Stuff when reading that fries your brain

What are some things, when you read them, that you feel like a fucking retard?

>reading physical descriptions of the landscape

This always destroys my brain. I just cannot comprehend reading a bunch of sentences that describe a landscape. Reading Lord of the Rings was a killer for me. It all just gets so jumbled and cloudy in my brain and I can't understand any of it

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Influences
timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Anything related to sailing.

Anything described as "shapeless

you have to take the time to construct the landscape in your head. not just read and see it as if there was a photograph embedded in the text. take it one piece at a time.

>I just cannot comprehend reading a bunch of sentences that describe a landscape
if you can't handle that pham, I'd say start with the basics, dr suess etc
usually, when authors specify and/or restate certain aspects like the surrounding environment, it's usually created that way so that we pay more attention to those details to add to the message behind the book
for example, one of the underlying messages of the lord of the rings is the destructive nature of industrialism on our environment and the setting acts as a thematic arc throughout the majority of the series

Geography, especislly over a very broad region.

You probably love Cormac McCarthy then.

>underlying messages

No thats just your headcanon you faggot. LOTR is just a dumb fantasy story about a bunch of dweebs with a ring. Why do you retarded Americans revere this shit fantasy book so much?

scientific processes

the first chapter of brave new world, for instance, describing the embryos and stuff. my head just glosses over all of it.

Same, but most books don't do this, do they?

But it's not his headcanon. LOTR *IS* about the destructive nature of industrialism on our environment, and the message is out in the open. Just read the ending.

heres an example

>The woods on either side became denser; the trees were now younger and thicker; and as the lane went lower, running down into a fold of the hills, there were many deep brakes of hazel on the rising slopes at either hand. At last the Elves turned aside from the path. A green ride lay almost unseen through the thickets on the right; and this they followed as it wound away back up the wooded slopes on to the top of a shoulder of the hills that stood out into the lower land of the river-valley. Suddenly they came out of the shadow of the trees, and before them lay a wide space of grass, grey under the night. On three sides the woods pressed upon it; but eastward the ground fell steeply and the tops of the dark trees, growing at the bottom of the slope, were below their feet. Beyond, the low lands lay dim and flat under the stars. Nearer at hand a few lights twinkled in the village of Woodhall.

And this is actually a really basic example. Stuff like this drives me nuts.

except in the letters that he sent home during his time at the war (while also mapping out the world of middle earth), he showed deep dislike and possible hatred for industrialism and the effect it had on society
>"Tolkien had an intense hatred for the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside and simpler life. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of cars, preferring to ride a bicycle.[101] This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings.[102]"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Influences

>"It is full Maytime by the trees and grass now. But the heavens are full of roar and riot. You
cannot even hold a shouting conversation in the garden now, save about 1 a.m. and 7 p.m. – unless
the day is too foul to be out. How I wish the 'infernal combustion' engine had never been invented.
Or (more difficult still since humanity and engineers in special are both nitwitted and malicious as a
rule) that it could have been put to rational uses — if any."
letter 64 of the the letters he sent home

>"Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go
in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become
chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for
magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy:
speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap
between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and
at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing
concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build
pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the
tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It
would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of
Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them"
letter 131 of the letters he sent home

both can be found here
timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf

I'm similar about descriptions of interiors. When a book goes into detail about the arrangement of rooms in a building, I start skimming. I don't understand why so many authors bother describing physical space, since I've never been in a situation where the placement of a coffee table or the location of the study in relation to the kitchen was important to know in order to understand the book.

i feel you op that shit is always a waste of time

if it's fiction i barely pay attention to this anyway. if it's not scientifically concrete in real life then it doesn't apply to anything anyway.

This shit plagues me every day. My internal model of these descriptions always manages to contradict the text eventually. Decades of reading hasn't improved it one bit. Is there anything that can help one improve at this? I mamaged to get confused about the boat in life of pi for fucks sake.

Does anyone else have trouble understanding the physical geography and location of things and places when they read? Like whether something is north or south, etc, it fucks me up when I imagine something is on the right and then later the author clarifies and its on the left so I have to reimagine what happened.

In my head anything sailing related just gets interpreted as guys walking across the deck fiddling with ropes.

Apparently learning what different types of trees look like is the best way to deal with this.

I feel you OP. I'm reading Sometimes A Great Notion right now and Kesey does that all the damn time.

I totally didnt get the landscape in for whom the bell tolls.

I have the same problem OP. I will take my time imagining the landscape, but later in the book something will contradict that image and confuse me.

When it feels like there's a deeper meaning to a part of the book. I can't stop trying to figure it out and it ruins the book until I either make sense of it or convince myself there's nothing more.

It might be from lack of exploration of certain areas. It was always really easy for me growing up in Washington state. You could probably do some visualization mental exercises, and there's exercises for drawing memory that could help.

I usually dislike long descriptions of nature but something about the ones in LOTR is so cozy.

I struggle to picture descriptions of rooms in my brain. I guess it's because English isn't my first language and I always read in English but still, I always spend a good while trying to imagine a room exactly like described or else I can't continue reading. I need to imagine the scenes as if they were a movie.

Beckett's more experimental prose tends to do this to me. I just read "All Strange Away" and felt as if my brain short-circuited the entire time, trying and failing to grasp something to follow.

just draw it out on a piece of paper

what really frustrates me is an entire chapter dedicated to the character's past. like, move the frikin plot already geez.

All the action scenes in Starship Troopers I just picture robots jumping and launching nukes while alien police shoot at them with revolvers.

>Author starts naming different kinds of trees and shit; don't know anything about trees so can't visualize it

I agree with you so hard. You just made me remember Harry Potter 5 and those painful descriptions of the ministry of magic. Pleb example I know but it's the first thing to came to mind

Descriptions of interiors are often useless unless they highlight a character or organization's qualities. But sometimes, a building is just a building

I'm the opposite. I dislike descriptions of interiors but dislike descriptions of exteriors. I believe it's because I've spent all my life inside and don't have enough examples to reference when reading exterior descriptions.

>New fantasy novel
>Author throws in hundreds of made up concepts/names in the first half of the book without defining them to the reader through storytelling

Whoa, King Jordas the 5th used Omega Monkies during the 3rd age of magic to save Dicktouchinstan from the Mongoloid faction and was crowned Arbiter of the Tribunal Council of Magusflaggus Elders before the dawn of the Kleptomaniac Archmages, saving his dimension from total enslavement using a relentless form of Girudis warfare.

What an insightful prologue, I now understand the entire three thousand years of rich heritage from this enlightening exposition.

my brain fries when i see a lot of proper nouns in a short span. If you mention 20 names in 2 pages, I will not remember them

This shit. Once I picked some scifi that was some transhumanist trash and it insisted on using stupid terms and never explaining what the fuck they meant.

Especially bad was the seriousness used in describing I guess what were telekinetic psychic mountain goats that were hostile to human life for no reason.

>On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrödinger Box.
>Q-dot tendrils like sparks from a Tesla coil trail from my fingers into the little box of lacquered wood floating in the middle of my cabin. Behind it, displayed on one gently curving wall, is the Highway – a constantly flowing river of spaceships and thoughtwisps, a starry brushstroke in the dark. A branch of the gravitational artery through the Solar System our ship, Perhonen, is following from Mars to Earth. But today, I’m blind to its glory. My world is the size of a black box, just big enough to hold a wedding ring, the mind of a god – or the key to my freedom.
>I lick sweat from my lips. My field of vision is a spiderweb of quantum protocol diagrams. Perhonen’s mathematics gogols whisper and mutter in my head. To help my all-too-human senses and brain, they translate the problem into yosegi: opening a Japanese trick box. The quantum protocols are sensations, imperfections and valleys in the marquetry, pressure points inside the wood like tense muscles, faint grins of sliding sections. I need to find the right sequence that opens it.
>Except that here, the trick is not opening it too early, the wood patterns are hidden in the countless qubits inside – each zero and one at the same time – and the moves are quantum logic operations, executed by the arrays of lasers and interferometers the gogols have built in the ship’s wings. It all amounts to what the ancients called quantum process tomography: trying to figure out what the Box does to the probe states we ease into it, gently, like lockpicks. It feels like trying to juggle eight-side Rubik’s cubes while trying to solve them at the same time.
>And every time I drop one, God kills a billion kittens.
>The gogols light up a section of the diagram, red threads in the tangle. Immediately, I can see another section that is linked. If we rotate this arrow and that state and apply a Hadamard gate and measure—
>The imaginary wood beneath my fingers groans and clicks.
>‘Sesame,’ I whisper.

Architecture.

I've always been bat at orientation and geography.
Notre Dame of Paris was the shit. 50 pages description of the architecture of Paris. I was desperately looking up the architecture elements. Remembered 2-3 of them as names only and that's all from those 50 pages. Really god-tier phyisical descriptions.

Reading that rn. I'm page 150, and until now it was doable, I don't know what comes next.

Flowers in Mrs Dalloway...

>when a shitload of charaters gets introduced all together and they all have generic names

and then they start referencing them just using their names even if they only appeared once.

Nautical terminology. I thought I knew English. Turns out, I'm stupid.

I should care more about Tabernacles.

paragraphs or sentences in french/german/latin in regular english books

I usually get mixed up with scene layouts, especially house plans.

The author opens the scene and I imagine it, but then contradicts the image in my head several pages later. This becomes very frustrating.

When Cadarousse breaks into the house in the Count of Monte Cristo, I had no idea what was going on because new details kept popping up and I ended up totally confused as to the layout of the rooms and window.

Names. I can't remember names.
A lot of the times when a name is mentioned I will forget it after 2-3 pages.

>What are some things, when you read them, that you feel like a fucking retard?

This sentence. Most of the text made on Veeky Forums. Etc.

Most text on Veeky Forums makes me think the other guy is the megatard.

thats fucking great, is that from something, or all you? its the perfect amount of fake science and mumbo-jumbo

Bad writing

When many names and characters are listed at once

>tfw i actually love physical descriptions and dislike it when an author just does not care at all for them

Fighting scenes, especially duels, and especially when they last for pages on end. Yes I get it, they're fighting and it's very intense, and the hero is either a magnificent bastard or he's going to get his ass beat unless he comes up with some cunning scheme, no need to tell me about 'he hit him there, he dodged, he hit hit somewhere else, his head spun, yadda yadda'
Fantasy novels belonging to any author are particularly infuriating because of this.

>Geography
>Multiple, similar characters
The most vivid memory I have about reading is getting pissed at The Hobbit and the dwarves

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

I'm with you about the boat in life of pi. Throughout the entire book, I could not grasp what he was talking about with the tarpaulin and the benches and where Richard Parker was in relation to Pi. Don't know if it was confusingly written or I'm just an idiot. Probably the latter.

This is what annoys me with authors like Philip K. Dick. They don't describe anything, and I get no sense of place or physical space.

it seems that the authors themselves are confused
i red somehwere that dostoievsky made characters sat in scenes where they were already seated

When there are more than three characters having a conversation and the author doesn't bother making it clear who's saying what anymore