Do you often feel inauthentic about your interest in literature?

Still trying to find it.

>if you don't know shit about shit, you should shut the fuck up

--Wittgenstein

No because it wasn't authentic in the first place.

>original ideas
lmao

Found the NEET.

Some of us have shit to do.

t. Redditor

No, I'm pretty open about not caring about the vast majority of it.

I do feel bad for canon obsessed young lads who haven't reached this stage yet though.

Nope. If I didn't think books were the single best part of the human experience I wouldn't have read 46 of them so far this year. Sometimes you get burnt out or hung up on the wrong reasons to read but then you just read something and go "oh yeah"

Sometimes I worry that I read so much to try to prove myself in someway, but no one appreciates my reading as much as I do.

I'm horribly embarrassed lately, bc I finished Ulysses a little while ago, and it's actually objectively the greatest book I've ever read, and I totally get why it's derided for its implications of pretensiousness, but it's really that guy.

I'm also embarassed, but less so, to admit that I've read IJ. I kindof murmur that I've read it if it comes up somehow, bc I think I appreciate what he was trying to do to a certain degree, but I didn't really like it very much. Still a little ashamed to have read it at this point though.

Too close to home.

no

I don't see the problem here... literature is a slow growing kind of enthusiasm for most of us, and it's all bound up in your sense of trying to reach for deeper levels of meaning as an individual... trying to avoid cheep thrills and teach yourself to endure the difficulty so you can have the greater, more hard earned and infinitely more meaningful experience.

It doesn't come quickly or easily precisely because of what it is and who we are.

(I'm not saying it's good to "think about" literature as opposed to reading it, but it's not something one should feel any essential shame about. It's a hopeful aspiration of sorts)

Is wanting to read to avoid the shame of an uncultured life sincere enough?

no. i like what i like.

no, you don't like literature, you just like non-shame.

Is it something unique to this era in time that there are so many of us awkward self-conscious young men who are incapable of enjoying anything sincerely, and cling to activities that we like the idea of more than the actual practice? It's like we are completely devoid of any personality traits except for a complete phobia of being judged not good enough, though we have already made this judgement long ago in our hearts. We read literature to convince ourselves and others we are smart, we follow fashion in order to appear like our inner lives are in order. We paralyze ourselves into inaction and shit posting via a never ending barrage of self criticism and doomsay imaginings.

Fuck me, dude

That's completely inaccurate. I enjoy literature, it's just that I enjoy many other things that require considerably less effort to enjoy. Doesn't mean that on the occasions when I do actually read I don't enjoy it.

I think if you read books and you enjoy it in any form, that is authentic and you should continue.

I spend an extreme amount of time reading everyday, much of it being religious and historical scholarly works. Almost every free moment I have, I'm usually reading via pdfs from my phone if I'm not at home because it's the most convenient.

It's one of the few things I genuinely enjoy.

If you don't hate yourself and what you're doing with your life, you're doing it wrong

Most ideas are a mishmash of others ideas stretching all the way back to human prehistory.

That was so deep, well done. And as they say that resonated with me...
>fuck

>46
Nigga ur not even gonna break a hundo...im on 57

I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

- Dwight Hansen

No and this is a retarded question/thread.

This is an interesting question. I like the idea of literature, but I often get bored when reading it.

yummy pasta, 10/10 would eat it again

You should all go fuck yourselves.

The two varying opinions have either been yes: meaning you are a frail, awkward, and scared of the world bitch who shouldn't even be reading in the first place because you're so unsure of yourself that it won't even make a difference.

and the other, no:
Yet none of you have been normal about it, you are either stuck up, braggadocios assholes, or shitposters! This board is terrible.

Go rape your sister Phoebe, Holden.

>Is it something unique to this era in time that there are so many of us awkward self-conscious young men who are incapable of enjoying anything sincerely, and cling to activities that we like the idea of more than the actual practice?
Read Byron - Childe Harold, Pushkin - Eugene Onegin and Lermontov - Hero of Our Time

i was gonna argue about onegin and pechorin

but you're kinda right

If you can't enjoy things sincerely, you're either depressed (which is unlikely, because in that case you would just say you can't enjoy things, period) or you spend too much time around people who tell you what you should or shouldn't like. If you are afflicted in this way, go outside, take a walk, listen to a song which you associate with some old memory, and try to forget what you've read here. Then return home, and instead of opening up Veeky Forums, open a book.

You weren't the only one, to fall for the IJ meme

Sort of. The majority of my thoughts and even a good deal of my dreams are about works of literature, authors, and my feelings towards them. Reading is just as emotionally moving as it is intellectually, so people like Shakespeare and Whitman and Eliot have a profound influence on every part of my life. I don't read to look smart either (though ill admit I sound like I'm boasting right now), so all in all I don't really have a reason to think i'm not being genuine. But still, I don't think I devote enough of my essense to literature. I slack off in school and I only read intently about an hour a day (the rest of my time is casual glancing and rereading sections of my favorites). My biggest sin is liking and respecting authors I don't even read (never got through all of Joyce's shit, only read sections of the Odyssey).I feel that if I really love books as much as I think I do, id do more than just think about it.

Much less so since I stopped trying to read things because Veeky Forums told me to.