>If you want to take up serious reading dont treat your reading list like buffet of literary history to be sampled, pick one topic to master. Time is precious, reading Mishima, then Carlyle, then Art of War, there's no momentum there, choices must build geometrically. A reading list of 10 classics is worse than one of 10 books about same classic. Doing latter will produce lasting gains, former won’t. Your reading knowledge and critical capacity must be trained and disciplined in a structured manner to build up that grey matter. Books arent checkboxes to be ticked on your erudition application, they are not so easy to exhaust, require many viewpoints to discern truly. I wouldn't expect to get a good handle on a book until studyin the author, the era, the genre, and the criticism. These perspectives interlock to create understanding, just read one thing in passing and it won't grow roots in your mind, you need to compost.
If you can find a way to link Mishima, Carlyle, and the Art of War together, I don't see why you couldn't have "momentum."
Camden Diaz
Yes, and it's one of the things I've noticed with "classics readers". They've read all of the most famous books in the canon just to have a basic knowledge of the plot points/themes. Many people think you'll look like a pseud or something if you don't read a specific classic novel, but it takes time to properly work your way into it. This is why you fucks have to start with the greeks and STAY with the greeks.
Jordan Foster
Yes. Maybe not pick just one topic necessarily, there is definite value in a broad reading list. But you should certainly structure your reading to get the most out of it.
Blake Gomez
Yes
Dominic Peterson
He is probably right, but I really don't want to read a 500 page commentary of Schelling written by some gay university prof. I would much rather discuss with people more knowledgeable than I but considering how universities are that's a pipe dream
Mason Morales
There's something just so nice about his face. I kind of wish he were my friend.
Austin Brooks
Seems like this entire rant could have been condensed to >start with the greeks
Matthew Martinez
partially agree in so far as reading "The Canon" is a good way to miss out on a lot of what literature has to offer. It's also a good way to quickly lose interest since you aren't necessarily reading what you like and instead reading out of a false sense of obligation. That said, I think there is an organic way you can move from one book to the next that's not tied to era, author etc. neither must you become an expert in everything you read. Moby Dick can still be good and appreciated on its own w/o having read the transcendentalist or the entirety of Melville corpus.
Jacob Murphy
Lol fuck you I will read whatver I want. Looks bottom line is Yes time is precious so don't waste you time watching TV, porn and loads of other shit that do not matter (that includes replying to retarde posts which...kind of what I am doing) JUST read books mothercuker
Ryan Johnson
More:
>no, you just waste too much of the book, you must be more efficient. spend a long time studying the same books, read all criticism, all related books methodically. you will extract every drop
I wish there was a course. I feel like if I could find an Oxford University syllabus from the 1890s or something you could get a good order and follow a 4 year program from yourself.
Failing that, I think a good way would be to read one of those Cambridge Companion To books after reading a classic. So you could go a 1:1 list of commentary to books.
I think a good way would be to go the greatestbooks.org, get the .csv files, delete all but the top 100 rated, then sort and read them them by order of publication (earliest to latest of course) And read a companion inbetween each book.
Oliver Rogers
But you could read classic commentaries. I think any commentary written from say 1950 would be a decent scholarship.
But if you just read as quick as possible without thinking about it and engaging in a dialogue about it it'll be a waste of time. It'd be like swallowing your food without tasting and savouring it.
>I read and loved Goethe’s mature novels, the “Wilhelm Meister” novels and “Elective Affinities”, and one day in a used book store I found a copy of “Goethe and the Novel” by Eric Blackall and I read that, and that book extensively reconstructed Goethe’s novel reading habits throughout his life, what works were his favorites, what he had said about different novels etc. And I wanted to understand his books better so I started reading some of the Augustan English novels he seemed to talk about the most, like Goldsmith’s “The Vicar of Wakefield”.
>Human knowledge is unbelievably self-reflexive, you have to develop the ability to be critical about your own knowledge if you want to develop it. You have to objectify what you know and turn it into a picture in your imagination, and when you’re able to do that you can judge that picture as if it were a painting you were in the process of creating, and figure out what you need to do still to fill in all the remaining gaps. Then when you’ve figured out that if you want to know more about, say Augustan era British literature, you can develop a reading list for yourself to teach yourself what you think you need to know.
>Off the top of your head can you tell me who Horace is for example? What works he wrote and what time period he lived in? I kept seeing his name come up in works like Tom Jones but I didn’t really have much idea who he was. Turns out the “Augustan” era is called the “Augustan” era because of the influence of Golden Age Latin writers from the time of Augustus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Livy etc. And so I decided I should familiarize myself with those writers, and then I found out that Dryden had done very influential translations of Virgil and so I read his Aeneid.
Andrew Wilson
>You really have to put in a concerted effort over the course of years, and you have to let your own interests develop themselves. It is daunting, and it only becomes more daunting as time goes on. I’ve come to feel stupider and stupider the more I’ve read because I’ve realized just how much I actually don’t know.
>Don’t expect instant results, proceed slowly, take it one book at a time. The more you read the more it all begins to fit together in your head. Part of it is just being humble about your own knowledge and your abilities and not trying to run before you can walk. I had initially ignored Kantian philosophy and at first I didn’t really think it was important to understanding Goethe’s literary works, but then I read Boyle’s “Goethe: The Poet and the Age” (Volume two specifically) and realized that I needed to take it more seriously. I was humble about it though, I knew the CPR would be way over my head and that I needed to start smaller and work my way up. So I read some secondary scholarship like Beiser’s “The Fate of Reason”, and Manfred Kuehn’s biography of Kant. From there I sat down with a much more manageable work, “The Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics”, and I sat down with a legal pad and I went through section by section writing the argument of each one out on paper in my own words. The key was I was humble, I broke down what I wanted to learn into smaller bites and I followed through with a course of study I created for myself.
>For me there was a very noticeable, profound change in my entire way of thinking after about three or so years of reading, I just hit this sort of critical mass of knowledge where I suddenly exploded into intellectual self-awareness in a way that humiliated me, where it just hit me that what had passed for intelligent thought and reading comprehension when I was in college was only a shadow of the real thing.
3 or so years sounds reasonable. I think he's right about being humble, but if I know I'm starting off as a brainlet I could make a plan to not be an embarassment after 3 years. I'll try to make one.
Wyatt King
They most enjoyable commentaries I have read and I recommend to anyone who wants to study these texts are Proclus' commentaries of Plato, Church Father commentaries on the Bible, and Zhu Xi's commentary of Confucius
Ryan Clark
Thanks senpai.
Ok, so I got the top 150 fiction books from thegreatestbooks.org, ranked them in order of publication, here is the first year of reading. I can read a commentary book inbetween each choice.
I don't think he's wrong, but on the other hand there's just a tradeoff between breadth and depth. Is having a deep understanding of Carlyle worth not knowing anything about Mishima? Would it be better than the other way around? How do I know without reading them? There's got to be some room for exploration and survey, otherwise what actually happens is that anyone trying to follow his advice just latches onto the first decent thinker they find and then specialize without having a clue about anything else.
There's also diminishing returns to time. Most of us are autodidacts because barbarians already looted the liberal arts before we were born and now sit around in the ruins jacking each other off and drawing graffiti on the walls. I have a day job, if I have to read 10,000 pages of commentary for every thousand pages of primary material then I'm never actually going to get anywhere. Once upon a time you could do that sort of study full time and be ready to go by your mid-20s; instead we read Harry Potter and learned about Harriet Tubman. The ship's sinking; I need to get what's important onto this lifeboat before everything goes under, and Carlyle might be worth it but four shelves of criticism isn't gonna make it.
Colton Russell
There is literally nothing better for your brain than reading ancient geometry. I firmly believe that I owe some kind of relation to how able I am to rationalize certain philosophical concepts solely because I decided to go down that road.
Austin Turner
Yes and no. Just read C. Paglia's Sexual Personae and then explore her ideas about other mediums. Her understanding is informed by contemporary media and her ability to find patterns in the cannon wouldn't exist without her passions. So if you don't have passion to acquire a subject to study, you should follow intuitions in choosing random books until what unifies them, what stands out to you, makes apparent what you can then focus on.
But what the fuck is "serious reading" anyway? Doesn't that just smack of wowie marginalia and check-marked book lists?
You want to be a serious reader, you go into logic and, while you're in logic, you get inside entomology, you pick up a magnifying glass and look for the queen, you make certain you're not burning her if the suns too bright, and then you open up a rhetoric book and wack, you smush her highness together and look at her insides which you read like an ink blot. What comes out is logic, if then, sentence by sentence, a history of sacred Word through an investigation of early dictionaries, then smack the rhetoric over your head, contemporary business letter type, and bob's your uncle.
Ryan Roberts
The canon of generality which he suggests can be read in a year and really should be read by anyone considering themselves educated. And from there you can pick and choose which periods are worth your time to dig into. Is that so fucking hard?
Also when people like these have such massive glaring gaps in their knowledge, such as not even having a favorite poet, I get the idea that they're some kind of willing retard. Imagine knowing everything about the impressionists yet blanking when being asked to name one painting by Bruegel.
Jason Wood
kantbot is a retard trying to justify the fact that he's wasted his life eating cheese are reading german idealists.
he is right that supplementary material helps, but he's wrapped up one of the most basic, common sense pieces of advice and tried to pass it off as some profound bit of wisdom. every college freshman knows this stuff after a semester
Nathan Phillips
My dude what are you even talking about "basic plot points and themes"? You're stuck in middle school my dude!!!
What is the purpose of a 'classic'? A classic is a book that contains (an) essential truth in this world. So no, the point in OP makes no sense at all. Like the poster above, it suggests that the purpose to read is for knowledge. As in crystallized knowledge on themes plots and literary history. That is not the ideal reason to read classics. Classics are meant to be USED. They have utility because they actually teach you things about yourself. I do believe in dedicating yourself to a singular pursuit but that is something separate from classics because all classics aid us in the essential pursuit that is living.
Ryan Torres
Show me your Greek gains, Veeky Forums About to move to Aeschylus. (not everything I've read is included in list)
Evan Sanders
Can someone link me some videos of this guy?
Gavin Baker
Here's my progress on second chart. Will probably round everything up with two more translations of the Iliad/Odyssey to round things up (already read Lattimore).
Connor Myers
I've only read Illiad and Odyssey. Im planning to read Edith Hamilton, Herodotus and Thucydides next, after i finish Don Quixote.
Alexander Cox
You laugh at him now but you will be the ones looking like idiot when his prediction about Trump completing the system of German idealism becomes true.
Hudson Cook
>round everything up...to round things up apologies for phoneposting
David Morgan
Are these actually good or is this just a meme
Cameron Richardson
depends on what u mean by "good"
Ryder Cooper
like if I sit down to read them, will I enjoy the experience or is it just page after page of shit which pseuds read for their pseud credentials?
Henry Hughes
why don't you read them and see for yourself?
Lincoln Fisher
he's mostly wrong, his advice leads to becoming a pedantic monomaniac with misplaced priorities and lack of breadth. he's spending all his spare time in every abstruse nook and cranny he can to get the final word on German Idealism and he DOESNT EVEN SPEAK GERMAN. come the fuck on.
Chase Lewis
I don’t have time to read every book ever
Matthew Taylor
He rejects the Enlightment so all lit's sacred texts would be useless to him anyway. You guys come up with the most ridiculous rationalizations sometimes.
Sebastian Williams
Why waste time here discussing everything you won't be reading then?
Jaxon Murphy
Oh well he actually doesn't know what he's talking about
Alexander Perez
>He rejects the Enlightment ??????????
kantbot has the biggest hard-on for the enlightenment of anyone i've ever seen.
Matthew Gonzalez
Till he started reading Hamann maybe. That guy is the start of the counter-enlightenment. He's the Christian Nietzsche.
Aiden Hernandez
I agree with most of what he says, yes.
but if you want to spend a year or two just reading all of the 'greats' and meme books that are popular then you should. It gives you things to talk about with strangers and they are popular for a reason.
Do that in the same way most of us spend a few years pissing about before we grow up or how we often take a gap year or two before truly starting to buckle down and focus on one career path.
James Bennett
Why are you on lit if you dont want to read?
You could read all of those books within a year, easily. Dip your toes into the first few online and then buy them if you are enjoying learning what they teach. These aren't entertainment books.
Dominic Cruz
The Christian Nietzsche whom by countering christian teachings critically actually gave them a better understanding of themselves and a higher standards of religious thought to aim for. I grew up hating the church and being le edgy athiest until I read Kant and started looking at religions as both a philosophical, political, social and economic entity.
Hudson Gray
This.
So many people on Veeky Forums seem to have this image of themselves as young scholars that will one day have driven their way through all the greatest works (there are a handful of reading lists being cooked up in this thread which will most likely will never be used) but the truth is that if you’re old enough to browse this board then it’s too late for that, and many of those works won’t have the enormous mind-shaping impact that they would have had if we were all treated to rigourous classical educations from childhood. Just read (and re-read) what interests you and keep in mind that reading in order to live a better life is far more important than sacrificing half of your life in order to read better. If you want to see someone who has, with regards to literature, done what Kantbot suggests then just look at Harold Bloom. How inspiring really is a man like that? Is he more able to be enriched by great works than you?
Jacob Phillips
I just love how fucking fat and jewish looking he is No, he isn't right. What he is advocating for is an in depth academic approach to literature, and while that may be good for anyone it doesn't mean that that is the only way to seriously read. He is willingfully ignoring the ability of humans to memorize and basically use their brains. I read Crime and Punishment a year and a half ago, then went on to reading McCarthy, Ligotti, some assorted WWI poetry and a week ago I finished Germinal and am now reading War and Peace and I can recall a lof of the themes, inspirations, styles and overall feeling of the era that I read on C&P. Fuck this ugly goy, e-fame has gotten to his head and like many other socially deprived anons that make it big on a meme basis he will reveal himself as a fraud sooner or later. Fucking fat fuck I hate his guts and I hope he chokes on butter and that a dog bites off his limp and minuscule dick. Shit.
Juan Watson
No he doesn’t. He’s talked and written about the enlightenment and how it’s been misinterpreted.
Christian Edwards
Nietzsche writes a lot of things, but I don't believe he writes any of them particularly well.
William Price
You need at least a decent understanding of a books historical, literary background and stylistic nuances probably. I wouldn't go for more than articles though.
Ethan Gray
If you've read his work in anything other than German, that would be why. Even in German his writing can seem a bit fragmented but I believe this is because he would walk for a while to stimulate the creative process, then sit and write. Still, his work has a much better flow when read in the original language.
Ian Gonzalez
Who the fuck is Kantbot and what does he do? Is he one of those badphilosophy fags?
Ryan Garcia
Double dubs of truth
Blake Barnes
Why did Kantbot delete all of his essay archives? They were great commentary pieces, and some were really funny. His new Autistic Mercury website is garbage. Instead of satirically being autistic, it actually is.
Robert Robinson
Yes, he is. This concept actually applies to anything you do in life.
Charles Campbell
Wrong. Scholarship from 1920 onwards always holds the risk of a containing political trapdoors, autistic focus on some minor issue that was then the center of scholarly debate, besides of course the author's biases etc.
Kantbot's advice only goes if you're attempting to become a commentator, academic, journalist yourself. Otherwise, read the original texts, come to your own conclusions based on them. Avoid secondary material if it's not necessary to literally understand the text, e.g. for Hegel.
Eli Gutierrez
>What he is advocating for is an in depth academic approach to literature, and while that may be good for anyone it doesn't mean that that is the only way to seriously read. Agreed, depth and breadth both have their value.
Luke Powell
Why does the image recommend the Pope translations? Aren't these widely criticizing for being untrue to the originals, and more like English poems based on the originals?
Joshua Sanders
Exactly the wrong approach to reading if you want to be a writer. The writers I appreciate most all had a very broad understanding of the lit canon and it enabled them to lay out within their works a specific cultural scetch which can lead one deeper into different ends of the landscape. Maybe I'm too much of a pomo-shitter but I like when authors do that.
Carter Bailey
The problem is if you don't read some scholarship you sort of don't know what you don't know. You might think you understood some novel, but you might have missed massive sections- I don't mean symbolism or deeper meaning, but basic plot stuff:
>What a lot of people don’t realize is how much you can miss when reading a book from the 18th century without realizing it. For example, how much is one “Crown” worth? When Squire Allworthy gives a crown to a beggar, how much money does that actually represent? A lot? A little? If you were reading a book written in the present day, and you were told one of the characters in the story spent $500 on a pair of Nikes, what would you infer from that piece of information about what kind of individual that character was? On that alone you’d probably be able to guess a lot of things about how precisely that character fits into the Society he lives in, wouldn’t you?
>Now imagine that that I told you a woman in 1770 had a wardrobe worth £500, what would you infer from that?
>Or say that you’re reading Goethe’s novella, “The Man of 50 Years Old”, and you get the wonderful ice skating scene, one of the best things that Goethe ever wrote. What can you infer from the fact that these characters enjoy ice skating?
>Like I said you can miss out on a lot without even realizing it, if you don’t know for example that the total annual income of a middle class English family in the 18th century wasn’t more than a couple hundred pounds, or if you don’t know that the hugely fashionable sentimental poet Gottlieb Klopstock was the one who first made ice skating popular when Goethe was a young man.
Camden Gomez
would you care about any of this if you read the primary work on a lonely island?
>Is all your knowledge to go so utterly for nothing unless other people know that you possess it? t. persius
Anthony Johnson
If one person experiencing something is worthless then surely two is as well, even three or four.
Justin Hernandez
that sentence is true backwards
Charles Richardson
He's absolutely right, but everyone should still have a solid, broad foundation so it's still advisable to read all the classics, but then one should focus.
Zachary Gray
Yes, thanks for spelling it out
Levi Robinson
Yeah he's right if your goal as a semiotic manifestation of cybernetic capitalism is to deny yourself any individuality and let the system dictate your worth and mold you into some specialist drone. Don't forget to file your taxes.
Xavier Russell
Why would I forget to file my taxes?
Nathan Phillips
Maybe, but I've yet to find a book I've felt like would b worth this input.
Christian Baker
Imagine actually taking any advice about life from someone as chubby and smug as KuntBot.
Isaiah Lewis
Mishima, Carlyle and the Art of War aren't really books you need to read the western canon for. You can read them in any order.
Aaron Hernandez
Just read some fucking history of philosophy manuals to get a general understanding and then read what you are most interested in without forgetting the big picture. Do this with everything you are interested in general and you'll have a good ground of understanding. You don't need to be autistic about it.
Wyatt Kelly
>tfw no longer a young man about to embark on a journey through University, starting a subversive reading club, growing my mind by working through classic literature before falling firmly into a small segment, thus gaining mastery over the years of my study until I enter into that glorious ivory tower myself to continue the cycle of knowledge by passing forward all which I have learned
David Gray
Yes, thank you for stating the obvious you fucking retard
Why does Veeky Forums jerk off these people? It's like if /tv/ jerked off over Youtube "Video Essays"
Anthony Jenkins
>Having a deep knowledge of a singular area makes you a capitalist drove Are you retarded in real life too?
Levi Long
Sorry kid, welcome to 2018. Here we only have education in the form of catching up and making up for lost time.
Luke Bennett
Gotta get that job training bro! Oh wait, they don't actually do that anymore. Just reiterate the same theory behind a job over and over.
I took mostly accounting courses because it was easy but every class up the chain just taught the same theory and rules of accounting applied in different ways. Then when applying for jobs because I didn't have hard experience at an internship I couldn't get a job for almost a year because they only value your ability to do the actual work not how well you understand it. After all, the computers can put the numbers in the right spot so actually knowing the underlying doesn't matter, it just matters if you can use the computer. Modern education needs to be totally dismantled and rebuilt, as does our business environment.
Michael Ward
>Modern education needs to be totally dismantled and rebuilt, as does our business environment. This. It won't happen though until automation's progression has completely hollowed out the remains of any actual functionality that there is left in the current systems. This whole farce will become much worse before any real change can occur :)
Grayson Thompson
you shouldn't forget to pay them, but you should chose not to pay them.
Jack Sullivan
Right and wrong. You have to specialize, true, if you just read from the buffet without any attempt to study a topic then you are wasting time (then again this supposes some sort of goal or direction, as if there is some sort of test at the end of it all). However this is also impossible. If you truly read from a good list you will find topic whether you like it or not (given you approach your reading with even a modicum of reading comprehension and try to be interested in what you consume as opposed to just marching through words). You don't have to pick a subject and stick with it, your subject will find you. Additionally if you decide to skip the buffet and go straight for some subject that you chose arbitrarily (it will always be arbitrary if you haven't already consumed a wide gamut of material) then you will lack any kind of depth to be able to critically analyze your subject. >These perspectives interlock to create understanding, just read one thing in passing and it won't grow roots in your mind, you need to compost. I really, really disagree. This is only true if you don't enjoy reading. I had no (and still don't) any context on 100 years of solitude yet I had a blast reading it and if has forever shaped my perception of Latin American culture (especially the mysticism). True that I don't have a particularly deep knowledge of this subject but I don't need that. I greatly benefit that for the rest of my life in the cases where I do encounter Latin mysticism (and really it shapes my perception of all the cultures, it gives me great context) I have a simple yet good perspective to start with.
Hunter Perez
he's right.
but reading broadly isn't the worst thing in the world. Sometimes all I need is Mary Beard's SPQR and I'm good. Other people may need to read Cicero and other primary sources to satiate themselves with Roman history.
Caleb Hughes
It's a good list (we could quibble, but I've read around 90% of them). After that, specialize. Find an author or period you want to delve more deeply into. Take a seminar. Have fun. Pick another area. Repeat until you die.
Aiden Scott
kantbot we know it's you. No one cares about your pseud advice
