ITT Books that got you into literature

ITT Books that got you into literature

Faust.

Unironically pic related, i read it when i was like 10.

The Artwork of the Future by Richard Wagner

Goethe drops some weak-ass forced rhymes in the first part though. Every American phony faux-intellectual reads a shitty, distorted translation and thinks it's this is the most transcendental woke shit of all time.

Dante in 6th grade. I thought it would be edgy because I'd only heard it was about hell. I wanted to understand the things he was referencing so I had to start with the Greeks.

Moby-Dick. Read it in high school, adn it had the most engaging narrative voice I'd ever come across

Do you prefer the second part to the first?

The second half of the first part is some genuinely good shit. I never finished the second part tbqh.

Infinite Jest, not even memeing. I picked it up when I was 17 before a vacation, and the fact that it was hard for me to read it frustrated me. I powered through it, loved it, and then looked for more.

Red Badge of Courage got me hooked on war novels/literature

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban got me into more general fiction

Crime & Punishment, after that it kind of just took off.

Same.
Faust is Goethe's life achievement. When he wrote the first part, he was still an artist of the Storm and Stress era.

When he wrote and finished part II, he had morphed to an artist of the Classicism.

Not a fan of Classicism, never have been. I'd rather read the Classics. They're more authentic.

I feel like he was a lot more engaging in the early parts of his life - but maybe that's just me identifying with the younger Goethe due to my own age.

I think I took a liking to literature after reading Büchner's Lenz.

I love Büchner so much.
Have you read Leonce und Lena? It's a weirdly sad and beautiful comedy. I really aspire to get the Büchner-Preis one day, it's only a dream of course. He's the role model for everything good about German literature.

Ficciones by Borges when I was 11. They were easy to read and infinitely suggestive. After that I was definetely hooked on literature as a whole.

i got into literature reading infinite jest off of a recommendation from /lgbt/

I first saw it on stage, then read it. It's really good, although not my Büchner favorite.
Would put it on a par with Woyzeck.

Büchner is one of the authors who could've become a pillar of literature had he not died so early. He's terribly underrepresented in education.

The Beats and HST, desu. Particularly Burroughs. I read a lot as a kid but started skating in early middle school and doing drugs in late middle school, so drug-fueled books were appealing to me as I started being able to comprehend more complex ideas (not to say that those ideas are contained in those books) from there, it was probably The Odyssey and Hugo that propelled me into "Veeky Forums"

Pedro Paramo when i was 14, now that was awesome

We read Dantons Tod for our Abitur and it was an absolute nightmare. Nobody even got the basic gist of the story. Something about Leonce really resonates with me. The procrastinating prince wasting away his days. The nostalgic haze of it all.

Same here. Started devouring everything Russian and classical after reading him, he also switched me from Atheist to Agnostic.

>enjoyed C&P

How? What exactly did you like about it?

I understand that feeling, and I would agree from today's point of view.
Back when I read all those works, I was a lot younger and a lot less stable. The cruelty of irresistable dementia seeping into Lenz' mind was both terrifying and fascinating to my young self. I didn't know as much about procrastination back then.

My Abitur dealt with expressionism, metropolitan lyric poetry, I think. Boring stuff. Very mediocre result.

Camus and Dostoyevsky

I read The Stranger and Crime and Punishment back to back as a teen and I spent my entire summer plowing through Brothers K. and The Idiot

I read other literature well before, but the "book" that really got me into thinking about it was Macbeth. Then the book that actually started my willing descent into literature was Don Quixote.
Right? He's the guy I recommend to newfags. But people keep saying he's really difficult, including this one lit professor.

Demian by Hesse and Metamorphosis by Kafka probably, although I read some other stuff before and after that, those were the first real, deep experiences I had with literature

Moby Dick, almost became a whaler after reading it.

Cuckoos Nest
Clockwork Orange
The Outsider by Colin Wilson

Infinite Jest when I was in 5th grade, I just remember loving Wallace's prose...

>Büchner is one of the authors who could've become a pillar of literature had he not died so early.

This.

He had a poetic gift and was able to nest inside the souls of other (and very diferent) human beings.

Children's lit initially, but Notre Dame de Paris was the beginning of my career of maniacal reading. At 12 or so.

Kafka's Metamorphosis at 16

lunch poems

Ulysses.

Hearn and Akutagawa. I came from /jp/.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & Dubliners (I have the B&N copy where both are included). First time I really read for the prose. Made me want to try to writing too. Changed the way I viewed fiction.

i just kinda forced myself into it desu
faust was an early one i enjoyed though

The Gretchenfrage:
Faust I or Faust II?

The Epic of Gilgamesh funnily enough

It is pretty good. Which translation? (inb4 >he doesn't read cuneiform)