How do I read great literature?

I've tried to read Ulysses. I've tried to read The Brothers Karamazov. I've tried to read Infinite Jest. I never get further than a few dozen pages.

I read short stories, and I read textbooks. How do I read literature?

>starting with Ulysses
It's over user, find a new hobby

Try my diary, desu

>Try my diary, desu
I love this level of shitposting

Also, OP, maybe you are just not made for this.
Maybe just stick to YA. English is not even my native language and even I can read easily BK or Infinite Meme.

Try easier novels. Even if you have the patience for it, you aren't going to get anything out of reading Ulysses as your first novel.

Read Dubliners, Crime and Punishment, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again first. Don't dive into an author's hardest, longest, most erect and throbbing work right off the bat. Ease yourself into being psychologically and intellectually penetrated by the greatest minds first with easier, more lubed-up works.

Dubliners would especially be good for OP's sensibilities. Honestly I was turned off by the short story structure but despite that I could still see that Joyce was an impressive author.

I would also suggest Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon. I may be biased because I just read it for the first time but it combines the beautiful prose of more literary fiction with an interesting plot. It's pretty short as well, but dense enough to where you could re-read it a few times and still not glean everything from it.

I would go so far as to say that of the books I've recently read to 'catch up' on my literary fiction, which are comprised of Dubliners, Madame Bovary, Lolita, American Psycho, Fight Club, and Taipei thus far, Crying of Lot 49 was the most enjoyable.

Though Madame Bovary, despite the slow beginning, elicited the most emotional response from me by the end out of those, so take that as you will.

Probably don't read Taipei either unless you enjoy reading about aimless drugged out layabouts meandering through exotic locales with no apparent purpose but getting their next high. Tao Lin was a mistake on my part.

I suppose that was really quite silly of me. I would have never made the naive mistake of trying to dive into the most advanced material of some technical discipline, but I had a subconscious bias that trivialized literature.

I didn't mean to have this bias. I want to appreciate literature. And understanding great literature requires years of intellectual cultivation.

I would recommend what others are saying. Start with easier stuff. Also, find supplementary writings. Notes, essays, analyses of books, etc. I don't know how others here feel about them, but I have almost no knowledge of literature as an art, so I would read cliff's notes analyses whenever I finished a chapter. It was a plebeian thing to do, but now I have a better idea of what to look for and appreciate in tougher novels.

>I've tried to read Ulysses.
Baaaaad choice, OP. You don't start with that one. You start with Dubliners and go chronologically forward. Also, it's really surprising that you managed to stop reading the Brothers Karamazov that soon. That book had me intrigued from the very beginning. It isn't even difficult to read. My guess is that you were just intimidated by the length of the book and forgot about the actual story.

>understanding great literature requires years of intellectual cultivation
This is a meme, user. Literature doesn't require much intelligence, you just have to have the attention span for it.

I read the Brothers Karamazov without any prior experience with Dostoyevsky and it went well for me. I don't know why anyone would consider it a difficult book, the prose was pretty straightforward.

The attempt at that book was when I was an adolescent. I was probably just stupid and implicitly unwilling back then. The other two were recent, in my mid-20's. I'll try Karamazov again and read Dubliners.

My question would be if you're actually interested in the stories/settings or if you want to read these books just because they're long

Ulysses is basically worthless as literature and the Brothers is not what I would start with at all if you want to get into Russian literature

i always seem to meet people who are on antidepressants and horrible shit like that. if you're one you may want to stop. besides that, television is far and awy the primary mind killer and attention killer. few people have the strength of character to jettison it, though.

If you don't like it, then why do you try to do it? You sound young, and young people do not have the life experience to truly appreciate great art. i

Most of these "smart" books don't mean anything, it's just garbage passed off as deep.

...

I am a PhD student in mathematics. I have spent my life studying and creating math. My intellectual cultivation is narrow but deep. I have a profound appreciation for the great works of art in my discipline, but this type of art is all I know.

Though mathematics is a bottomless well, there are other wells. The mystery has granted me existence, and soon I will be old.

I don't know why I'm suggesting this but try reading Perec

If you can easily read Infinite Jest then either a.) you're not doing it right, or b.) something is wrong with your head.

Yeah, that's pretty much the whole pull of the 19th century Russians, they write so effortlessly and easily and realistically. If their shit was all modern and btfo like the 20th century tards they never would have been embraced like they were, nor would they have had the humility and everyman's perspective which is implicit to the success of all of that work.

That's funny, I used to be a PhD student in math too (not even joking). Your question of how to read literature is kind of hard to answer; it's like asking how to make love. It's not a matter of learning some secret rules and all of a sudden everything clicks into place.

Underrated post, this is pretty much it. It's mainly TV and all the short attention-span distractions that fuck up the ability to read, that and the obvious things like lack of experience, practice, starting on too hard of a difficulty, etc.

Try reading first thing in the morning, just 5-10 pages, you'll find it much easier. Also, comment more on why exactly it's been hard for you to read ... struggling over the longer sentences? keeping track of the characters? expansive vocabulary? maintaining interest in what's going on? getting annoyed at something in the novel? feeling like it's too difficult and takes too much effort? etc.

This thread honestly should just become a discussion of the analysis of the obstacles to reading in general: Go

Don't start with those books. You need to ease yourself into this.

I became an avid reader like three months ago and I can't stop. I stopped watching tv and I don't spend much time on Veeky Forums anymore.

Here's how I did it.

-Remember the average person reads like zero books a year. If you read 5 pages a day, you are 5 pages above the average person

-Don't force yourself to read. Commit to read 5 pages a day. I swear after three days you'll feel like reading more and after a month or so you should be reading 50-100 pages a day for pleasure

-Read various books at the same time. When I grab a difficult book or one that makes me sleepy I grab another and switch. This should refresh your head. Keep them thematically different. I read economics and fiction.

-It isn't a race. Reading slowly won't make you sleepy that fast. Try to acknowledge what books are for you to read fast and which aren't.

-Buy the physical copies. When you get the books from your own money you'll feel the need to read them to avoid the feel of wasting your money.

-Start with books highly discussed here so you feel motivated to discuss.

Most of this is good advice. I don't really agree with starting with highly discussed books though. Most of the books that are highly discussed here are way too difficult to start with e.g. Infinite Jest, Divine Comedy, anything by Dostoevsky, Homer or Tolstoy and so on. The reader will get burned out and stops reading. Start with easier books that aren't too long.

>I would start with at all if you want to get into Russian literature
Where does one start?
I started with W&P, read the big ones, C&P, TBK, AK and some of Tolstoy's short story's.
I'm going to read pic related once I finish my current book. After that I'll get around to Dead Souls and then I'm not to sure.

>starting literature by reading doorstoppers

no

start reading some novellas to get you in the swing of things.

I read the Brothers Karamazov in high school and it wasn't difficult at all. It got slow at times, but certainly not within the first 100 pages.

>Reading for any other reason than "this topic interests me"