>>6
Gonna check this one out. I just read the first page or two and I like the writing style. I'll keep an eye out for a physical copy before I finish No Longer Human (I'm >>5)

>>5
No longer human is definitely an interesting one. It’s almost subversive in how much it refuses to subvert expectation. It loops, spirals, draws closer and eventually ends exactly where you knew it would end from the beginning. Definitely thematically fitting, but while I acknowledge the structural purpose, it was a bit tedious at times.
Yeah agreed. The whole idea of recapturing feelings, reliving experiences etc feels incredibly defeatist to me. What are you? A cat? You got it at the height of what novelty if can afford you, any subsequent time your prey will be slower, exhausted, closer to death. Really just torturing the both of you at that point when you could use whatever you have learned in the process to catch something much bigger next time. Rinse, repeat. It's almost like people think they've just stumblefucked their way towards the most fulfilling experiences they could possibly have by accident. What a horrible fate to believe to have suffered.

daemon(d ’m n) n — A computer program that runs continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events.
Condensed from “Disk and Execution MONitor”
and it's sequel
freedom™
by Daniel Suarez

Very much a "blockbuster styled triller" but it extremely opinionated about the advancement of the internet and technology, everything from software monoculture being vulnerable to cyber attack, corporate farming practices such as Monsanto using patented genetics to legally take over small farms, and the power of distributed social media.
Fun to read just for entertainment. Some people have said it gets a little "scifi" but those people just don't know what is possible, for those they should also read Influx to understand why they are wrong.

Currently reading Mother of learning the highest rated story on royal road, its a progression fantasy/time travel story about 15y old Zorian Kazinski a studious mage with slightly above-average shaping skills and more insecurities than you can count (atleast at the start),trough 'unfortunate circumstances' he gets trapped in a time loop that takes place at the first month of the semester, making the most out of his predicament he spends his days studying and training his magical abilities. Altogether its a perfectly written, tightpaced fun story that is also very easy to read and I highly recommend it

MoL is fun agreed. I found red-robe's identity reveal a bit anti-climatic though.

>>11

im at book 2 currently, im fine with any reveal tbh also he villains are not really the strongest/most integral aspects of the story for me

>>9
I've had daemon on my shelf for, like, eight years. I don't even remember buying it. I guess this is my sign to read it

currently reading through dostoyevsky's notes from the underground because a friend recommended it to me, i'm also re-reading ligotti's conspiracy against the human race and céline's voyage au bout de la nuit. notes from the underground has been an interesting read so far, there's some good insight in those pages.
recently re-read through the nhk novel while waiting for 14 hours at the hospital. as for short stories, i read to build a fire not too long ago and i really liked it.
my next reads are gonna be lautréamont's chants de maldoror, liberi's fior di battaglia and lizars' a system of anatomical plates of the human body. anatomy manuals make great complementary material for fencing manuals.

I've been reading in and out Shahnameh. I'm only on book 2, can't say much about it besides liking where it is going so far.

I recently re-read nhk as well. This time I was surprised at how non-otakuish it is compared to the anime series. Still has the otaku angle obviously but the adaptation leaned way more into the otakuish qualities (for the better I'd say). The book is more just weirdly bohemian.

I just finished rereading Hatchet and 1984. Felt like revisiting my schooldays, turns out I think I remember more of them subconciously than I thought. Atleast it seems that way. Since it feels like my concerns are very similar to those, just much sharper then they once were.

>>8
if you like nlh check out kokoro. Stay away from the modern penguin translation though

i have been reading the Earthsea series by LeGuin. nostalgic, chill and thoughtful fantasy novels, that feel separate from stereotypical tolkein-esque fantasy. their light reads, especially as sped up audio books. i recommend them to anyone interested in fantasy storytelling, history and anthropology

>>19
I have good memories of reading these as a kid. Thoughtful is a good word to describe them. They felt more contemplative than other children's books. Good shit, maybe I need to go back and reread them and finish the series since I only read up to the third one.

https://casper.isotls.com/gotr-prologue/
By Mushoko Tensei author. Top Syosetsu author writes a time loop novel about being kidnapped in a room until he can become the top Syosetsu novelist.

wow cool

Here's some good shit:

Valencia, James Nulick
Animal Money, Michael Cisco
Inland, Gerald Murnane
Skin Elegies, Lance Olsen
Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson
Stories in the Worst Way, Garielle Lutz
Hopscotch, Julio Cortzar
The Fountains of Neptune, Rikki Ducornet

>>23
Hopscotch was 2 hard 4 me...
But maybe I will try to read it again and test my skillz...

Dune is pretty zeitgeist these days, and sure it's great and all. But "Destination : Void" the first book in the Pandora Sequence is peak Herbert. "The Jesus Incident" is pretty good too, but Void is on another level. So much done with so few characters.

Woot, my kinda thread
Been reading Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson. It's the final book in the Sprawl Trilogy, and sort of ties together the plots of the last two (Neuromancer and Count Zero) together, with a few returning characters.

I like it but it comes with an asterisk. Gibson's writing style is really hard to follow, and it isn't helped by the fact that Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero jump perspectives with each chapter, and have multiple protagonists.

Not to spoil, but he is doing it better in MLO than CZ since the stories start to come together halfway through, not just mostly at the end.

great book. do you like neal stephenson?

1Q84 - probably the most autistic book I've read (definitely more autistic than No Longer Human)

I love how Aomame - who was raised in a Apocalyptic christianity cult, tries to scientifically test her reality and has a hard time accepting she's been isekai-ed. But Tengo - an athiest math prodigy just is like "huh I guess things are magical now".
tengo is very nearly a based neet, but not because he is antisocial, just because he likes being in his house.
aomame is forced into neetdom and flourishes in it.

Ushikawa is definitely a failed normie who embraced his autisim.

then of course there's Eriko.

anyway. it's great.

I've just finished with Starship Troopers, by Robert A,. Heinlein, and I really like it. In fact it might just be one of my favorite books, period. Come for the power armoured military adventurism, stay for the gripping, personal depictions of war and the way it changes people, and the robust, no holds barred discussions on society, suffrage, the duty we have to eachother, and how war affects all of it.

>>27
And funny you should say that because I've also read Snow Crash and it's also really, really good.

>>27
I wasn't able to get my mind around Indonesian Cryptonomicon
was boring & hard to comprehend
but I had good time with Wintermute
>>29
I've heard this books kinda describes fash. Constant fight/struggle from the moment being born.
>>28
neat
we kind of living through apocalytpic dystopia ww3 with cultists sects, brainwashing

There are some interesting literature I've read, but maybe I'll share in another post

recently finished the first 5 foundation books
(foundation, foundation and empire, second foundation, foundation's edge, and foundation and earth)
the first three are aproximately a hundred times better than foundation's edge which is better by far than foundation and earth.
also the entire series is just kinda boring. like it definitely has some interesting ideas in it, but then I remember frank herbert exists and issac asimov seems like sellout - fraud.
I wanna find a novelist who makes frank herbert feel like a sellout - fraud.

so i just just finished kafka on the shore and now reading hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world.
and now imagining that all the murakami books take place in the same literary continuity.

I read that Minneapolis shooter's "manifesto" (it was just some dumb as journal full of whining). I can't believe I wasted an hour procrastinating on this. Typical discord neo-nazi meme brainrot. Another hour wasted on yet another non event that doesn't matter.

read the tenant by roland topor. It has a unique blend of surrealism and horror, with a main character who is slightly too relatable to me, as in I know I've had the exact same trains of thought he has in the book myself. Probably worrying given how that ends up. I'm no literature critic idk what to say about it. It does a good job at demonstrating the true horror of everyday life via this main character's psyche.

try not to get the idea that i am reading a lot because there are a lot of books on my list. id guess i sit down to read a small amount of one or two of these books about half of the days on a given week.

- rereading cat's cradle by kurt vonnegut with a friend, absolutely delighted to be returning to it. it is delightful in its whimsy and deeply inspirational towards my personal relationship with religion.

- picked up afro-american folk tales edited by roger d abrahams at the library, it's been very fun. the editor provides wonderful context and a well reasoned argument for his editing and selection decisions at the preface. the stories themselves are insanely funny and largely insightful in the good fables tend to be.

- found a copy of 2016 the best american short stories edited by junot diaz at a little free library. it excites me as i love anthologies but rarely feel compelled to read anything published in the last 20 years.

- enjoyed but had to pause the non violent communication book by marshall rosenburg 100% want to try and return to it soon since it feels it feels as though it functions like a guidebook on bomb defusal in the convesational realm. if you have problems with stuff like saying things that you regret later or not saying things that you wish you'd have said i would say looking into it, there are a lot of good introductions to it on blogs and youtube videos or just like wikipedia.

- very slowly reading a lover's discourse by roland barthes, the preface does a lot of work for this one since it's written in a somewhat unorthodox manner (it resembles both a dictionary and a treatise)... i haven't read that much aside from the preface but it's already conveyed a reality that's brought me to tears.

- been slow-going but nonetheless greatly enjoying rurouni kenshin, since it's one of the few manga i own and i can rarely bring myself to read manga on a screen, maybe i've been underutilizing my readers' functionalities.

read the first half of leni's state and revolution. hes constantly dunking on performative fakers who use marxist rhetoric but at their core are just shitlibs at best. guys cool.

>>35
she was a nazi, so this is obvious

i started reading ferrante's neapolitan novels last week and i surprised myself by how quickly i've been going through them. i'm currently on the third volume, maybe halfway through. i haven't read too many reviews or sought out any opinions but i did see one comment describing my brilliant friend as "slow", which is the exact opposite of my reading experince. i think the quartet is easy to read through (so far) because there's always something going on.

i was about to write something like "the best part of the novels so far is the way that time and family resemblances are treated" before realizing that's too trite and general an observation. I'll have to wait until i finish before i can even figure out for sure what ferrante's conception of history and family even are

Events in Gaza and the atmospheric pollution have led me to reread Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Well. it’s just not bleak and depressing enough. Adorno is too optimistic.

Almost finished reading 'Pessoa' by Richard Zenith. Pessoa were he to have been born one hundred years later, would likely be posting here right now with us.

>>39
I haven't read that biography, but Ive read 'The Book of Disquiet', and I'm inclined to agree with you. It's crazy how relatable he was.

Almost finished with confessions of a mask, enjoyed most of the first half but the end feels really boring. Like idk how many times this retard can lose his shit about not being able to love his gf. My eyes just kinda glaze over his neurotic faggot rants

>>41
Genuinely terrible book. I don't understand what people like about the books he wrote.

>>42
I also found Confessions of a Mask to be underwhelming. A large reason as to why it became so well-known was simply because it was the first major modern Japanese novel to explicitly tackle the psychological intricacies of homosexuality. It's kind of foundational to queer canon, in that sense. To be totally fair, Mishima was young (24, in the beginning of his career as a writer) when he wrote it.
That being said, Mishima was a great writer. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is particularly good. Very, very cathartic work. It's unironically kind of reminiscent of Death in Venice and the like, in how it portrays an obsessive protagonist who is ultimately driven to destruction upon being faced with an idealized beauty beyond his comprehension. I'd strong recommend it to anyone.

I've always found the idea of a "queer canon" suspicious. Psychological intricacies of homosexuality? Gimme a break. Penis goes in hole. Same shit as heteros. What intricacies are there?

>>44
Even if heterosexual attraction functions identically to homosexual attraction, our society doesnt treat it as such. Existing in a society where your sexual orientation is deemed as dirty and degenerate causes repression and neurosis, which can be interesting to explore in literature. Confessions of a Mask, for example, is mostly about Mishima's struggle against his larp of heterosexuality. Because the topic of existing as a homosexual in a heteronormative society was seldom explored at the time, Mishima's contributions were regarded as a fundamental part of the early body of gay literature.

Since we're talking about the queer canon: is anyone here a fan of Dennis Cooper?
His works are quite intense, but theyre extremely worthwhile... and particularly for those intimately familiar with the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5PYz_PV8Jc

>>43

Confessions of a Mask, for example, is mostly about Mishima's struggle against his larp of heterosexuality.

I don't see that at all. The book's title is Confessions of a Mask, not Confessions of the Man Behind the Mask. The MC is, by his own admission, an unreliable narrator. He's obsessed with death and glorifies suicide attackers, but when he has the opportunity to serve in the army he avoids it by feigning tuberculosis. He mentions being attracted to his female cousin and then there's Sonoko, but tells the reader (in first person) that he's not attracted to women like some kid embarrassingly insisting he's not into someone. His relationship with Sonoko reveal this to be a lie. He's unwilling to commit because marrying her doesn't line up with his self-image (mask). The only same-sex stuff that happens in the book is him jacking off. Mishima's point is that Kochan is just a mask, he's not using a mask to hide himself, because he's so insufferably deep into his own larp that there's nothing authentic behind the mask. He's insincere, self-destructive, and childlike.

Some Japanese critics have said that the book is a continuation of Nanshoku rather than a depiction of homosexuality. Kochan is attracted to older boys/men and (despite his protests) females too. This romance is asymmetrical and based on an age-gap, whereas Western homosexuality is exclusivist (anti-female) and symmetrical (both partners are of the same gender). The Western cultural invasion of Japan led to a decline of Nanshoku around the time Mishima was writing and this is reflected in Kochan's neurosis. But he also feels this sense of guilt when visiting a brothel towards the end of the book, not because he's a homosexual who's larping as straight, but because he feels that indulging in prostitution is doing something wrong just as indulging in Nanshoku.

Confessions of a Mask isn't about homosexuality, let alone Mishima himself. If this is a depiction of homosexuality, then gays really are as bad as homophobes make them out to be. Its bizarre that homosexuals have taken this book as a piece of gay literature and transform Mishima into a gay icon. I've read somewhere that Mishima hated Western style bar orientated gay culture. He had his own vision of sexuality based on his romantic nationalism and let's not forget he was married to a woman and had children. Mishima's erotic vision isn't gay and it isn't straight. In that sense, I can see him as a queer author who doesn't fit conventional social standards, but he's certainly not a gay author lamenting heteronormativity and this isn't gay literature.

ive been reading albert camus and it broke my brain in a good way

Niggerstani's Cyclonopedia was a massive waste of time.

>>3
I read the VALIS trilogy and most of Dick's other works back in my twenties. If you read his Exegesis first, it gives a lot of context to the rest of his stories.

Dennis Cooper's The Sluts is unironically a very good representation of what internet culture is like. The way that it's formatted is quite interesting, too -- one of the few novels whose story can only be told via text. (You) should definitely read it, if you dont find the subject matter too gross.

>>51
Just realized I already shilled him in this thread a month ago. Sorry, I legitimately forgot. Please ignore this new post. (°ー°〃)

Did you know that Dennis Cooper has a shota gif as his blog's banner? He also puts a lot of anime gifs into his gif novels!

>>51

The Sluts is a 2004 epistolary novel by American author Dennis Cooper. The novel is composed of posts on internet forums, transcriptions of tape recordings, and private emails. The focus is on Brad, a gay male sex worker, and others' attempts to ascertain his identity. Throughout the novel, characters relate stories of sexual and physical violence they have perpetrated or wish to perpetrate against Brad, though the veracity of their claims and of Brad's identity are disputed.

>>52
nah man I never would have checked the backlog. Cheers o/

>>53

the author has a shota gif as his blog's banner?

..oh

>>54
I'm serious! 0-0
denniscooperblog(dot)com

>>5
who is this "young autist"?