and comic)
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>>25317970
>Holy normgroid
>American Psycho
>Marcus Aurelius
>The Goys
Nigga... and it's called "Meditations," by the way, not "Marcus Aurelius journal." I'm making myself believe your post is bait, for my own psyche.
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>>25317816
Decent
>>25317942
Lit bro
>>25317949
Beginner
>>25317970
Edgelord
>>25317992
Pseud
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>>25317970
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>>25317811
1.Ulysses
2.Moby Dick
3.Les Miserables
4. Picture of Dorian Gray
5.Anna Karenina
In shock and mild disgust that Ulysses has not appeared on this thread until now
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>>25318267
There is the small matter that it is a frightfully tedious read. There is that. How the fuck do you jizz in your pants out in public so bad that it sticks to them and it hurts a bit to separate them, to the point that you register a bit of pain. Oh here now, let's have an interminable description of the exact contents of one particular drawer in the question-and-answer cathechism format this time.
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>>25318269
>How the fuck do you jizz in your pants out in public so bad that it sticks to them and it hurts a bit to separate them, to the point that you register a bit of pain.
I did that in college when this tall girl sat next to me with 3-inch long shorts
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>>25317811
lots of performative so-called readers in here
Lord of the Rings
Book of the New Sun
The Night Land
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Gor
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>>25318269
It’s the minutia such as that which in their totally form all encompassing beauty of Ulysses.
If you go into it with the intention of understanding and deconstructing all aspects of the work you will inevitably fail. finding yourself frustrated and disappointed, but if you throw yourself into it and allow it to encompass your soul, in a religious fashion, to submit to the work than you will see a spark of true art. Metempsychosis.
give up the agenbite of inwit
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>>25317816
Holy based
>>25317811
John (Bible)
Ecclesiastes (Bible)
Fear and Trembling
Blood Meridian
The Hobbit
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>>25318298
>just go with it dude
No, I will not just go with it. Non Serviam. You have to give me something worth liking. What characterizes Joyce's major works is that they have a strictly monotonic decrease in quality, which becomes clearer once one actually reads them, thinks seriously about them, and becomes familiar with all of them, even to the point of looking at those tiresome volumes to explain the hard ones. The "novelty" of the fragmentary consciousness of Ulysses (and to a lesser extent, Portrait) pale before the actual good work: Dubliners. Good not for its simplicity, but for its legible richness which does a vastly better job of communicating a society than the other works. There are several remarkable resonances throughout the stories when one pays attention, and these comparisons are far more interesting than anything else that Joyce ever did.
His dumb bitch wife being a dumb bitch who remembers Gibraltar and thinks typical childish foid thoughts at the end is not some grand finale. If anything, the real point in reading this sort of thing is to overcome it and get past the cult of it from a position of genuine knowledge and understanding, but the exercise is largely superfluous given demographic and cultural trends. Large numbers of dumb brown people who don't care a fig about Ulysses will inherit the earth, and despite all of the attendant problems in this, at least it will have the happy effect of diminishing unwarranted homage to a dull book that runs twice as long as it should and thereby overstays its welcome.
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>>25317811
Introduction to Magic volume I by Julius Evola and UR Group
Introduction to Magic volume II by Julius Evola and UR Group
Introduction to Magic volume III by Julius Evola and UR Group
The Hermetic Tradition by Julius Evola
Azumanga Daioh collected edition by Kiyohiko Azuma
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>>25318689
You could read it for yourself, anon. But if you need someone else's opinion, take Clark Ashton Smith's.
>In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy.
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>>25318298
I do this for other books but from the little I've read of Ulysses it still doesn't appeal to me. I have a similar thing with music where I can appreciate the artistry but still hate how it sounds, usually regarding Jazz, because the emotional content is something I'm uninterested in or annoyed by.
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>>25317811
1. Roadside Picnic
2. Samuel Beckett's French trilogy
3. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
4. Suttree
5. The Sun Also Rises
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>>25318643
Well, if what you care about is cartoonish characters and grand finales maybe you should stick to genre fiction
The idea we shouldn’t care to engage with the highest human achievements just because people in the future won’t care is ridiculous, you will die, nothing will matter to you then, so spend the very limited you have wisely
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>>25318856
Not him but it's bizarre that you reference an objective value ordering then slip into nihilism. If we're all gonna die and nothing matters then who cares about the collective greatest (which still ultimately means nothing, remember) works?
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>>25318932
It’s not that nothing matters, it’s that when you are dead nothing will matter. But for a brief time you are alive, you are free, you have the power to decide what is important. There is no meaning but the meaning you make for yourself. This makes our passions and our pursuits all the more important, If i and all i know will soon be dust in the wind then that simply makes the choices I make in the now all the more important, for me I believe that the appreciation of beauty and love is of the greatest value, it’s a better use of my time to read Ulysses than to wile away the days being angry about brown people on the internet even if both actions lead to the same inevitable end
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>>25318936
Let me put it more abstractly: You are universaling your aesthetic preferences at the same time as you claim to believe that no universal values of any kind exist. It's fine to be incoherent but it's bizarre to be so and claim that you aren't.
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>>25318946
I don’t deny that I am incoherent, nor do I actually believe that aesthetics hold any true value, it is merely what I have assigned value to.
I was simply being catty when I replied to that individual earlier, I for no other reason that emotion, view it as such a waste that he is so content to flitter way days he will never get back, I am judging those who decline to spend their lives in an interesting fashion
but again, pursuing aesthetics holds no more value than spending the days staring at a wall, i’m simply being a catty absurdist
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>>25317811
>books
Glad you didn't say novels
1. The Count of Monte Cristo
2. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor
3. The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James
4. Maldoror
5. Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
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>>25317811
gm here's my five books
>>25318829
need to read roadside picnic. read hemingway's The Capital of the World
>>25319431
>The Master and Margarita
why should i read this
my reply was longer but the site thought it was spam so whatever
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>>25319505
thanks anon
rest of the post was something like respect to all the borges, narnia, quixote, and les mis enjoyers. and i am literally prince myshkin. and why should i read the tartar steppes?
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>>25317811
Second Skin (John Hawkes)
The Tale of Genji
How It Is
In Search Of Lost Time
The Golden Bough
>>25318261
Do you like anyone else comparable to Nabokov, or just him among the secular moderns?
>>25318267
>In shock and mild disgust that Ulysses has not appeared on this thread until now
It is very good, and would have made my top 10. Unfortunately you get people calling you a poser or a noob for listing objectively good and well-known books, but I'm glad this thread's not the same twenty books we've all read slightly rearranged. I respect Ulysses as a Great Book but there are others that do more for me.
>>25318561
Bitchin.' Petersburg would be on a lot more lists if it wasn't so opaque to the non-Russki. Not impossible but challenging without lots of context. I liked the other Bely I read too- underrated writer.
>>25319479
>why should i read this
TMaM is a fairly easy read and a fun ride. But idk why it's so many people's favorite book, there's not a lot to say in terms of depth or style. When I ask why they love it I usually get some variant of "it's fun" or "I love the premise" and little more.
>>25319502
nice
Policeman especially, that book is the tits.
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>>25319639
>golden bough
ever read campbell's masks of god? eliade? check out martos doorways to the sacred
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>>25319651
>ever read campbell's masks of god? eliade?
They're on my radar- I own MoG volumes 3 and 4, can they be approached on their own or should I get the first book before diving in?
>check out martos doorways to the sacred
Never heard of this one, thanks for the rec anon.
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>>25319696
each volume is pretty independent, though campbell makes comparisons in the later volumes iirc building off of stuff in primitive mythology and oriental. but yeah they're pretty great; basically a catalog of lots of different mythos and how they are similar. like tracing DNA or language across continents but its myths instead. honestly vol 1 was skippable. it's literally about prehistoric people, like something you'd see early on in a philosophy of religion class, but if you're into that more power to you.
you're welcome; martos is basically just about Catholic sacraments. still, very interesting. it was a textbook of mine once.
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>>25317970
>complains about normgroids
>only reads what podcasters tells him to read
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>Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith
>The Mask of the Sorcerer by Darrell Schweitzer
>Lords of Light by Roger Zelazny
>Lyonesse by Jack Vance
>The First Book of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber
Pic related is me by the way
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1. American Psycho
2. Halo: The Fall of Reach
3. The Merchant of Venice (it's a play but)
4. Dark Matter (blake crouch. tried to read another book by him, was pretty faggoty)
5. The Chronicles of Narnia, I guess. When I read them it was a single compiled book.
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>>25317811
'Dracula' by Bram Stoker
'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley
'Swiss Family Robinson' by Johann David Wyss
'Mr Dizzy' by Roger Hargreaves
'The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women' by John Knox
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>>25320130
>Halo: The Fall of Reach
lol. thought i was the one that read this book. Read it in middle school
In any order:
2666- Roberto Bolano
Valis- Philip. K Dick
Woodcutters - Thomas Bernhard
The House of Hunger- Dambudzo Marechera
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
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>Chromos, Alfau
>The Tower, Yeats
>The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington
>The Black Heralds, Vallejo
>Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs
>>25317811
Europe was only coverted with the sales pitch, "The Godhead's son is your older brother, and he wants to recruit you for judging and smiting Demons and evil sonsofbitches in the end of days, so we all can chill in Paradise thereafter." There are more mismatched pairings possible.
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This was surprisingly difficult.
60 stories - Donald Barthleme
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
Swann's Way - Proust
Infinite Jest - DFW
All the Pretty Horses - McCarthy (For some reason I just love this more than Suttree or BM, or any other McCarthy. I think Bevins is just one of the most haunting characters of all time. Suttree close second.)
I did include not non-fiction, poetry, essays, or philosophy. Arguably Swann's Way doesn't fit, I don't care, get fucked.
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>>25318983
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
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>>25320834
>Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.
I don't agree with much of what you said but I can believe this. I get a similar enjoyment out of him as I do from Shakespeare, except I enjoy the former a hundred times more. The prose itself is not what excites me.
I've repeatedly heard Russians and only Russians denigrate Dostoevsky so I wonder if something is somehow gained in translation to English. Or maybe it's just the same familiarly bred contempt that leads me to spurn Mark Twain, Whitman and Thoreau. TBK has always been one of my favorite novels even though I don't read it too often.
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>>25320880
It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of ''realism'' or of ''human experience'' when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoyevsky's characters have yet another remarkable feature: Throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes, although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment,'' for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: Innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoyevsky do even less so. The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot. Let us always remember that basically Dostoyevsky is a writer of mystery stories where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem. Being an intricate plotter, Dostoyevsky succeeds in holding the reader's attention; he builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you reread a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realize that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there anymore. The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoyevsky's favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging his farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoyevsky is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense. (The relationship between a strong-willed hysterical old woman and a weak hysterical old man, the story of which occupies the first hundred pages of ''The Possessed,'' is tedious, being unreal.) The farcical intrigue which is mixed with tragedy is obviously a foreign importation; there is something second-rate French in the structure of his plots.
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Inland by Gerald Murnane
Molloy by Beckett
Locus Solus by Roussel
Blood meridian by Mccarthy
Pricksongs and Descants by Coover
Hon. mentions: Da Vinci's Bicycle by Davenport, Ulysses by Joyce, The Sound and the fury by Faulkner, El Aleph by Borges, Pale fire by Nabokov, Endgame by Beckett, Corrections by Bernhard, The Plains by Murnane, The Passenger by Mccarthy, Harrow by Joy Williams, Moby-dick by Melville, The Golden Bowl by James, Swann's way by Proust
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>>25317811
In no particular order,
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace by Donald Kagan
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Bone, The One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
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>>25322286
better than speedreading the foundations of western morality. leviticus was quoted verbatim in most colonial american legislatures. Art of War and the Prince go without saying. Its only reddit chungus "trivia" folx who dismiss them as "erm... arnt those books just saying the OBVIOUS? I am very smart"
And if you think Metamorphoses is boring I take it you just never read it. By Ovid. Not Kafka. Maybe I have to clarify.
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>>25317811
Fahrenheit 451
The Courage to be Disliked (and its sequel, Courage to be Happy)
The Call of Cthulu
The Art of War
Atomic Focus by Patrick McKeown
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>>25322302
It's more the tired and obvious fact that you have such clear and rampant unresolved sexual obsessions. Ovid and Leviticus are huge red flags my man. Of course, you'll deny this as they are too repressed for you to consciously access them, further outlining what a yawn case you are. Hope you face these issues in yourself and transcend them, but my money is on a flat denial followed by indignity and insults. Don't prove me right now :)
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>>25317811
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
The Decline of the West
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
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>>25317811
2666
The Brothers Karamazov
Buddha's Little Finger
A Country Doctor's Notebook
Gogol's Petersburg Tales
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Are 50% of the people in this thread larping about having read blood meridian or are there just that many midwits that believe that snooze even scrapes the top 100? BM is a merchant's log with studio lighting. Suttree however...
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>>25324031
I love BM but I also grew up in the southwest desert so im very biased towards the environmental prose
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>>25323799
Checked and based entropy appreciator
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>>25324031
>>25324037
if this isn't bait you both are dumb if you aren't esl. McCarthy very carefully uses dialect, tone, and tons of other stuff I don't know how to describe to make it obvious who is talking and when. It's the best prose I have ever read. It *literally* took my breath away when the apaches attacked for the first time, the writing grabbed my subconscious and imparted meaning before I was aware of it. Maybe try reading it out loud, idk.
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>>25324069
>It *literally* took my breath away
I figure this is because you usually breathe with your mouth open and you closed it for a few seconds.
The entire book is grammatically incorrect and unreadable if you're actually fluent in English. It's a gimmick. "Dude he breaks all the rules of writing, so cool!" is only compelling if you already didn't understand how language worked.
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Lord of the Rings
The Unbrearable Lightness of Being
Master and Margarita
Ubik
Macbeth
This was pretty difficult. Turns out I have my reservations against a lot of books I otherwise like, or most of the books I liked were very uncomfortable reads.
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>>25324091
>Ah so you're actually retarded, oh well.
>ah so the anonymous poster of shitposting and debate and basketweaving typed his typing and never was he possessed of an intellect worthy of discourse but he was stupid yet indignant to the end and all that entailed and.... [and so on and so forth for the rest of the book]
ftfy
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>>25317811
I already gave away most of my favorite books, because I had finished studying them front-to-back and wanted to share the joy of them, but I can líst some.
1. KJV
2. Kramers' Nieuw Nederlands Woordenboek 1990
3. Oxford English Dictionary 2012 Paperback Edition
4. BIjbel in Gewone Taal
(5). Car license plates: they give me something to read while on the road and I won't have to be on my phone while walking and it saves me traffic accidents.
6. Currently studying the Van Dale Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal 2015
Basically:
Bible
Dictionaries
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>>25324146
And I skimmed a PLAYBOY and a HUSTLER long ago, but the women didn't really look like what my woman would look like and from what I've read of the articles, sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll I don't really seem to find a durable way of life. Of course, they're meant to exist for sómeone, otherwise they wouldn't exist, but not for me.
I think we're blessed boys, the titles I see on here are a solid foundation.
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>>25324146
Samereader: There are absolutely fantastic books out there, I sometimes have the need to make a list of everything I've read and so I can put it in my curriculum vitae and get a job, but I found making the list impossible. But yeah, books leave a trace on the character and soul. It surfaces when it's most needed, working its way up to surfacing when you need it less, slowly becoming The Man I Always Wanted To Be.
And there are many ways to read and study nowadays! Find your ways, practice a lot, you'll be better in no-time.
Also, I like the .edu websites.
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>>25323941
It's a rocky start, not going to lie but when you find yourself rooting fora giant crab jacking off to a dead baby seal you'll know. You'll really, really want him to finish too,because not everything goes as expected. It's very funny, totally unpredictable and has great character diversity and development, takes a deep dive into isekai for an American perspective and ties lots of videogame tropes together. I mean you're not just rooting forthe crab to ejaculate, you understand the magnitude of what he's doing and what it means.
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>>25324031
>>25324052
Better than Suttree
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>>25317811
The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford
Harassment Architecture by Mike Ma
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Fear and loathing in las vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
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>>25325690
The "dramatis personae" of the history were all highly interesting, and the speeches were a high point for me. I remember writing impassioned notes and journal entries about Alcibiades, Hermocrates and Athenagoras, Brasidas, Cleon, Demosthenes' night assault on Epipolae, the vote for oligarchy in Athens, the Chios affair, the Persian treaties, etc. I also just enjoyed the way he wrote, or at least the style of the translation I read. I just enjoyed it. I read it right after finishing Durant's Life of Greece, so maybe that enhanced my experience with it.
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>>25317811
Blindsight
Reaper Man
John Dies at the End
Can't remember of any other that actually made me keep reading besides the latest bout of science fiction I got, I just reviewed the 30 titles I read last year and none are books that I would read again
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>>25323791
>>25324064
No response, just entered the thread to say "no one knows a good book like me" and leaves. Sadly, typical of the modern /lit/ poster.
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For me it’s
1, Paradise Lost
2. the Brothers Karamazov
3. Hamlet
4. War and Peace
5. Moby-Dick
I wish it wasn’t so /lit/-core but these are objectively my favorite books to read and the ones I’ve had the best experiences reading. 5 is too narrow couldn’t even mention gravity’s rainbow
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