How much did the great authors read? Howany hours a day, how many books a year? Does anyone know?

How much did the great authors read? Howany hours a day, how many books a year? Does anyone know?

Take someone like Joyce, for instance. It'd be nice to compare myself to the adolescent Joyce, for motivation and to see where I stand. I am nowhere near as talented or intelligent. But Joyce was a firm believer in the maxim that the artist is made, not born. And I think I could go far if I have an idea of what's required.

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*How many

I'd stop thinking of it as a time requirement to put in and get carried away reading stuff you actually want to for hours

Homer never read a book.

librarything.com/legacylibraries

In one of Frank Delaney's Ulysses podcasts he chronicles all the authors Joyce references in Ulysses up until I think the middle of Proteus. It's something like
>53

So definitely once Joyce got into his 30s he was reading a fuckload, and he must've had a real ability to retain what he read.

Also if you look at Joyce's early nonfiction writings, he has an essay probably written when he was about 20 criticizing a book that came out about Shakespeare's plays. He hated the book because it did the I think 11 Shakespeare plays no justice. So by 20 he had presumably read all of Shakespeare's works enough, not to just read them, but to think critically on them.

That's just a ballpark, what can be cited, but you can imagine that not everything Joyce read made it's way into one of his works.

because most ancient greeks couldnt fucking read or write, user

their main source of communication was singing about their ancestors, telling fart jokes, chucking fuckin spears and sucking dick

Probably a lot. Most of them had big libraries by the time of their demise. I'd could say Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa, for example.
You could get an idea with how much they cite other people's works.
Most of the authors tha came from rich families surely had big libraries and sepnt much of their time reading them. Others, like Roberto Bolaño, for example, who came from a low-middle class family, stole a lot of books.

Technically there's a lot of book stealing going around here as well with all the downloads.

does the amount matter? really, shouldn't your spectrum matter? It doesn't matter how SMART you read, if you only read a narrow selection. I'd think, the most intellectual people would read a huge spectrum, to get the largest spectrum of information.

there's something weirdly poetic about stealing books. Not an ebook, but actual physical copies from bookstores.
I stopped of course, because I started getting panic attacks, but goddamn, it's romantic.

you sound like you're pretty high on the spectrum desu

>I'd think, the most intellectual people would read a huge spectrum, to get the largest spectrum of information
Ol' Schopenhauer is going to rise from the grave and beat your ass.

Of course. I have on my Kindle more than half (167) the number of books that Doestoievsky had on his personal library (273), and bought none of them. What a time to be alive.
Where did you steal them from? I personally would feel very bad for stealing from a small, family owned bookstore, for example.

Well, I mean, that's just how it is, isn't it? Basic scientific theory, right? Any decent experiment needs a control group- you can't make an informed hypothesis with only a selected excerpt of information to go off of. That's not how you get an impartial result. The same is with ideas and thought, right?

>Where did you steal them from? I personally would feel very bad for stealing from a small, family owned bookstore, for example.
Mostly chains. I didn't steal a lot, mostly when I was in the city and bored. Feeling bad is sort of counter intuitive if you're stealing in the first place. You sort of just make up shit to justify it.

They re-read a lot.

I do a large sweep of writers. Then I zero in on 3 writers and study them with intensity. Right now my focus is Joyce, Wharton, and James. When I'm tired of those writers I move on to another set. Kafka, Goethe, and Faulkner perhaps. I'm not very widely read (which is a negative) but I know those writers very well. Read Ezra Pound's The A B C of Reading. I agree that you only need to read a few writers but you need to understand (down to the word) how they work.

The ABC of Reading is so good. Somewhere he urges people to read Homer in Greek. If they do not know Greek, Pound advises a French translation, of which the last edition is from 1590. But yeah, you'll learn a lot from it, especially on poetry. The parts on prose are short and not helpful.

Aristotle never even wrote a book, he was actually against writing. :^)

Also nice dubs and trips.

in ulysses stephen says he used to read 14 pages every evening, maybe joyce did the same, but it seems unreal because he was too widely read to had read only 14 pages a day, unless he like read them very, very deeply and the works were dense

>Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.

Shelley regularly read up to 14 hours per day

You're confusing intelligence with wisdom. Prophets/philosophers are wise, mathematicians/masters of a field are intelligent. Great amounts of broad knowledge equals wisdom whereas acute and highly applied understanding of a specific field equals intelligence.

I don't think that's unreasonable provided he was analyzing what he read. I studied chapter 2 of A Portrait in depth. And could do maybe 6 pages at night. But that chapter is cut into small sections of sometimes 2 to 3 pages long. The first section is only three pages long but spans the entire summer at Blackrock. So you have one paragraph devoted to describing Uncle Charles smoking behind the outhouse. And the paragraph before describes an incident that explains the reason why he must smoke there. Another paragraph is devoted to what they did on Sundays. Etc. It's slice of life at it's finest. But it still maintains an interest (for me at least) by the introduction of Mercedes. I think the chief interest in the chapter is yearning for the Eternal Feminine. It's incredible to see the development of a boy with romantic and tender yearnings to an adolescent with a fierce suffocated desire to fuck. Which he does. But with a prosititute. Compare the first section to the last to savor the full irony of it. Anyway I got off track. But I think you only need to think deeply about a few worthwhile books. Perhaps that's the meaning behind the 14 pages.

Ezra Pound has a few books of essays (actually on Gutenberg for free) that have more extensive discussions of prose writers. He likes Henry James and Joyce of course. I honestly think that James is better at novellas than novels. Turn of the screw and Aspern papers are brilliant. But Portrait of a lady, considered one of his finest, just doesn't seem as consummate a work. Wharton is a better novelist if you ask me. And she's not as complicated which makes her ideal if your just starting out.

Thanks for suggesting this! Just found his essay on Joyce, in which he says he likes Dostoyevsky. The latter is somewhat surprising, I thought he would have criticized him for his prose style.
Many read James for his psychological genius, but I found PoL not very impressing as well. The character-painting is good, but the story lacks weight.

as I said, it's not that weird if he actually read dense work and tried to analyse what he read, which he certainly did because kek it's Joyce and he probably read some obscure shit too in who knows what language

when I read ulysses it was more like seven paragraphs a day and not pages

and reading seven books at the same time is patrician desu

Virginia Woolf said in a letter that the only proper way to read was seven books at once.
Something about a chorus instead of a single voice

highly underrated.

I have to reread it. I don't want to be unfair. But your right it lacked weight. I love the idea informing PoL but I just think the execution wasn't quite equal to the idea. Have you read the Age of Innocence or the House of Mirth? Compare those to PoL. I think James was probably more technically capable than Wharton. But Wharton knows how to give a story emotional weight. Her endings are devastating. I feel like the ending of PoL should have had more weight behind it given that it's informing idea (of a woman embracing her fate) was so good. I think it would be worthwhile, now that I think about it, to study just "what went wrong." Who knows. Maybe it will grow on me.

Not read any Wharton yet, but The House of Mirth is on stack, and moves up a few places now. As for James: if you haven't already, you might want to give The Golden Bowl a shot, it is considered by many as his finest novel.

Yes that's what I hear as well. I'm reading The Wings of the Dove. And my first impression is that if might be over wrought. Wharton has a book out. The Writing of Fiction, where she discusses The Golden Bowl. She knew James and said he was obsessed with designing ever more elaborate and ornate structures. But that he didn't give himself enough time to let the work grow organically. So that the reader is left feeling as though "the puppet strings are still showing." The illusion of naturalness is lost if you're too distracted by what should have been kept safely out of a reader's attention. They are brilliant designs for future novels. Idk. That's easy for a rich lady to say who didn't have to write for a living. But it's sound advice no doubt. WoD does look a bit heavy. I think the Aspern Papers is just perfect. Not too heavy, not to light.

You're why Borders died.

retarded post

>im 12 years old and this book SUCKS because it doesnt have an epic emo sled-crash

The creeping darkness of Portrait is incredible. So many characters are fully realized. Awesome novel.

Noob to the search for knowledge and truth here. I'm 18. How much should I read everyday? Is learning languages worth it? And how much time should be devoted to science?

>chucking fuckin spears and sucking dick

yes

Yeah it'll be real fucking romantic when you have to buy all your books off amazon

nah mate, real genius thinks of ideas on its own. Books aren't necessary. Lots of books aren't either. at least thats what schopenhauer says :^)

ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter3.html

I'm 18 too. I spend an hour on language and an hour on maths/logic, then the rest on reading and writing/thinking about what I read. How much you should spend reading really depends on how much spare time you have. I prefer to think in terms of chapters or parts instead of units of time. That way I can prioritise my reading as I do any other task

Schopenhauer also quotes like 15 authors (in 10 different languages) per page. this meme is so dumb, he was Veeky Forumserate af.

I used to do that too but stopped because is right.

Shitty books like young adult fiction should be avoided, anyone on lit could tell you that, you don't need Schopenhauer to tell you.

Good essay. Although I mostly agree, I think he is wrong in assuming that reading books somehow stultifies thoughts. If anything, it magnifies thought, like reading his essay magnified my own thought. Ironic.

Being a consumercuck isn't a prerequisite for being a producerbull. It can be harmful in some cases. Domain dependence is a hell of a drug

Authors will tell you to read a lot but they just want to sell books.

I can't help associating Joyce with farts now. Thanks lit

You're not an adolescent Joyce. You suck

Without making excuses for myself (heh) you have to remember that a lot of these greats were classically educated in a way that students no longer are, even at very prestigious schools

That means they were not only exposed to the great texts of the english language, but were made to learn Latin and Greek, and then made to read the great texts of those languages. So they were leaving school with a shitload more knowledge than any of us could ever really hope for. It only changed very recently too, I'm sure many of our parents are old enough have been forced to rote learn Whitman, Wordsworth etc. especially if they went to a religious school.

I know that. The point is that how do I suck less?

Bump

Here's a list of Joyce's literary influences and opinions.

One thing is kind of confusing though – "Sheridan" refers to playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and not Sheridan Le Fanu (whom Joyce referenced a few times in Ulysses and a lot of times in Finnegans Wake).

saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/James-Joyce-Literary-Tastes.pdf

I remember there once was a chart about daily routines of famous writers. Anybody has it?

this is neat, thanks user

Nassim Taleb in Antifragile:

>My parents had an account with the largest bookstore in Beirut and I would pick up books in what seemed to me unlimited quantities. There was such a difference between the shelves of the library and the narrow school material; so I realized that school was a plot designed to deprive people of erudition by squeezing their knowledge into a narrow set of authors. I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time. I read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Céline, Schultz, Zweig (didn’t like), Henry Miller, Max Brod, Kafka, Ionesco, the surrealists, Faulkner, Malraux (along with other wild adventurers such as Conrad and Melville; the first book I read in English was Moby-Dick) and similar authors in literature, many of them obscure, and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers, Husserl, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, Scholem, Benjamin, and similar ones in philosophy because they had the golden status of not being on the school program, and I managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Corneille, and other bores. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. Perhaps joining an underground anti-government group motivated me to look into Marxist studies, and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève.

>When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline

wtf I have a boner now

This.

It's about the prose style and characterisation. The Portrait of a Lady is absolutely delicious in those respects. Thanks user, you've made me want to re-read it. Man James is great.

>Take someone like Joyce, for instance. It'd be nice to compare myself to the adolescent Joyce, for motivation and to see where I stand. I am nowhere near as talented or intelligent. But Joyce was a firm believer in the maxim that the artist is made, not born. And I think I could go far if I have an idea of what's required.
Interesting that you bring up choice. Certainly he read alot, and believed reading was the key to art and life. But the key to his reading was how sensitively he did it: based on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake alone you can tell that he was an incredibly sensitive reader...

Gulp

That's impossible.

Who even is this guy? The Arab Peterson or something?

If this is true then why are his books so shit?

Yes, repetition is very important.

yeah, I stopped too, because I stopped being 16.

i didn't go to book school, i went to books

read meaquinone4's tweet thread about brainchad genetics

no amount of reading can make up for a dull mind. liberal arts departments are full of erudite dullards who would create if they could but lack the mojo