Forcing myself through yet another western canon 'classic'

Pic related is directing, starring, and producing his own film. Thoughts? I know this isn't /tv/ but said movie has Elle fanning in it, so yeah.....

Have you realised that the information age, with the huge amount of reading material, everything in English or translated to English, and vastly increased number of (sub-)media for books alone (physical, magazine, tablet, phone, e-reader, website, blog etc.), has destroyed the idea of being "well read"?

I think this for two reasons. First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff. When it was 1600 and you could have read everything during your 3 years of formal education (more than 99 % of people) you could immediately join the intellectuals club. Now that's not true and it's demoralising.

The second reason is the killer. The idea of some sort of central planning bureau setting the list of required books is seen as farcical. We truly live in a much more multipolar world. Back in 1100 the Church told you to read the Greeks and the Bible and you are suddenly intelligent and well informed. There were no universities or companies or groups to tell you otherwise. These days, the huge increase in education means that everyone has an opinion and the arbitrariness of the "canon" has been exposed even to the most soody of pseudo intellectuals. Not only due to the multipolarisation within literature, but also the multipolarisation among activities. Who would claim that some Fields Medallist winning mathematician is an idiot because he hasn't read the Bible? It would take a high level of soodiness. But it would have been easy 1000 years ago.

Ultimately all this "well read" stuff was just a way for groups of people to signal social status / intellectualism or deriving other benefits by grouping their claimed interests together. We see it today when the academia-media-publishing industrial complex tells you that you have to read books or you're stupid. But this has been taken to a farcical new level now that writers like Tao Lin / Mira Gonzalez exist. It's also clear in other activities.

Just read fun sci-fi novels then. Do you just read so you can get cred on Veeky Forums?

Ben Affleck is probably the only Hollywood actor I can sympathize with.

Ben Affleck is a gigantic homo

Although I agree with your conclusion and have thought similar things in the past, I disagree with part of your reasoning about comparing the past and the present.

What you call "formal education" is still only for 1% (perhaps less, or more, idk, but it's minimal). Because the number of people increased and communication got better, you can meet a thousand people with doctorates and only be around scholars and think that we live in a more educated age. It's a bubble, it doesn't even scratch the surface of population of the world, more so when you consider the quality of a lot of universities. Knowledge is also more "spread" (not increased, spread). I can read about physics problems of the highest order in a watered down version in cheap teenage science magazine. Am I educated about it? Debatable.

Second, the world was always, to some extent, multipolar. Perhaps even more so in the past. While an european monk may have read all the Greeks and so on and know 90% of what other monks around him all know, what does that person understand about Indian philosophy? My point being, what's new is not the different points of view, but that these points of view are able to contact each other and perhaps clash, merge, devalue or transform each other. You know more about what you don't know, so you feel you're missing out more.

There are also greater more nuanced differences between past and present. What time are we talking about exactly, where, who? I know it's not the point to go into it, but worth mentioning anyway. How were they translations? How were they discussions? We have an extremely idealized view of the past, for good and for bad.

Well is it only subjectively better to read a math book than a fiction book or is it objectively better? I'd say it's objectively better. Pleasure is never objective so we have to take that out.

>implying its all not just a pyramid

Is not canon books objectively better than young adult fiction(pleasure aside) but is not also a programming book better than a western canon classic?

I sometimes struggle with melancholy at the outset of starting even a classic, as even the pleasure, knowledge and achievement I get from reading this book is nothing compared to spending the same amount of hours studying programming, a foreign language, math or philosophy etc.

This sort of melancholy is elevated further if I am to start a "fun sci-fi novel"(which happens) since this in an objective way is less of a time well spent than a classic.

Is not the ultimate ideal to strive for to have the mental fortitude to forgo objectively the lowest parts of this pyramid, which amount to nothing but pleasure, in order to spend your time the wisest?

Forsaking useless pleasures such as reading YA fiction, sci-fi novels and playing World of Warcraft should be found on the bottom and therefor be the first ones to go. But then again, is not shitposting on Veeky Forums also on the first levels? It's a struggle.

>tell myself i'm going to unwind and read some "exciting" genre fiction
>the characters are too flat to get me invested in the story

user, who reads the books, is it not you, a subject? I disagree with all your claims to objectivity.

I don't think classics are better than YA, or that math is better or worse than classic fiction. Not objectively anyway, I have my preferences, but there is nothing inherent to them that make one better than other. One is better than the other only when talked about on certain terms, whether that is something as obvious as saying you'll learn more about math with a math book than the Bible (or vice-versa), or something of a tradition like that of studying literature, which would place some center pieces in the place of classics, creating the idea of a canon. But it's an idea of it.

That pyramid you mention is completely imaginary. Just like the "ultimate ideal", or the thought of something amounting to "nothing but pleasure", or "spending time the wisest" or even this very struggle that you caught yourself into it. On top of it all, I see a greater problem in considering something like this
> Pleasure is never objective so we have to take that out.
Something that is not objective must be taken out? For what purpose would you erase the subject (read: you) out of the equation? And better yet, do you even think it is possible? The ideas you brought up in your post, are they not the best evidences of your subjectivity, of those things you value highly and that you think you should be up to and so on. They are so within you, you cannot see them as subjective, you think they are a given, that to read this is better than to read that.

Not to mention there is a lot to be said about pleasure. It is not just simply the imediate pleasure, there is also pleasure in struggle, and even in suffering of going through a hard book or subject to study. If that was not so, no one would go through it.

user, you are trying to calculate what is useful and what is not through objective standards (which are imaginary btw), while at the same time not looking at the most palpable and to your face factor, which is how you relate to what you're reading.

This desu. Being a sheep is bad, but being a contrarian is worse. Just be yourself :^)

Yes I suppose you're right. I'm just trying to imagine my subjective thoughts and ideas as objective truths, I suppose this is a necessary "evil" though since in the end subjective achievements are not worth achieving, whether or not objective achievements even exist.

Sci Fi is so fucking boring though, where's the fun? Is it the needlessly excessive descriptions of autistic tech details? The threadbare cliche plots? The cardboard cutout characters?

user, the word achievement means completion, finishing something. An achievement is essentially the end line of a path, "getting somewhere" as people say. Consider that what you do is walking, that is your subjective experience. When you speak of achievement, the very thing that is projected is a supposed path.

You say "I must get there, in that particular place" and then you set the standard to adjust how you'll get there for instance, the most quick straight line or perhaps around obstacles, through the easiest road and so on. To go off road or through a more complex path at this point will be felt as a bad thing, or at the very least, a useless thing. You'll see your objective and feel frustrated for straining for the path that leads to it. Then again, suppose walking the path becomes more and more painful. You need to solve this, so you reach for strategies. The best of them is perhaps to remember why you started, to think of where you want to get. Except quite often (or perhaps always) we don't know how that place actually is, we only know what we felt early on when we gave the first step. In this doubtful moment, the easiest trick we can pull on ourselves is to ignore our pain and just repeat it like a mantra that it is our mission, our duty, that we simply must go there and it doesn't matter why. We invent more and more things in our head about how that place is to try to justify our walking. Unfortunately, that also makes it so much more easy for us to ignore the fact that our pain also have a reason for being, that perhaps one of this reason is that we stumbled upon the realization that where we are heading is not what we thought was going to be, or perhaps we realized we want to get to other places more. Forks in this road will make you feel even worse, for you'd see so many paths you have given up so not to give up on that one. It's easier to let the mission make the choices for you then to truly question whether you should take a different path, specially when you realize there is no certainty, nothing for you to use to make this choice, or even to know if you are actually heading where you want to go.

It's important to face the question head first: what do you think you'll achieve? What do you think will be concluded when you get there? Say, reading the classical canon, will you be more respected for it, happier, more successful in some way?

When I raise the idea of not looking for "objective achievements", it doesn't mean to say for you to quit something before you finish it or just do what is pleasurable only. But that perhaps you have found what you were looking for in the middle of the road, or alternatively, that you have found out the path doesn't lead where you thought it would. In short, that you've reached a conclusion for it in the middle of your trip.

The paths are not a given truth. I'm not saying to be still, but to walk with your feet, to consider them.

check these dubs, sathanas

Plotfag detected
They're plotfags

This desu. I saw Donnie Darko recently and I was interested in the themes of the movie, but all I could find was people analysing the time travel mechanic in the obsessive detail, as if that was the point of the film.

Time travel ruins the discussion of anything

There's is absolutely no reason to fully understand any time travel mechanic in any movie/book/etc. These things are art, not tech-wank.

some are terrible desu. i feel that way with poetry too. stopped trying to force myself to read things i don't care for.

but, a lot are great. it's history (which i enjoy more than most literature) too because these things have survived and are "canon" for a reason. so the historical context around the place/time is cool.

...

I personally just read for enjoyment. It feels like the only way I can tolerate it these days.

>reading some plato and tolstoy
>"I shouldnt be so damn pretentious, ill try science fiction!"
>20,000 leagues and Nightfall bored me to tears

guess I just a high IQ

yeah just like move your time line temporarily

My biggest problem with them when I was more of a pleb was the prose of it, a lot of the language felt extremely antiquated to me, hard to really flow with
I got over it though

thank you user

respect

>Honestly attempt to read fun sci-fi novels
>Get fucking bored
A lot of them are the same nerd fantasies with simple themes.
What novels are you interested in reading, op?

If you think "classics" are boring you're probably just not smart enough for them to enjoy them enough. It's like a cheeseburger from mcdonalds and a cheeseburger from a 5 star restaurant that's around $25-40. Sure they both might taste good, great even if you're hungry enough or just enjoy all types of food. But at the end of the day ones of a clearly higher quality, has likely more ingredients, and time spent into making it, as well as a chef (author) who after years of study put all his time into crafting the best dish he was capable of making.

I read warhammer and scifi/fantasy when i was a teenager but you have to grow up eventually.

Pseud detected.

i really think it's just a personal taste thing. like, very few people are going to authentically enjoy the entire western canon, but with the requisite amount of attention and interest everybody could get something out of some part of it.

Read Michel Strogoff instead if you want a fun Verne book.

Why read it then? Who are you trying to impress?

>forcing myself through yet another western 'classic'
>really just want to read classic westerns

Are you happy with yourself meme master?

NIgga just stop being a faggot and read whatever the fuck you want to read. If you don't like classics then fuck them and read things you like. No one will be impressed because you've read an old book.

Because not everyone is literally you. Different people have different tastes. You don't even sound human.

>Reading "western canon classics" is ultimately an achievement of sorts
No it isn't. There's no difference of 'achievement' between reading Gatsby and reading Fault in our Stars. At the end of the day you've read a story that millions of others have read, too. You've achieved nothing, and if you think you have then you are a vapid waste of an organism with no personality.

>Is not canon books
>Singular verb for plural noun
You are illiterate, stop posting.

>This sort of melancholy is elevated further if I am to start a "fun sci-fi novel"(which happens) since this in an objective way is less of a time well spent than a classic.
There's nothing objective about it. You *subjectively* think a classic is time better spent. Whoop de doo. No one else cares. No one else is you. You are applying your personal subjective experience as a universal standard because you are not a human being and don't understand that people are different.

You sound like such an unbearable faggot I would be shocked and appaled to find out you have real life friends.

>All sci-fi books are the same because I read two that I didn't like and avoid the entire genre
I don't like sci-fi books either, fella, but Jesus Christ stop being so fucking retarded.

>Le plebian stupid man meme
You sound like you read books to feel better than other people. That's incredibly sad and insecure. You sound like a weak person with few positive qualities.

OP, just read whatever the fuck you want. Look at the type of faggot you find on Veeky Forums and ask yourself, are you legit trying to impress these worthless husks who lack all empathy? Just read what you want and stop being such a stupid piece of shit.

If you want to know the Western canon --assuming you're not doing this for school -- and don't like reading the books, you shouldn't.

If you just want to familiarize yourself with the works, read the Wikipedia pages, or Shmoop or whatever plot summaries and analyses you want.

I guarantee you that if you read the Wikipedia pages on every Henry James novel, you would be more familiar with the work of Henry James than 95% of people with Ph.D.s in literature.

YouTube, Wikipedia, and all the plot summary/literary analysis sites are great for people who want to be familiar with the Western canon (or any other literature, like Asian) but don't want to read the books.

If you are really ambitious and have money, go to Barnes & Noble and read the Monarch Notes.

If reading the summaries and analyses bore you, give up on the Western canon.

Pretty much. I want to like sci-fi but I just can't get into it

I used Henry James as an example bc I am a college freshman at a giant state univ w/ a good football team. A from-China girl in my class told our Eng 101 teacher (full-time "faculty associate" w PhD in lit) she would like to her term paper on Henry James. "Oh, the British author?" the prof said. The Chinese girl -- who can't speak English that great -- says no, he was American, he just lived in Europe mostly. So an 18yo girl from Shanghai knows more about lit than our fucking PhD teacher.

I feel like this also refutes a lot of the stereotypes spouted around here.

I'm kind of the opposite. I want to write sci-fi, so I force myself to read it, but i'd honestly prefer a restaurant menu.

SF has so much narrative potential, the reason it gets a bad rap is because for the most part that potential is wasted.

...not really, a lot of classics have become classics long time after by institutions and academies. People read a lot of garbage back in the day too, like pikaresque*-novels and shit and it was way more popular than those we call classics today.

Only Shakespeare and Don Quixjote fits your description.

*pikaresk in swedish, I don't feel for checking if I have made the right spelling in english. Merry christmas

picaresque. Mind you I don't even know what it means lol. I just know that we don't really use ks in between vowels (unless you're waka flaka) and esque has that frenchy spelling.

I'm more curious about his Batman-movie and if he still is excited to be Batman after Znyder butchered BvS.

I should probably watch the one he won an Oscar for though... what was it called? it was about some hollywood-script becoming political or something

It is a certain genre of adventure-novels that people read back in the day that often had an anti-hero as protagonist, romance and fought villains like pirates etc

Voltaire parodies the genre in one of the chapters in Candide - I think it is when they get attacked by pirates.

what actually is in the western canon

Stories that feature canons, such as Treasure Island.

I'm currently writing a horror-fantasy, because I'm such an autist that feel like I don't know enough about the world (how cars work, army ranks, architecture etc) and I don't wanna spend million of hours doing research on everything, I just do the fantasy-approach and make things up...

...but I don't read that much fantasy and I need to start doing so. I've read a lot of Terry Pratchett though, but that is way too far from traditional fantasy

Oh, so basically like the top ten today.

I'm the exact opposite. I read up on quantum mechanics just to fact check one little sentence. I took an architecture course just to be able to properly design the buildings I describe.

I've heard that I should read more fiction, but quite honestly I just get pissed off by how stupid it is. For example: Narrator introduces a character by highlighting a certain moral failing. How much you wanna bet this is what gets them killed or some karmic bullshit happens? The reason Dante got away with such satire was because he was actually good at it. Bonus points if it's some quaint social norm nobody even cares about anymore. Even the Greeks realized this which is why they invented tragedy instead of this "you got served" karmic reality most SF authors seem to subscribe to.

I'd rather read nonfiction and history. History is the best, honestly. So much unexpected shit happens.

Nobody in the thread more cunty and condescending than this. Awful taste as well, good job.

Yeah history is fun. When I started on my book-project I went more with a historical approach. I honestly don't even have that much magic in my story - except when I realise I'm writing stuff like "he went inside a pitch-black room" and I realise that he can't see then and I just made up that his sword can glow.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel
Here is a more accurate description that mine, but yeah, kind of like the top ten today

Some tastes are better than others.

It's mostly objective you faggot.

Nice b8/10 though

And you're not going after her?

Wtf user

Socrates on women.
>Socrates: You say that you cannot be happy without a women.
>X: correct
>S: I assume the relationship with said women would involve sex on a regular basis?
>X: Yes
>S:Just to clarify, having this would make your life better. As in, make you happy. Suggesting that at this moment you are unhappy until you get sex?
>X:Yes
>S:Therefore it is right to assume that all your life, there has not been a moment where you were happy? Outside of having sex with a woman of course.
>X: Well uh...
>S: Birthdays? Christmas? Hanging out with friends?
>X: You win socrates

Because they find classics too irrelevant and abstract. It is also hard to empathise with the characters when they're so distant from you time-wise. This is why a post-modernist novel about watching porn and fapping was much more interesting than any work of classics when I was younger.

Disregarding the merits of your post, what the fuck is

>soody
>soodiness

As a gesture of holiday giving, I'm offering digital copies first two volumes of my sci fi space opera epic to any user who wants them.
Email me at [email protected] and I'll send them directly.

All free. No spam, no lists.

(Yes the foundation is western canon trope "the heroes journey", but I've made some significant deviances"

I hope you'll partake and enjoy.

Socrates on women.
>Socrates: You say that you cannot be happy without a women.
>X: correct
>S: I assume the relationship with said women would involve sex on a regular basis?
>X: Yes
>S:Just to clarify, having this would make your life better. As in, make you happy. Suggesting that at this moment you are unhappy until you get sex?
>X:Yes
>S:Therefore it is right to assume that all your life, there has not been a moment where you were happy? Outside of having sex with a woman of course.
>X: Well uh...
>S: Birthdays? Christmas? Hanging out with friends?
>X: You win socrates
>S: I am not finished yet. Don't end the fun too soon.
>S: When you crave delicious sweets. Are you eternally satisfied after indulgence?
>S: When you have exhausted a game. Do you go find another game to play? Or are you satisfied for life after one game?
>S: Therefore the pursuit of pleasure you are constantly striving for under the delusion that it would lead to a happy life is futile. For it is an infinite journey. And harms the soul for eventually the craving would get so big it would be impossible to satisfy in the moment. Even if you were the king of the known world!
X:You speak too much. But you have convinced me. But logic won't fix what I feel. I want what I don't have.
S: And you will always want what you don't have my dear friend.

All this time writing on Veeky Forums and not on a word document.

I wonder how much of the graveyard you will fill with your unwritten works?

Why not Ballard?

This. Obviously you will prefer classics and read them of your own accord, but this.

After all, there are classic sci-fi novels. My waifu told me all this.
What a spooked motherfucker.

If "achievement" is what drives you, you are a pseud, and you do not read for the inherent superiority that lies within real literature.

so fun pop novels of today are tomorrow's classics?

mind = blown

woah

*splashes water on face*

Philip K. Dick is decent, but no sci-fi has anything on quality literature.

How could you read anything other than the western canon? I'd rather watch a movie than read some genre shit or YA, they give the same amount of stimulation anyway.

Try reading this. It might help you appreciate more.

But, maybe not. I find the classics so far superior to anything else I've read that it's hard not read them exclusively.

As Bloom says, there's not enough time in life to read sub-par literature. You really need to ingest the best that humanity has to offer.

nice. keep up the good work. motivational t bh.

>Jesus, how hard can it be to just read what you feel like reading?

Slogging through classics can be easier than admitting you're just not as smart as you'd like to be.

>Because they find classics too irrelevant and abstract.

Nihilists usually do.

Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are.legit boring fucking shit and ive read all.of them twice

It has nothing to do with being smart.

>reading for fun

You don't deserve the written word.

reading "western canon", meaning translated works etc. is less productive than investing time to read stuff that's natively written on your own language and pretty cuck-like behavior.

and I say this because I have never been taken back, impressed by a translated work, maybe the translators suck or I suck but that's my experience and when I say this I mean fiction based novels.

for philosophy it tends to work since its not very painterly..

Ben affleck thinks its racist to say that radical islamic ideology is bad

>people think Tolstoy is boring
Wtf, I found the Kreutzer Sonata incredibly enjoyable. Planning to read one of his larger books once I finish with my current book.

So i should skip the bible right? Because it's not written in my native language it couldn't have had much of an impact on my culture or country.

You could just read the Wikipedia page.

>read sci-fi
>100s of pages of "world building"
>storyline and prose are nonexistent, the focus is always on some stupid gimmick like time travel or "what if" questions that dont actually add any substance to the story and mean any story that exists is inherently full of logical errors

Read some of Bloom's shit. Guy's a fucking faggot and definitely has a micropenis. I'd give him a swirly if I met him in real life.

>he doesn't like world building

why the fuck are you even bothering with sci-fi

Read "Roadside Picnic" then.

I hated reading the "necessary" shit during highschool, and nowadays I only read comics and I don't give a fuck. Don't like the classics? Fuck the classics then. You should try doing less of what you don't want to do and more of what you want, it's fucking amazing.

Sad

This is you.

There's not that many actually fun sci-fi novels though...

>forcing my way through a classic sf novel i started for a "change of pace"
>really just want to read more depressing russian tomes written by dead rich people

First time on Veeky Forums and the first post I see is literally "I'm a genrefaggot plebeian retard with shit taste"

Guess I'm never coming back here.

The scare quotes confuse the hell out of me. Probably what you were going for but ffs.

Read The Golden Ass - Apuleius

fun as fuck

>Therefore the pursuit of pleasure you are constantly striving for under the delusion that it would lead to a happy life is futile. For it is an infinite journey.
I never understood this argument. Yeah, if you devote yourself to pleasure you have to constantly find new things to please yourself, but the world is full of such things. And even if you fail sometimes, that's just part of life. No one can be happy ALL the time.

>And harms the soul for eventually the craving would get so big it would be impossible to satisfy in the moment. Even if you were the king of the known world!
why?

If the classics were one page long there would be no conflict for we all would have read the classics.

If the classics were infinity page long there would be no conflict for we all would have read nothing.

It is a matter of time management because the classics take a long time to read

But it's manageable

And they're full of life lessons and really creative all around

I like the classique