What are some books that made you feel like a brainlet?

>Wallace Stevens
You just need to read his shit like 50 times to get it, then you realise it's really quite simple.

Also sometimes can help to listen to his readings of them, the pace at which he reads certain parts and inflections can help illuminate stuff.

Heidegger. I thought Zizek was pulpy until I bought one of his books and realised that knowing Hegel off by heart was required prereq reading

Same on Heidegger. Tho where he cracks out greek, that was more just a dick move on his part that necessarily a brainlet failing on mine.

>a tour de force

Colin Wilson - The Occult. The problem is that I just don't believe in magick and the occult - but I have so much respect for how smart Wilson is that when he treats it as so self-evident I can't help but feel that there's something there I'm missing.
This goes x1000 for Crowley, who I suspect was actually hamming it up deliberately to make things more obscure.
>I WANNA KNOW WHAT YOU MEEEEEAAANT

Ulysses. Not even memeing. I just read the chapter where Stephen and his professor buddies theorize about Shakespeare, and fuck I have no idea how it relates thematically to Bloom gallivanting around Dublin. I understand the gist of the argument, Stephen saying that a work of art can "fail in an interesting way" versus the professors saying it has to be a success, but what the hell is the point of inserting this between Bloom having a cheese sandwich and the introduction of a semi-observant pastor character? What does this dialog about Hamlet have to do with anything? It's interesting on it's own, but why is it in a novel about a fat, not-too-bright jewish guy? Is Joyce just showing off?

I had the same thing with Wilson. I keep wanting him to be just SLIGHTLY less credulous than he is. It's one of those occult books where the author goes
>[Yadda yadda yadda, everyone at the seance reported seeing a ghost.] Can anyone really doubt so many witnesses would be wrong?

And even as someone into weird shit and very eager to give the benefit of the doubt, I'm like YES NIGGA I CAN.

You might like Charles Fort. Wilson's Beyond the Occult is also really good.

it's like pulp fiction

Charles Fort sounds pretty interesting:
>Wilson called Fort's writing style "atrocious" and "almost unreadable", yet despite his objections to Fort's prose, he allowed that "the facts are certainly astonishing enough." In the end, Fort's work gave him "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."
I'm also drawn to how Arthur Koestler became fascinated with paranormal phenomena towards the end of his life. He even left his life's savings for the establishment of a research centre for the study of the paranormal. Oxford and Cambridge wouldn't touch it but there's been a centre at Edinburgh since the 80s. It's these things - knowing that otherwise credible intellectuals and even research departments take the idea seriously - that make the whole field so tantalising, because you can't just write it off as a bunch of crackpots.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

Jesus.

>The World and Will as Representation
>The Red Book (by CG Jung)
>V.

Elaborate.

(Slightly) technical genetics, network theory, complexity theory and so on.
I also read a book about complexity theory that was really computer science, I didn't feel like a brainlet but rather as if the author was autistic.

that book is hella redpilled

like the movie, Pulp Fiction

*hecka
dont use gods name in vein duder

user, remember that Joyce has set up the framework that Odysseus:Telemachus::Bloom:Stephen. Don’t try to read the literary arguments so much as direct commentary on Bloom’s life, they have more to depicting with setting up Stephen in relation to him.

I read Hegel and I didn't feel stupid, I just felt Hegel was stupid

heck=portmanteau of hell+fuck fyi
dubliners? why that?
desu right now I am reading Doctor Faustus, and I can safely say it's my first encounter with (((real))) literature
It doesn't make me feel like a brainlet, but it definitely makes me feel small compared to Mann. It makes me feel that I will never achieve this perfection in writing style.

This was helpful, thank you.

When I started reading ten years ago every book let me feel like a brainlet

penrose was proved wrong a long ago tho
>Crick "penrose is writing about things he knows nothing about"
>
Murray Gell-Man "Roger Penrose has written two foolish books based on the long discredited fallacy that Godel's theorem has something to do with consciousness"

t.schopenhauer

most of the time i read literary analysis. like real shit that identifies all of the details and elements and references of a book or poem, not stuff that just expands on the themes.
good literature has so much going on in it, it's completely beyond me.

How do you know they arent overanalysing?

Eco. He actually manages to dump a shitload of knowledge on your ass without sounding pretentious it's incredible

Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion
of signs postmodernity subverts with virus. As culture
migrates into partial-machines (lacking an autonomous
reproductive system) semiotics subsides into virotechnics.
0010101011011100101101010101001100100010001010
1011101000010101100101001010001100100111001000100
000000010011111100010010010101010100001000010101
00111111001001000100011010010001010010101111000101
001000010001110100 Yes No Yes No Yes Yes No longer
what does it mean? but how does it spread?
Having no proper substance, or sense beyond its re re
re replication, yes no no usage of virus is ever metaphorical.
The word 'virus' is more re re virus.
Postmodern culture re re chatters-out virus virus virus
virus virus virus virus virus virus virus 0110001001001
011010010010110010010010010010 'virus' (viroductile,
virogenic, immunosuppressor and and or, meta-, or or
and or hyper-) virus.
383
FANGED NOUMENA
101 10010010011101 100001001001. hypervirus eats the end
of history
00100100100010111 10100001001 101010101010101000
10011010100100101001001010010110100100101 1110 10001
0101010101010100101010010101101010010000001000101
110101001001010100 1010010010101010010001001001001
00100100101001001010110101001001001010110101010101
010111 101000010011010101010101000100110 11 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 00
1 1001000100010101011101000010101100101001010001100
1001 1100100010000000000001001 11111 100010010010101
0101000010000 K-( coding for cyber)positive processes
auto-intensify by occurring.

it's usually easy to tell when that's the case. to be clear i'm talking about stuff like the layered descriptions in madame bovary, not "the wooden floor represents capitalism"

When I finished I felt like I didn't comprehend at least 60-70% of the book. More parts slowly came to me, but still at least 50-60 are still a mystery. I will probably read it again desu.

Finished The Crossing recently and can only recollect it as a series of 2deep4me excursions lasting 15-25 pages each with no overarching commonality that I could distinguish. Very gripping all throughout but I still don't know what to make of as an ultimate theme except maybe that Trump is right.

boomp

this

>Gravity's Rainbow
>Blood Meridian
>Flannery O'Conner's stories
I just don't understand this salvation or redemption violence stuff.

if you can’t read attic Greek and/or interpet what he’s getting at by citing things like φαινόμνον you’re a fucking brainlet

If you think everything you read is obscure pretentious garbage you are a brainlet

Hegel actually is obscure, pretentious garbage.

Man I find the confusing circuitous mathematical-based tomfoolery of Walras kind of circuitous.... but I don’t mind it.

Keynes was really the genius. There are still some sections of his General Theory book that puzzle me

cyclonopedia by reza negarestani

which was kind of the point desu

Lacan. I have read volumes of secondary literature but when I read the man himself I become mush. I’ve probably just represented him as a subject supposed to know.

>lacks basic comprehension of the history of philosophy
>fails to understand hegel

Grande Sertão: Veredas.

He's full of shite anyway

When I first read Benjy's chapter in The Sound And The Fury I wasn't aware of how hard it supposedly (and actually) is and thought it was just one single day. Quentin being referred to with a female possessive pronoun had me confused so I checked its Wikipedia page. I've never felt so dumb before.

I don't remember any book that has recently made me feel like a brainless but I remember that a couple years ago i tried to read The world as a representation by Shopenhauer and it was really difficult to even read one pagar without feeling you missed a lot.

What has actually made me feel stupid but not because I couldn't understand the prose was reading Beyond good and evil. One of Nietzsche's aphorism's, the 208 I think, really deconstructed my personality and moral. The aphorism made me feel like he was directly talking about me, like an school bully trying to put me down in front of other people,. Heck, there's even a part when he actually explains why I don't have a girlfriend.

You should read op, Its just two pages long and I suspect the personality traits Nietzches describes could fit too a lot of people in this board.

All of them. I don't understand anything I read. I look up wikipedia articles and plato.stanford articles and shmoop to see what the work is about and then try to come up with a reasonable sounding opinion using those resources.

Somebody save me

Wtf im retarded as well, and thats by choice

>there's even a part when he actually explains why I don't have a girlfriend
damn

It's been a while, but honestly there are quite a few books that made me feel like an idiot. Under the Volcano, for some reason, I don't remember why. I stopped reading Godel, Escher, Bach somewhere in the middle. The book of the new sun (after I read some of the things you were "supposed" to pick up on).

Anything with a lot of history references as well because my comprehensive knowledge of history is pathetic.

I can feel the angst resonating off the screen.

Try learning some math, it's the easiest [[subject]] to learn.

Ulysseys by James Joyce
Leo Tolstoy's Last Steps
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
S/Z by Roland Barthes

Hans blumenberg kicks my ass In a way nothing else has.

The people who read Hegel are stupid. The core of Hegelian philosophy is basic, and it's the only idea of his worth learning about. But people throughout history read through every thought Hegel ever wrote down and attempt to extrapolate some deeper meaning, despite there not being any in his writing. He just writes in a complicated manor to hide the fact he has nothing of value to say, just like most authors today do.

F U C K
WHAT DOES ANYTHING WYATT SAYS MEAN
Trying to unravel his stream of consciousness when he returned home felt like trying to pilot an aircraft while blackout drunk.

The inchoate longing in you is the desire to suck Norbert Weiner's cock. You probably use the word information unironically.

The Republic. Not because I couldn't understand it or anything, but because it was too overwhelming. I felt like I was being water boarded with information.

>He just writes in a complicated manor
I was going to disregard your pseud posting anyway but this is icing

t. nordestino

t. butthurt christians

What an odd post

My man
Fuck I hate that retard

Hypervirus was pretty cool huh

I agree that Hegel is a pseud, but so are you.

At least that user didn't save three images with the same name

No, you're the brainlet. I was implying it's better to give non-meme answers, retard.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I don't consider it obscure or pretentious, I only read it because I was taking a philosophy class (well, my third to be precise). Maybe it was just a turgid 19th century translation, but the sheer unreadability of this book convinced me that I did not, in fact, want to minor in philosophy, and though I passed the class I never took another philosophy class after it.

Godel's theorem is the equivalent of saying that any give system has its own version of "this statement is false." It can be applied to consciousness too, if consciousness operates by a set of rules.

Plato's Symposium or anything in Plato's body just because it is amazingly multifaceted.

Hegel and Kant are geniuses in their own right for having invented an amazing system of metaphysics, but Plato is so...
polyphonic that I sit in awe thinking about it occasionally.

>without sounding pretentious
Name of The Rose is basically Look How Much History I Read, Did I Mention That I Speak Latin: The Novel

Some parts of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Being and Time and probably other stuff I'm choosing to forget.

Being able to see the complexity of Plato already puts you in a far higher position in terms of understanding than most people desu

The second time around I read some of Shakespeare I had no idea what was going on. Though apparently I had 90% comprehension of Romeo and Juliet in Middle School.

it makes me sad that people think this kind of reply is even sorta better than just saying "you're a faggot." at least faggot is straightforward

Thomas Aquinas. Cant remember what one. I just kept getting into the loop of reading a page and then realizing when I tried to start on the next that I hadn't understood or even really absorbed a single fucking word of the previous, so Id try re-read it and the cycle continued. Probably got less than 20 pages in by the time I dropped it.

catcher in the rye :(