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>>24116054The Dark Archives one sounds unusual and interesting, pick that one.
>>24116054You need to be over 18 to post here, anon.
every time someone does this it's the weirdest group. like the bargain bin at the good used bookstore uh uh unh Crime and Punishment!
No surrender
>>24116067It is the selection of someone who spent a lot of time on /lit/ "preparing" to become a "reader." Mostly regularly talked about books and few oddballs which occasionally get talked about and are the books which tell us what sort of person OP is, they are the books which he actually found interesting and not things he feels a weird compulsion to read because of all the time he spent on /lit/ and the image he wants to create for himself as a reader.
>>24116116hard to parse this, because I didn't say it in judgment. I find it hugely strange to be asked "should I read Andrew Zimmern or Brothers K or Ted K's manifesto?" on its face. and I don't think OP's culled all this from /lit/. I think he foraged this in the wild
>>24116116and one more, I'm gonna assume this is a younger reader, and it's a trend I've seen that I don't understand--why can't they go with their gut? nobody else need be involved, you know? when I was younger, I just gravitated towards whatever. I understand needing and wanting guidance when approaching a course of study, but OP should read the back covers and just be like "yeah, this one's gonna hit right now"
>>241161216 of 11 books are /lit/ meme books, seems statistically improbable especially with Ted in there. Don't know what you are getting with the judgement thing, just part of life.>>24116129Because he is just starting out at reading and has an image of what reading and being a reader are. Everyone goes through this in some aspects of their life, somethings we dive into without much consideration and other things we overthink and needlessly complicate.
The Infinite and The Divine, Necrons are so Kino
>>24116155but 4 of those 6 are Dusty and Cormac? everyone who started *reading* in the last decade starts there because of the culture. not a major contention tho, i see where you're coming from. I agree with your second point, guess I'm trying to tell OP not to overcomplicate. developing personal taste is instinctual and pleasurable. making it programmatic is what will kill that drive in a newer reader
>>24116054>>24116067If 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.
>>24116054>he has an actual bound physical copy of the memeafestoPor que anon
>>24116261I don't think he is over complicating the selection process, the needless complication is in the formation of the idea of what reading and reader are—the image and preconception—which is an unnecessary hurdle you have to eventually overcome if you stick with it but can be fun and is a part of life. No matter how one selects books when first starting out you are going to go down dead ends, if you don't you will never figure out what you like or what reading and being a reader is to you. In someways I think forming that image and the preconceptions is better than not, reinvent yourself and throw yourself in fully because what ever it is you are embarking on it may just be a phase, you may discover that it is the ideal which drew you in and not the thing itself, if that is the case you won't get much out of it if you don't attempt to realize that image. Feel like I am showing my age here.
>>24116054CP
>>24116391Really? I'm liking how you're expressing all this, but it is extremely foreign to how I go about my intellectual life and how I've done since an adolescent. I have a kneejerk response to these kinds of posts, because it is so opposite of that moment of discovery in the stacks or later in your dorm room or your stupid first apartment, the beautiful moment when you find something and it hits you right where you needed it to, and no sooner or later than you needed it. I never thought about it before, how you've put it here. The image of yourself as a reader. I don't think I had that when young (I have a self-concept now of course, I want to think more about that formed image and what it is), but I had a strong drive to be a formidable thinker. To be able to take part in the kinds of conversations that excited me to listen to but to which I had nothing to contribute. This is the old way of learning. You hear the elders around the fire, you hear the men in the forum, and you know something vital is happening, and that sends you off on a quest guided by your thirst. Don't know if OP's even reading any of this, I just want him to know he's got to notice and seize on that thirst.
>>24116330kys
>>24116614Those four years of penal servitude Dostoyevsky spent in Siberia he spent in the company of murderers and thieves, no segregation having been yet introduced between ordinary and political criminals. He described them in his ''Memoirs from the House of Death'' (1862). They do not make a pleasant reading. All the humiliations and hardships he endured are described in detail, as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoyevsky had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. His emotional life up to that time had been unhappy. In Siberia he had married, but this first marriage proved unsatisfactory. In 1862-63 he had an affair with a woman writer and in her company visited England, France and Germany. This woman, whom he later characterized as ''infernal,'' seems to have been an evil character. Later she married Rozanov, an extraordinary writer combining moments of exceptional genius with manifestations of astounding naivete. (I knew Rozanov, but he had married another woman by that time.) This woman seems to have had a rather unfortunate influence on Dostoyevsky, further upsetting his unstable spirit. It was during this first trip abroad to Germany that the first manifestation of his passion for gambling appeared which during the rest of his life was the plague of his family and an insurmountable obstacle to any kind of material ease or peace to himself. Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody. Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment.
>>24116752can you explain not feeling drawn to anything? I just don't believe that. what do you like? what writers?
>>24116354source?i think I've seen her being posted here long time ago.
>>24116054 american psycho, its a laugh riot
>>24116116This is only spot on because it also applies (or used to apply) to you too.
