I only read the classics

>I only read the classics
What is up with people on here only reading classics? That's like being alive when those authors were still writing books and missing their masterpieces because you were too busy reading the Greeks.

I read mostly classics. I try newer stuff too, but prefer to stay in the 19th and 20th century.

but the classics are better

The thing is that hindsight is 20/20. People tend to look back with rose-colored glasses but there were just as many shit books written back then as there are now. So yeah you might pick up Crime and Punishment in a bookstore in Petersburg in 1886 or you might pick up one of the thousands of shit books that were published that year. However now the books that have survived from 1886 are guaranteed to at least have some value so if I read classics I don't really have to worry about whether or not reading them will be a valuable use of my time and if I was just buying whatever was on the NYT bestsellers list, I would.

Because people have less time, and because there's less of a filter of active intellectual circles to know what is really ground-breaking in new literature and what is just circulated for publisher profit and pseud credentialism.

If you want to justify reading something as truly essential nowadays you have to justify it as either classic or fun.

Pretty much everyone on this board got crappy modern educations so we're all catching up and trying to become familiar with works that literary people of the past would already have read by this age.

>reading anything but the greeks

If these authors were alive today we would have no way distinguishing between them and the other 200 megatons of pages published every year . time is the most ruthless critic. More has already been written than you could read if you lived 100 times your natural life span, and we produce more and more and more at an ever growing rate. 90% of everything is shit and you do not have time for the new

People here have no critical reading or thinking ability so they need academic and historical consensus to tell them what is worth consuming.

>he doens't exclusively watch OOP VHS from garage sales and head shop back rooms featuring big actors first days

Very true. BTW can anyone tell me what order I should read Nietzchie's works in? Dont know if this gets asked a lot. Thinking about jumping into his stuff.

please don’t ever again do subthreads on Veeky Forums or else

The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, BGE, Genealogy of Morals, The Antichrist, Twilight of the Idols, The Will to Power faggot

I don't have a long time on this mortal coil. I'm not going to waste it thumbing through dross in the hope of "discovering" some great new work.

Sorry yo, but I just had to know. Thnx anyways, much appreciated.

>that's like being alive when those authors were still writing books and missing their masterpieces because you were too busy reading the Greeks
Is that a bad thing?
Plus Infinite Jest, GR, Blood Meridian etc. are not yet classics but people here read them.
It's just easier to pick up a classic instead of making a wong choice which results with waste of money or bizzare book dropping.

Reading classics only is better than reading non-classics only either way.

Many people disagree, but the real classics (Plato, proclus, Philo, Plotinus, damascius, Olympiodorus, Iamblichus etc.) were describing a philosophy that was erased from the face of the earth by the church and the western world has had access to it for half the amount of time that it has had access to Shakespeare. The information provided by these sources existed long before these writers put pen to paper. This information offers a solution and I’d suggest you fucking find it quickly. Fucking read it. Quit your day job tomorrow. Get a job as a night-time security guard and study this shit every day for at least 5 hours. It’s the only non-goddamned way.

>doesn't know what the classics are
the Greeks are the classics retard

those books are decades old now though

id consider them classics, at least neo classics

Bro, that pic is fucking perfect paired with that comment. Nicee

>platonism is a coherent and complete system of philosophy

I feel the same way

Sure thing. I'll just drop everything and devote myself to some dead mediterranean guys because someone on a message board said so.

What is incoherent? What is incomplete? You fuck.

I like the way they were written. Modern writers are peurile. Link me to the modern Cervantes/Mottieux tr. and I'll give it a whirl.

They aren't the ONLY classics pleblet.

>tfw one of my favorite authors won a Pulitzer Prize
>tfw love her short stories
>tfw novels aren't quite as good but still much better than the brunt of modern fiction

>tfw afraid to shill on Veeky Forums because I'll get called a brainlet for enjoying a writer who didn't die at least a half-century ago

pleb as fuck. An unwillingness to keep abreast with the contemporary is an unwillingness to face reality.

who is it?

I only read classics and Murakami

Because after the great vat of gravy has cooled for a couple hundred years one can scrape off the delicious wrinkly skin on the surface without getting any chunks off the bottom

Are you me?

He is right you know

>being afraid to voice your opinion on Veeky Forums for fear of ridicule

This is more brainlet than enjoying modern writers.

Like it or not, most people can only read so much and I certainly don't want to begrudge people any unwillingness on their part to spend hours forcing themselves into reading things they don't like. You shouldn't force yourself to read things you're not interested in, of course, something everybody's all to quick to agree with when it's classics we're talking about (lol it's a bunch of dead guys anyway!) but when it's new stuff it's more like "why don't you face reality and get with the times gramps?" When really you should just dive into what interests you (and that means going past the "entry level" at some point for sure), there's plenty out there (way more than enough for most people) to enjoy either way, no need to turn it into some sort of virtue signaling about "the classics" or "timeliness and relevance"

>He's scared of being made fun of on an anonymous image board
Pathetic

>There were just as many shit books written back then as there are now.
Why do post-fedoras always have to repeat this idiotic point?
It simply is not true and does not further your argument. It is plainly not true. Take good or bad out if it, there wer FAR less books being written at any point in time ("back then") just in general. Either the increase in books being written has come entirely from 'good books' or is simply mathematically impossible that your statement should be true.
Am I nitpicking? No, because there's more to it: The barriers for entry used to be much, much higher (and, roughly speaking, the further you go back, the higher). That meant a lot of dogshit never got put to paper, because it's potential authors neither could read or write nor had access to a writing medium, to copywriters, printers/publishers etc.
There were no doubt things written in the past that we would consider 'bad' or not worth writing, and plenty of them have been forgotten/lost. But that doesn't prove your point.

>Plato, proclus, Philo, Plotinus, damascius, Olympiodorus, Iamblichus etc

Proclus were deserved to be written from BIG fucking P you moron, Damascius too. And i absolutely agree with your post then

I hadn't even read your full post, turns out you ended up making the point I would have made. I still hate that argument, which is so often used to make the point that today's literary world is supposedly just as high-quality if not more so than at any point in the past.

>That's like being alive when those authors were still writing books and missing their masterpieces because you were too busy reading the Greeks.
>implying

>broadly calling every work that isn't contemporary a "classic"
That's just called literature

good post. the majority of church 'theology' is one long chain of bad thinking, founded on a bad interpretation.

>thousands upon thousands of books written by humankind through all of history
>over the years many have persisted in cultural consciousness
>there's still hundreds of them
Because, lad, there is only so much time and we often choose to start at the beginning.

the best parts of the first world in our time are rooted in platonic thought, and religious opinion has for millennia been the source of oppression and stagnation

> the majority of church 'theology' is one long chain of bad thinking
There were good thinkers in that tradition. But mostly blockheads, sure. But can't you say that about any other tradition?

>That's like being alive when those authors were still writing books and missing their masterpieces because you were too busy reading the Greeks.
Which would've been fine because the Greeks rule.

keep fighting the good fight against the spiritual materialists platonist user, I believe you'll have a good afterlife

The only contemporary writing worth reading are comics, like Batman.

Which is embodied and perfected in the Abrahamic faith so.. there goes that theory.

The best faith is something Neoplatonic, like Neoplatonic Islam.

thanks for the kind word user

go away reactionary atheist buttmunch, go be a wormfood nothing with CHRISTopher hitchens. you big dummy, islam is an abrahamic faith. cant we just be happy to put down our mortal burden and return to the one.

there goes that theory looooooooool

:/

I'm sure Veeky Forums must be dead, for I am clearly not an atheist, but a Muslim.

>I am clearly ... a Muslim
>the best faith is

you're a brainlet. faith in god is a philosophical position, not an ice cream flavor. you would know this if you were not a brainlet. stop soiling platonism with your bearded ways.

>the beauty of Platonic Idealism which is analogous to Hindu Idealism which are the most noble of all the faiths any human has ever aspired to hold is perfected in the disgusting ressentiment filled scheming cave mutterer screeds of the desert people and their domesticated European adherents
no

>best way to believe in god is neoplatonism
okay so deism
>yea but it also has to be Islam
pic related, it's me

Why does Plato need to appeal to transcendentalism to justify living virtuously in Gorgias? If instead of all the arguing he would have just said "live according to virtue so you get rewarded in heaven" I wouldnt have to waste so much time on this shit.

because an afterlife nevermind a specific heaven is not knowable, and it is taken on faith that the gods find merit in mortals who emulate them
>inb4 what is faith

>taken on faith
I'm not going to fedora you by saying a defense of virtues shouldnt come down to "to what god wants"; Instead, I want to find a more amiable reading of his afterlife. I just cant see an intuitive way of reframing "take on faith that the gods reward you for emulating them" without it sounding like mental gymnastics.

‘Live according to virtue so you get rewarded in heaven’ is more like the Christian perspective imo. Plato was more like ‘learn philosophy, meditate, contemplate the forms, practice dialectic and enter heaven before your body dies, oh yeah, also, of course you need to do good things and avoid bad things in this process’

...

Except you're reading garbage. Literally everything posted here is garbage.
Platonism isn't erased. It should be.

Neoplatonism is only the best bonfire fuel.

>Except you're reading garbage
Then those are the people that aren't reading the classics, bud. Pay attention.

The people reading 'classics' are reading garbage. In fact, they are reading garbage superficially.

Where the fuck do i even start with contemporary literature though? There is just so much shit published and i don't have the time to read everything, and anything contemporary that comes to attention just mostly seems like it's been built up by marketing.

I don't refuse to read contemporary works, it's just too hard sorting through the chaff.

Start with the memes.

>enjoying female writters
The absolute state of Veeky Forums

Magris

Pretty much this. Yes, there's an absolute shit-ton of books being written in the past few years, but there's no real way of telling whether or not you'd be wasting your time with them, and the only way to do so would be to peruse through anything that remotely interested you.

I started reading exclusively the classics because after trying to read a few books from new authors that were written in the past few years or decade, where people waxed on about how they were "insant classics", ground-breaking and revolutionary, I found them personally to be mediocre and shitty. This, of course, isn't counting modern studies or science, purely fiction and philosophy.

When it comes to literature, the only true critic is time. Let the mediocre novels crumble away into nothingness, let time do the work for you. Besides, there's still more classical literature out there in the world than you can read in your lifetime. It's not like you're going to run out anytime soon.

>Except you're reading garbage.
Subjective, kys

>Quit your day job tomorrow. Get a job as a night-time security guard and study this shit every day for at least 5 hours. It’s the only non-goddamned way.

I'm unemployed atm and am seriously considering this.

>her

Are There any physical requirements for being a night time security guy?

What is your argument as to why every book labeled a classic on this board is garbage?

What do you like to read?

Tao Lin

This guy gets it.

Because the only reason I read is to appear intellectual in social situations and classic books are filled with multifarious confabulation which helps cultivate my marvelous phraseology.

No - in fact - you. You are the garbage. Superficial garbage.

Check and mate, faggotron.

Talk shit, post lit

Ideally, I want to read modern writing but what I do know is that your average basic fiction that's interested in telling a mass-marketed story is a plodding read. I find reading classics right now will give me a formative lens to judge other books. But really what do I know, I find I've been too pretentious in reading for prose when really at the end of the day, the (classical) author simply feels that he has something worth sharing. The idea and plot is much more important than the writing and I'm reading most of the classics in translation which is essentially a work in itself and defeats the purpose of reading for prose.

What I will say is ideas presented in canonical works are much richer than what you would find in Harry Potter or what have you and there is satisfaction in participating with the dialogue by attempting to understand what it is the author wishes to partake, rather than having it all spelled out for you, letter by letter.

You can't compare a classic work of literature to YA fiction like Harry Potter as an attempt for posterity. That is being intellectually dishonest and willfully ignorant.

I've always been more interested in writing than reading, and classics are more valuable for absorbing into one's authorial mind. I don't need to read the latest up and coming book to write one.

>>you can't compare a classic work to YA fiction
>what is aesop's fables
>what is the jungle book
>what are the just-so stories
>who are bros grimm
>what are the childhood adventures of Hermes
>who is world-renowned boy wizard harry potter

just stop trying to defend a position you haven't actually considered and don't really hold

Well, yeah, I agree with you and I apologize. My point came across poorly and I don't mean to judge YA fiction with whatever lens or erudition I'm hoping to gain from studying classics, but I would like to read modern authors who wish to write for a serious, or intelligent(?), audience and compare them, because I definitely do not doubt that there is talent worth reading today. Gaetan Soucy is one such author that I personally adore myself who lived through the second half of the last century. I wish he were still alive

I think it depends on the place. I’m wiry white boy, so I don’t really fit the mold, but I have two degrees so I’m hoping that makes me a shoe-in in spite of my race/weight

you do a disservice to your race with your weakling attitude and lanky physique

Personally I only read big brain books, not my fault it is mostly classics that achieve big brain

T.

>me b-big brain boy

>mfw one day people are going to call "The Fault In Our Stars" a classic

I've been here forever. I just read. I think that we could use more of that in general.

Zadie Smith
Helen Oyeyeme
Colson Whitehead
ZZ Packer
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Roxane Gay
Natalie Baszile
James Hannaham
Dinaw Mengestu
Jesmyn Ward
Teju Cole
Marlon James
Tayari Jones
Jeffery Renard Allen
Taiye Selasi
Ayana Mathis

You don't know these, Veeky Forums? That's because you don't actually bother to read contemporary literature,

>not exclusively reading fun YA fiction
I’m just here to laugh at all the plebs dedicating all their free time to pretending they like stuffy outdated literature. All the strangers on the internet all real impressed, bros

I count one (1) potentially white man

why read YA when you could play video games or watch anime, at least these media aren't garbage by default

Because Snake Pass was the last good video game and anime is shit

>I know what Veeky Forums reads

You are wrong. Read enough classics to see people have been writing shit-to-be-forgotten for millennia. Read Schopenhauer’s On History or any of Tolstoy’s tomes to see this being talked about.

It is true, you're simply not well read enough to know this (and probably have a very superficial view of literature as well).

did you even read his post?