/lit/ - literature

He truly is risen. Hades where is your sting?

Finished: Negative Space, maybe too slow and repetitive at times but overall pretty cool, some very wonkers imagery towards the end.
Next: Gravity's Rainbow, meme book but 70 pages in and so far I'm really liking it.

Very interesting dive into aristocratic French culture and African ethnology. Also, it's a biography of Talleyrand … and we get some glimpses of Bolshevik Russia.
It's all over the place, but it never feels out of place. Calasso is a brilliant essayist able to tie these threads into a compelling meta narrative. There is a narrative of sorts and it indirectly involves the author's studies. The prose is interesting from page to page and if you give the book some time and don't mind the varying topics, then this is a great read for the more experimental and culturally bougie reader.

Christian Kracht’s new novel Air. Kind of disappointed, though—mostly because I expected a different book. But the cover is cool, and maybe that’s part of the reason I was misled into thinking it would be a story with a totally different atmosphere.
Now mostly reading non-fiction: an introduction to ancient political philosophy, and a (at least in the Western hemisphere) obscure book on the history and theory of Russian monarchism. Seems to be a gem.

>>9
Thanks for the insight! It has been on my 'to read' for a while

Wow! Was /lit/ really a whopping total of 11 people? I'm not surprised.
The last book I finished was Faulkner's Flags in the Dust. I have read Sartoris, but that was probably 7 years ago, so I can't say how different they are from each other. It felt about the same to me. But man, did I forget how funny Faulkner is! The housenigger character of Simon is hilarious! Every time Simon appeared he'd make me laugh with his ornery ways and his pompous view of himself being the lead housenigger. The funniest Simon moments are when Bayard takes him on a wild ride in his roadster and Simon starts moaning "OH LAWD!" and clutchcing his lucky rabbit's paw. The other one is when the church Simon is the treasurer wants the money entrusted to him for the building of the Second Baptist Church, but he gave it to a nigger woman he wanted to screw, so gets Old Bayard mixed up paying back the money.
I'm now reading the Roman de Renart. I'm enjoying it so far, but the first few branches are really just variations on the same basic story without adding anything new. It's only after the first few that you start getting functionally new tales.

I recently read Elric for the first time, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
It's delightfully simple. I am missing all of the annoying DnD-isms and grand world building concepts, the competition in justifying fantasy and fiction from the viewpoint of rational scientific society and history.
It's just fiction, it's enjoyable fiction. Especially the first book is such decent read.
It really reminded me of the way I felt reading Howard's Conan stories…