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.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.
No.26892
>>26890Sounds interesting. Do you have a particular translation you'd reccomend?
No.26893
>>26892I read the Translation by G.H Needler. In the forward parts he mentions that he wanted to replicated it in English in the original poetic form and he is the first to do so, he did this in 1909 so there may be more modern versions since but they may have a more modern interpretation and use less of an archaic vocabulary, I think that would lessen it's charm though. I don't have any other translation to compare it to I am afraid.
No.26954
>>26951Start with short stories! Everything takes practice and the more you read the better you get at it. Never give up!
No.26957
>>26951Don't give up! A lot of people feel intimidated by literature but it's a vast world and one you can gain skill in exploring. Maybe you're just starting out with a book that's too dense or old. Many classic novels have archaic words or phrases in them that make it difficult for modern readers to understand everything. Maybe some short stories would interest you more? Or a contemporary novel, a sci-fi thriller, a nonfiction paperback? There's no shame in starting small. Even learning one word a month or reading one page per day is progress. What books have you tried reading in the past?
No.26970
>>26959I've had windup bird chronicle on my list for a while. Maybe I'll read that next. I enjoy the occasional disquieting book.
No.26973
When I'm interested in a book I remember that, if I don't write down my thoughts I forget everything but that writing is very difficult especially for me since I haven't been taught how to write in school and I'm not a native English speaker, so I get discouraged and disappointed at my inability to retain my own thoughts and go back to doing nothing.
No.26975
>>26973Your english is really good
No.26978
>>26957I’ve tried to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Internet of Money, and some other unrelated books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye and Grapes of Wrath that I read when I was younger. It has been almost a decade and I haven’t tried to read much since.. the most ambitious book I tried to read was Crime and Pubishment by Dostoyevsky. While I could understand the plot I often times had to re-read chapters multiple times to remember what had happened when I resumed reading, and 2 years after attempting I barely remember what it was about.. I only really read a few chapters before I got upset and gave up.
Thanks for the encouragement but reading isn’t really for me. It’s such a hassle and I feel like my vocabulary diminishes every day, regardless of if I read..
Sustaining my initial interest is also difficult because once I begin to read something and realise I have difficulty understanding many words or concepts it just becomes so onerous to press on...
I’m going to give Hitler’s Revolution a try because it’s a topic I’ve wanted to learn about for a while now.. if you have any suggestions for fiction books I might enjoy, please tell me. I’ll give them a try. I really want to enjoy reading!
My favorite genres are romance and non-fiction (I don’t even know if that counts as a genre, now that I think of it..)
I don’t really think I replied adequately to your post but thanks very much for the encouragement.
No.26983
>>26978You could try reading plays, they are less dense and most can be read in one sit. I've recently read Death of a Salesman and really enjoyed it, you should give it a try!
No.26986
>>26983Ah, I read that, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blood Brothers and a few others plays a long time ago but I didn’t and don’t consider them books. I liked the Blood Brothers play the most.
No.26991
>>26978Well to start with here are some short stories and brief essays I've had reccomended to me, try starting with these and see if any retain your interest:
A discourse by three drunkards on government by nakae chomin
The king in the golden mask (collection) by marcel schwob
Errand by raymond carver
The dancing girl of izu by kawabata yasunari
The razor by naoya shiga
Seibei's gourd by naoya shiga
The nose by nikolai gogol
Rashomon by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Candide by voltaire
The dead by james joyce
Spring in fialta by vladamir nabokov
A sound of thunder by ray bradbury
The nightingale and the rose by oscar wilde
A perfect day for bananafish by jd salinger
The snows of kilamanjaro by ernest hemingway
A very old man with enourmas wings by gabriel marquez
Three questions by leo tolstoy
Eveline by james joyce
Symbols and signs by vladamir nabokov
The infamous bengal ming by rajesh parameswaran
The great divorce by kelly link
Heaven by mary gaitskill
What we talk about when we talk about love by raymond carter
The lady with the dog by anton chekhov
A living chattel by anton chekhov
About love by anton chekhov
The grasshopper by anton chekhov
The little match girl by hans andersen
To build a fire by jack london
An occurance at owl creek bridge by ambrose bierce
A dark brown dog by stephen crane
The mokey's paw by ww jacobs
The cask of amontillado by edgar allen poe
Eve's diary by mark twain
The luck of roaring camp by bret harte
Regret by kate chopin
The skylight room by O. Henry
A horseman in the sky by ambrose bierce
The legend of sleepy hollow by washington irving
Rip van winkle by washington irving
The cactus by o henry
The tell tale heart by edgar allen poe
The celebrated jumping frog of calaveras county by mark twain
Scarlet stockings by louisa alcott
An angel in disguise by t.s. arthur
Bartleby, the scrivener by herman melville
The purloined letter by edgar allen poe
A jury of her peers by susan glaspell
On the gull's road by willa cather
The lottery by shirley jackson
Thank you, m'am by langston hughes
The splut cherry tree by jesse stuart
The cat by mary wilkins freeman
The lady, or the tiger by frank stockton
The night came slowly by kate chopin
In praise of shadows by junichiro tanizaki
The tao te ching by lao tzu
Are you interested in WWII history? I have some books I could reccomend in that genre if you're interested.
No.26993
>>26987I don’t know, sorry.
>>26991Thank you for the recommendations, I saved them. I appreciate it a lot. I’ll definitely try some!
I like history in general. If you want to, feel free! Japanese history and Modern European/American history are my favourites. I pretty much know everything about WW2 but there’s a lot I don’t know about pre-1700s Europe, I guess.
No.27009
>>26993I'm interested in the same subjects! I've also found that newer books on WWII do a good job of challenging my preconceived notions despite me already knowing a lot. History is constantly evolving after all. Here are some good WWII history books I've read or had reccomended to me:
Russia's war: a history of the soviet effort by richard overy
Eagle against the sun: america's war with japan by ronald spector
Embracing defeat: japan in the wake of ww2 by john dower
In the service of the emperor: essays on the imperial japanese army by edward drea
Japanese destroyer captain by tameichi hara
No surrender: my 30 years war by hiroo onoda
Shattered sword: the untold story of the battle of midway by john parshall and anthony tully
Requiem for battleship yamato by yoshida mitsuru
With the old breed on pelelieu and okinawa by eugene sledge
The good man of nanking: the diary of john rabe
I'll try to think of some more but those are the ones I've looked at recently. I also know of some good history lectures and videos on youtube if you'd like to know about those.
No.27020
>>27010Pretty good. It was really interesting to hear from the man himself how he could be convinced the war was still going on after all those years. The reasons he gave for not killing himself are interesting as well. I've heard he left out some relevant details like the people he killed but it's a memoir so that's kind of expected. It's more about survival than war but I liked it all the same.
No.27074
>>27009Thanks for all the book recommendations once more, I appreciate it a lot!
Yes, I’d definitely appreciate links to some history lectures and videos. I only know of one YouTuber and he goes by HipHughes! I liked his videos on American history especially.
No.27093
>>27089Thank you very much. I appreciate it a ton, /nen/fren.
No.29259
Watched some David Foster Wallace interviews. He's one of us (terminally autistic).
No.29267
>>29260What you're reading is only one part of philosophy, ethics. There are many many other areas of philosophy like metaphysics, logic, epistemology. The Meditations is unusual because it's just Marcus Aurelius writing to himself, whereas other Stoic philosophers like Seneca wrote with an audience in mind. He isn't presenting a system, just his own methods.
No.29277
>>29260>I'll try reading Nietzsche and if I don't like that either I will give up on it.Bad idea. Neech expects you to have already read a decent amount of philosophy. He spends a lot of time responding to Kant and Schopenhauer, for example.
Start with the Greeks.
No.29413
>>29410Ganbatte. The only thing of Joyce's that I've read is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was good but nothing outstanding. I've heard that Dubliners and Ulysses are the more outstanding works of his so I'd like to get around to those and get a better idea of what kind of writer Joyce is.
No.29415
>>29413>It was good but nothing outstanding.It actually is something outstanding but it took me two readings to realize that.
No.29417
>>29410I'm thinking of getting The Dubliners, it's supposed to be his easiest read and also very good.
No.29426
>>29415I guess I'll reread it then.
No.29428
>>29426Do, but do it after reading Dubliners. Dubliners is definitely his easiest to read and appreciate.
To really appreciate Portrait you need to pay close attention to exactly which words are used. Sometimes a word or phrase that was used earlier will reappear for a significant reason. The style of prose changes as Stephen matures and you can pinpoint which events are most important in his life by noticing these changes.
Also consider that nothing in the novel is extraneous, every passage has a meaning that contributes to the whole portrait, so if you read something that seems inconsequential to the story, you're probably missing something.
No.29446
Finished Norwegian Wood, and now I'm moving on to Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
No.29496
>>29446How do you like it?
No.29528
>>29496Norwegian Wood felt really detached, really great sense of the reality of loss and trying to see yourself through it. I'm glad I finished that novel, it has definitely stuck with me since then.
We'll see how Colourless goes, same general themes it seems so far.
No.29539
re-read pic related today
>>29534I reiterate this poster's exact sentiments. I just read it last year and felt like I missed out by not being in the class in high school that had to read it.
No.29542
I'm reading the tale of genji. Its a very good book.
No.29555
>>29539Other than the alarm clock and working, aren't those all essential human activities or part of basic hygiene?
Even when I was a NEET, I still got out of bed, ate food, used the toilet, and brushed my teeth.
No.29587
>>29555I don't understand how one could miss the point like this. Please reconsider. Its not a list of random things he thinks are bad for whatever reason.
why read Bukowski when you can listen to Waits
No.30181
Read (last month):
Days Without End (Sebastian Barry)
The Acolyte (Nick Cutter)
The Hellfire Club (Jake Tapper)
Dopesick (Beth Macy)
On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
The Sellout (Paul Beatty)
Reading:
The Great Shark Hunt
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov, 50th anniversary translation)
Will read:
Nixonland (Rick Perlstein)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Oscar Zeta Acosta)
>>29539High-school required reading is my favorite non-genre category of books. Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Hatchet, all very good books.
No.30188
Since 2019 started I've read:
Government in the Future, Chomsky
Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky
High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup
The Castle, Kafka
I plan on reading this month
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin(If the person in front of me in the library hold will ever return it...)
Who Rules the World, Chomsky
I don't really know what else I want to read, maybe one of Chomskiss your sisterbooks on linguistics even though I think I read some of his stuff is kind of dated now. I'd appreciate some book suggestions so I can keep with my 1 book a month resolution for 2019!
No.30189
>>29277I had already ordered it in before you made the post... Well I don't think he expects it that much, certainly I never felt like I could not understand what he was saying because of it. Still, it was more of the same, it's just his opinions and some common sense(with a fair amount of him stroking his own ego thrown in). Philosophy is not for me. I might try reading some of the Greek stuff but that is more because they could be interesting in their own right, many are plays and stories and such.
No.30190
Read recently:
Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus (reread)
Symposium - Plato
A Sentimental Journey - Laurence Sterne
One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn
Parmenides - Plato
A Comedy of Errors - Shakespeare
Public Opinion - Walter Lippmann
Reading currently:
Anatomy of Melancholy - Burton
Will read:
A collection of Dostoevsky stories
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
A Hero of Our Time - Lermontov (reread)
Too many others to list.
I buy books faster than I read them, aka tsundoku, so they have been accumulating for a while now. It doesn't help that I bought complete editions of Plato and Shakespeare. Just between the two of them I would have enough to read for a while.
>>30189Try reading the dialogues by Plato about the trial and death of Socrates: Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. They are all fairly short and can usually be found bundled together in a single volume.
No.30192
>>30189>certainly I never felt like I could not understand what he was saying because of it.Yeah, that's the problem with FN. He's easy to read and to
think you understand, but if you have a solid foundation in the ideas he's responding to, you realize he was saying much more than you thought he was. This is partly why everyone from Nazis to anarchists thought Nietzsche agreed with them.
Interestingly, I also think the same applies if you have a solid foundation in his
own philosophy, and in re-reading you find even more.
>Philosophy is not for me.That might be true as well. In fact, if Nietzsche was right it's most likely true.
No.30195
>>30194From Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 11:
"How are synthetic judgments a priori possible ?" Kant asked himself - and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty" but unfortunately not in five words
[...]
"By virtue of a faculty" - he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By virtue of a faculty," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire. [Because there is in it a dormitive virtue,
whose nature it is to send the senses to sleep.]
But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?" - in effect, to realise such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments! Or, speaking more plainly: synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective view of life.
end excerpt
If you know nothing about Kant or what "a priori" even means than this passage doesn't mean much other than some pedantic quibbling about epistimology. With the philisophical and historical background in Kant, and in N's philosophy as a whole you'd know 1) Kant was extraordinarily influential and 2) a priori judgment is one of the essential epistimological of Kant and is, according to him, a basis for all human knowlege. If one beleives in the "truth" of a priori judgment then, according to Kant, they can live in a certain way and "know" right from wrong, without the need for a divine authority.
Aphorism 13 from Beyond Good and Evil:
Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to
discharge its strength---life itself is
will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent
results.
In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of
superfluous teleological principles---one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). Thus method, which must be essentially economy of principles, demands it.
end excerpt
So if you don't know what "teleological princples" means you can look it up and find that "Teleology or finality is a reason or explanation for something in function of its end, purpose, or goal.". So you might think "ok, so self-preservation isn't a goal, it's just something that happens". But if you knew about the history of teleology, you'd know that it was the basis of the entire understanding of the world. Aristotle's view of the world is founded on the principles of teleology, and Christian thinkers like Aquinas would use teleology to argue for the existence of God.
If you don't know the history of the ideas you might just think he's complaining about the mistakes of previous philosophers. But he's doing more -- he's illustrating how
entire worldviews, the things that people in the past thought were the most important things, the essential truth of the world, are, at best, convenient interpretations.
No.30275
>>30185I think I read it in early middle school, it just quickly came to my mind as a 'cirriculum book'
I remember the books we read in high school were To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby and The Joy Luck Club in that order.