No.3508
I rarely read books that aren't comics or manga, but I remember Umineko got me into mystery novels for a while, and I even bought a bunch of books I found for cheap. I love Agatha Christie. Arthur Conan Doyle and Ellery Queen are pretty cool too.
This reminds me I still need to read some of the books I own.
No.3511
Yeah man. The most recent novel I finished was No Country for Old Men. I've been sporadically reading the stories in Dubliners.
I think I might read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying next but I might read something else too.
No.3515
I've read lots of classical literature, mostly from Russian authors! I also bought the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft recently but I just can't find the time to read them… The last book I read was "A Study in Scarlet", it was pretty short so I could easily read it on the bus, maybe I'll get "The Sign of Three" next! Detective novels are pretty cool!
I've been reading the Game of Thrones series but I'm kind of stuck at book three because it's really huge and I can only read it at home… it's hard to find time for that since I have to read though a lot of textbooks!
No.3517
>>3512I have all these three on my readlist too. I've actually started Don Quixote once, it was pretty
cool, but I stopped reading for some reason.
More recently I've been reading some roman authors like Tacitus and Livy. I got a bunch of Yukio Mishima and Houellebcq books, as well as Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Lord of The Flies, so these are the next in my list.
No.3520
>>3517I really like cormac mccarthy's books
No.23817
Another good russian author is Lermontov. I would highly recommend his A Hero of Our Time, unfortunately the only novel he ever wrote.
>>23816Brother's Karamazov is really good, it has basically everything Dostoevsky wanted to write about all in one book. Have you read Crime and Punishment or Notes From Underground? Those two are more focused than Brother's Karamazov. He also has some good short stories.
No.23819
I've wanted to get into reading for the longest of time but my short attention span for things has made it really difficult and it has become even more severe in recent years. I've been wanting to read Natsume Soseki, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well as a couple of other well-known classics but haven't made much progress. I did manage to read quite a bit of the Brothers Karamazov but the premise failed to really pique my interest, perhaps I should have went with Crime and Punishment instead.
No.23835
>>23819Have you given audio books a shot?
No.23841
>>23819Try reading some short story collections first. If you read consistently, your attention will improve.
No.23842
>>23819Maybe try setting aside a small amount of time, about half and hour or an hour to read, and do it in a new place. One thing that helped me get back my attention span was to have a place where I read and nothing else. So try not to read at the desk where you have your computer or where you play games or things like that.
No.23848
>>23845The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman is a really good book, it was really moving, some parts made me so angry I had to take a break to calm down because I couldn't focus otherwise.
No.23856
>>23835What are those?
>>23841That sounds like a good idea, do you have any recommendations?
>>23842I tend to find myself dreading about spending too much time doing something despite the fact that I probably have all the time in the world and that is part of what has been stopping me from being able to actually enjoy anything. At the same time however, I would like to immerse myself in the things I do and enjoy - something I haven't had the chance to do in a long time. I do think it might have to do with my living space arrangement and the lack of having a nice, cozy place to do my reading as you have mentioned. I should probably also get physical copies of books but that is very expensive and there are very limited options where I'm from.
No.23889
>>23856Asimov's
I, Robot is very good and you can probably easily find it in any bookstore.
No.23891
>>23856It was my solution to not having a good attention span, instead of reading and having to re-read the same page 5-10 times the audiobook is narrated. Audible is amazon's product for this, they have amazing narrators and it keeps track of where you're at. There's a back/forward 30 second button for when you do zone out that helped me a lot.
No.23897
based
No.23899
>>23897What are you trying to say? That you like fiction based on historical events?
No.23902
>>23889>>23891Thank you for both of your advice and recommendations, I'll look into it.
No.25836
>>23845It's the anniversary of Kaneko Fumiko's death today.
No.25838
>>23856I have similar problems. Every once in a while I get an urge to finally read the things I've been meaning to read, so I start reading something, but I can't keep it up for very long. My memory isn't very good, so when I get back to reading I either have to start over or start reading something new. I read a lot more when I was younger, but I could never remember important things like names as I was reading, so a lot of stuff went over my head.
No.25841
I don't consider myself a reader, just sometimes I'll find a book about a subject I'm interested in and read it. Right now I'm reading a book about the russo-finish war and another by budd hopkins.
No.25866
Hontakus...
No.25872
>>25837What sort of martial books do you read?
No.25876
>>25872All sorts. I have an interest in many martial related fields. Right now I am reading a Book On Japanese castles in the Sengoku era and then I will be reading Truppenfuhrung, a German WW2 Infantry field manual.
No.25888
>>25885The aho baka girl strikes again.
No.25889
>>25876Meditations of Violence is an interesting read for you. It's about martial arts myth and violent encounter reality.
Also it's funny how much Orientalism has affected Western stereotypes of martial arts after WWII. I remember reading through a WWI Infantry combatives training and noticed that most of the drills and techniques were based on western boxing and wrestling.
Compared to the combatatives guide from vietnam-era which was heavily influenced by japanese martial arts.
Are you interested in Historical European weapon treatises by any chance?
No.25892
>>25889That looks interesting.
I know German officers were expected to be acquainted with Jujitsu before and during the first world war. Much of that kind of thing is found in HEMA treatises but it was still extant in Japan.
Yes, I have a British manual on the use of a spadroon but I don't have a spadroon so it's pointless. I have a few other Hema books on the list of things I want to get like Talhoffer and Meyer. I only read for an hour or two a day, so I have a significant backlog.
No.25893
>>25892A fellow martial arts otaku I see. There used be a hema thread on 4queers/asp/ but unfortunately puroresoru drowned it out.
I found the field manual I mentioned earlier
https://archive.org/details/massphysicaltrai00raycrichDo you have any swords friend? Willing to take pictures?
No.25894
>>25893Military field manuals really show how each generation's stereotypes regarding combatatives differ. Going from old style western boxing and wrestling to Japanese karate to the more mma-influenced blend that is seen in our modern military. MCMAP is heavily influenced by Brazilian jiu Jitsu.
No.25895
>>25893I used to browse there a long time ago, I forget why I left. Probably something to do with the nature of being a board on 4chan.
I have a few, I really don't like steel scabbards...
Do you have any?
>>25894I heard that modern martial arts are heavily based in grappling because they are mainly a tool for confidence and fitness and they don't want their soldiers to be too deadly. They don't want arguments in a barracks to end in people striking throats and such, they also don't want these soldiers doing that in civilian life. So the only ones learning deadly styles are special forces. This is what I heard but MCMAP looks like it has strikes in it.
No.26396
Everytime I pick up a book I read about halfway through it before I stop, pick up another one and repeat the process.
I can't remember the last time I've finished a book...
No.26397
>>25911No, they are all replicas. But decent quality replicas. I want to get some originals but they really need to be treated better and be kept in a much more secure manner. I don't have such facilities for them yet.
No.26422
>>26396I do this as well, maybe someday a book will hold my interest long enough to finish.
No.26436
Read about half of Aristotle's Poetics. I love how he makes references to plays and playwrights that have been lost to time. The way Greek and other ancient cultures has been preserved piecemeal in arbitrary ways is fascinating to me. For example, Aristotle's own works that we have are the works that were designed only for students at his school, while the lost works are the ones he intended to be widely distributed. As such the ones we have are sometimes difficult to interpret because they assume a knowledge of the more accessible lost texts.
No.26745
>>26436It is interesting also how the medium on which they wrote influenced how much was preserved. Because the ancients wrote on papyrus, the only intact writing we have from that period is the stuff preserved in extremely dry areas like Egypt (the famous Oxrychnus Papyri are from a trash dump). The medieval writers favored vellum which keeps much better and so we have almost all of their writings. An unfortunate side effect of vellum however was that it was very expensive so in order to "save on paper" they would scrape off the ink from a sheet of vellum and copy over it with a new work. But now we can actually see what they copied over and find totally new works (like a new work by Euclid that was discovered under a copy of something else).
It's also incredible how little we actually have of the original works. We probably only have 5% or less of all the ancient writings. If you look at Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers he gives lists of all the works he knows of that were written by a certain philosopher while giving anecdotes about the philosopher. He says Epicurus wrote over 300 rolls and today we have none of them. Even among the dramatists we only have the works of three of the Greek dramatists and only a small fraction of what they wrote over their whole careers.