/lit/ is for the discussion of literature, specifically books (fiction & non-fiction), short stories, poetry, creative writing, etc. If you want to discuss history, religion, or the humanities, go to /his/. If you want to discuss politics, go to /pol/. Philosophical discussion can go on either /lit/ or /his/, but those discussions of philosophy that take place on /lit/ should be based around specific philosophical works to which posters can refer.Check the wiki, the catalog, and the archive before asking for advice or recommendations, and please refrain from starting new threads for questions that can be answered by a search engine./lit/ is a slow board! Please take the time to read what others have written, and try to make thoughtful, well-written posts of your own. Bump replies are not necessary.Looking for books online? Check here:Guide to #bookzhttps://www.geocities.ws/prissy_90/Media/Texts/BookzHelp19kb.htmRecommended Literaturehttps://lit.trainroll.xyz/wiki/Recommended_Reading
Are you incapable of making decisions without the guidance of anonymous internet strangers? Open this thread for some recommendations.
Hello! This a a group focused on music appreciation which means reading great texts on musical theory and history. I already have several in mindhttps://youtu.be/xp6jLTz446cThe materials I have chosen for this group focus on the western, classical tradition, including ballet and opera, but other materials are also welcome.This is what I suggest to start with: The Great Courses Lectures and textbook Music Appreciation which will give you a good grounding in basic musical literacy. You can download the textbook for free from Anna'a Archive, and you can watch the lectures for free on Kanopy, a streaming service for those with library cards. If for some reason you can't access Kanopy, lmk in the discord so I can set you up with an alternative free link to lectures https://discord.gg/XhFGx57VKmDown the road we will also enjoy operas and ballets. Input is always welcomehttps://youtu.be/0kgUMlvRUh0Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>25000307Why bump when not a single anon wants to participate?
>>24994911Do I really have to take courses and take music theory to listen to classical music?I’m honestly asking, not shitting on you OP
>>25000358You don't have to know how to read to appreciate books, you can just listen to them
>>25000366I’m also interested in opera and ballet but I don’t know if this thread will be alive for me to see the resourcesIs planets a good starter for classic music
>>25000374For opera I strongly recommend starting with the Barber of Seville. An excellent production is available for free on Bilibili: https://b23.tv/DGQ7ed6For ballet, I strongly recommend starting with Giselle. An excellent production is available for free on Bilibili: https://b23.tv/P9HVg31If that whets your appetite, some books you might be interested in are Ballet: The Definitive Illustrated History. And Opera: The Definitive Illustrated History Here are other choice operas https://youtu.be/3stgof-xyN0https://youtu.be/lAcedJD4LawOther choice ballets (scroll down until you come to the video player)Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
Kill! Edition.Stubbed >>24992485>What is /wng/ — Web Novel General?A general for readers and authors involved or interested in the growing phenomenon of 'web novels', serialized English fiction posted to websites such as: Royal Road, Webnovel, Scribblehub, Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, Spacebattles, HFY, various personal author websites, and more>Why read web novels?Not for prose or tight editing or deep themes, frankly. As a whole, web novels are infamous for content sprawl and pacing issues. If you enjoy having millions of words to sink your teeth into to get to know the world and characters, though, you may be interested. Keeping up with other readers on a weekly basis to discuss the story's events unfolding is another perk, in the same way discussing an ongoing TV show might be.>Why write web novels?Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.>/wng/ authors.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>24999917
>>25000033Don't ditch the game world. It is typically a bad decision to have the fantasy world be deigetically fantasy, but your premise of AI NPCs, unaware of their illussory nature, living in constant terror of monsters and disasters designed to be managed and culled by parties of powerful heroes, and a lone wolf hero strategically strategizing cunning tricks and traps to alleviate their suffering, ooohhh, it is delicious. The best parts of Christian and Buddhist cosmology and morality, and you can spice it up by having an MC who doesn't even particularly adhere to either ideology, but that's just my preference, I swear I'm not the noirschizo from earlier, but he had a fucking point. What I'm trying to say here is, if you ditch the game world for a gamified real world, ypur setting will be no less generic for it, but your hero and his motives will be so much more generic, the game world has a justification, and you could always portal or isekai him into the world he's trying to help, if you really want to lock him in there or just don't have much you want to do with his native setting.
>>25000580>ooohhh, it is delicious.Anyone who talks like this should definitely kill themselves.
>>24999917There's some fiction that some anon keeps shilling (something like player 0.4, or perhaps Redemption arc) about someone logging into a defunct world, but it's not MMO iirc.
>>24999351>ContI'm just writing my impression as I read.The 2nd chapter of ARCHTYPE is (almost) entirely dialogue, which is strange considering the first one was infodumping.I'm beginning to notice some issues with the prose that are distracting me from the story.This is only 800 words, but it has 8 instances "said my friend". Which comes off as repetitive, like there is no variation no "he said" or any replacement for said. Considering the entire chapter is just two characters talking, the talker-indicator is unnecessary.It's interesting to hear people question the newspaper exposition from the last chapter.Bit of dialogue also comes off as unnatural:>"You're being an idiot," I said, "A super idiot. And you're making me responsible for you if you blow up, and this conversation was the only conversation you might have entertained where you might possibly have changed your mind. Won't you consider it just so we can go through it all together? If, like you say, there's some big evil government scheme going on then…shouldn't we face that together, man?" Who talks like this? I'm not getting the personality of the speaker at all. Most of the sentences come off as childish, but then some formal usages like "might have entertained" come more mature.Another issue is the lack of dramatization and blocking. For example:>"I could say the same thing to you," he said, "Come with me. We can hide out somewhere, wait until this all blows over. It could be fun. Our own adventure." Demands to be more dramatic, indicative of body movement, internal thoughts, or just anything.Overall, this is a step down from the first chapter, and there is very little to hold onto, but I guess the plot is going somewhere; I just wish there was more momentum behind.
Is he the greatest writer of our times?
>>25000201I do understand him. But he clearly mystifies you, which is why you take him so seriously, superstitious nigger.
>>25000201
>>25000222>niggerwe do not use that kind of language here, sir
>>24999994Pynchon is a minor writer compared to Corncob
>>25000169Jen Egan is better than Saunders. At least until her post-Goon Squad books.
Is the Chinese Room argument literally the most pseud shit touted since the four humors, or what?>I don't understand X>therefore the human-level-intelligence I am operating, which by all other metrics can objectively understand X, cannot understand XAm I missing something here? If not, if it IS as catastrophically retarded as it appears to me, why is it lauded as some kind of Great Question on a par with Pascal's Wager or the Ship of Theseus? Is it just because it's comfortably pro-human?
>>25000573Not true, there are also all sorts of attacks on reductionism (which isn't even popular in the physical sciences anymore), the epistemic issues of empiricism, supervenience, Hemple's Dilemma, etc.
>>25000582Physicalism is the most commonly held position by neuroscientists and philosophers of mind.
>>25000576This is just cope. Atheism is growing faster than any religion. You guys screaming about birth rates are showing you do not actually even know what the game is. As a percentage of the population, there is no mass conversion of the young to christianity. Jesus didn't rise and he's never coming back.
>>25000592Wrong, thankfully Islam is growing the fastest In Sha Allah. And Athiestroons will get destroyed. I don't like Christianity but I'd rather them be Muslim first then Christian second, atheists will have no power when Muslims take over, AllahSWT has humiliated atheists
>>25000594Muslims also leave the religion in the west by the 2nd generation. Islam is also declining. If you want a non-atheist worldview, it will necessarily need to be the 'spiritual but not religious" or whatever, as that's the only non-atheist position that's actually growing as religious apostasy continues. Basically, paganism.
>mom, make a big cup of coffee. I just downloaded Nietzsche's complete works
>>25000553You need to read and listen to Wagner before you can understand Nietzsche.
they're all bumbling dogmatic existentialist toddlers in comparison with the metaphysically coherent and philosophically rigourous ancients and mediaevalsI literally don't see how anything from this era could be seen as philosophically substantial.>let me just build on this tower of dogmatic untruths, starting from Descartesthat was their project
The "angels on a pin" question was just a way to frame the distinction between the intelligible and sensible. It's the same sort of distinction that gets made in metaphysics to this day. It was popular because they would often test a student's knowledge by forcing them to apply abstract distinctions to more concrete questions. Education back then was in a number of ways more rigorous and adversarial than today. Defending a thesis actually meant defending it against people trying to tear it down, which rarely happens today. Copying books was time consuming and expensive so having your work spread meant being held in high esteem by other experts. Education was long, as long as doctoral degrees today, but in many ways more intense because it was an entire lifestyle, with ascetic labors and spiritual exercises considered essential to doing philosophy (this is common to earlier Pagan traditions and Eastern thought too). Often, those seeking to "do philosophy" took lifelong vows of celibacy and poverty to remain focused on their work (although, arguably getting an advanced degree with philosophy is a vow of poverty today too, lol).This partly explains why early modern thought seems way more amateurish. It was. As education became far more common, it also became far shorter and less rigorous. Getting your book copied became about market forces. The sage and saint are the measure of good opinion in the pre-modern West and East. In modernity it becomes the "general audience." At the same time, the wars of religion were truly cataclysmic, killing vastly larger shares of Europe's population than the World Wars. They also focused on destroying the monasteries and purging universities, with intellectuals in particular coming in for exile, imprisonment, and execution.Advances in the scientific method and technology, which were driven onward by the needs of warfare and competition, paper over the cataclysmic knowledge loss that occured over this period (in some ways worse than during the fall of Rome). Instrumental knowledge was maintained based on what was useful, but a bunch of other stuff was lost. Crucially, theology wasn't removed from science as Whig histories have it. Newton for example thought he was doing secular theology and thought his Biblical scholarship was absolutely essential to understanding his science. Rather, what happened was that a particularly shallow and dogmatic voluntarist theology (the result of the Reformation cataclysms, which also deeply shaped, and we could say corrupted, Catholic theology) was enshrined in the "New Science" of mechanism. But because the scientific revolution and Great Divergence continued due to instrumental technological progress (which began BEFORE nominalism and empiricism became dominant, and didn't really accelerate until the 19th century), this was obscured. It seemed like the new theology was driving the progress, even if it was actually retarding it in some ways.
>>25000372OP here. I was talking about the Neoplatonic tradition.
>>25000498>he was also primarily an orator anyway, renowned for his rhetoric as much as his ideasso you're basically calling him a sophist
>>25000579oh i forgot you "logicians" are all retards
>>25000394Jews love christians
>cheats on wife all the time, beats and rapes her, believing women can only be satisfied if they are abused and raped, blatantly racist, especially against gypsies, and has dinner with Francisco Franco whom he apparently admiresHow exactly is this guy supposed to be a sexy heartthrob?
>>25000352/pol/fucks say this about every race, not just Romani>Indians? Normal to be racist if you ever actually dealt with them>Jews? Same>People of color? Same>Women? Pretty normal to be a misogynist if you've ever really dealt with them>North Africans? Arabs? Yep, them too
>>25000361Okay, Bogdan, but that doesn't take away from the fact your people are horrible, low IQ thieves who are rightly hated across Europe.
>>25000361If you had to deal with any of those people daily you would be extremely racist too
>>25000361>lefty/pol/ shut-in cannot comprehend other people's opinons formed from their lived experiencesMany such cases.
>>24999966>Conan, what is best in life?WASPy/JAPy women in jodhpurs and riding boots, to see their trim perfectly spherical little Daisy Buchanan booties jiggle before you, to hear the pop of the champagne bottle.
>I want to destroy human inevitability; I condemn slavery, I chase out poverty, I instruct ignorance, I treat illness, I light up the night, I hate hatred. That is what I am and that is why I have written Les Miserables. As I see it, Les Miserables is nothing other than a book having fraternity as its foundation and progress as its summit.I tried to read it anyway, I honestly tried, because it's the favorite book of a cute girl I know and she quotes passages of it in French, which she can't speak. But it's honestly too much. I need an alternative to recommend her that be just as appealing to her sort, but also not so woke. Preferably Christian works, as Christian as they come, but anti PUSSY works. Give me your best
>>24999221yes, you do illiterate bastard.>>24999218
>>24998611>how is being against slaveryBecause OP is an American and because America has spending the last 5+ years beating people over the head that because some black people were enslaved, anyone that remotely had to do anything with slavery should be destroyed and black people should simultaneously be absolved any crime they have committed, are committing, or will commit, and deserve infinite gibs.Therefore, "anti-slavery" causes knee-jerk reactions in reactionary Americans
>>24998614Being woke is a good thing, wokeness won
>>24998691Socialism is good thou
>>24999184>She's still too young to vote. I can save her
>Your age>The last book you finished and your thoughts on it>The book you're currently reading and your thoughts on that
>>2499129026Knausgaard’s second Min Kamp.I have already read through the My Struggle series, and they’re a fantastic read. I like the second one the best and often revisit it, in large part due to how relationships are the centre of the book. In my experience, the desire for loneliness in a relationship is both a poison and irrefutable need. I crave it, and over the holiday break I have felt selfish in the fact that all I have wanted is to for my family, and my in-laws to leave me alone, in peace, for a day or two. Just one day of silence would have been enough to quench my thirst. So I picked it up, and felt comforted that this Norwegian agrees with me.I’m now reading Soumission, and The Secret History. I am about halfway through TSH, and I am liking it, I love how it reads as an almost satire on these types of students, how up their own ass in fantastic they are. Such little cretins, I hope they all get what they deserve, particularly Richard, for the total non-entity he is in his own life. Retard
>23>Blood MeridianThis book is a supremely well-crafted midwit trap. The Judge owns all these bumblefuck cowboys the whole book simply because he can bullshit circles around them, and is an excellent theological metaphor for how persuasive and enticing true evil is for its own ends. If you take the time to deconstruct the shit Holden is saying he's completely insane and mostly makes no sense with his arguments about power and divine right blah blah blah, but he plays the part of the wise man so well everyone just rolls with it and accepts his guidance until they realize it's too late to get out from under his wing. Like a certain ruling class and their occult obsession with Saturn/freemasonry, that shit just stewed for a while in these powerful people unchecked because the ideology attracted them and they were too absorbed in its promises to think about it very long, and now we got Bohemian Grove and Little St. James. Overall it's a great meditation on the structure and nature of true evil from the eyes of an old ass cowboy christian, and the way that evil seeps unnoticed into people. The imagery is also fucking sick as hell.>Current read is the Divine ComedyI'm right in the middle of the Purgatorio. So far it reminds me a lot of how any time some prominent scientist or philosopher comes up with a "universal" theory of psychology or metaphysics or whatever else, it ultimately just ends up being WAY more about whatever was in that particular guy's head than any common structure or scientific truth, and their self-exploration incidentally can help others as a framework to use in the end. Freud and Jung instantly come to mind. Dante wrote from Dante and it reads like him trying to solve some private internal crisis through creative storytelling.
>>24999968Actually I'm wrong I read Kafka's Metamorphosis after that and it was hilarious. The whole book sets you up so hard, like this depressed anxious mess of a dude falling into a black hole from being a cockroach, despairing the whole time of his family hating and rejecting him, that coming true and him becoming a huge burden (the thing he feared most), then getting crippled, etc. talking nonstop about how everything would be better if he just died and he's causing so many problems blah blah blah. I spent the whole book waiting for a turnaround where his family accepts him or he puts down his delusions or is proved wrong somehow, and then at the end, nope lol he was totally right and his death fixes everything for his now incredibly relieved family, who forgets him and moves on. Very dark but very funny, turns out he was right the whole time.
>>24994821Most people who complain about moralizers on 4chan have flexible opinions on child labor laws and certain other regulations involving what children should or should not be able to do. The day I take one of these hacks seriously again is the day I will saw off my own hands.
>29>Brothers KaramazovEnjoyed it (i think?), but reading other people's opinions and analyses of it, I'm slowly realizing I'm too stupid for these kinds of books.
Discuss good narrative history books on any subject.>1776 is a nonfiction historical account written by David McCullough and published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster, focusing on the military campaigns of the American Revolutionary War during that pivotal year, particularly General George Washington's leadership of the Continental Army against British forces under General William Howe.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77347.1776https://www.audible.com/pd/1776-Audiobook/B002V8KSTW
You really don't know anything about U.S. history until you've read this.
>>24999306I think Jesus said something or other about being cheeky.
Mesoamerican history nerd here, as usual I'll shill "When Montezuma Met Cortes"It's a fascinating historiography and comparison of different accounts (+ their various biases and contradictions) of their meeting and the Cortes expedition/the Fall of the Aztec in general, and how they have been retold and distorted over time and leveraged for different ideological/national interestsPlus, it gets into a lot of the personal as well as political background on both various Spanish and Aztec historical figures: It's one of the better books I've seen to tackle the political dynamics and motives of other Mesoamerican kings and officials like like Xicomecoatl, Ixtlilxochitl II, Xicotencatl II, etc, which is important as very few sources do this despite the fact their actions and motives played as big a part of how events played out as the (more commonly covered) Spanish officials did. This is something I get into myself (including some observations even restall doesn't get into, tho moreso in even longer posts not linked here that me/friends have posted on other sites) here: pastebin.com/h18M28BR and arch.b4k.dev/v/thread/640670498/#640679139 and desuarchive.org/his/thread/16781148/#16781964 and desuarchive.org/k/thread/64434397/#64469714 + the other posts in that one I link and the two directly preceding itI don't agree with absolutely every conclusion Restall makes but it and his prior work "7 Myths of the Spanish Conquest", are pretty much mandatory reading for a decent understanding of the topic just to get an idea of how the different primary sources conflict with each other and skew detailsAlso pic related is WIP reading chart me and some friends are working on. I'll probably end up removing Broken Spears from the Conquest section for Collision of Worlds and/or maybe add a few books on the conquests of West Mexico and the Maya regions since currently this is very Central Mexico/Aztec focused, when in reality there were centuries of campaigns and expeditions against Mesoamerican states in other areas: The last Maya kingdoms didn't fall to 1697If people want more suggestions let me know>>24994326I also second this, though I will say that in reference to the title of "new revelations", 1491 is itself 20 years old now, and Precolumbian Archeology and History advances pretty fast since it's a relatively young field compared to say the study of Classical Antiquity, so it itself is kinda outdated, though honestly even at the time of publication a lot of what it covered wasn't new findings, but rather stuff already well established by researchers but hadn't yet become common knowledge outside of academia... which is still the case today as general publication and knowledge of the Precolumbian Americas is still terrible, sadlyComment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>24994136Good economic histories with a heavy emphasis on numismatics?
>>25000342Military histories are fine too
>Hansel and Gretel were, depending on how one looks at it, two children or two data points that lived at the edge of a forest that functioned less like geography and more like an algorithm whose purpose was to reduce things [1]. There was a house, there was a father who loved them in the abstract, there was a stepmother whose practicality had the brittle sheen of something decided in advance. there was a famine, famine in fairy tales being less of an agricultural phenomenon and more of a moral weather pattern. It arrived the way a bad season of television arrives: suddenly everyone was talking about it, and it justified decisions that would otherwise require apologies [2].>The decision, presented as logistics, was that two children constituted an inefficiency. The stepmother framed it as a walk, which is what adults do when they want motion without accountability. Hansel, who had already discovered that attention is a form of currency, listened hard enough to hear the father crying and the plan inside the plan. He collected stones, which are small, white, and have the decency to stay where you put them [3]. Gretel watched him do this and said nothing, which was her way of understanding that some problems are solved sideways.>The forest was dense in the way systems are dense: repetitive, indifferent, full of micro-choices that feel meaningful until they aren’t. The stones worked. Moonlight, that great collaborator [4], turned each one into a reassurance. They returned home to relief that had the odd aftertaste of disappointment, as if the stepmother had been briefly deprived of a solution they’d already practiced defending.>...
>>24999752More like his interest in literature destroyed his ability to understand math. Everything and More is one of the worst non-fiction books I've ever read.
Tf did I just read? A grown man doesn't know how to excuse himself to the bathroom
>>24999953His style is quite turgid
>>24999752Came here to post something similar, like "this is your brain on modal logic".
>>24997989>when they want motion without accountability.This is usually my thinking when I take a walk
Books by Philosophers or theologians who frame sex as a sacred act that contributes to the growth of life?
>>24998904As dishonest as is to be expected from pure fucking evil.
>>24999052>>that they're not on the side of disease, that eating food is good for organisms or that procreation is sacred.>The production of literature related to the Symposium of Plato in the Middle Age was immense.>Picrel is one of them. Agrippa, Ficino, even Abelard himself had works specifically written about the philosophy of love.Here, let me post the Wikipedia page for this branch of philosophy.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_loveAt least OP will have a source to check.
>>24995220literally imagine the faggot behind this post. you have literally no testicles
>>24995712Thats not exactly what I said
>>24999237Thanks.
It is clear the world is entering a new age where the strong shake off the weak like a tiger shakes off and destroys its fleas. We are sick of the weak clinging to us like anchors, dragging us down, and now we cut the chains. We laugh as they sink into the sea and demand we save them. But this is the new age, where the left will be destroyed forever and ever, and great men will rule forever. What are some books that will shed light on the coming times? I have already read Schmitt, Evola, Spengler, and Hitler.
>>24997710working conditions now are infinitely better than 99% of human historythe mistake a lot of anti capitalists make is forgetting that we still live in an unfathomably opulent period compared to even just 150 years ago, we are so far off the material conditions necessary to produce a revolution it's not worth entertaining
>>24997711>working conditions now are infinitely better than 99% of human historythey're not lmao, people work longer hours than they ever did>the mistake a lot of anti capitalists make is forgetting that we still live in an unfathomably opulent period compared to even just 150 years agowe do not and you would know that if you actually studied the lifestyles of people from 150 years ago
OP is not only a faggot, but he's been spamming multiple boards with this exact image. He was in the Doom thread on /vr/ earlier asking for the "manliest Doom maps" or something like that. >>24992025>t. Nig Fuentes
>>24990653
>>24990653A tiger can't shake off its fleas.
A good 95% of independent bookstores aren't actually for people who read, they're for tourists and rich "shop local" liberals who like the "cozy aesthetic", and they mostly sell trash that you could get on Amazon for 50% cheaper. I hope Bezos puts them all out of business. Fuck you and fuck your locally owned chunguscore Instagram bookstore. Let only the true, used bookstores owned by some 90 year old who clearly doesn't want you there survive.
>>24986590Not my local bookstore. Mine is a hoard of used books spilling off shelves. Sometimes even the cashier desk is covered so much in books due for processing that you wouldn't even know a desk was there. To the careful peruser there is gold squeezed into shelves, to the quick shopper something is bound to catch their eye. Hidden in a spiral of shelves of decreasing width there are dusty old encyclopedias and rare editions of classics. To top it all off, the building is two storeys. It is one of the few joys in my life.
>>25000276How do they finance themselves? I always wanted to be a bookstore but you need to have a serious inheritance and funding from the government or someone.
>>24999862>Walmart is a deeply politically-charged environmentThis might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen on this site.
I've been to most book stores in my city. One is a chain that has, hands down, the best selection. Thousands upon thousands of used books you've never heard of, arranged haphazardly so that finding a genre is easy, but an individual book takes searching. Another is downtown. It's the tourist slop that OP mentions. Maybe 800 books in the whole shop, most are ~employee picks~ that take up the largest shelf. Then there's one in the hipster district. This one pisses me off the most. The downstairs is tourist slop, but there's a secret upstairs with a decent, not great, selection of used books. I went there this past weekend looking for Bocaccio and they had gutted the entire upstairs. Got rid of 80% of the selection. No shopping could have done this. It was completely wiped for a reason.
>>25000000>literature
