When did you grow out of your pretentious stage and start reading for fun again instead of to feel superior to other...

when did you grow out of your pretentious stage and start reading for fun again instead of to feel superior to other readers?

so the only two reasons you think ppl read are 1. for fun or 2. to feel superior to others

lol i read pynchon kiddo and i enjoy it, he's fucking hilarious with postmodern quirks, pop culture references and feces/cock imagery

I read cause i want to be smarter so naturally that doesn't direct me towards steven king and grr martin.

I always read for fun.

It's just that I find Shakespeare and Proust fun and most pleb lit to be boring because not very well written or interesting.

Plebs can't understand the pure pleasure of reading great works of literature and think we must all be phonies due to their ignorance.

I've always read for fun, not sure what you're going on about.

I never got into the pretentious stage. Reading has always been for fun, but that doesn't mean I don't want to read the classics either or to better understand philosophical concepts. It doesn't have to revolve around feeling superior to other readers.

That said, I do cannot for the life of me understand grown adults who list Harry Potter as a favorite. It's children's literature. Did you just make it through the Dr. Seuss Complete Works? Also, I don't care for YA, but to each their own.

I am pretty sure that only pathetic individuals and very ignorant and stupid people go through such a phase. When I was a kid I read for fun (mainly fantasy shit and tom clancy's) now I read literature to improve myself.

this year senpai

People who need to post about how they never were pretentious and only ever read for fun are obviously the most pretentious.

Yes, I am projecting.

I don't know about that. I went through this phase and I'm not particularly stupid or ignorant.
I think it has more something to do with how late you started reading as a hobby.

But in any cases, generalizations based on your own particular experience isn't a particularly modest or smart thing to do.

I try to hop from one to the other.

Never really grown out of it, being modest is a reaction to it in my case and it is more profitable on a personal and social scale than being pretentious anyway.

When I was around 18, was actually the thing that made me start reading seriously and not just focusing on "The Classics"

I think "The Classics" are something you kind of have to come into on your own. I think every reader eventually finds their way to them simply because so much of our culture is built on them.

And they might like them or not like them. We have a whole thread right now about famous authors who hated other famous authors. I know I would find it much more interesting to talk to someone who read Antigone and hated it than someone who read it and just flips their hand and says "Ah yes, brilliant."

I never went through that stage because I'm not a loser that cares what others think.

I read fiction for fun until I found philosophy.

I read philosophy because I wanted to be smarter and improve myself.

i'm gonna start that now and i'm 21. the best books i've read have been YA novels. i'm tired of forcing myself through old books with no stories just because they're "classics".

Harry Potter is a meme, it's horribly written.

>old books with no stories

>being this much of a pleb

October 2016.

I've never had a pretentious stage.

Writers > Readers

Staring at paper and having an opinion about it does not correlate any level of superiority that matters.

Dr. Seuss books are pretty legit.

Never had a pretentious stage.

I am pretentious.

...

I am somewhere in between reading for fun and "reading to feel superior". I actually do enjoy a lot of what I read and that includes a mixture of what most normies would call boring/pretentious and what a lot of people here would say is for plebs. I like them both and they keep each other from poisoning my mind.

After a long, complex or "important" book it feels good to read something that's less demanding but that doesn't mean it can be straight trash. I want to read "fun" stuff that's not just "a thriller" or whatever.

By the same token I'm not going to read some 1000-page dry text about Eastern mythology. I have to be drawn to the work naturally and that includes stuff like Shakespeare, Dosto, etc.

Reading "pleb" books keeps me from falling into my own mind and reading "pretentious" stuff keeps me from losing the edge to progress.

I still feel superior but it's an empty kind of victory because it's not so much about what I do but rather what others don't. Bloody plebs.

when i had read so many of the things ones reads to feel superior to others that i one day realized i had moved from reading for posturing to genuinely enjoying them over anything else. and i then understood the difference between the type of reading pleasure i'd had before and regarded as true pleasure and the type of intellectual pleasure i have now. and i don't consider this intellectual type of pleasure any truer than anyone else's, only that it is what works for me and all else feels impoverished next to it. so i don't care what other people read and don't care to show them what i read unless they're interested or it comes up naturally.

Thought I don't read for the purpose of feeling superior. I just love good fiction in all its guises - lit, theatre, film, anime, games, etc.

Right about the time I quit infinite jest because of how disgusted I was with how much DFW reminded me of myself.

probably not until I'm fucking ancient and my nuts dry up. wanna know why? because i'm no good at sports, and naturally, my competitive personality, having been trounced in athletics, moves to reading and writing. i'm actually good at these things.
also, we're men. we're competitive. most of us suck at sports, are small, or just are extremely interested in intellectual pursuits. ain't a crime friendo. my brain tells me i have to be better than everyone, as do the brains of most of the people on this board. it's natural. stop complaining about the forces of masculinity, and you'll live a satisfying life

But reading the good shit IS fun.

>implying feeling superior can't be fun
>which leads to compelling impressionable women
>implying fun is the ultimate end

He knows too much…

GRRM isn't fun. His books aren't exciting enough to justify their length, even though you cab get a pretty good grasp of what the book is about just by reading the topic sentences of each paragraph

This

I'm always in the pretentious stage to an extent - it would be pretentious to suggest that one has fully grown out of it, much more so to suggest that it never happened. There's nothing wrong with being proud of knowledge, or excitement with regards to having "ticked off" a book from your list. It shouldn't be the main factor, that's all.

I've always read for fun, but I grew out of crap lit in my teens after reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I read the occasional classic genre fiction, but there's a lot more substantial literature out there left to delve into, and I mustn't waste too much time on fluff from the likes of King and Martin.

Fun can never be the end mode of Literature because play is only one aspect. The other is clarity. There are some works that I found boring to get through, but they placed my mind in a clearer spot after reflecting upon them.

But truly, the feeling of superiority is the basest feeling. One should not feel superior unless one has the pen to match a person like Chekhov or Dostoyevsky. Reading more books should make you feel inferior that you are currently unable to manifest such dignity and grandeur of mind. They should drive you out of complacency and into creation - striving for excellence.

>comparing Rowling to Seuss
Seuss was a legitimate poet and artist with a unique style and a strong grasp on politics and the human condition.
Rowling can't even remember the fact that Hermione was written as white. (Not /pol/, just amazed any author could forget the ethnicity of his/her own character.)

kek, when did that happen?

She didn't forget it, she just forgot she'd ever made it clear. She was trying to market the film or whatever to SJWs.
Shitty books are legitimately not fun though.

No, you're missing the people who read "to improve themselves", which is for pseuds and plebs. It's the kinda /pol/ mentality that leads to people reading Aurelius as a fucking self-help book.

Bloom says you should read foremost for fun btw.