I skip all the scenes where Rocky isn't around. He's the only reason to read this crap. I love it when aliens are friendly and we get to explore a different kind of consciousness. There should be more novels focused on aliens being bros.
I thought people here were exaggerating but it really is a terrible very bad book. The reddittisms are the least of its problems. Half of the book takes place doing bullshit on earth, which wouldn't be bad if every character wasn't annoying as shit. Grace cries every time he thinks about the dead crew members but not once we see him develop any relationship with them. The russian's character is>she likes le vodkathe chinese is>he's seriousThe german boss lady is just a power fantasy.Why even have an ensemble of characters at this point? Grace is supposed to be this lonely detached guy with nothing to lose but somehow everyone likes him, and he calls them friends for some reason. I also wasn't sold on him being such a coward as to threaten the survival of humanity because he doesn't want to die in 4 years but is perfectly ok with dying in 20 in a far more horrific way. Rocky was a complete useless moron who needed Grace to spoonfeed anything scientific to him and even save his ass at the end lol. Apparently physics envy is something that happens in stem circles and it looks like Weir suffers from it. He just wants to prove he understands REAL science. Why else spend all that time painfully detailing everything about physics but not the software Grace wrote to talk to Rocky? Why would Andy Weir the software engineer do that? I liked the relativity bit, he could have gone deeper in it. I did some research into what's actually happening in relativistic physics and form the little I understood it's fascinating. It makes sense even though it feels wrong. It could be used to delve deeper into the workings of the universe with some reverence and a sense of awe or bring humanity into perspective by highlighting how doomed any space expedition is due to the fact the austronat will die to the world and it to him even if he makes it back. I suspect Weir doesn't really understand it and just plugged numbers into a calculator. Whenever he brings up relativity he goes "That's relativity for ya weird huh? haha my brain just did an epic science fart".Not worth a read there's better slop out there
>skipping scenes just because he just doesn't like itThe consequence of american education.
>>25303128I'm not american.
>>25303332i am
>>25303344Ok.
>average author bio
>if only I were a published author, I’d be such a based Chad mogging sigma >no, I’ll never write anything
>>25303266The vast majority of people here could write a better novel than 98% of contemporary published authors. I mean that seriously. It's no secret that the industry has been inundated with milquetoast jobsworths and passive aggressive functionaries.
>>25303220She needs a firmware upgrade in the form of “coffee.”
>>25303266I hate all of you.
>>25303294 /wg/ /wng/ and the writing competitions have proven this statement to be false
He lived for 42 years and during that time, it is believed, he never had sexual relations. His female characters are either young and dangerous girls, or old and narrow-minded women.
>>25294689Ukrainian
>>25293149>, it is believed, he never had sexual relations.why? because he never announced to the world whenever he went to see a hooker? are you really that retarded?
>>25294085Taras Bulba is so fucking good.
>>25293546one of the very few people that ever tried to punch me was a girl. its cool, i blocked it. i think we were both impressed, really. shes a cop now.
>>25302467This is the opinion of experts. Throughout his life, Gogol had no known romantic or sexual relationships with either women or men.
This is unreadable.
>>25301576I read this as a high school sophomore and while some of it went over my head I still enjoyed it overall. Just add some more skill points in INT, it and Dubliners are by far the easiest to read of Joyce's works.
>>25303160My one piece of advice for you is to fully immerse yourself in the mind of a child (for the first chapter at least) and not to be overly concerned with understanding EVERYTHING in a text (picrel, the author of the quote is talking about Finnegans Wake, but the message is universally applicable to any work of literature). Basically, you are an outsider looking into the mind of young Stephen, seeing whatever he is thinking at the moment, no matter what it is, a "stream of consciousness" if you will. Not everything here has to make sense, like not every one of your waking thoughts has to make sense.
>>25303160You need to go post this on Reddit. It really is outdated "comedy."
>>25303290>wothe botheth>>25303287the writing doesnt make me feel like a child, it makes me feel like a retard kicking me out of the stream of consciousness. I genuinely can not place what is happening it is just hopping from place to place
>>25303296The first section, which seems most confounding to you, contains Stephen's earliest memories, so of course, it will seem disjointed and kinda schizo, since his brain is literally in the earliest stages of development. And since he's still just a boy, his internal language is not yet developed, so there will be a lot of repeating allegories and blunt statements. A huge part of the enjoyment of Portrait is to see Stephen, along with his use of language, grow over time. And also, read aloud, or just subvocalize if you're not used to that yet, and just let the rhythm of the words carry you to the end. Seriously, don't scrutinize it so much. The first read is always going to be incomplete. You can only grasp a work fully on your second, even third or fourth read.
Redpill me on this guy, where do I begin with him? My library has a ton of his stuff.
>>25296213He means social autism as opposed to actual autism
What the fuck was his father's problem?
>>25296057I would rather read a thousand pages of him musing on poetry than ten about his awful wife
Do you think his daughters will write their own version shittalking him?
>>25300213aren't you reading the wrong books, then?
Surely no one actually believes this book is anything but a work of fiction written by Joseph Smith, right?
Bumping to see if I can learn more about the witnesses
Does anyone here know if there's like an LDS "study Bible" verse-by-verse type resource? I'm curious how they interpret the Bible, in particular the passages that would support traditional (Nicene) Christianity. I don't think the LDS church has any of those types of resources on their website but hopefully someone knows something.
>>25292509>Be Jew>had some Christian read parts of the book with me>in my head, I was going "That was already in the Old Testament" over and over again.
>>25301879Well our standard version of the Bible comes with heavy cross-reference footnotes, and some additional study helps as appendixes. The LDS website edition of the Bible has these footnotes too. If you want to go some steps further you can just read Mormon apologetics research there's a lot of searching of Jewish aggadah, Christian apocrypha, and early Christian Church Fathers, and there's lots of similarities found, some people also notice that modern Christian theological movements like Open Theism and Social Trinitarianism end up recreating the wheel when we did that stuff first, but it's a nice point of theological convergence to see anyway.>in particular the passages that would support traditional (Nicene) ChristianityI honestly cannot read John 17:11,21-23 and not conclude on the basis of the simplest reasoning that the only two viable options for natural interpretation are either (1) the Father and the Son are consubstantial iff we are capable of the same consubstantiality with them, or (2) whatever oneness the Father and the Son have is weaker than consubstantiality, and we can participate in that same oneness. There's just no natural space for taking the "oneness" of Father and Son with humanity to be piecemeal, to take their unity with us to be non-consubstantial but their own unity to be consubstantial. Nicenes have no good response to this.
>>25292081Half the NSA is Mormon.
Does Japanese translate best into English, German or French? I'm curious about which translations to get.
huh. that's a good question.my gut reaction is german, because they both have a lot of "compound" words that mean very specific things, but I don't actually know.
IIRC it's actually Spanish.
iirc mishima said the english translations were better than the original. not sure if that has more to do with the english language or quality of translator.
Best NTR novels?
i'm not into ntr stuff so idk if this is of interest to a real ntr freak but robin hobb's assassin's apprentice trilogy involves one of the most insane cucks of all time and is a great seriesalso maybe the floating opera
>>25299653>>25300274Are you a woman? It's hard to imagine it having that effect on a man
>>25299554Deep Water by Patricia highsmith, movie is also worth watching after
Just started this but it’s pretty damn good so far
>>25300567It was pretty decent up until that exact point
I would like one (1) ambitious, thematic, and symbolic piece of artistry—one that is eternally relevant, understands the world in a way you will never fully comprehend, and is devoid of any slop. It refuses genre labels or tropes for the sake of marketing, and it can be consumed 1,000 times, with the 1,001st still offering a new way of seeing it. It is meta in the sense that it says more about the observer and this world than it does about the content itself; a work where every character is more real than the people you see every day, and where even 0.5% of it is worth 20 dissertations.
>>25303120Also it needs to actually be interesting. Not boring, universal in understanding and with annoying "flowery prose"to describe a sandwich or endless metaphors to where you don't even remember if they were describing a sandwich or not.
>>25303120
I so dearly wish the world worked like this. But it never has, and it never will. Best to save these naive dreams for a vision of the afterlife.Post other books that make you feel this way.
>>25303138At the smallest level, there is no such thing as self
>>25303153And yet when it comes to mobsters who made their fortune from extortion and racketeering, suddenly their casinos are sacred?
>>25302200Capitalism isnt cancer it's the metabolism of the human superorganism
>>25303177Doesn't that turn into cancer
>>25303177Labor is. Capitalism, private ownership of capital, is not, strictly. It it does augment metabolism until a certain point at which point it is tumor that lives upon the rest of the organism in a way that doesn't augment metabolism but actually inhibits it
If you dedicate yourself to the craft of writing, people 100 years from now, maybe 200, maybe even more or even forever, will discuss your works, your life and how they reflected the time you lived in
You can't make good art if you're driven by the desire to be important. Great artists did create because of some inner necessity or to celebrate life, not to be famous
>>25302117Most commercial media are either sanitized or created for shock value, making future people delusional about the human psyche. Anonymous online forums are the closest thing we have to looking inside people's minds. 4chan should be documented in an unbiased way.
>>25303014Thinking that other people will care at all is narcissistic already. Delusions of grandure are just a more extreme symptom.
>>25302117If I dedicate the rest of my life to writing i will be worse than William McGonagall and far less known
>>25303124who?
Thought we might try something a little different. Show us what you're expecting of a book you haven't read or haven't finished yet. If you see a post with a book you have read, feel free to fill in and let anon know what you though.
>>25301769Holy shit that's a lot of cocaine
>>25301843it was on sale
>>25301732Here's the real thread >>25299581
>>25301861kek
What happens if I steal a book from the bookstore, read it, and then return it to the bookstore when I'm done?
>>25302008you are about to discover the concept of public libraries, a very important step in the life of every double digit iq midwit
People are doing this en masse at Barnes & Noble. Just filling up their bags with books & criterion blu-rays only to walk straight right out of the store.Tempting, but it's really only worth the risk if you have a friend on the outside making sure there's no cops in the parking lot or something, as well as an easy escape to the woods, lest they nick your license plate.
>>25302658I used to do this when I was a teen, I'd steal like 5 books and a few moleskins at a time, never even tried to be sneaky about it, just put them in a tote bag or in my pants/hoodie. Never had an employee do anything about it.Nowadays with surveillance shit though I'm more worried. The best way is to not look sketchy is to just buy something. I only got caught by an LP one time at a home depot, I asked if he was a cop and he said no so I just walked away
>>25302008Not worth it anon, just pirate it
>>25302008After you do this often enough, the aging owner, who all this time has silently observed you, will grab your wrist as you're about to exit, and deftly extracting the pilfered book from beneath your overcoat, demand: Where do you think you're going? You stammer, helpless, withering under his spectacled gaze - but what's this!? His stern expression has melted into an avuncular smile! One of my favourites (he says, leafing through the slim eighteenth-century volume). I see you're a fellow with taste, and a book like this deserves to be read somewhere special. And, one hand still on your wrist, though now not as tight, he leads you between teetering stacks of yellowing books, saying in a warm and resonant voice: Yes, I've seen you often, scurrying around like a thief filching precious treasures - oh, only a true book lover could look that guilty. You are touched by the owner's kindness, but where is he taking you? What is beyond this old wooden door he has stooped to unlock? Suddenly all is brightness, fresh air, the smell of roses: you never knew the bookshop was hiding this courtyard garden, mossy and green, where the plash of the fountain and the chirps of the birds are all that disturb the silence. Here (he pulls up a white metal chair), take a seat, take your time; and don't mind my daughter, if you see her; sometimes she too comes to read, or to draw, or simply to hear the birds sing. And before you know it, the owner has left, and you are alone. It is like a dream, the place is so beautiful, so unexpected. You realise the book has fallen open in your hands, the sun is dappling its pages, and with the effortlessness of lapsing into a deep sleep after a great exertion, you sink into the words of the story. When you finish, twilight has already crept on. You rise, and head to the door. The door is locked. Strange. You knock, and when there is no answer, you knock louder, call out. But the reply comes from behind you, and her voice is as soft as a night-breeze: Father doesn't like it when they're noisy. She is standing but a few paces from you, eyes dark like polished stones. In her one hand, a lantern; in the other, a stack of books. She wears only a pale gauzy nightdress. Stepping closer, muttering to herself, she selects a book of fairy stories and presses it into you hand. Yes, this one tonight (she murmurs), this one is best for bedtime, we'll save the others for tomorrow. She settles cross-legged on the grass, and, studying you intently, asks: Do you do voices? The last man couldn't do voices, all the characters sounded the same. It was horrible! Father sent him to the cellar to learn his lesson, but that just made him worse, he couldn't read the words right at all after that. I sure hope you're good at voices. Well, why are you just standing there, mister? Start at page three seven five - that's where the last one reached before Father got rid of him - three-hundred and seventy five. Just remember to do the voices.
What do you think about joining online book clubs? (pic related)Any success with this?Athenaeum is big on twitter, I might join this one, but are there any others /lit/ recommends to join?
To clarify, I am looking for a place to discuss the Great Books with others, since I don't have anyone to discuss IRL with at the moment.athenaeumbooks.com looks like an interesting place to start...
>>25302876Have you tried talking to yourself anon.The people in book clubs probably can't match your quality, it's much more fun anyway
>le AI cartoony face
>big on twitterHello, Rajeesh
My wife. Just read At the Bay and was moved to tears. The first episode contains a description of life (human, animal, vegetal) that is a masterpiece; the whole story is somehow a plain description of everyday life while maintaining a pure metaphysical quality. The episode with the children playing as animals was perfect and surreal. She somehow managed to display life as a whole in a few pages. Very clearly a genius. She was gone too soon and I wish I could go back in time and save her.Katherine Mansfield thread? Also, post female authors you fell in love with. I always fall in love when I read good female writers.
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