Books to convert filthy psueds like me into lit-gods with perfect taste

He's right though, and your childish response only strengthens his argument.

>Welp
Please end thou's life

So should childish people just not read? I wasn't trying to say I'm done with the Greeks of I'm better than all of you or I know everything about literature. I just wanted to know if there were any books that I should be aware of while I begin to get into literature other than well known classics. I'm sorry if I sounded childish, but I'm trying to learn here and I basically got told to just not even try.

Wouldn't it be "thy?"

Looks sick, will be on the hunt for it.

As an artist I want nothing more than to be hated, tbqhwy

In your position, diving straight into classics might not be the best idea. You gotta find a good middle tier writer you connect personally to, in my case it was BEE, Less than Zero. After that you branch out to things that are highly regarded and challenge yourself

>As an artist I want nothing more than to be hated, tbqhwy
faggot lying pussy narcissist deluded loser with no friends

I know Vonnegut gets shit on here, but I read Breakfast of Champions and enjoyed it. After I finish slaughterhouse 5 I'm going to read Crying of Lot 49, then Crime and Punishment. Close enough? Thanks for actually responding instead of shitting on me.

thanks

Good start yes. What always helped me is fuck what critics or academics say, pay attention when a writer you like talks about their influences. That's how I found my favorite author, BEE mentioned DeLillo once and here I am twelve of his books later

I'm going to assume you're new and it's hard for you to focus on reading and you would rather watch anime or play video games. The following list is pretty arbitrary since I'm making it up on the spot. You can swap anything around or jump ahead, but seeing as you need a good mix of challenging and comfy...

>Richard Adams - Watership Down
>Homer - Iliad, Odyssey
>Steinbeck - Cannery Row
>Steinbeck - East of Eden
>The Stranger - Camus
>Twain - Huckleberry Finn
>Plato - Apology
>Plato - Symposium
>Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
>Martial - Epigrams
>Aurelius - Meditations

If you want to go big daddy head honcho mode then you can skip the lighter stuff and also include:

>Aristotle - Ethics, On the Soul, Poetics
>Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (honestly not hard)
>All the Greeks
>Pretty much all the Romans
>Shakespeare
>Dostoevsky
>Pynchon
>Don Dellilo

Why the fuck am i even writing this? sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Stop jerking off and just read.

also youre not an artist and never will be.
just a mean little sack of pretentious shit.

Please sir may I have another

give me your email and i will convince you to go work at burger king where you belong

open wide so I can shit in your mouth you worthless pig slut

Talking about elitism, while bragging of taking two literature classes, and still not knowing 'what to read next'. Honesty follow my advice and do what I said, you've obviously fallen for lame meme, and think reading right thing will somehow expand your horizons. You're also egotistical, self centred hipster, or else you wouldn't be crating pointless posts, and exposing your psyche after being called out.

Now for a honest advice on what you should read next. Go to /scify/ safezone thread. Find the first thing mentioned there that catches your eye, and read it from cover to cover. Force yourself through it if needed, but do it.

If you want to be an artist, you should kill yourself. You worthless no dick roach. You are an abomination, no one loves you. You should have never been born. Your parents put so much effort into creating you but all they got is a useless faggot in the vague outline of a human. I fucking love cucking scum like you out of life. I fucking love bullying you disgusting no friends shitter until you make the world a better place by tying a noose around your pathetic neck. I shit down your throat and you take it like a bitch.

If I met you diseased overweight petulant child I'd break your spine over my knee and end your life like I would swat a mosquito. That's all you are, a minor annoyance that's too much of a fucking pansy ass baby to do a job that was made for men with courage and bravery flowing through their veins.

Kill yourself art majors, I mean it. Everyone you know would love to see you gone. Don't even write a suicide note, no one will care enough about your boring life to read it, there's no point. You'll pass quietly like a speck of dirt in the breeze while real men, the scientists and engineers, are out fucking the girl of your dreams before throwing her out like a stained rag. Every single one of you fucks is probably under 6 ft, balding and limp-dicked. No fucking life.

I fucking shit on your wages, I fucking shit on your worthless paper, I fucking shit on your intellect, I fucking shit on your career, I fucking shit on your life. I fucking shit down your useless fucking throat and all you can do is bitch me and pray that I don't piss on your skull as I'm on my way to ramming my dick down your crush and bitchslapping your worthless mother. I hate you, your family hates you, you hate you.

Kill yourself fucking autist. Don't keep Satan waiting.

excellent

You only need like 15 fiction books and 15 nonfiction books tbqh, just put these on your bookshelf and sell almost everything else. I think most of Veeky Forums can agree on this list:

Fiction:
>Iliad & Odyssey by Homer
>The Divine Comedy by Dante
>Don Quixote by de Cervantes
>Complete Works of Shakespeare
>Crime & Punishment, plus The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
>Moby Dick by Melville
>James Joyce's major works
>In Search of Lost Time by Proust
>War & Peace, and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
>Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
>Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
>Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
i'm sure there's a few to add but basically most other fiction outside of this is not even worth the effort, you'll gain more artistic substance and entertainment re-reading one of the above versus like 99.9999%. I'd even narrow it down to just Homer, Shakespeare, Dosto, Joyce, Proust and Tolstoy.

Nonfiction (keep in mind this is for practical wisdom to live by, not some bullshit academia pseudo-intellectual circle jerking)
>Plato's complete works
>Aristotle's complete works
>Key Stoicism texts: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca
>right to Nietzsche after, don't waste your time on that other bullshit. Get the Portable Nietzsche or whichever book was all his nonfiction works in one volume. I'm sure some philosophy majors will try to justify their degree by flipping out at me here but the reality is that almost everything else you can just watch some Youtube videos for and get the gist of it.
>Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
>Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (actual scientific outline of happiness and how to achieve it via "flow" states. not sure if anyone else on Veeky Forums even heard of it but it will have a more practical
>Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

my diary desu

The Dialogue of Pessimism from ancient Babylon

You are not a lit god that's what's wrong with you desu , don't become upset towards what user said .

I think it would be thine. As in End thine life.

Endest thine life. Conjugate for "thou".

Thanks for the great list user. Is there anything else you think you can include?

>tfw OP just asks for some good reads and elitist scum feels the need to brag and insult him

How old are you and what have you read so far?

this is the first seminar in every good art course. you left out the bit about "you'll die working a shitty minimum wage job to feed your retarded hobby work"

>Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

You're really going to choose the worst of his well known books?

A real literati is a wizard
Through certain manifestations of the logos assembled in a very particular way by a very particular person for very specific reasons found in dissparate moments his life the literati answered the call of being and found there the written on the walls of his home all the lies written in the blood of others. In blissful transcendence there followed the all horrors of this world. The literati, next to a small flame, between the pages, searching for it with it.

>3 poets
>herman hesse, nietzche, DFW over any lyrical poet beside Shakespeare
>none of Dante's sonnets
>no Ovid
>No Beowulf

poetry is more important than your lazily disguised treatises

11+1

You are an ant trying to become a butterfly, but only capable of becoming a worm.

Don't just quit literature, quit life.

I'm in high school and I've read, from what I can remember, Gilgamesh, Sumerian Creation myths, Iliad, Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Agamemnon, Antigone, Aeneid, Ovid's metamorphoses, song of Roland, Hamlet, Henry V, Canterbury Tales, Inferno, LotR, Red badge of courage, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, animal farm, and some stuff I can't remember since it's been years since I've taken some of these classes. As for books I've read on my own, some Vonnegut, parts of Ulysses which I need to finish, Kafka on the shore, American psycho, to name a few. Also I have philosophy next year so I'll be reading a lot of that soon. Only thing we won't cover at all will be political philosophy, so no Machiavelli.

>novels
Miguel de Cervantes "Don Quixote"
Stendhal "The Charterhouse of Parma"
Jane Austen "Emma"
Charles Dickens "Great Expectations"
Fyodor Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"
Henry James "The Portrait of a Lady"
Marcel Proust "In Search of Lost Time"
Thomas Mann "The Magic Mountain"
Herman Melville "Moby Dick"
William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying"
Nathanael West "Miss Lonelyhearts"
Thomas Pynchon "The Crying of Lot 49"
Cormac McCarthy "Blood Meridian"
Ralph Ellison "Invisible Man"
Toni Morrison "Song of Solomon"
>short stories
Ivan Turgenev "Bezhin Lea" and "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands."
Anton Chekhov "The Kiss" and "The Student" and "The Lady with the Dog"
Guy de Maupassant "Madame Tellier's Establishment" and "The Horla"
Ernest Hemingway "Hill Like White Elephants" and "God Rest You Merry, Gentleman" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "A Sea Change"
Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" and "A View of the Woods"
Vladimir Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters"
Jorge Luis Borges "Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius"
Tommaso Landolfi "Gogol's Wife"
Italo Calvino "Invisible Cities"
>plays
Shakespeare "Hamlet"
Henrik Ibsen "Hedda Gabler"
Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Being Earnest"
>poems
A. E. Housman "Into My Heart an Air That Kills"
William Blake "The Sick Rose"
Walter Savage Landor "On His Seventy-fifth Birthday"
Alfred Lord Tennyson "The Eagle" and "Ulysses
Robert Browning "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"
Emily Dickinson "Poem 1260 - Because That You Are Going"
Emily Bronte "Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning"
Popular Ballads "Sir Patrick Spence" and "The Unquiet Grave"
Anonymous "Tom O'Bedlam"
Shakespeare's "Sonnet 121 - Tis Better to Be Vil Than Vile Esteemed" and "Sonnet 129 - The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame" and "Sonnet 144 - Two Loves I have, of Comfort and Despair"
John Milton "Paradise Lost"
William Wordsworth "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" and "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Triumph of Life"
John Keats "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

>recommended reading for becoming elite:
harry potter
game of thrones
twilight
50 shades of gray
the martian

infinite jest
the color purple
rupi kaur
savannah brown
roastie booktuber youtube channels

This list is fucking depressing
Is there a reason your lit looks like every other list on the fucking planet?

OP I'm gonna tell it to u straight. When you say some stupid shit like

>excellent literary knowledge and understanding

You remind me of the cow who, upon being told that it would be used as a body for its nutrients, then slaughtered to be eaten, and its children would have the same fate if only the cow could continue walking down that open path there and continue without looking back, just bent his head down and said MmmmmMMMmmmm and continued chewing grass

You forgot Life of Pi

Stop bullying op, desu

Someone post that that quote by Jane Austen on middlebrow readers. I think it was Jane Austen. I think it was a real quote.

The original post was meant to be in jest, but I just ended up looking like an idiot. Probably should've been more serious because clearly the tone wasn't conveyed the way I had hoped.

kek

>gaylord

You are in Veeky Forums polak you talk like you are some doctor and shit this place is full of lolis pedos porverts sick fuckers neets incest /b/ /tv/ /pol/ /int/ /muz/ /mu/ Veeky Forums

Wow you just been a full retared never go full retaread

Demnnnn!!! Polak you are a subhumans

I am just a 18 your old american summer fag who want to party and smok weed but wow How old are you why are you so mad ??? Sound like you are old fag from the original Veeky Forums i just Ask for good books to read what the problem ??

God bless america and englos death to russia and Europ

Start with the Sumerians

Resume with the Romans

Thanks /b/rother

Kek

>not fully understanding the depth of Siddhartha
you have no clue what you're talking about

fair enough, some more poetry can be included

thank you for the thoughtful critique

Think of the English authors (or any British author will do at first) you know off the tippy top of your head, put their names in a bag and mix it up and pull out one at random. Then read. Don't come back to Veeky Forums anymore because this is just a distraction. If you don't understand something try to find an understanding on your own, but don't force it.

In 4-6 years things will be a lot better.

Based on what you've said, I can see why there might have been some controversy. You should've said you already read the Iliad and Odyssey, instead of just saying you didn't want to start with the Greeks.

The next step I would take is to read other ancient writing, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible.

Why the hell are you even here? You seem to hate art (maybe artists anyway). That guy deserved this comment for making that faggy statement wherein he called himself an artist, but I am confused. I'm not asking as a way to insult you or anything--I'm actually curious.... Why are you on this board?

As far as an approach, you can explore literature that suits you based on a literary movement, you can take a chronological approach, enjoy texts categorized in the same genre, use an author you like to read the works of authors they influenced, or find a theme to follow, such as the "Great American Novel" or "Bildungsroman."

Personally, these are a few of my favorite, many broadly postmodern and most contemporary (not popular) fiction just before and after WWII; there's some historical and crime fiction involved and a variety of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Julia Alvarez, Haruki Murakami, and Yann Martel:

Fahrenheit 451
In Cold Blood
Libra
The Great Gatsby
The Talented Mr. Ripley (think Hitchcock)
Ragtime
The Life of Pi
The Tiger's Wife
Never Let Me Go
Black Water (Kennedy-Chappaquidick)
The Remains of the Day
Norwegian Wood
Agatha Christie
The Known World
China Men and Woman Warrior
In the Time of the Butterflies (DR-Trujillo)
The Little Stranger (British)
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (British)
My Brilliant Friend (Italian author "Elena Ferrante whose identity is still s mystery)
The Road (post apocalyptic)
Invisible Man
Tales of the Unexpected and The Umbrella Man (Roald Dahl adult short stories)

Nonfiction: The Use of Enchantment (Bruno Bettelheim)

...