ITT: Post a writer you don't give a shit about and anons convince you to read them and which books in particular

Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Magic Mountain is comfy as shit

The Christmas Carol musical film (Scrooge) is the peak version of that story though.

Is it? every adaptation I've ever seen put scrooge as this 2d cardboard cutout of a guy who just loves munny but then gets saved by the power of christmas, which is not how the novella goes at all.

If you have ever looked down on another man because of their inability to face reality, then you most likely will like The Sun Also Rises. It's also a comfy book to read on a day off.

Things that are comfier than The Magic Mountain:

* "operating system not found"

* getting mugged in a foreign city

* opening a letter from the hospital and seeing the word "metastasized"

James Joyce. It's not that I'll never read him but from how others on lit talk about his work, I'd want to wait until I've covered more of the Western canon before I give it a go.

For Ulysses and FW that's true, but Dubliners and Portrait are great if you're just getting into literature.

What's dubliners like? I have a copy laying around somewhere, and I wouldn't say I'm new to literature especially since i've done a lot of literary analysis for school but I've only really been serious in reading for the past year.

It's a procession of character studies and snapshots of small moments, atmospheric and melancholy without being too sentimental. Give Araby a go. Also The Dead since people tend to talk about it more than the collection as a whole.

araby is great

thanks m8

Read The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, and The Liar. His best works are his short fiction from the 1880s to the 1890s. Sometimes James can be quite entertaining. Other times he is very boring. But it is interesting to what James mature from the 1870s to his peak years in the 80s and 90s to decadence in the early 1900s.

I'm reading The American, and I'm really enjoying it. Granted this is early James, and apparently his style changes over the course of his career.

Maybe the subject matter turns certain anons off of him?

There's a hue disparity the the quality of Dickens' best and worst books. At his best, he offers some of the greatest prose in the English language. Just read the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities if you don't believe me. He's also somewhat subversive if you like that sort of thing.
There's a certain rawness to his writing that really has an effect on me.

For me:
Kierkegaard
Lacan

>Kierkegaard
Easily one of my favorite authors. His works on anonymity and humor (*cough*) were prophetic.

>Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask; do you believe that life will always allow itself to be trifled with; do you believe that one can sneak away just before midnight in order to avoid it? Or are you not dismayed by it? I have seen people in life who have deceived others for such a long time that eventually they are unable to show their true nature. I have seen people who have played hide-and-seek so long that at last in a kind of lunacy they force their secret thoughts on others just as loathsomely as they proudly had concealed them from them earlier ...
>You practice the art of being mysterious to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who cared to guess your riddle—what joy would you have in it then?

haha his name literally contains the word ass

>Camus

I'm a Céline guy

fucking idiot

Borges
Robert Bolano
Johnathan Franzen

Kek

James is arguably the apotheosis of the classical novel form. He's what Joyce and woolf were subverting. They had too, as he had raised the classic ABC novel form to such a height of perfection there seemed little point repeating that form, and face the inevitable diminishing artistic returns.
His later prose, with its intense psychological and social detail foreshadows the stream of consciousness style of the modernists.
James is perhaps the most perceptive psychologist in English novels, certainly he writes women better than anyone in English before or since.
He's a writer it's best to work through in a chronological way, as his later prose can be so opaque you stand a better chance if you have worked up to it.
Good early works to start with are Washington square or the Europeans (this is Balazacian social satire in an American context)
Personal favourite it 'What Maise Knew' which is very modern in its treatment of divorce, and the accurate depiction of child psychology without any victorian sentimentality.

There are plenty in the american academy that do and of particular interest to academics of the pragmatists stripe. I am with the other user that most of his work is boring and decadent outside of his short stories

Just read Bloom and James Wood on James, I don't have time to convince you myself.

That's John Malkovich.

Henry James was a pale shadow next to his brother William James. Read William instead.

William unironically had better prose

wtf I want to read Kierkegaard now

I enjoyed The Turn if the Screw. I thought it was spoopy.
My classmates thought I was a fag for thinking so.

Not the guy you replied to but you've convinced me to read him with those quotes. Which work are they from?

If you like Proust you'll like James. I.e. if you like good literature you'll like James.
if you like the movie "Midnight in Paris" BUT (and this is important) despise Woody Allen , aaand you like this scene youtube.com/watch?v=2YEstLmzyvI before Veeky Forums turned you into an anti-edgy edgy, then you'll like Hemingway.
read Either/Or but when it comes to part 1 only read the following: preface, diapsalmata, rotation of crops, and seducer's diary. It is almost impossible not to like him once you give him a shot.

I know I'm not giving direct reasons but if you actually give these authors a shot--which kind of makes this thread pointless--then you'll see why they're great. For me? Pic related.

Remember the old schoolyard rhyme:

In Heaven there is no algebra Remembering dates and names
But only playing golden harps
And reading Henry James

James represents a certain kind of 19th century realist sensibility which influenced writers in many languages, and almost all writers in English, who followed him. The paradigm on display in James' works is worth investigating, if for no reason other than its influence.

Thomas Mann's writing is beautifl. Captures the Veeky Forums inner-life in all its grandeur and depravity. Read his short story Tristan for a little taste.

>Horrible. They hated it. And I made them read Henry James. And some kid said, Well, he must’ve been all right in his time. I wanted to hit him.

>If you like Proust you'll like James. I.e. if you like good literature you'll like James.
Nothing alike

No, but if you've leveled up enough to tackle proust your also ready for james

G. K. Chesterton

I seriously has no idea this was the case. Is it like Frankenstein in how the adaptations fester off each other and ignore the source material?

I don't really know what to say other than that Chesterton is funny and clever. (At least what I've read: "The Man Who Was Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross.") This is coming from someone who doesn't really give a fuck for any of his religious or social beliefs.

If you can make it through the first few chapters of TMWWT without laughing, then I guess you probably shouldn't bother.

kek

Nietzsche.
Literally the epitome of a fandom ruining something for me before I could experience why people like it, and now I am bitter.
Every night while browsing at work I see at least 2 threads about him being >ourguy
I see at least 1.5 threads about him BTFOing some mostly or entirely irrelevant other philosophy
I see at least 4 threads about Nihlism as a concept that always devolve into late teens or early adults bitching about how hard life is and how by bitching about it they are being as super cool and calloused as that one kid in 10th grade who tried to be the protagonist of Evangelion and ended up with no friends because he was a depressive fuck.

Convince me to not think of flocks of spiteful teenagers squealing over a girl who never noticed them when I see that glorious moustache

just read beyond good and evil and see if you at least find him interesting.

yeah, the man is funny.

Chesterton is my favorite kind of writer. he could have been remembered as a novelist, essayist, theologian, poet or biographer had he just stuck with one of these. But no, he did all of it, and did it all extremely well.

Father brown is goat short detective fiction

I thought The Aspern Papers was very funny and endearing, this from someone who wasn't a fan of Turn of the Screw or Portrait of a Lady.

Chinua Achebe.

Colonialism doesn't interest me in the slightest and I actually like Joseph Conrad. Give me one reason I should read Achebe.

Do you like yams?

that's funny, you've listed 3 of my favorite authors

i hate this guy so much i can't read anything from argentina that isn't borges (and, yeah, i know they were friends)

>Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.

Attached: pynchon[1].jpg (260x320, 38K)

Things Fall Apart is good if you like stuff like Works & Days, it's almost like a pastoral loredump with a foreign invasion at the end. And the gradual progression of that invasion is almost like Submission.