Before the culture war bait threads completely consume this board in the coming years, let's try to steer the conversation back to literature as we close out 2025...What was your favorite read this year, and how did you discover it?
>>24886960The Brothers Karamazov, I discovered it through the library
>>24886960not a huge fiction reader but I want to attempt Buddenbrooks next year. how does it fare among Thomas Mann's works? are the characters likeable? or pitiable?
Read Atomised by Houellebecq this year. The edginess was a little excessive at points, but apart from that I thought it was great. Recommended to me by /lit/ bros of course.
>>24886977haven't read it but I've heard it's his best work
I haven't finished a book in 3 years thoughbeit
>>24886960Gravity's Rainbow, /lit/
>>24886977>>24887002I like it less than Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, but that's because I'm a modernist fag. MM and DF are more about ideas and are more essayistic, while Buddenbrooks reads like your typical realist novel. His characters are at once likable, tragic and comic. He's a great ironist, but you need a specific point of view to catch the comedy. When I first read Magic Mountain, I found it intellectual and profound, but when I came across this text:>As to Director Wulicke’s personality, he was dreadful—as enigmatic, duplicitous, willful, and jealous as the God of the Old Testament. His smile was as terrible as his anger. The vast authority he held in his hands made him appallingly moody and unpredictable. He was perfectly capable of telling a joke and then turning in horrible anger on anyone who laughed. None of his trembling underlings knew how to behave in his presence. They had no choice but to lie in the dust and adore him—and hope that their almost frantic abasement might prevent his snatching them up in his wrath and crushing them in the mills of his great justice.>Kai Mölln and Hanno Buddenbrook used Kai’s nickname for him only between themselves and were careful never to let their schoolmates overhear it—out of an aversion to that fixed, cold look of incomprehension that they knew so well. No, these two boys had nothing whatever in common with their fellow students, who were content with simple revenge or obstinacy. That was not their way. They despised the usual nicknames given the teachers, because these were based on a humor that left them cold, didn’t even make them smile. It was so cheap, so prosaic, so unfunny to call skinny Professor Hückopp “the spider,” or Ballerstedt “the cockatoo”—poor compensation for their own compulsory service to the state. No, Kai Mölln could be a little more cutting than that! He had introduced the practice, just for himself and Hanno, of calling teachers by their proper last names, but with the addition of the word “Herr”: “Herr Ballerstedt,” “Herr Mantelsack,” “Herr Hückopp”—and it added, as it were, the right ironic, dismissive coolness of tone, a mocking, quirky condescension. They spoke of the “pedagogic body” and could amuse themselves during an entire break between classes by picturing a kind of huge, fantastic, repulsive monster. And they usually spoke of “the institution,” in a tone that implied it was much like the one in which Hanno’s Uncle Christian resided.I realised the kind of humour Mann is going for. Settembrini and Naphta are comedy gold.I also heard Joseph is is his best novel.
>>24886960Will we ever be free of the cultural ear?
>>24887050Deleting twitter helps a lot, but I don't think you can berid of it entirely.
>>24886960I discovered Alexander Theroux by browsing Leaf by Leaf's channel and after trying to find something from him in print have now read his short story collection Early Stories.This is some of the funniest shit I've read in years. >What do you call a fish with no eye? FSH!>What do you call a deer with no eye? No ideer.>What do you call bears with no ears? B.>Why don't you have to starve in the desert? Because you might eat all the sand which is there.>Why are the sandwiches there? Because there the family of Ham was bread and mustard.
>>24887061I don't even have Twitter and yet I'm involved. I write a lot of theory and read books on psychology, sociology and political science. Eh...
>>24887096rec some good sociology
>>24887096>I read books on psychology, sociology and political scienceThere's your problem. The three academic branches most infiltrated by faggotry. Read other stuff.
>>24886960I read a lot of great comics this year and a few so-so novels.What I'd Say to the Martians by Jack Handey was the only great non-comic fiction work I read. Not really a novel though. But read it anyway.(A series of short comedic pieces, this is one of them)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/08/what-id-say-to-the-martians>People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys a new Martian asshole. You say we are violent and barbaric, but has any one of you come up to my cage and extended his hand? Because, if he did, I would jerk it off and eat it right in front of him. “Mmm, that’s good Martian,” I would say.
>>24887105Emile Durkheim's Suicide is the only sociology book in existence worth reading.He simultaneously started and ended the branch of study with one book. Everything conceived since then in the field has been a bunch of theoretical retardation with comically flimsy foundations.
>>24887111You just reminded me I’ve had ‘Stench of Honolulu’ in my tbr forever. Going to get to it once I finish ‘Against Nature’.
>>24886960I just finished Infinite Jest, and it's pretty impossible to not know of it. /lit/ was obviously a huge influence, but I'd been itching to read it for over a year; I think what triggered the initial interest was that I saw it adapted into like a six-hour audio play in Finnish—a bizarre thing I checked out one episode of and never continued. Now that I've actually read it (in English), I think the play might give an interesting perspective, as in what the fuck did they even do to fit it into six hours of acting? It has so much in it that it's pretty hard not to pick it as the favourite.I don't think I really "discovered" anything else. It's all just well-known, classic stuff that everyone's at least vaguely familiar with. I got started in reading a bit later, so I'm treading well-trod ground for a while before anything particularly novel gets read.
>>24887116>Durkheim>methodological holismNot even once.
>>24887143>I got started in reading a bit later, so I'm treading well-trod ground for a while before anything particularly novel gets readSame. I'm working through all the classics myself. Read Stoner, Nausea, The Stranger, The Idiot, and Hunger this year.This board is good for finding obscure gems every now and then as well.
>>24886960>culture war baitAlready peaked and you know it, at least this type of culture war shit.The parts of Argonautica I got through were pretty interesting. I don't really "read" ancient texts though, I have to constantly look up references, think and reread the interesting parts, so it doesn't flow well as a story.
>>24887173>Already peakedPeople have been saying that since 2015, and yet here we are. It's arguably louder than ever.
>>24887106okay, what are you doing to change that? these fields aren't going to change based someone attempting to "wish away" the bad research. you actually have to critique and input your own insights or its going to end up in entropy. besides ought I research anthropology? already do it. history? that too. what else?>>24887105ignore the other poster (Suicide is good, though)Max Weber - Economy And SocietyGeorg Simmel - Conflict & Web Of Group AffiliationsErving Goffmann - StigmaJean-Jacques Rousseau - The Two Discourses (proto-sociology)Gustave Le Bon - The CrowdGustave Le Bon - Psychology Of RevolutionsWolfgang Schivelbusch - Culture Of DefeatDavid Rothkopf - SuperclassTheodore Dalrymple - Life At The BottomJames Burnham - The Machiavellians (history of sociology moreso)
>>24887176>okay, what are you doing to change that?there's not really anything you can do to change peoples interests in redundant fields, besides offer them the opportunity to reconsider
>>24887116i’ll check it out>>24887176nice, thanks anon, been meaning to get deeper into sociology
>>24886960>Before the culture war bait threads completely consume this board>beforeAnon...
>>24887191no problem, anytime.
Most recently, War and War by that Hungarian. It wasn't my abolsute favourite of his, but it still tickled me nicely. Love the website too.As for discoveries, I read Richard Powers, who I would have ignored if some anon hadn't said something kind. Anyway, The Overstory - strong, provocative book
My favourite was Pere Goriot, I found out about it on standardebooks I also read collapse of the Soviet union, I don't remember how I learned about itI also read Neuromancer, /lit/, didn't like itI also read Dune, /lit/, didn't like itI read 40k slop (first and only), also /lit/, also didn't like itI think I don't like fiction books
>>24886960The Revenant Brother gave me his copy and told me it was good and suggested I read it
>>24887419Pere Goriot is fiction. Maybe you just don't like sci-fi slop?
>>24887551Of course it is fiction but it feels like it's based on the thoughts and feelings of an actually existing people, the parisiense new bourgeoisie were a people that are now extinct, and books like those of balzac let us peek into how they behaved and thought (obviously you have to think critically about these things), so in my mind they don't seem the same, despite all of them being "fiction"
>>24887555You don't seem to understand what fiction is. Just read more literary fiction instead of genre slop and you'll be happier.
My favourite read was Aristotle's physics, it was nice not only because of Aristotle's theories but also because of the recount of previous theories as a little history of philosophy. I was taught a little about the presocratics in high school and many of them seemed too primitive, but as told by Aristotle they make more sense, even Thales.I read more philosophy than literature this year, though I have confirmed that Odyssey > Iliad. Sense and Sensibility was comfy as an ESL, a taste of English aristocratic vibes.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It's always been apart of the cultural zeitgeist, so it was just a matter of finally picking it up and reading. Not disappointed one bit, it was a fantastic adventure from beginning to end, though like most older novels, it's longer than a modern editor would allow.
‘A General History of Labyrinths’ by Silas Haslam. Found in a dim corner of the library even the librarians seem to have forgotten.
>What was your favorite read this yearWilt.>how did you discover it?Anon said it was funny.
>>24886960finally got back into reading around this time last year, after about a decade since I'd last read for leisure.had a lot of catching up to do; favorite thing I've read this year was probably IJ, which I managed to tear through in about a week
