Stack thread Post ‘em
It's all so very /lit/. Do you all share the same wishlist or something?
>>23513748>Do you all share the same wishlist or something?
>>23513748I only read what they recommend here. Anons in /lit/ are pretty smart and well-readed you see
>>23513748Most /lit/posters have not read widely enough to develop an actual taste, so they just copy internet taste lists.
>>23513748>a likeminded community shared an interestGee, I don’t know
>>23513748I can’t remember the last time I saw a James Jones thread here
>>23513660>DeLilloHated white noise and that shit was like 300 pages cannot imagine reading that tome. My condolences
Currently reading/intend to read next>>23514207High five Ciardibro
>>23514287high five brother. I tried reading the longfellow, but wasn't feeling it. I don't know, reading an epic poem which doesn't rhyme in translation, is not fun the first time around. Thus i went with Ciardi.Longfellow on the 2nd read.How's that Elizabeth taylor?
>>23513660()>>23514207() 'cept for the Divine Comedy >>23514287Ditto ^^^ Nice teapot and bookmarks tho.>>23513783Lmao I get 99% of my recs here ngl
>>23514331>()I guess 4chin doesn't support special unicode charterers
>>23514330that's one I haven't started yet but I love her in general, I've read three others previously. She does really great nuanced flawed characters
>>23514365How's the Toynbee?
>>23514351Thanks anon, sound very nice. I'll keep her in mind.>>23514365I've gifted that copy of the letters to Milena to a friend, never read it myself.
>>23514365To your Toynbees I raise mine. Plus other stuff I got. (>>23514207) Nice reading list miller anon.
>>23514365Hoe many iterations of this are you going to spam in ever stack thread, you attention-seeking faggot
>>23513660cursed
>>23513660I remember being 17
>>23514383I started it some weeks ago and it drew my interest back towards the Ancient Greeks so I put it down to reread Herodotus and Thucydides. From what I can tell it’s in the same vein as Spengler but more dry and a little differently focused. Spengler is focused more on culture and has a bold cocksure poetic style whereas Toynbee seems to be focused on history in a more pragmatic way and much drier tone. As far as I can tell they both have similar theses and will always be compared to each other. I’m planning to start it again soon so I’ll post about it more eventually >>23514573Nice. What’s the red Choose Life book?
>>23514701obsessed
>>23514762along with the exact number of times you were molested by a sodomite throughout that fateful year, i'd imagine
>>23514811Nice. Will get Spengler after readingToynbee. Before knowing about him, based on lit posts, I thought he was some fascist or something kek>Choose LifeIt is a transcript of conversations between Toynbee and Ikeda (a buddhist monk himself and a president of a buddhist organization with over 120 million attendees), that Toynbee took part in at the end of his life.Pretty vast range of topics.I'll post the content pages.(1/4)
>>23515102(2/4)
>>23515106(3/4)
>>23515112(4/4)
>>23514991>mentions being sodomised at a young age out of the blueAnon, I don't know what to tell you. What would one call a Freudian slip that one has precisely typed out on the internet and filled in a captcha for?
>the dimwit redditor doesn’t know what a Freudian slip is Kek say it ain’t so
>>23515102>>23515106>>23515112>>23515115Nice. This looks like something I’d be interested in. Quite an interesting combination of people. I’m not familiar with this press but I’ll have to look into them. This seems like the type of book that has the potential to be a hidden gemSpengler gets a bad rap because of some of his fans here. He was definitely a fascist and a major influence on the Nazi party but he was also critical of the Nazis and his views on antisemitism were very similar to Nietzsche. I posted about Spengler recently saying the reason I think Spengler is great isn’t because of his ideas but because of his style. He is arguably more of a poet than a historian. His breadth of knowledge is impressive but it’s his delivery that gives him fame. He has that Nietzschean style and he’s bold, almost shouting frightening prophecies. He’s worth reading for that alone. I don’t agree with everything he says but he definitely gives food for thought and some of his ideas are intriguing. If you’re interested I’d see if you can find the introduction he wrote online as that gives a good idea of what he’s about. Some sections are much better than others and I read the abridged version so i imagine there’s a lot of filler in the whole thing. I like his interpretation on Goethe too and wish Goethe was seen more as a philosopher than just the man who wrote Faust and Young Werther. I definitely don’t consider myself far right but I’ll read some of them if there’s a good reason too. Same with the far left, I eventually want to read Lenin and Guevara. It seems a lot of anons here who rally around Spengler might have not read him or didn’t really understand his ideas. There have been lots of left wing or non radical writers and people who have liked Spengler
>>23515655Thank you yeah, I always appreciate your thoughts.MLBD is a pretty old Indian publisher specializing in spiritual and historical texts. Lot of buddhist literature has been published by them.Here's a paragraph I really liked from 'Choose Life'.
I've got a lot of Busi on my mind.
>>23513660Shadow at the Bottom of the World is Ligotti
>>23515786Thank you for posting this and it’s always good to see you around. I’m going to get this book in a few weeks; just splurged a bit with the NYRB 4 for 40% sale so i want to hold off for a couple weeks
Bought these today off an old guy from Facebook marketplace for $20. There is also another stack of non-sci-fi, mostly horror, paperbacks I am not interested in.
>>23516820There...sure are some books in there anon. Hard to complain, it's a good haul all around. Good curation all around, but it's giving me flashbacks to trying to read out of secondhand bookstores before the internet. Those Nebula short fiction anthologies tend to mog everything.
>>23516616Did you post "Young Skins" earlier in the week with just your legs. I literally bought that book b/c of you. Hope it's goodAnd why the thinkpad - are you linux/FSF enthusiast?
>>23516855My shitposting has been criticized in the past but I have convinced more people to read something new than I would have ever thought. It's a very tight and cleanly written collection of short stories about sleazy nowhere town life. He has a little Joyce in the prose and can flex when he wants to, but most of it is careful characterization on par with a southern gothic. Best contemporary short fiction I've read in years. I do some offline things on it, it's too old and slow for much else. Mostly keeps the desk from floating away.
>>23516833Ya, the short story collections are the reason I bought the lot. That and the vintage 1950 copy of The Dying Earth (sadly not first edition though).
I am humble and proud
>>23516820I would oh so like to see the cover of that Stranger in a Strange Land
>>23517003Sadly not one of the good covers. Also in rough condition.
>>23517174>Books 1&2, Books 3&4, Books 5&6, Books VII&VIII
>>23517178The last one is a newer print, I got it from a used book store for half the price of new and the books are all in excellent quality so I can’t complain
My current e-stack (yes, I don't buy paper books any longer) is:Stan Gooch - Cities of DreamsDesi Serna - Guitar Ruth & Technique for DummiesPeter Singer - Hegel: A Very Short Introduction Haters gonna hate.
>>23517505*rythm
>>23515196>faggot doesn't know when one is being ironic
My big ol stack
>>23517550why two copies of AA?
>>23517550>Alcoholics Anonymous>Personal Bankruptcy Laws for Dummies
>>23517550How's the lobotomy Pivner?
>>23516616I'm feeling like I'm Busi back in 2009! When nigga drop a diss I drop a hit right on his mind.
>>23516820Beautiful. I used to buy shitloads of old paperbacks, and they costed me nothing, but I have so many that I don't do it anymore.
>>23514207Hmmm, always love me some Divine Comedy
>>23517492Dutch fren?
Here's mine.
>>23517652Are interest rates gonna rise this year? One in September another one in early 2025?
>>23518871Nta. Another recession is coming
>>23518871Don’t think so. The ECB already lowered rates recently and is expecting inflation to gradually drop below 2%. The Fed will likely keep rates the same for a while I think.
>>23518631>RozmanGay
>>23519271Yeah, it was a gift. I have much better resources these days.
>>23518372The page numbers and stories are different between the editions. Everyone at meetings uses the one with the yellow band but I had initially purchased the blue one.
>>23518441Are such problems uncommon on this board?
>>23514207how are you finding Ulysses Unbound? I just started on Bloomsday a week ago, currently i finish the chapter then Sparknotes and Nabokov's chapter notes after.
Test
>>23515193Not him, and it clearly wasn't out of the blue. You were riffing on the OP's stack, which contains Sade, and referred to your younger, teenage self. The other guy then referenced 120 Days of Sodom, a work frequently discussed here, as a play on your remark. Also the kids in that one range from 12-15, not 17, so it's a bit more depraved than what the other guy initially suggested. Sade very autistically describes how a total of 16 children are kidnapped for the four friend's delight: two boys and two girls apiece of the ages 12, 13, 14 and 15, or a total of 8 boys and 8 girls. He also spends a good amount of detail on how each man takes four of them to bed with him each night (among others), and the four friends change up who gets whom on a regular basis, throughout the proceedings. They are made to wear cute outfits for the amusement of the men.
>>23513660if quads i'ma get published.
>>23519998ouch
>>23520001I knew the risks when i rolled this. I accept my punishment before the lord.
The stack thread always gets far more replies than 'currently reading' threads. Don't tell me you buy books to not read them?
>>23520017I post in both and frequently am the one making both. I’ve always seen their decline as a sign of the times. It’s a disgrace that current reading threads don’t hit bump limit and frequently die with less than 100 replies. There should be one stickies at all times
>>23520017>>23520027It's visual and print readers are a little more engaged and invested. Anons are timid and boring at times and don't talk about the books they're reading, so this format is a little better at getting posts. Not to mention, reading is a slow process some weeks and the whole board is pretty slow as far as literate posters goes. I think one day we need to talk about how wide literature is and how that impacts being able to talk about what is off the top 100. I see a few anons in shelf and stack threads with taste I recognize but the rest is opaque to me.
>>23520086I think stack threads are a good way of throwing a lot of darts. Instead of posting one book, put up a bunch that you just read or are interested in reading. It’s a numbers game. I’ve had some good interactions throughout the years in stack and shelf threads. They aren’t always good but generally people who get physical books read them
>>23520091I will say that compared to the shelves, stacks are less entry level on the whole and I get a good sense of broad tastes and some good recs occasionally. They're much more eclectic. Ebook frens aren't starved for choice but they miss out on the new translations and releases that aren't on the open seas. One thing I think would be the sign of a healthier board is more contemporary lit, at least the past 15 years. /lit/ used to be pretty hot on seeking out, not trendy, but that underrated hipster kind of lit that takes a while to surface.
>>23520017>'currently reading' threads.I literally never see these.
>>23520191I see them routinely. The main reason why I don't engage with them is because I read oddball shit out in public that could conceivably uniquely ID me if I were to be detailed. Of course, I don't read the edgy stuff out in public, I keep that indoors. But still. The mere fact of asking about it around these quarters reeks of some sort of enhanced government monitoring, on top of the passive government monitoring which occurs here, which is obviously not a paranoid consideration given this particular forum.
>>23520191I make them pretty much every weekend. Some other anons do too
>>23520186/lit/ obviously isn’t a healthy board and I think it’s a bit of a chicken or egg thing in regards to contemporary literature. /lit/ has generally been focused on the classics, minor classics, the western canon and such. The contemporary readers were somewhat of a niche and if they’re not present today no one is going to get recommendations and it dwindles and dwindles. I’d be curious in some good contemporary literature. I’ve thought about taking a blind swipe at some Fitzcarraldo or whatever that publisher is. I’ve mostly stuck to the big names that have released books in the last 30 years like Bolano, Sebald, Roth, Fosse, McCarthy, Delillo and guys like that. Contemporary literature isn’t my thing and I would like some direction to be pointed in. I’ve thought about Joshua Cohen, Rachel Cohen, Olga T. and some other Fosse
I'm just following the Great Books reading list right now so->Plato's Republic Book 1-2>Aristotle Ethics Book 1>Aristotle Politics Book 1>Plutarch Lives, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Lycurgus and Numa Compared, Alexander, and Caesar>The New Testament, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Acts of the Apostles>St Augustine Confessions Books 1-8>Machiavelli The PrinceI'll keep going with year one beyond that point but this is my current stack
>>23520236An anon pointed to Farrar, Straus & Giraux and from what I've seen (they published Bolano and Busi), the current lineup isn't bad either. I'd read most of it. Blackouts by Justin Torres is next on my list after I recoup some funds from the NYRB sale. Looks like well-written and mindfucky fag shit that's outside the thing for white women that not even fags like. I trawled the archives and have some more contemporary Irish lit coming, Oisin Fagan sounded up my alley. I haven't tried to keep up in a long time and the market has changed to the point I'm starting over nearly from scratch, but you end up following a few publishers who do the kind of stories you like, reading review blogs from people who buy a lot of shit from those publishers, and enjoying books you know very little about. Just avoid anything that will ever be a bestseller at B&N and it's usually a pleasant experience. I don't watch tv, videogames lost their appeal overt a year ago, and I'm trying to limit my time shitposting so I read a lot now, as I did in the past and I'm going to try and squeeze in one contemporary novel a month. Eventually one has to strike upon something worthy of telling you fags about. I'm surprised Tom Robbins isn't more popular around here but I never took the time to shill him.
>>23520277The Great Books aren't really the sort of thing you're meant to power through in a few years. I remember first encountering Homer's Iliad and Odyssey back when I was a teenager and also tried reading Plato's Republic but got very little out of it back then. I got more out of Plato and Aristotle's works after going through an Introduction to Philosophy course in college, and Homer only really started clicking with me once I began to look for the great ethical lessons that Plato spoke of in his dialogues. Writers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche stop feeling like edgy, subversive writers once you get to understand their context and look not just at fragments from their most famous works, but rather the entire set of works from each one of them. A person who's never read about the 19th century Kulturkampf, the battle between the church and the state, and the fight for secularism in France, Germany, and England might believe Nietzsche to be a violently anti-clerical, undemocratic thinker by reading parts of The Twilight of Idols and The Antichrist, but a person acquainted with Nietzsche's intellectual predecessors, like Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Kierkegaard, will know that Nietzsche sought to relieve humans of inauthenticity and resentment. Nietzsche loved life and humans, and he hated people who worshipped idealized, fake forms. Such lessons are not caught onto by a casual reader with a superficial knowledge of the history of ideas, but rather by one who knows just enough to appreciate how the parts connect to the whole. You can go back to the works of any great thinker, any great writer any number of times and always find new details to appreciate, new ways to interpret reality. The text itself remains the same, but the reader changes, and as the reader changes, so does the reading they perform of the text.
>>23520413Yeah, knowledge and understanding doesn’t necessarily work in a progressive way, as in you fill in gaps both for the future and the past as you read more. The more you read the more gaps are filled and eventually a clearer picture starts to form. I said in another thread recently that I think chart and curriculum readers have done some damage to new autistic readers. One doesn’t need to prepare for a book by spending months reading other books. It’s faux gatekeeping. If a book is dense and worthwhile you’ll return to it anyway when more gaps are filled in. Autistically trolling through a chronological book list isn’t necessary. Just read what you want to read. If you find that book, topic, writer interests you you can start to look into influences and enhancing your understanding. Life is short and reading takes time. Read what interests you and if you like it then dig deeper
>>23520413I found it worse than that. You can't understand philosophy without a holistic context of engaging with the pedagogy surrounding it. It's so much easier when you're in a setting where that context is provided immediately alongside the texts, as well as methods of interpretation and various intellectual dead ends most people learn their first day on the job. It's one of the greatest traps in autodidacticism.
>>23514365Just wanted to say I started Invisible Cities and it’s great. It’s like a book of parables. Some click with me much more than others but it’s so short I’ll probably reread it soon. It’s definitely good food for thought. No clue why I avoided Calvino all these years. Because of IC i just ordered Why Read The Classics. I love writers on books/writers I finished American Pastoral. It’s great but got progressively darker and more depressing as it went on. A very prescient book. I gave my thoughts on it in another thread
>>23520413I'm not looking to one and done the books. I'm just reading them and thinking about them as I read them. The reading plan outlined in The Great Conversation is just an introduction to the set anyways. I have a lot of other books too. Like I said, I'm just reading and thinking.>>23520435I skipped reading Aristophanes Clouds and Lysistrata again because I read it a while ago. I started reading it as I was working through the list again and I just wasn't enjoying either so I bypassed them and I think that's alright. I might do the same with the illiad and the odyssey. I know I'm missing context but so far I just haven't enjoyed very many greek plays that I've read that much.Right now I'm just trying to keep reading and keep actually thinking as I read. That also includes writing about what I read just for my own sake and structuring ideas about what I'm reading.
>>23519662>>23519662Aha, Bloomsday was my impetus too to read Joyce. But I wanted to read him chronologically, so I ordered the portable joyce (which contains dubliners, a portrait and his plays and poems).But I did test Unbound for the first chapter (for I had read it ages ago as a naive child), it's very helpful whilst not being too overbearing and drowning you with notes.For each chapter it has, a summary of the chapter, comparisons with The Odyssey (and sometimes the hamlet), a paragraph about the style, a commentary on the chapter which is pretty insightful, and a glossary of biographical/historical details and meanings of all foreign language phrases.Where are you reading Nabokov's lectures from? Mind sharing a link? I know he had a book of his Don Quixote lectures published.
>>23520485Nice Miller Anon, I had bought both Why Read The Classics and Marcovaldo by Calvino last month.I have read invisible cities earlier, still need to read if on a winter's night. Why read the classics is nice, I liked his essay on hemingway a lot, earnest critique. (Pun intended)Here's what I wrote about Marcovaldo earlier somewhere;>you all should read Marcovaldo, by Calvino. It's 20 short vignettes (barely a 100 pages total) from the life of a working-class Don Quixote type character, who doesn't necessarily dream of castles and dragons, but rather getting away from his wife and Six children and sleeping on a park bench under the moonlight.It's always the seemingly mundane stuff, that gets him hyped but they all end in hilariously miserable ways for him. The first story is him being very happy that he saw mushrooms growing in his neighborhood and he plots to have a grand meal with his family when they're fully grown, eventually when his rival also starts collecting the shrooms. They all have a grand meal, and all get sick because of the mushrooms and he has to end up sharing a hospital bed with his rival.Geniuenly funny stories. 10/10
These are the only four books on my shelf I've yet to read; which one should I take with me on the train tomorrow?
>>23521128Lao Tzu.
>>23520660Reading his lecture notes from a used copy of this i found a while back. i originally bought it for the metamorphosis content but the Ulysses stuff is great too. dont have a pdf for you unfortunately but libgen or zlib im sure you can find it.
german reading hours
>>23517652What have you learned so far from those Xi Jinping books?
>>23521857I’ve only read Volume I so far. It’s mostly a repetitive collection of speeches but there’s some interesting stuff in there. He talks about fighting internal corruption in the CPC and reaching the “China Dream” of national rejuvenation by 2049 by mobilizing economic forces to reach certain goals (like eliminating poverty)There’s also a short 25 page biography of Xi at the end which is pretty neat.
A few of these are for work:>Anatomy of Genres I get to teach creative writing for the first time after running it as a club for 4 years>Writing Rhetorically>The Trivium I want to get stronger at teaching writing. I feel like it's my weak spot as a sixth year teacher.>the restsummer reads
>hiya milleranon :) uwu Like clockwork with this faggot
>>23518551Yes fren, from the north of the country.
>>23514277>White NoiseThat shit was so so bad. Might read Underworld just to seethe about how shit I expect it to be because I find fun in that
>>23521989>obsessing over some random person's postsLike clockwork with this faggot
>>23521128>being a single man>unhappyI can't relate to this sentiment at all.
>when the attention-seeking faggot isn’t responding to himself, the attention-seeking faggot seethes at anons making fun of him Like clockwork with this faggot
Bump
>>23522515>Like clockwork with this faggotLike clockwork with this faggot
Being able to post infinite piles of books you may have read, or want to read, or started to read, or read years ago, or had signed in a frat house by an author who ogled your friend's mom, or halfway finished but life got in the way, or infinitely read forever, or would have wanted to have read in the past but the time isn't right, or would have liked in the past but reading now is better than having read it already, is a real boon to keeping this thread on topic.
>>23523801Having once read all there was to read, I now see that I only read half of what could be read from what I did read. I may not read some of it again but informs my future reading as placed in this stack.
>>23513660Currently reading and recently bought. I've had decent luck with sales recently, from HPB to the library. I even took a drive to a bookstore about an hour away yesterday and grabbed some stuff I was kind of excited about. Nabbed an indie bookstore roadmap, and walked up and down the main street sipping a coffee from their cafe. Super cozy.I'm a comic guy and a literature newfag and hadn't read anything in like half a year, but the library's summer reading program started the other week and I took too big a bite. I've got bookmarks in four comics in addition to Macabre, Michigan Dog Man, and No Sharks. The latter informed me of Subterranean Press, and I'm too poor to appreciate this new knowledge.How much do versions of King Arthur/Le Morte D'Arthur vary? I kind of want to read that next. Should I just grab the one on Gutenberg? I'd prefer a physical book if it's decent.>>23516786Shadow sounds cool. I'll have to look up the rest of that stack.>>23516820This looks really fun, at least.>>23519122Redwall is on my short list of YA stuff I missed as a kid. I've got one random volume that was like a buck at a garage sale. I'm actually really looking forward to my kid getting older so I have an excuse to blow through a bunch of shit for kids and teenagers.
>>23523857Blow through it now, it doesn't exactly get better but the good stuff doesn't get worse. Wind in the Willows is good at any age but you want a sense of what is good and what is shit and what a kid of a given age can reasonably read and what kind of structure and prose holds attention. I read a lot of books by jews, as we all do when we're of the Elite of any background, filter them carefully because the (hidden) message is also for them and is sometimes useful or the better option. Babby's first subtext and all that.
>>23523857I digressed, Redwall is gifted program prodigy autist shit, Seriously, check out graded readers for an idea of what average looks like, and even that is optimistic. You probably have one of them mutant prototypes from god but it's better not to have high expectations.
>>23520668I’ll have to check that out. I had the wrong idea about Calvino or at least Invisible Cities. I had the impression he was a bit of gimmick writer. It reminded me a lot of Kafka’s short parable stories
>>23521128>The unhappiness of being a single manWas Kafka an incel?
>>23518631Throw that Bible in the trash and get a KJV (not new KJV). Basically any church will give you one for free. If they give you a NIV trash it as well and go to a Baptist church.
>>23514365>>23514573why do you like the Toynbee books so much?are they popular here? why?
>>23524495Are not all men — a single man?
>>23521425>wiley chem stuffbased fellow STEMfag?
this is one of my stacks
Just got these in the mail today, a few more coming soon. Should hold me over for the next couple of months. Flipping through some of them, I’ve realized I made a couple mistakes. I didn’t realize there was so much calculus in Weiner’s book and I never took calculus. I also didn’t realize Voyage au bout de la nuit was 600 pages long… I’m still learning french so it may take a while to get through that, though I do already have some shorter simpler french books that I need to read so I can work up to it. I also didn’t realize School for Atheists (“a novella”) was so big. You can’t tell by this picture but it’s bigger than my laptop screen.
Stack
Yeeeep, guess it's never too late to get into philosophy
