ITT books that everyone knows of but no one has actually read...

in for that

ordered mine for my christmas, I'll make a thread about it when im done.

What happened to Phenomenology of Spirit?

Didnt know there was a phenomenonogy of spirit readthrough planned.Wouldnt that need a ton of background reading though?

>finally read it
>don't want to talk about it because people will think I'm a pretentious dickhead

/pol/ is too retarded to read this and properly understand. They keep jerking to loli and trump.

>Wouldnt that need a ton of background reading though?

Not him, but I'll answer: Yes. A decent knowledge of the History of philosohpy and specially Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. You can read Hegel before the last two as long as you don't skip them at the end.

>tfw three of my best friends have read it as well.

Feels good to discuss it in real life.
Also, i'm gonna keep an eye open for the readthrough, i might chime in every once in a while.

Finished it yesterday.

It was a strong 9/10, Natasha is a pure waifu

Prince Andrei was my favorite character and the scene where he reunites with Natasha and his death made me cry

On the other hand, while some of the war scenes were interesting, they did toll on me after a while. And pretty much the entire Epilogue was unnecessary other than the plot stuff (which even that I thought was a bit too saccharine and neatly tied up) because half the points he made about history had already been said.

Definitely a great novel though, worth the effort. Some scenes like the Rostovs going sledding during Christmas time and Nikolai and Sonya's kiss, Pierre's captivity, Natasha's first ball, Pierre's duel with Dolokhov, and etc. will stick in my mind for a while.

Read the Maude translation, Denisov's Elmer Fudd like talk was hilarious.

I should note that I think that his points about history were definitely much more salient at the time of publication. But now people more or less take it for granted, at least in academia, that Great Man theory is a sham. So to me, the premise was at once something I already accepted, and it was argued entirely too repetitively in my view, albeit being important to the nature of the story.

What is the book even about? I'm entry-level and I just find it hard to wrap my head around 1000+ pages of stuff going on. Most I've read is like 4-500.

Do we have a timetable?

I have multiple friends that have read war and peace. I'm the only one that have finished Don Quixote, and I'll rather discuss that one.

Here you go friendo.

This is for the Oxford World's Classics edition. I'll produce a version that has chapter numbers instead of pages once my uni exams finish (which means Friday night I'll do that, if all goes to plan; Saturday at the latest.)

Thanks, can't wait to relive the friendship from all those years ago when we read Infinite Jest.

best translation?

damn I wish I had the book, sounds like a comfy winter book to me

I know this feel desu

> Don Quixote
> Faust

Do you have any idea how many people are intending to participate?

maybe you need a better class of friend? this usually happens in college/univeristy, though, where you meet people with similar interests. so if you're not of that age yet, you'll soon find out weeding out the dumb asses you befriended during childhood or high school or because they lived in the same neighborhood as you is beneficial to your quality of life. if you're skipping out on going to college/uni, then you're shit out of luck, mate.

i hope this is real, im totally in for this

Lots of rich russians whining about love, lots of Napoleon doing his Napoleon stuff

Well I just turned 30 and never attended college. So much for that.

>tfw about to finish Infinite Jest and thinking about reading War and Peace next

wtf

Not a clue. It seemed quite lukewarm at first in the initial thread, but a lot of folk seem enthusiastic now. So hopefully a good number

wow i should unironically do this

i was leaning towards anna karenina but this is a big motivator

this sounds like a great excuse to (re)start with the greeks. would anyone be down for a grand philosophy readthrough? the only question would be to include plotinus, boethius, and aquinas ...

Damn. I'm already committed to reading The Count of Monte Cristo over Christmas. I'd want to get a nice hardback copy of w&p but I can't afford it at the moment.

Hope you guys have fun, and hey, if anyone wants to do this same thing but with TCoMC then you would definitely have me involved.

i am up for it too

OP here. I've actually have an untouched copy sitting on my book shelf for years. Maybe not a bad idea.

which edition should I buy for this readthrough?

ayyyiii am in

Oxford World's Classics ideally. But I'm gonna make a progress chart that uses chapter number instead of pages when I get time, so people can use any edition. The only thing is that I'd recommend the Maude translation over any other translation.

What's up with the lines separating days? It looks like every five days or so?

Only problem for me is that I have trouble sticking to one book at the best of times. Picking up another breaks my already-broken rule of six books max. Are these readalong-threads particularly different from discussing books in any normal thread?
Christ that sounds like an exercise in failure.
Patrish. Finished book I, stuck on the part where DQ accosts a random peasant girl 'cause she's Dulcinea. I've a feeling the second-hand embarrassment is going to make this part a lot harder. Which translation did you read?
Holy shit that's actually an edition you can get off libgen. In nice shiny epub, too.

When you say "starting next Saturday", d'you mean start reading on Saturday, or have read the first fifty pages by Saturday?

grr i'm too poor to afford the book so I'll be using the ebook, therefore won't know exactly where to stop reading/how long i need to keep reading for.

Who knows man. It just came out that way I'm not good with computers

They've been of varying degrees of effectiveness in the past. You just kind of have to wait and see whether the book generates interesting conversation or just shitposting. I remember the Gravity's Rainbow readalong started off with some really interesting explanatory and interpretive stuff, but fizzled out halfway through. I wasn't there for the IJ one, but people say that was good too. War and Peace is less of a difficult encyclopaedic tome than either of those books, so I imagine that'll influence how the discussion plays out. Probably a lot of plot conversation, a lot of chat about the books ideas about history, more technical discussion as well probably about characterisation (which is what T. Is famous for after all). The readalong threads, if successful, deal with a work in a lot more detail than a normal thread. In fact, most of the time normal threads discussing books don't even discuss the books beyond "yeah I liked it" or "Pynchon a shit, read Gaddis", because when you lack that sort of foot in the door so to speak, given by particularity (I.e we have all read these one or two scenes and we're gonna talk about them), you have to talk about a book in its totality, which leads more often than not to pretty unconstructive conversation.

But six books sounds like quite a lot to juggle at once so it's really up to you whether you want to join in. I can't read more than two books at once.

Thread will be up Saturday night (gmt), so probably best to read the first fifty pages on the Friday if you've got time.

>tfw just finished reading Faust
>tfw none of your friends have read it
>tfw I would look like a pseud in a serious discussion because many references went over my head
Fug

>none of my friends
Fixed.

If this is for the war and peace readalong, no worries, cuz I'll be posting a chapter-based progress sheet along with the first thread.

So it's only a problem for the first day, and I can just tell you that we're reading up to chapter 12 for the Saturday night.

nice

>Peer Gynt
Seems to me everyone knows at least some of Grieg's accompaniment without knowing the actual play. It's a shame because I consider it one of my favorites.

Nobody I know at least. It's been 9 years already, shit.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle

I'll give it a go. Read the first fifty pages and check out the Saturday thread. It's a lot more reading than I usually do of one book -- usually I do maybe twenty pages for a book in a day. But maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Yeah, that's part of the appeal of these sorts of readthroughs. Because you're reading alongside others and towards a goal, you really do almost always overshoot the number of pages you think that you're capable of reading in a day. I remember having that feeling about Gravity's Rainbow when we had the readthrough of that.

Not anyone I know, at any rate.

I read both friend

Since my thread isn't producing any responses, I will just try my luck here:

What would be your recommendation (books, papers, whatever) to someone who wants to know more about Russian history, the less biased source the better, and regardless of the era in the said country's history?
Is "War and peace" a good advice as well, if we don't count that "less bias" line?

Yep pretty good account of the Napoleonic War and a great look at Russian society (mostly aristocrats) at the time if you don't mind all the anti-Napoleon Russia-did-nothing-wrong shilling. Also it is really good.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Ulysses. It seems like most people just accept that it's one of the greatest books (in English) of all time. Yet, almost no one ever actually reads the whole thing.

I liked when Quixote rekd a buch of puppets

>Yet, almost no one ever actually reads the whole thing.
It's in the meme trilogy nigga, most people here only read those 3 books

Nota actually reading the meme trilogy is part of the meme.

I reckon plenty of anons read half of Infinite Jest and called it a day.

Man I just want someone IRL to talk about it with

I, too, enjoyed the clergy-clobbering scene.

>50-60 pages a day for 25 straight days
People are not gonna stick to this. Whether they should be able to notwithstanding, the average Veeky Forums user will not keep up this pace.

This is War and Peace, not Gravity's Rainbow. It's possible to get through it at a fairly swift pace. I only expect possible problems with the abstract theory of history chapters, but we can adjust for that as we're going through.

For most of War and Peace, it's action and conversation, not a lot of complex stuff, so 50-60 pages is only an hour to an hour and a half's reading at what I imagine to be the pace of your average Veeky Forumsizen. And like I say, if people really have problems keeping up, it'll be apparent from the start and we can adjust to a rate people are comfortable with.

It's a mix of an oerview of aristocratic life in napoleonic russia, the history of the invasion, an essay on historiography and philosogy and a classic web of romance.

I'm gonna try to stick to it. From what I've heard it's an easy read (for a 1200 page book) so I'll probably try to stay 20 pages ahead to give myself a buffer for the rough parts.

I have a personal basic bitch edgelord library now that I am a (quasi, as life goes) secure bachelor and I have my own place. I've been building it up for about two years.

It's common edgelord stuff, much of which I've acquired precisely because of the latent taboo.

If I could feel comfortable in bringing some of it along to work on break, the only stuff that really interests me as reading material these days, I'd do so. But as it stands I don't want big controversial titles under my nose while at work lest odd impressions follow and so I currently content myself with Houellebecq, nevertheless closely guarded.

It really is basic bitch edgelord stuff, but I feel a vague accomplishment at having amassed it, actually bought copies and hoarded them. I've read the Satanic Bible and its companion the Satanic Rituals, for example. I've been through the more salacious half of Sade's the 120 days of Sodom (typically having skipped the middle bit, though I do mean to finish it at some point) and furthermore predictably having skipped all the other lit in the volume for that one central edgelord text. I have some Giger art books and a Mein Kampf, the latter I really do mean to read at some point but other things are more interesting at the moment. There's a small Crowley selection, I've read the tiny book of the law as well as the book of lies, which latter actually holds some literary interest. Years ago I read my copy of Mao's little red book and wrote it up on wiki (the writeup survives).

Yes I have a Finnegans Wake. It sits there, only flipped through, unread, but I mean to. This goes directly to the OP.

I've recently become aware of an old publication by early American eccentric Timothy Dexter: "A Pickle for the knowing ones". Dexter is an amusing meme, which lends his brief text some credence, but the connection with Joyce's wake is that Dexter was an uneducated man who totally eschewed punctuation or even proper spelling. So in all honesty if you are willing to subject yourself to the one meme, then you must do the other.

I have also recently collected most of the mathematical articles of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the unabomber. If anyone would care to know more about this I'd be happy to share.

My point about this post is to suggest that edgy books are one genre that everyone knows about but no one actually reads, due to their unpleasantness. Obviously other genres may do.

I think I'd like a Psychopathia Sexualis next. There's a shop which has one I think but I don't care about some old musty edition, just having a good working text.

I've never touched Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow but I shitpost about them all the time

I just got to the part where Patroclus dies
He fucking owned Hector

None of mine either though

Absolutely nobody, which is a shame

I hope you know you're writing in-character.

next saturday as in 24 of december?

I am totally down for this, when do we start? maybey the pace is a bit too high?

this is the most complete guide I know

docs.google.com/document/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/pub

This saturday, the 17th.

Sorry if that's too early for people to get a physical copy of the book, but the edition I'm planning on using is on Gutenberg (the maude translation), so if you're in that situation and you still want to take part, you could make do with the online version till your physical copy arrives.

Nice, I am down for this.

>Gutenberg (the maude translation),
Exactly what I was going to ask, going to use that aswell.

Is there anything I should read before War and Peace?

Guise, should I read Notes from the Underground or L'Étranger before we start W&P?

Or some essay from DFW?

Nah, you can pretty much launch into it. It's not a book you really need to prepare for.

I read DQ at 13 so I remember jack other than him being a general idiot and his sad, sad death.

I'm glad Veeky Forums still has these kind of actvities, count me in.

Wait til after Christmas you douche, I'm getting my copy then

Yeah you need to reread it. Thirteen is still young enough to completely miss subtle things an author might do, including Don Quixote being the only intelligent person in the series.
Ebooks my man.

Yeah I have a kobo but I hate to get a new book and not start at the beginning

I'll be there dude

>read the French
>read the Maudes' butchery
I'm not sure about this translation, guys.

>mfw this

What you guys think of creating a group in goodreads for the people doing the readthrough? i think it would be nice to gather together the people doing it

What you guys think of creating a group in goodreads for the people doing the readthrough? i think it would be nice to gather together the people doing it..so if anyone create a group in goodreads, post in the next thread and I and possibly other anons will join it

Why though. And not all of us will have an account.

Eh, no translation is perfect. Tolstoy especially is an ambiguous case in terms of translation. It's not like Proust where we all know the Moncreiff translation is best. But the man himself supported the Maudes, so I think that must be worth something.

Comfy War and Peace? Done.
I've done AK already this year.

I know he vouched for the Maudes himself, but the French "translation"...it's a straight-up rewriting. Removing whole phrases, adding others in.

That's gay though...

Brace yourself for the next few books.