unga bunga me eat rock but at least me no berry picker

>>8
>berry picker post

ooga ooga sir me eat funny polka dot flowers actually

Just started The Recognitions.

>>114
Same, it's an amazing read.

Damn I last posted 11 months ago huh? (>>27). Might as well update some books I've read.

I chose to listen to Roadside Picnic and the audiobook I chose was more like a middle ground between a dramatization and an audiobook which I actually really enjoyed. There was a constant droning ambiance in the background almost like the sounds of a wasteland and I felt it fit the story well. As a fan of the STALKER games this was actually a great read because I could truly visualize everything that was describes as anomalies and artifacts are common in the STALKER games. I do wish we got to see more of the exploration into the zone as it's obviously the most interesting part of the book. I also really enjoyed Red interacting with his daughter who was a lively and happy child in the earlier years until eventually becoming a mute like all children of people who enter the zone become. I found it very touching he tried his hardest to give her a normal childhood, even paying off the other people in the apartment block he lived in to treat her normally and it was a shame to see it all be for nothing. The ending did confuse me a bit but I understood it after a bit of searching here and there. I did enjoy it a lot though.

I took a long break from reading for several reasons and tried to get back into it with several books but each of them didn't really stick. I tried listening to Jeeves and Wooster as my mother said it was a funny comedy but I didn't really get it. I tried to read Catch 22 but found it somewhat boring as it went on. I tried to read Journey to the Center of the Earth but couldn't find an audiobook good enough, one I found would change readers every three chapters which was incredibly annoying. I did read The Idiot through a dramatization because I didn't want to really listen to the book and I really liked it, it skipped a few chapters but I just re-read chapter summaries on what I missed. The final section was harrowing.

The last book I did finish was Stoner. That was a really good book, like surprisingly so. I was hooked from the first chapter. I tried to find what to read next after The Idiot but couldn't find anything good before checking /lit/'s top 100 books and picking one that seemed cool which landed me on Stoner. I pretty much understood why it was a top 100 for /lit/ as it's basically about an r9k user's liPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

I've been going through Discworld lately. It's hardly high brow, but I'm having a good time. Recently I've finished Going Postal and Making Money, and I think Moist Von Lipwig is probably my favourite protagonist in the series. He's smart but also deeply flawed and it's always great watching him bullshit his way out of situations. I'm thinking of picking up Raising Steam as it's the last Von Lipwig book, but I also hear Pratchett was under the more severe effects of his illness around that time and it supposedly shows. Sounds depressing to me.

So I'm currently reading Guards! Guards! Instead. I've already read a few of The Watch series and it's odd seeing them as a disheveled group of four guys. Fun all the same though, it's like Hot Fuzz in Discworld.

>>68 I enjoyed Roadside picnic a good too, though I read after having watched Tarkovsky's movie version. Strugatskie also did a 'Snail on the slope' novel that's touches on similar ideas staged in a similar context. Pushing this a notch further away from the gloomy buzzing environment while still staying true to the core problem of order and chaos, human and nature I have another amazing rec, Frontier by Can Xue. I'd love to have all three physical books to sit together on the shelf, but have only the last one.

Well I'm back (>>68) Still slowly reading books, still slowly exercising and still failing to lose weight…also for some reason spoilers didn't work so I deleted my previous post and wrote this again.

I read and finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay about 4 months ago or so, it was a good book but felt meandering at times, also for a book that was set before, during and after WW2 there is not a lot of WW2 in it. Like seriously, a good chunk of the book is like 1939-41 then there's about 5 chapters on the war and then a big timeskip to the end of the war. I get that the war isn't *that* big of a deal but it kinda was in the book since one of the characters was literally a jew that escaped from europe and wrote comics in America with a seething hatred of the Nazi's that I'm just surprised there wasn't much about him finally letting it all out on German soldiers or something halfway through. As for the other main character, I was surprised he turned out to be gay because to me it kind of came out of nowhere but did lead to interesting parts of the book closer to the end where he was tried in court for being gay and had to defend himself and everyone assumed he was due to his "odd" lifestyle and how he always seemed to add child sidekicks to the comics he worked. A decent book with some fun moments.

After that I think I read Piranesi and legitimately it might be my favourite book I ever read. It's written in the form of a diary with a very cool dating system, instead of something like "3rd October 2012" it'd be "the year the albatross came to the south western halls". It's pretty much about a man who seems to exist in a house full of rooms and rooms of marble statues. He explores these rooms and tries to document it all. That's his entire world. The house seems to exist in its own plane, of existence as well, birds fly in and out of it all the time and sea surrounds it for miles, sometimes it rises and he has to find higher ground or drown. He's not alone but there's only one other person he has seen that he calls "The Other" and he reports to him a week or so, as time goes on Piranesi begins to question his past and just who exactly he is and when questioning "The Other" about it learns he's asked that question before but cannot remember how. Without spoiling any more of the book, it's truly fascinating, and a real treat for the mind's eyPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>18
> first four books of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series
What prevents you from embracing this amazing work of art? It only gets more frustrating, but when you get used to it, you can finally delve into the atmosphere. I think all of the drawbacks are to be blamed on his wife. Women only exist to manipulate you and give you trouble, and they can do it in their sleep! I bet she has been sticking her nose into his work all the while!

>>104
>just another day of living the masshole life
least i got my dunks

When I was a kid, I loved the fantastical, especially science fiction. I would try to impart these stories and tropes into my own life, fictionalizing it as much as I could. As time has passed, that has quite changed: realistic fiction is my bread and butter. I do still enjoy fantasy and science fiction, but nowadays I do my best to attribute even the most abstract, futuristic, alien fantasy stories with elements from my own real life. I find that this has helped me make more sense of both fiction and my own life, though sometimes I feel guilty about the latter. With all of that said, I also find that the stories that offend me the most are stories that match my real life very closely.

>>31

Depends on your religion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

in the zamonia books there is a race that feeds by eating.

>>63
*by READING

Just found out that in the english language the personal pronoun "i" must always be capitalised, are they out of their fucking mind? Who made this shitty rule? Capitalised letters are only allowed at the start of a new sentence and for proper nouns, all the other uses should be prohibited.

>>102
Skill issue.

There’s a show produced by NHK called Yokai narrated by Michael Dylan Foster which looks at various yokai stories and their origin. You might find it interesting.

Obligatory reading.

INFOBLOB MEGA PACK
http://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13gNcyzC7QvfTbXcVSqorj1pZmFb-csP6
google drive easy to use interface
.
.
lots of reading material

Barefoot Gen.

>>73
>frogs
>/pol/ speak
>shitty academic publications
>eugenics
>negativity
Yeah no thanks. Trash reading list. Obvious bot post.

>>74
It's an obvious bot post, but you clearly don't know how to read the thread. Why are you posting manga on a literature board?

Manga isn't lit? I-It has pages... FINE! Here's a book!

Foundation of the loli genre. Enjoy.

>>60
The standard recording of Tannhauser is the Solti, there's not many good recordings of that one unfortunately. Tannhauser is definitely the best starting place for Wagner, very simple, a more traditional opera but still brilliant drama and music.

But before you get into the operas I would recommend listening to all the major excerpts from each, like the overtures, siegfried's funeral music, parsifal verwandlungsmusik, pilgrim's chorus, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COhLnFwGaT0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXh5JprKqiU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s88hmJ_osjY

>>61
Thank you for your reply, I will start with Tannhäuser then. I own the recording by Konwitschny and a libretto, so I will likely listen to that one instead of Solti. Also because Fischer-Dieskau is one of the few singers I actually manage to understand.

I also remembered a funny Wagner-related anecdote from the circle around Stefan George: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBk002KDYEE&t=1724

>>62
A George related Wagner story! that's pretty rare. I'm surprised he didn't stay awake for it, since some of George's earlier poems (like Algabal and Litanei) are on Wagnerian topics, but I guess they must have been inspired more by general culture at the time than a specific interest in Wagner.

Thanks for the cool story.

>>59
Quick run down of Wagner? New to this subject.

>>66
Wagner was the greatest and most influential composer after Beethoven, wrote operas early on in his career but later rejected the idea for the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (total-artwork), in which all the arts join together in equal importance, which is something that has been unseen since the Greeks, hence it’s a return to both the culture and art of Ancient Greece, but with the advantage of the full development of the arts of music and painting, which Ancient Greece only had in a more primitive form. So Wagner was equally a dramatist and theorist as a composer, and his dramas and theories have had an enormous influence on literature and various important philosophers in modernity.

His sunken eyes were fixed on the screen. Its incandescent glow was all that illuminated his room, engulfed in blackness like a monastic cell. He couldn't feel the wet clothes sticking to the flesh. He was elsewhere. The keyboard, slick with sweat, projected his soul through into an endless stream of content. He could feel it surging beneath his skin like heroin through an addict's veins. Bare breasts, orgies of flesh, hands caressing nude body parts decapitated by the lens, cute girls in idol dress copulating, moaning, penetrated by hordes of faceless men. Intensity increasing. And then it ended. Drenched in his own fluids, he fell back into his seat exhausted tearing the wires from the headphone jack. Suddenly he was back in the real world. Fallen like Adam from a cybernetic Garden of Eden he felt like reality had suddenly been pulled from beneath him. Yanked from the machine by the limits of the body's biochemistry he fell back to earth too mentally drained to move. Pure bliss overcome now by a deep inner feeling of longing and disgust and that icy cold shiver brought on by the familiar pangs of guilt. He longed for pain. He longed for pleasure. For something. Sprawled back in his seat like a corpse he glanced over to his S26 .. 03:12 AM. "Damn... 4 hours? fuck... work tomorrow...." Still breathing heavily he closed his eyes and tried vainly to sleep.

>>37
Then, out of no where, a massive Gondola came bursting into the room and murdered the main character in cold blood (he didn't like him). The creature, the Gondola, showered with brown fur, had no arms, was about seven feet tall, and bared the face of bear. It spoke in a fast paced Finnish prose; so as to confuse passer-bys. The Gondola then walked out of the room and into the kitchen and began to prepare...

>>38
... a continental breakfast: bacon and eggs, orange juice, breakfast sausages. Despite the otaku clutter in the bedroom, main character kept a well-stocked kitchen. Maybe he had wanted to become a cook. Maybe. The Gondola wiped its forehead. The steam from the bacon and eggs crept into its matted fur, twisted with mud dingleberries, and it made the Gondola feel soggy. But the Gondola soldiered on with the breakfast, whistling some Finnish folk song all the while. He had forgotten the lyrics. Something about a revenant. If it had stopped whistling, the Gondola might have noticed that in the bedroom ...

Gondola stopped. He begun to scan the room for information, anything that could piece together the worthless otaku he'd just relieved of existence. He started at the employee ID pulled from a cum drenched wallet "Kirito Wakamatsu. Age: 26. Technician" Employer? "Himazawa Corporation" Slowly begun to contort his face, painfully tearing flesh and sinew, reshaping his bones as his master had taught him until he bore the resemblance of the man he'd just killed. This is it. This is how he'd hide from THEM, by hijacking the otaku's identity he could lay low all while infiltrating the Himazawa clan to boot. The Gondola went back to whistling the folk song but decided to finish the JAV film still running on Wakamatsu's PC. Nudity was a good thing. He needed to shape the rest of his body to look like the otaku and the semen dripping from the seats was the perfect DNA sample. Gondola stood up, penis still erect, and begun to cry a heroic villainous laugh, even though he's the good guy in this story despite murdering a defenseless computer programmer and defiling his corpse. Whatever. You should be more worried about THEM.

Ham on Rye - Bukowski
legendary, not technically 'beat' but close enough

Dharma Bums - Kerouac
Enjoyed it a bit more than On the Road

https://www.beatdom.com/allen-ginsbergs-first-trip-africa/

Article about Ginsberg and his failed(ish) sex tour in Africa

Desolation Angels is Kerouac's best, the poetry of Gary Snyder is good if you feel like blowing your mushroom cap.

>>39
Live by 3 of Kerouacs old houses. Love lots of his writtings. Read a bit of Bill and Allen and Herbert and others too, but none of them hold a candle to Kerouac.

Naked Lunch... normies are forever filtered by it because it's actually meant to be read as a manual to deprogram your brain from MKUltra conditioning and other forms of external programming.

>>45
Read the 'Lunch, Mugwamp definitely is a filter. The book has many interesting concepts and ideas, but it ain't my favorite Beat book.

>>34
Reposted source. The added parenthesis ruins the link.
https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1978209.htm