>>25230474
I'd hold off on meme books like Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow for now. DFW short stories should be fine though.
Other than that, don't bother with Sun and Steel until you have at least some Mishima under your belt or have a specific interest in body building. He has plenty of good, approachable books like The Sailor Who Fell from Grace and The Golden Pavilion.

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>>25230474
Avoid Pynchon for now, Gravity's Rainbow is cock & ball torture if you're having trouble with simpler books. GR I personally found harder than Ulysses (minus Proteus+Oxen), which is also often memed.
From OP, I can confirm that Hemingway is a very easy author. Dostoevsky fluctuates, Crime & Punishment is very accessible, TBK has a bunch of philosophical discussions you might find challenging, Demons is pretty difficult. Haven't read White Nights.
McCarthy's the Road is actually pretty accessible and short, so you could go for that. I didn't like it, I think it doesn't even come close to Blood Meridian and Suttree, but it failed to move me (I heard people can get emotional over this book) I'm a fan of flowery sentences.
My personal recommendations for easy books are:
>The Count of Monte Cristo
>Kafka
>Madame Bovary
>Anna Karenina
>The Stranger
>A Christmas Carol
>Crime & Punishment
>The Road
>Stoner
>Tartar Steppe
Once you 'graduate' from the easy ones, I recommend:
>The Odyssey (the Iliad can be challenging)
>Bleak House & other Dickens
>Brothers Karamazov
>Buddenbrooks
>Don Quixote
Note that difficulty is subjective, I know a of lot of people struggle with Kafka, which I find completely bizarre.

>>25230474
>DFW, pynchon, McCarthy
Those are meme authors lad. Don't be the clueless newfag who gets tricked into reading objective shit.

>>25230474
Read chronologically. People were stupider back then but got smarter. So you should have no problem keeping pace.

>>25230559
based kafka image, saved

>>25230596
I tried to find that one comic of him trying to eat a peach, but couldn't find it so I settled on this one.

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thanks for all the replies anons
>>25230499
checked
i wonder why these three are so polarising on here and elsewhere aswell. i mentioned them because they were the first american ones that came to my mind as i wanted to keep a seperation by the authors nationallity.
> DFW short stories should be fine though.
what do you think of "this is water" for when the time comes as my first DFW introduction?
>don't bother with Sun and Steel until you have at least some Mishima under your belt or have a specific interest in body building.
I do, but is it really that bodybuilding centric in general or more about his mindset when he decided to become /fit/?
>The Sailor Who Fell from Grace and The Golden Pavilion.
these are already on my list for reading down the line. both of them are part of the tetralogy right? the reason why i mentioned sun and steel instead of any of these was that i thought they would be more complicated to comprehend. thanks for your input

>>25230559
>Avoid Pynchon for now, Gravity's Rainbow is cock & ball torture
this seems to be a widespread common opinion about that book in particular from what im seeing. but how come? is it the content and theme of the book or the writing style that makes people think this way?
>GR
Geographus Ravennas?
while i do have interest in reading antique literature this would abviously happen down the line once i have read the more recent classics.
>Dostoevsky fluctuates, Crime & Punishment is very accessible
thank you noted, the gambler and poor folk would be rather short aswell and i thought of getting them, have you read them?
>McCarthy's the Road
the descriptiong paints it as some kind of post apocalyptic world the father and son try to survive but arent mccartys books set to be in a old west/frontier timeline? i´ll put it on my list
>My personal recommendations for easy books are:
thanks some of these are already noted others i havent heard of. but im supprised that TBK ranks higher in difficulty than crime and punishment. is solely because of the philosophical discussions you mentioned or the writing style itself?

>>25230560
thanks for the input. i really wonder how it came that there are two extreme opposite camps of people regarding these three authors in terms of likeability there seems no middle ground. but i guess this is a reason why more and more people flock to either side.

>>25230566
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this can be interpreted in many ways but i think i get what youre trying to say anon. thanks

>>25231043
>is it the content and theme of the book or the writing style that makes people think this way?
Both. Pynchon has a very dense, heavy writing style. He'll also throw you into a scene without giving you any context (whether it's real, if it's a dream, a hallucination, or whose point of view you're in). He also uses surrealism, absurdism, unmarked flashbacks, flashforwards. On finishing my first read I felt like I understood maybe 50% of the text, and I'm a relatively experienced reader.

>>25231043
This Is Water is a transcript from a graduation lecture he gave iirc, they tried to sell it as a book with huge font size and margins. Your okay to to listen to it on YouTube. Personally really enjoyed The Depressed Person and Good Old Neon - but that’s probably because I’m mentally ill person myself. Some people swear by his non-fiction like A Supposedly Fun Thing, but I found him to come off too snooty. Next thing might be heresy to some, but you could also read select chapters from IJ. Off the top of my head there’s a chapter about a cannabis addict and another on AA meetings that are essentially discreet short stories.

As for Mishima, I think Sun and Steel would have best been left untranslated. You might happen upon some choice phrases here and there but I dont trust anyone who says it changed their life. Same goes for his book on the Hagakure. The Paul Schrader film Mishima: Life in Four Chapters does a good enough job combining some of his nonfiction into a coherent narrative. Lastly, the 2 books I mentioned are not part of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, Temple of Dawn and Decay of an Angel) and both give a good impression of his central themes. Confession of a Mask is also good but doesn’t represent all too well his broader body of work- and is also him at his most bookish; ie includes references you might not yet pick up on. Lastly, Mishima also wrote a lot of pulp romance stories and such, and the more recently translated books try to subvert his image by focussing on them. They’re not bad perse, but their whole pitch is giving you a different impression of him as a writer.

>>25231091
oh now i see why he isnt everybodies cup of tea. thank you for this detailed explanation. sounds like even if i after some time regained my lost abbilietes back that this would be a tough read. And while these points are rather negative what would be something positive about pynchon? why does he have such a large audience that recommend and defend him. thanks again for the explanation

>>25231237
>This Is Water is a transcript from a graduation lecture he gave iirc
thanks for the heads up anon.
>Personally really enjoyed The Depressed Person and Good Old Neon
i´ll write them down on my list
>- but that’s probably because I’m mentally ill person myself.
thats sad to hear i hope you´ll find your peace and comfort one day
>but you could also read select chapters from IJ.
i obviously heard the most about IJ here and there but what is the overall theme of the book? also how would you describe DFW as a person? was he a depressed nihilist? because im getting that impression from the things i hear/read about him.

>As for Mishima, I think Sun and Steel would have best been left untranslated.
so you think its solely a matter of "untraslatability" into english etc or that its content isnt anything transformative?
>The Paul Schrader film Mishima: Life in Four Chapters does a good enough job combining some of his nonfiction into a coherent narrative.
i´ve yet to watch that one from the clips i saw on youtube it looked interesting.
>Lastly, the 2 books I mentioned are not part of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy
oh then i mixed them up. i will see if i can get my hands on them down the line.
>Lastly, Mishima also wrote a lot of pulp romance stories and such
i belive "patriotism" and "madame de sade" to be part of this category? thanks you for your reply ißll keep all of this in mind when the time comes for new books

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>>25230474
A book I don't often see recommended for beginners (or people getting back into reading) is Fathers & Sons. Not only is it immensely beautiful, it's also (after Pushkin, who mostly wrote poetry and is therefore harder to parse in translation) the single most important book for understanding 19th century Russian literature. So if you eventually want to get into Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, you really can't do any better than starting with Turgenev's novel on nihilism. It's a little bit longer than A Hero of Our Time, but narratively it's incredibly easy to follow while still giving you a lot to think about. Reading A Hero of Our Time isn't particularly challenging either, but it does shift through multiple narrative styles so it can be slightly disorienting. Anyway just my two cents.
I think this anon >>25230559 generally gave some good recommendations. Monte Cristo is perfect if you want to challenge your attention span with a LONG book that's very easy to read and follow because of how plot-heavy it is.

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>>25231800
Negative? I see those traits as a positive. I adore dense, beautiful prose, and I rather like digressions. Surrealism is also a positive for me, Alice in Wonderland is a classic for a reason.
Some critics say that Pynchon is operating within the Menippean Satire genre, and I can definitely see that. It's a genre that survived all the way from Petronius' Satyricon (also highly vulgar and sexual, just like Pynchon), through the Renaissance (Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel) all the way to present day. It also shares traits with many of the all-time classics, including Don Quixote, Melville's books and Dostoevsky's novels.
It's a genre that requires shifting your mindset, you won't find much of the traditional 'plot' here, but you can get a lot of it both as a layman reading for fun, and as a scholar digging deep into the symbolism. Many people find it hard to adjust, or simply find this mindset distasteful, hence the lovers and haters. That, and he's also a difficult writer high on /lit/'s top 100, so many unprepared anons get filtered when they reach for him. I know I would've hated him if I hadn't started with the Greeks and slowly made my way through the ages all the way to modernism and postmodernism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menippean_satire

Reading meme authors before you read the fundamentals is walking before you can crawl. Also, the canon has always built on itself, so if you start at the beginning and work your way forward it's like you are 'keeping up with the conversation', if you will. Not doing your homework will result in not understanding a lot of the references in older stuff.

>>25231800
DFW is like that 30 y/o in your freshman course. Knows a lot and is very engaged with the material, but is also slightly off-putting. IJ is about a million things and if you're so inclined allows you to get lost in endless theorising. Despite its length I found you rarely get close to any of the characters and even the basic plot is very oblique.

I don't think Sun and Steel is actually all that bad, more so that many a young Mishima reader gets spoiled by it. The problem with starting Mishima with Sun and Steel (or Patriotism too, for that matter) is that the irony of those works is not at all apparent to the uninitiated. But if you want him to be your based gigachad Nippon man, then by all means.
Patriotism and Mme de Sade are themselves solid dramatic works; I would not include them with his pulp output. Patriotism was originally a short story about the February 26 Incident that he later adapted into a short film. The incident itself is very interesting and features prominently in his later work and final years. The 1973 movie Coup d'Etat, I think, is a good companion piece to it.
Mme de Sade is a play he wrote inspired by the work of his friend and Sade expert/translator Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. It's very much a minor work in his bibliography. You can find a recording of it on YouTube directed by Ingmar Bergman. Incidentally, Shibusawa is an interesting figure in his own right, and just a few years ago received his first translation into English with Takaoka's Travels. He was somewhat of a tastemaker for things European, and if you read up on him you'll discover a lot of his influence on Japanese media, mostly horror.
Sorry if this is a bit of a ramble. Had a long week.

>>25231850
>A book I don't often see recommended for beginners (or people getting back into reading) is Fathers & Sons.
you will think im joking but i got it yesterday after i saw it heavily discounted at a used book store along with a maksim gorki book(my childhood).
>the single most important book for understanding 19th century Russian literature.
this sounds promissing thanks for the recommendation i´ll hurry up with american psycho so i can start all of these shorter books soon.
>Monte Cristo is perfect if you want to challenge your attention span with a LONG book that's very easy to read and follow because of how plot-heavy it is.
it seems that i will have to eventually buy it aswell since its a often praised and recommended classic. thanks for the input anon

>>25231904
>Negative? I see those traits as a positive. I adore dense, beautiful prose, and I rather like digressions.
i see, and yes for a well versed and seasoned reader these traits might be positive traits you would expect from an author, i missed your point before and thought you meant that all of them are negative at least that they are nagetive for people like me who are getting back into reading.
>That, and he's also a difficult writer high on /lit/'s top 100, so many unprepared anons get filtered when they reach for him.
sometimes misunderstood people are those who are hated the most but i understand your point.
>I know I would've hated him if I hadn't started with the Greeks and slowly made my way through the ages all the way to modernism and postmodernism.
this is an intresting approach i have never thought about. starting from the very begining of literature with selected works and slowly working your way up would really give you a wide spectrum and look into humanity at large.

>>25232024
i understand your point and i absolutely agree but i guess people like to be soft on them selves and stay in their "comfort zone" so they tend to gravitate to easier recent works. in my case i thought lets go with american psycho because i belived it to be written in a simple easy to understand language(which it is)so i guess i had lucky pick with this one.

>>25232169
>DFW is like that 30 y/o in your freshman course. Knows a lot and is very engaged with the material, but is also slightly off-putting
i see. and yes i absolutely can imagine the person youre describing.
>IJ is about a million things and if you're so inclined allows you to get lost in endless theorising.
sounds like it would be perfect for people who are into this kind of thing, you know people who are more introvert and like to overthing things so maybe a possible read for me down the line also because all the drama surrounding the book and author. i dont know what to make of the last point, so are the stories that arent character centric more about the plot, surroundings etc, or how does the book try to keep the reader intrested and engaged.

>>25233557
>for a well versed and seasoned reader these traits might be positive traits
It's not really reader experience (although it plays a role, you have to meet an author on equal ground before you completely discount him) and about competing artistic frameworks. Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare, because he valued creating realistic, believable character and moralising over beautiful language, grand speeches and moral ambiguity. McCarthy hates Henry James and Proust because they did not deal with grand issues of life and death like he did. Some people prefer ornate rhetoric (Faulkner), some simple, direct prose (Hemingway).
You have to experience a wide variety of texts, be exposed to many different authors, before you form your own taste and you're able to say "I dislike Pynchon and Rabelais, I prefer the way Dickens and Tolstoy do things" and vice versa. Not that they're mutually exclusive, there's nothing wrong with liking two writers for very different reasons. I like both Dostoevsky and Nabokov, even though Nabokov hated Dostoevsky's guts, but you typically run into at least one art movement that you can't stand.

>>25230474
>Retraining Brain and memory through reading
why is this thread titled like an LLM chat?

>>25232169
>I don't think Sun and Steel is actually all that bad, more so that many a young Mishima reader gets spoiled by it. The problem with starting Mishima with Sun and Steel (or Patriotism too, for that matter) is that the irony of those works is not at all apparent to the uninitiated.
i get you so these titles should be read after his "foundationnal" work after the reader made himself familiar with the way mishima writes and thinks. thanks for the great advise and explanation on this i will keep it in mind and hold back onto reading sun and steel for now.
>Patriotism was originally a short story about the February 26 Incident
oh i have heard about it before but i didnt know that the book was about it, this will surerly be a interesting read down the line.
>The incident itself is very interesting and features prominently in his later work and final years
i have heard that mishima was somewhat of a bitter man who was refused to participate in the army due to his physical limitations at the time, so hearing that he made this event a main point in some of his works makes sense as i understand he was also pretty militaristic.
>You can find a recording of it on YouTube directed by Ingmar Bergman.
i´ll check it out thanks
>Incidentally, Shibusawa is an interesting figure in his own right, and just a few years ago received his first translation into English with Takaoka's Travels.
noted it down for future reads thank you! you seem really knowledgeable on japanese literature and authors so i´ll ask you directly about some authors i was interested in reading/learning about and if you can recommend something if you know them.
-ryu murakami (i heard that he depicts modern japanese life and themes with a easy to follow style but also uses some surealism in his work)
- natsume soseki(i heard that he is called japans biggest excentric somewhere a long time ago and id like to check him out)
-kobo abe (ive seen bits of a older japanese film that apparently is based on one of his books about a man wearing bandages over his face as a mask)
> and if you read up on him you'll discover a lot of his influence on Japanese media, mostly horror.
this is some intresting information i´ll note his name and see if i can get his book once im finished with the ones i have here
>Sorry if this is a bit of a ramble. Had a long week.
not at all this was some valuable information thank you very much

>>25233575
>It's not really reader experience (although it plays a role, you have to meet an author on equal ground before you completely discount him)
yes this sounds like the way to go not only with authors and their works but with people and life in general but most obviously dont do that and dismiss everything even before experiencing it/them. also thanks for the insight of author beefs as i only heard about nabakovs dislike for dostoyevsky.

>>25233575
>You have to experience a wide variety of texts, be exposed to many different authors, before you form your own taste
correct again i totally agree with you on this and like i said this should be the norm
> but you typically run into at least one art movement that you can't stand.
i guess for me that would be JP sartre and the whole excistentialist movement(or maybe just sartre) as it was the last book that i had to read during school and it made me miserable and continued to piss me off years later, maybe that was caused by my naive brain and age at the time. i still have it here somewhere maybe i´ll give it a second go when i have the time to do so and see if things for me have changed in this regard after so many years. thanks for the input anon

>>25233591
that was the first thing that came into my mind for how i wanted to describe my situation. what else should i have named it?

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>>25233609
>excistentialist

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>>25230474
didn't read.
these helped me, but i'm probably more fucked up than you are, so i'd probably suggest you start with How to Read A Book and not TMI like i had to.

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>>25233609
>what else should i have named it?
only kidding dude. it was a perfectly fine title.

>>25230474
Start with the Greeks

>>25233610
That's a really gay little comic.

>>25233658
Yeah, I like it too.

>>25230474
You will never get to fully understand a challenging piece on the first read, that's not how it works. Read slowly and don't be afraid to go back when the story stops making sense.

>>25233557
>how does the book try to keep the reader intrested
DFW was big into television, and so maybe a good way to describe what reading feels like is to image being put in front of an alternative universe tv-set and channel hopping through a bunch of shows without context. You have a TV guide in the form of endnotes and a vague notion that everything must somehow be connected.

>>25233600
>ryu murakami
He's fun to read. Especially his shorter works like Piercing, Into the Miso Soup and Audition I think work great as palette cleansers between more serious lit. He does lack a certain depth to his work tho, so even if his outlandish plots seem intriguing at first, I do think his longer novels overstay their welcome.
>soseki
Can't go wrong with Soseki. He was part of the first cohort of Japanese novelists, and as such really had to wrestle with the form; to paraphrase: 'we had 40 odd years to make up for 400 years of European history'. Early Japanese lit in general is fun because it's like they suddenly got blasted by grapeshot of 19th cent lit.
The only thing to be mindful of with Soseki is that the books Sanshiro, And Then and The Gate form a trilogy. Oh yeah and also his famous I Am a Cat is one of those novels that was originally serialised in a newspaper. It's not bad, but if you can find a slightly abridged version that's totally fine. Kokoro would be the obvious starting point.
>kobo abe
Never really clicked with me. Could be down to the translations, but on a sentence level I found it doesn't flow. I forget the name of the director, but they worked closely together, and I think the films are more satisfying renditions of the stories he tries to tell. The Face of Another for instance (the one with the man wearing bandages) makes some really clever interventions in the texts. For example, in the novel the mask maker and wearer are the same person, and Abe spends a lot of time on the process of making the mask. Thing is, it's about as interesting as your neighbour's Sunday morning garage project. The movie elides that by introduces a perverse scientist character to fill that role instead.
Despite that, Abe seems very popular with more brainy readers than me (like Hideo Kojima lol), so at least give him a shot I'd say.
Two other big Japanese authors you'll probably have heard about are Akutagawa and Tanizaki.
The former wrote a lot of really outstanding short stories that might seem dull on the outset but really work very well. Can't go wrong buying a collection of his works and sampling them now and then. Tanizaki is good, but suffers from the same problem as Murakami, in that, if you're not scandalised by the subject matter, his books lose some of their magic and can't make up for it in depth.

Got back into reading last year around Christmas. I had a hard time until I realized social media and doomscrolling actually hurted my head, my memory and focus and my will. Got rid of that shit.
I knew I needed easy books to get back on my feet
>Old man and the sea
>Steppenwolf
>White nights / notes from underground
Next I got to read Celines Voyage (my favorite to this day), Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick. I'm finishing Blood Meridian right now and Ill move onto Monte Cristo, or maybe some book by Saint Exupery
It's a great journey