Want to seriously get into literature

>I hate the people who complain how hard it is to find good books.

Do people say that? It's really, really not. I have a to-read list overflowing.

>tfw you will die before reading everything you want to

I don't want to do this for e-cred. It's just that there's this wonderful world of storytelling that I want to explore but it all seems to big and overwhelming.

It's not about storytelling, faggot. Go read Game of Thrones or Harry Potter if that's what you want. Literature is about the ideas and the prose. You're coming at this from the wrong angle. Anyway pick some books from this chart and dive in.

To be fair I never see it on Veeky Forums. But definitely. I always ask these people if they've finished reading Shakespeare and Dante and James and Proust and everyone else who's been famous for hundreds of years. They get mad and rightly call me an asshole, but frankly they deserve to be ridiculed, for exactly the reasons you gave. My backlog is already years long, so to wring your hands because you can't find anything good to read is pathetic.

You Veeky Forums-fags are way too narrow-minded. You are too focussed on novels and shit but most of you ass niggas could not answer what a derivative in a mathematical sense is. The whole knowledge inherent to the natural sciences and mathematics escapes your perceiving, yet you pretentious asshats claim to be educated and that you undrstand the world.

I majored in physics and economics at university. Eat shit.

ooh I can I can

And you can't spell 'focused', even on a device that has spell-check.

I can spell it in enough languages not just English like you fag.

>You are too focussed on novels and shit

This is a literature board, mate. I'm not that user but all I am seeing is one egotistically fragile poster trying to call out another here.

Both of you should grow up.

The fact that you needed to say this reveals that you are very, very insecure about yourself. I fell with you. And btw you are an econ major? lmao

>The fact that you needed to say this reveals that you are very, very insecure about yourself.

>btw you are an econ major? lmao

The self-awareness levels of some of these posters... Wow...

>this is what your high school English teacher actually believes

It's like wanting to fuck every pretty girl but when you go out you realize there's way too many and too little time you get depressed then go home and masturbate and call it a day.

>tfw I have no problem chipping away at the western canon, but at 23 years old remain clueless about girls and have totally given up trying in favor of letting despair wash over me whenever I see someone pretty

Currently reading 1984. Still have Paradise Lost/Regained and The Grapes of Wrath.
Just bought Moby Dick and Siddhartha today.
Monday I'm buying: The Rebulic, The Art of Rhetoric, Beyond Good and Evil, Invisible Man, Inferno (maybe all 3), The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leaves of Grass.

Is that a good starting list for really trying to study/read literature and improving my grasp on the subject?
(Not OP, but feel like this was as good a thread as any to ask)

>Shakespeare
>reading

I started with American Psycho and Crime And Punishment at 15. I then read the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive and sought out many of the authors that he was inspired by, particularly Nietzsche. I'm now 28 and consider myself fairly well read. Just start with a good book and one thing will lead to another. Read interviews with authors that you like.

You should probably actually enjoy reading before you "get into" literature.

Bump

Each of those books will take you a few weeks to read if you're not speed reading for internet points.

It's better to go by schools of thought than to hit yourself with such a wide range (you're reading 1984, political, but still story based. Jump into the Republic then see if the philosophical direction is more interesting or the political one, there are also many references to tragedies so go with what if that makes sense).

It's really hard to be digesting Orwell's ideas and then start on Hemingway or Siddhartha, and you'll likely forget many good ideas in the process.

>Each of those books will take you a few weeks to read if you're not speed reading for internet points.
More like a few days.

This isn't a video game. The point isnt to get 100% completion. If you like to read, then just fucking read.

*pushes up glasses and lets out a Hmmph*

Well I've done spotty research into these books and topics already and along with many other religions and philosophies to help coincide with my own hypotheses and understandings. So I have an underlying knowledge of what I'm getting into already. It is specifically why I chose those works, because I am getting to a point where I need more specific backing structure into my own ideas.
I mostly chose them, and was asking about them, because I'm very rusty with reading and don't want to dive into more difficult or stylized books that I wouldn't understand well. (I'm holding out on Paradise, and I'm going to read those listed before trying the Bible, Ulysses, etc.)

So I'm not so much asking about content but more for them being a good footing in a growing ability of literary comprehension.

Also, not that it's very important, but I'm picking up Whitman, not Hemingway.

if you don't even enjoy reading, what makes you think you can become a good writer?

with that said, you don't need to read X amount of books to become a good writer. you should read culturally relevant books though so you can engage in the literary conversation tho

>I will never read the entirety of the Western Canon. Therefore, I will not try.

The problem here is that you forget that each single book you read can greatly impact your life.

It's about the journey, not the destination bro. Just pick one book and try it out. If you like it, awesome. If you don't, try another. After a while you'll have read plenty.

You don't "have" to read everything. Read what interests you from classics to contemporary. Read synopsis' or excerpts from certain works and see if you like what you read then go on and dive in. The great thing about books is that you're not a timed trial, take as long as you want and just enjoy it.

You don't need to read everything, you don't need to read some big list of great importance, you simply can't do that in your lifetime. All of the lists you will see simply serve as entry points. Eventually you should follow your interests and read whatever entertains and enlightens you.