Top products from r/literature

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u/sciencocaplypse · 6 pointsr/literature

In addition to reading, reading, and more reading: interact with your reading. Write notes during and after you read a novel. Write all over the margins (if you dare). Think about what you've read. This might sound crazy, but have a conversation with your book. Your author is trying to have a conversation with you, so go ahead and reciprocate. What are they talking to you about? What questions are they asking you?

Act like you're filling out the major sections of a Spark Notes book.

  • What was the overall plot?

  • What were the major themes?

  • What were major symbols that helped support those themes?

  • Are there things that feel significant but you're unsure where they fit? Continue thinking about it. If you have even the slightest inkling that maybe a particular passage or event is significant in any way, run with it until you hit a wall. Even if you don't get it all, it's still practice.

    The more you learn, the more questions you'll ask yourself. The more you read, the more you'll find that the answers to these questions often come from particular places. There are patterns that authors use when crafting the answers to those questions (rest assured they are thinking about them always), and the more you read the more you'll pick up on those particular patterns.

    If you've ever read something and thought that a passage seemed significant in any way, you've already started picking up on those patterns. You might think the author spent a peculiar amount of time describing some mundane thing, or the author seems to be using a lot of the same imagery, and so on. These are all ways the author is communicating to you through more than just the story. The more you read, the more obvious these become.

    Keep a "reading journal" where you write these ideas down. It doesn't matter if you never go back to them, because the act of writing forces you to think about it a little longer, and helps solidify these patterns in your mind. You'll find that it's easier to analyze the works you read and you'll get more enjoyment from them.

    Talk to others about a book if you can. I've begun to think that reading (or appreciating any art) is a communal act more than a solitary one. Learning what others have to say about a particular piece will help you learn new ways of viewing material that you couldn't come up with on your own, and therefore find new ways to view material in the future.

    Don't worry about being behind in your class. Many of them have their own ideas for sure, but I'd be willing to bet a few of them are just reading Spark Notes before they come in to class. Either way, as I said before, other people have different ways of reading material and different levels of experience reading. This doesn't make you any more or less behind in your expertise. You have your own, very unique, background in life that gives you a unique perspective and therefore unique insight into every piece of literature (or otherwise) that you pick up. What you find significant in a novel, even if it's totally different than everyone else, is just as valid as anything else. (A professor may like strong support for your arguments so you may have to give a little there, but with for-pleasure reading it still holds)

    Finally, after you've read the book and thought about it and wrote your own notes about it, go ahead and read the Spark Notes on it. I loved Slaughterhouse Five and picked up on a lot of things, but reading those Spark Notes blew my mind! Just like conversing with friends, Spark Notes help you view the material in new ways and even provide overwhelming support for their claims.

    I also want to add (and it's been posted before), I cannot recommend How to Read Literature Like a Professor enough. It will help you immensely, even if you think you already understand literature.
u/marewmanew · 4 pointsr/literature

There was a post about this on either /r/books or here a couple months ago. Goodreads made this interesting infographic.

One of the reasons for stopping—"extremely stupid"—cracked me up.

I wish I could find the reddit post on this, but one commenter remembered an interesting "rule" someone had told them: "subtract your age from a 100, and the remainder is the number of pages you should read before dropping the book." I like the idea that the older you are, the more precious your time is, and the better sense you have of your taste and books…therefore, it's cool to drop books a little sooner. But the younger your years and the less your experience? Gotta read a little more before you shut the experience down.

For my two cents—and since your discussion interests me and perhaps mine will interest you—I rarely stop reading books. It's rare to dislike a book so much I won't give it a full run. However, I also note that when deciding what to read, I have a pretty good sense of what books I'll like. But I don't know…is that because I decide in advance that I'm gonna like a book? In which case, I'm a bit of a fraud? Ha, it's something I think about.

A book has to fail in a pretty spectacular way before I give up. I'd have to reach a subjective determination that the whole premise fails or that it lacks thorough inspiration. As an example, this is the last book I gave up on (almost two years ago). I don't read the one-line critic blurbs before I'm done with a book, so after "finishing" my read of this book, I checked out what others thought, and one of the top positive comments summed up the failure for me: "It’s The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d call The Family Fang a guilty pleasure, but it’s too damn smart….A total blast." In my opinion, that was all the book was—it felt like a failed mock-up of a Wes Anderson narrative. All quirk but no character. And this was its only benefit from my discernment—if you really dig Wes Anderson, this would satisfy your craving like a guilty pleasure.

That said, I didn't think along the lines that the book was bad or poorly written—it just failed at that initial and critical level with me. Sure that's fickle and I'm using the academic criticism equivalent of the nuclear option in chalking something up to mere druthers. But, like I said, it's rare. And in life, I feel there's rare but occasional room for an unexplained subjective "didn't work for me." I hated giving up on this book in this way, because I can't enter thorough discussion or defense on my decision. And I know a team of people worked really hard to make that book, and I don't doubt others could've loved the book. I just felt like reading something else.

u/yonina · 2 pointsr/literature

This book is generally considered to be the Ulysses bible - the end all guide to understanding all the references, jokes, minutiae, etc. I think it's better to have a guidebook that you can reference occasionally, rather than blunder blindly through what is known as one of the most difficult novels in the English language. That's just what I would do, but of course you have to be careful not to get too obsessed and just to enjoy it as well. Good luck and have fun!

u/gmpalmer · 1 pointr/literature

Going off the idea you like Poe, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Plath my recommendations (and reasons):

Olives by AE Stallings (the best new book of American poetry since Plath)
Harlot by Jill Alexander Essbaum (a fantastic and sexy collection of work)
The Restored Ariel by Sylvia Plath (the best book of American poetry after Eliot)
The Standing Wave by Gabriel Spera (lovely stuff)
60 Sonnets by Ernest Hilbert (some funny, some sad, all sonnets)
Broetry by Brian McGackin (light but funny)
I Was There For Your Somniloquy by Kelli Anne Noftle (a good intro into avante garde)
Azores by David Yezzi (a travelogue of sorts)
Omeros by Derek Walcott (best new epic in a long time)
With Rough Gods by yours truly (monologuing Greek gods)
Love, an Index by Rebecca Lindenberg (a beautiful work of loss and love)
The Waste Land and other writings by T.S. Eliot (the undisputed master of modern poetry)

u/poemaXV · 1 pointr/literature

I agree with this! Russian literature has been my main focus for years and I bought Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature to see what he had to say about my favorite authors. It was so mindblowing that I ended up buying his Lectures on Literature, which covers a wide variety of proper literature, and since I didn't want spoilers, I just worked my way through most of them. It widened my scope a lot and I felt more safe to just enjoy and experience the novels because I knew I'd get a proper analysis immediately afterwards.

In the longer-term, reading both of those books and the books they were about, significantly improved my ability to understand literature.

u/Nalzzz · 5 pointsr/literature

Reading Arno Schmidt's - Collected Stories and really enjoying them so far. It's my first dip into his writing and I am loving his playful prose and extreme use of punctuation. I have just gotten to the more experimental "Country Matters" section and love it so far. I'm curious to once I'm done check out his novels to see how he tackles more long form stories. Anyone else read Arno Schmidt?

Interspersed with this I am reading Borges' - Collected Fictions and I am not enjoying them quite as much. I'm wondering is it just the nature of the chronology of them? seeing how everyone fawns over ficciones but not necessarily his whole oeuvre of short stories. Will the later ones get better? I'm interested in Borges because I know Italo Calvino was basically obsessed with him.

u/Artimaean · 4 pointsr/literature

I should probably be more clear; I mean it's best to read The Crying Lot of 49 to get an idea of what constitutes heavily-thematic content that Pynchon created based on popular culture (the anarchist in/and Porky Pig, the Trystero play, literalizing Maxwell's Demon) and what constitutes content that Pynchon put in simply referencing popular culture for the fun of it (the mock-british boy-band, Dr. Hilarius' voices). Ultimately, I'm trying to draw a line between so a younger reader (ie, one who does need to hunt down the references) doesn't get bogged down by assuming everything is structural and nothing contingent.

I don't think this is too reductive a method...(feel free to tell me otherwise)

If I'm wrong, or just in any case, OP, there is Pynchonwiki if you're at a loss for research of any stripe. Try to avoid the "Reader's Companions". The only formal Pynchon Study still worth reading is Joseph Slade's.

Also, speaking of technology, have you (/u/winter_mute) ever read Hart Crane's The Bridge? If you are familiar Slade points out some really incredible parallels between them that really struck me...

u/Beren87 · 7 pointsr/literature

Not pre-Yeats but also not terribly well known is Brian O'Nolan, also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. The Third Policeman is his most famous book.

As for before the 20th century Jeffery Gantz's book Early Irish Myths and Tales is a wonderful selection of Irish folklore. Quite a lot of the intertextual references in Yeats are from folktales.

Then of course there are Swift, Wilde, and Shaw, all of whom are all wonderful.

u/thysaniaagrippina · 2 pointsr/literature

I agree with what a lot of people have said about just reading it for the language, and letting go of understanding every sentence. However, if you're curious about the connections to The Odyssey, and also want to know as much as possible about every reference in the novel, I recommend Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. I liked having it on hand to use if I felt like referencing a place, name, or slang word, or when I just was trying to figure out what the hell is going on at certain points.

u/2518899 · 2 pointsr/literature

You could start with a book like this: E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy or Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book or How to Think About the Great Ideas.

Or you can, like you've said, gather some info. about certain historical periods or cultural eras and decide to learn more about them. It's not easy, but you're living in a time where you can easily and freely access a lot of information.

u/CecilBDeMillionaire · 11 pointsr/literature

http://www.amazon.com/The-Divine-Comedy-Dante-Alighieri/dp/0195087445

This is the edition that I've read and I found the annotations extremely helpful. I'm certainly not a Dante scholar tho so if anyone has better recommendations I'd be curious as well

u/saturninus · 3 pointsr/literature

The Christian element is in the Anglo-Saxon, too. The person who ultimately wrote the poem down was probably a churchman.

I've always enjoyed Heaney's translation, though it is not necessarily the most "faithful" one around. Heaney is a subscriber to Dryden's notion of transfusion, which leaves a lot of room for the translator's license as a poet in his own right (see his forward to his translation of Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid).

For my money the best version out there is Frederick Rebsamen's. It is a very literal rendering that pays close attention to the original's stress scheme—probably the most important feature of alliterative poetry—and somehow preserves much of its poetic force.

For a literal prose version, you might try the new one from Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which comes with an excellent preface.

u/alexandros87 · 3 pointsr/literature

It's not from Pynchon but THIS is a fantastic guide to the book which provides an overwhelming wealth of detail. In some ways this guide is as dense and as heady as GR itself.

u/tkennon · 2 pointsr/literature

This is a great topic and thoughtful thread. From my myopic POV there's a good argument to be made for Pynchon as the first and most radical American post-modernist. Just started reading an intriguing (post-modern?) bundle of essays by Kundera re the novel and its shape, effect and arc mapped from and across the European+ mind. http://www.amazon.com/Testaments-Betrayed-Essay-Nine-Parts/dp/0060927518/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406291451&sr=8-1&keywords=kundera+testaments+betrayed

u/mountainmad · 3 pointsr/literature

I read everyday with my coffee. I also carry a book with me everywhere and read on line, in waiting rooms, etc. Try some of the advice in How to Read More - A Lot More by Ryan Holiday.

For heavy texts, my approach depends on the type of book. I mostly follow the method Mortimer Adler set out in How to Read a Book.

I set my objectives with the book. Look at the table of contents, back, index, etc. get an idea of what is in the book, skim and dip, then I plow through the whole book not spending too much time getting sidetracked or looking stuff up, take some notes, re-read at a slower pace. Try to get the 'unity' of the book; what is the author trying to say?

For fiction, poetry and plays, I just plow through on a first read. Don't get too worried about missing things or understanding everything. In a re-read, I create an outline of major characters and plot points.

You'll never get everything out of a great book on the first read. Accept that and try to get at least something out of it.

u/PM_ME_YOUR_FAULTS · 6 pointsr/literature

Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature is a book of lectures that immediately comes to mind. Haven't read it myself (yet) but I'm a big fan of his novels and he's a pretty popular critic. Fair warning, he doesn't like Dostoevsky.

u/pzaaa · 2 pointsr/literature

Mortimer Adler put together a great [list] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books#Sample_list)
He also makes an important distinction between being well read and being widely read. (It's about what you can get out of it)
So i would advise his inimitable [how to read a book] (http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/dp/0671212095)

u/pporkpiehat · 3 pointsr/literature

Just go for it. When you start to lose track of what's going on, which is part of the point of the novel, just start focusing in on the sentence-by-sentence quality of the prose. One of the book's themes is about losing the ability to think in terms of longer time-scales, so the confusion is actually part of the message.

If, tho, you want outside help, the pynchon wiki is great, as is Weisenberger's Gravity's Rainbow Companion.

Bon voyage!

u/AnusOfSpeed · 7 pointsr/literature

Joyce by Ellmann is considered the gold standard.

Blotner on Faulker is great go for the two volume!

Knowlson on Beckett

Donald on Wolfe

Hon mentions - robert graves has a good one, will track down it is upstairs, john fowles had a recentish one I enjoyed

u/ginroth · 1 pointr/literature

Summary

Spanish edition

I'm, like, 99% sure you could've found both of those links yourself.

u/firstroundko108 · 2 pointsr/literature

This book changed the way I read literature and I actually began to enjoy it--as an investigator enjoys solving a murder!

u/UraniumCookie10 · 17 pointsr/literature

Here's a free Kindle ebook download link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RP93B63

Get it before the offer expires.

u/SirDucky · 1 pointr/literature

Eulogy to a Hell of a Dame is what got me into Bukowski. Personally I always thought his poetry far surpassed his prose. I think The Pleasures of the Damned is a great best-of album (it's an anthology of selected poetry compiled after his death).

u/SynysterSaint · 1 pointr/literature

This helped immensely with my Ulysses read-through.

u/devnull5475 · 1 pointr/literature

Paul Johnson nailed this one a long time ago.

Or, maybe one is supposed to say: The very controversial Paul Johnson nailed this one a long time ago. That way it won't be like I'm sitting at the losers' table in lunch room, right?

u/Potemkin78 · 7 pointsr/literature

Please, for the love of all that is amazing, read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box. I had to read it all the way through as fast as possible just so I could see what would happen, and I was terrified throughout. Really solid, creepy, wonderful writing.

And once you're done with that, read Horns, which has one of the greatest monologues in all of horror literature. I feel I should caution you that this book is not horror in the sense of being full of blood and guts and terror, but manages to build an atmosphere of horror at what people are willing to do right under the surface of their "normal" lives.

Ignore the fact that he's Stephen King's son, and then finally read all five volumes (the fifth comes out this month) of Locke & Key, which has some great terror and incredible storytelling. Also ignore the fact that this is a comic book, and I guarantee you will have a good time with it--and will rage and worry and freak out at the things that happen in it.

So, yeah, I don't read a lot of horror, but when I do, apparently it's all Joe Hill.