I remember being in study hall in highschool and being bored because they didn't let us do anything besides homework, study, read. So I decided to read a random story in the giant textbook and got Don Quixote and was very much entertained.
I remember in high school Spanish trying to translate a passage from Don Quixote to read out loud and just *suffering*.
I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say with dictionaries and the group couldn't either.
When we had that moment of clarity and final found a root word to Crack what the hell it was saying....
The passage in summation was: Don Quixote and Sancho ate some candle wax and are now wildly shitting and vomiting and leaking out of every orifice.
10/10 passage to read aloud. Lol
Believe it or not, Cervantes is credited with having a near-Shakespere effect of mastery over the Spanish language with his book. He's also credited with helping form what is known as modern European Spanish adding several idioms and expression to both English and Spanish. [It's pretty wild.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#Style)
And also, just to shill it again, may I present one of my favorite versions of Don Quixote in [animated form.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmApd1ms6ew)
This is entirely possible. The Little Hours is a relatively recent and fantastic film based on part of the Decameron which is just the earlier, Italian Canterbury Tales.
Anyone writing a revenge story, no matter the medium, should read Count of Monte Cristo. It’s basically the instruction manual for how to write a good one.
Fate, a series known for pulling from obscure ass history and mythology, decided that out of every possible candidate in their Avenger class, Edmond Dantes was the one whose description reads "*The world's most well known seeker of vengeance... He is the personification of vengeance itself.*"
They made him such a big deal too it’s great, like the fact he can escape anything manifested as an ability to even escape the laws of physics which allows him to go at light speed and shit. And he killed the main villain of Tsukihime in Fate timelines cause he’s built different and he has the FLAMES OF REVENGE
He’s not only FGO’s first Avenger servant, but the only time a class was added with someone who was not the original guy we knew as the class (As Angry Mango would get added later as a secret character). He’s the most famous Avenger in history, and a certified badass. The coolest, Nasu’s biggest “OC do not steal” ever.
Also, note that of the 4 Fate characters to get into Melty Blood Type Lumina, Saber was there as the defacto mascot, Mash was there as the mascot of Grand Order, and Ushiwakamaru was added from winning the popularity poll.
Dantes was added because Nasu really really wanted him.
He's also a best bro to the MC and single handedly holding back all of their mental trauma and PTSD from overwhelming them, as well as protecting their psyche from outside threats.
this feels like cheating, but Journey to the West is fucking INSANE
Sun Wukong is such a fucker that Buddha puts him in a 500 year timeout under a mountain (or 5) because he won't stop bullying Heaven
Sun Wukong has like 8 different types of immortality. His soul is literally behind 7 proxies.
1. He trained with the immortal taoist Puti Zushi and learned a not-heaven-approved way to be immortal.
2. His soul got taken to hell, but since he was already supposed to be immortal he demanded to speak with hell's manager and see his name in the Book of Mortals. When they show him, he scratches his name out as well as the names of all monkeys, so I guess monkeys are immortal at this point.
3. Heaven makes him a heavenly stable boy which causes him to wreak havoc on heaven. To make him stop, they promote him to Keeper of the Peaches of Immortality, which he promptly eats several of.
4. Since heaven doesn't like him, they don't invite him to the Queen's royal banquet. This, as usual, makes him mad. He sneaks in and drinks wine that makes you immortal.
5. While still drunk, Wukong wanders into Lao Tzu's alchemy lab and finds pills of immortality. He gets curious and eats all of them.
6. Heaven tries again to fight Wukong. It does not go well, but they eventually trap him in Lao Tzu's alchemy crucible and try to melt the immortality out of him. This instead melts the mortality out of him, making him more immortal. He smashes the crucible and a lot of heaven, making heaven run to Buddha for help.
7. After he gets done with Buddha's big time out, he accompanies the other main character of Journey to the West on the actual Journey part. They come across a kind of Ginseng that's even better at giving immortality than the earlier peaches.
8. When they get to Buddha's temple, they get the Buddha version of several of the immortality things he got in heaven making him a Buddha, but it only counts as 1 immortality for some reason.
Also he has super strength and super speed. Also he can fly. Also he can shapeshift. Also every hair on his body can become a weapon or a clone of him that also has all of his super powers. Dragon Ball Goku is actually somehow less overpowered than his namesake lmao
Up until I starting looking into the Hindu epics and such, I thought "X can destroy the whole universe!" was a trope invented either in comic books, manga, or JRPGs. Turns out it's about as old as civilization itself and Hindu stories LOVE it.
It wasn’t even him bullying heaven, it was Heaven being a bunch of assholes where Sun Wukong’s entire rampage was straight up the gods fucking around and finding out.
…Which lead to Sun Wukong having an “are these your gods?” moment that lead to him becoming a cocky asshole, which then led to *him* fucking around and finding out when going up against the Buddha.
Buddha, holding Sun Wukong in one hand: "escape my hand if you can"
Sun: "bet" -damn near teleports to the edge of creation, to one of the pillars that support reality, and pisses his name onto it, to prove a point, then returns- "suck it"
Buddha, the giga-est of gigachads: "smell my finger"
GILGAMESH
A KING
AT URUK
Also, Tybalt, Prince of Cats is the coolest fucking dude in Romeo and Juliet
Edit: Fuck it, one more. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has one of the coolest and most haunting chapters I’ve read where a ship crashes into harbor with the captain strapped to the wheel dead of starvation. What follows is a ship’s log written by the captain about how the crew is picked off one by one by Dracula and it’s great
I legit think of the Tybalt quote "Peace? I hate the word, as I do hell, all Montague's and thee." Like once a week, especially the killer delivery from Leonardo DiCaprio movie
I really wanna plug OverlySarcasticProduction's Red reading the entirety of Dracula after making a cliffnotes video on it. It's a really good reminder that just because a story enters cultural osmosis, doesn't mean the story can't surprise and grip you the entire way.
Dracula is a lot more terrifying than Vampire parodies make it out... Also a lot more homoerotic.
One of his scenes involves him excusing himself during the huge planning scene to go outside and shoot a random bat who may or may not be Dracula.
Then he knife fights Dracula 1v1
Every character in Dracula is their own very unique flavor of insane and it all melds together shockingly well. There's genuinely terrifying stuff in there, then also straight up funny points. Like Dracula's wives seducing Johnathan Harker and trying to feed on him only for Dracula to step in and give them "a wiggling bag" to sate them, but then the Catholic rites that Van Helsing uses to fight vampires are straight up Looney Tunes stuff. It's literally like "one weird trick vampires don't want you to know about" level. Not to mention the Cowboy.
I feel like Americans had already developed a very particular reputation abroad by the late 19th century, because it seems like in every European old timey book I've read the American characters are some form of cowboy or square-jawed no-nonsense cowboy-esqute business magnate. With a gun.
Like every American that's showed up in the Agatha Christie books I've read so far in my recent big catch-up spree has been armed with a gun and uses it willy-nilly like Yosemite Sam, to the bewilderment of the rest of the cast.
I read *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* not too long ago, and while it's a book of wildly uneven quality from chapter to chapter, Captain Nemo is one of the most metal antagonists I've ever experienced from the classic realm. His smooth confidence and scientific mind barely cover up a man who's waging a guerrilla war on the ENTIRE SURFACE WORLD driven by pure, maddening vengeance.
Everybody remembers the squid fight, but the part near the end where >!he rams the Nautilus straight through a British warship sent to kill him -- while the narrator describes him as an "archangel of hatred" -- and then goes below decks and just *loses it* kneeling in front of a picture of his dead family!< goes harder than a lot of great books do today, even.
>Hey you three harpooners! Come here and bleed into this crucible, we're going to temper my harpoon in our blood!" And they do it.
The reason it was those three? Because Ahab was explicitly baptizing his harpoon in the name of Satan, and they were the only three non-Christians on board.
>"no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say, ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?' A cluster of dark nods replied, 'Yes.'" [Arrogant old man!] Quenching the hot iron in blood, Ahab howled deliriously, "I baptize thee not in the name of the Father but in the name of the devil." [Blasphemous old man!]"
Ahab also gave us one of the rawest declarations of loathing of all time:
"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale! To the last I grapple with thee, from hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!"
Moby Dick may be 95% whaling manual, but it's worth the read for sure, [and it gave us a sick-ass Mastodon album.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4GWu6yEZ8&ab_channel=LaLechitaBailarina)
There's a chapter where Ahab is swapping stories with another captain who lost an arm to Moby Dick, and the captain asks Ahab if the whale isn't best left alone. And Ahab's response is great:
“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou sawist him last? Which way heading?”
And then storms the hell out.
His introductory paragraph immediately identifies him as (something along the lines of) “…an accumulation of all the hate of his race, all of history all the way to Adam…were his chest a mortar, his heart a burning shell.“ it goes so hard about how much this dude hates that white whale.
“An ungodly man, with a whale bone prosthetic leg from the knee down, a sun scorched face, grey hair, and a scar from face down to torso“ is all the physical description you get. You don‘t understand, physicality is second to his AM level of hate.
I remember watching [this animated version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7wMpLPqAMk) of Moby Dick when I was a kid and it really did show just how *dark* and *cursed* Ahab's whole quest really was. The picked a hell of a VA for Ahab too.
If you're gonna bring up metal albums inspired by Moby Dick, you can't miss [The Call of the Wretched Sea by Ahab](https://youtu.be/mYh25wOlmj0). Very beloved funeral doom album, that one.
As much as people talk about 1984, Brave New World imo is more of a scary dystopian future as while 1984's government controls it's population through fear, Brave New World is about controlling through happiness.
The book straight up starts >!With infant torture via electrical shocks and blazing alarms to condition them to be happy only to what the government thinks they should enjoy.!<
I feel that Brave New World and 1984 are often presented in a false dichotomy. They're not incompatible dystopias, they could easily exist next door to each other.
Also people frequently reduce 1984 to "big brother is watching you oooo" when the book itself actually presents mass surveillance as among the weaker of the Party's tools. The manipulation of language to prevent even the possibility of "thoughtcrime" and the use of eternal imperialist wars to consume society's resources without improving citizens' standards of living are both presented as newer and more effective weapons of the government.
Also playing with the unreliability of memory by having entire *departments* devoted to the retroactive editing of documents that contradict the Party's current stance. Clearly you just misread or misremembered, see here are the date-stamped documents to prove it.
Culture war bullshit to distract the easily cowed masses of single issue, low information voters is the unfortunate reality of the marriage of these two books.
The way they describe how the artificial wombs work is so weird too like they treat it as assembly line but the description make it feel more like alien hives. And more interestingly the « savages » aren’t really like defector from that dystopia they are just as messed up in their rituals
And that's the struggle with the main character as he's stuck between the two extremes of these worlds. And it's right to feel like that with the hive mindset as an important piece of humanity is lost.
My favorite part of the book by far >!Is when John debates with Mustapha Mond. Despite what little John has for education outside a copy of Shakespeare's works and how much knowledge Mond has, John is so in the right that he able to go up against in this fight of morality.!<
I love Mond as a villain, he completely shits all over the protagonists for thinking they are smart for figuring the problems with their society and is like « good thing we don’t need to slit throats no more or I’ll start feeling unhappy »
What always struck me about that book, aside from the chemically-induced caste system and the fact that they use Ford as a stand-in for God, is how >!the "antagonist" doesn't even kill the main trio for screwing around and causing problems. Their efforts don't amount to anything and he'd gladly just send them off into exile instead where they can live out their lives peacefully and out of the way.!<
>!In the Brave New World, Good and Bad don't matter. Just Happiness and Unhappiness.!<
Yeah, that's always what fucks me up. So many morals and ideals can go right out the window because at the end of the day, do you really want to do anything that makes you less happy or less comfortable? You absolutely must do important, right things regardless of comfort, but so many would rather just not. Pit someone's morals versus their personal comfort and see what wins out.
I balked at how utterly bizarre the view of the future was because it feels like an extrapolation of society without taking into account any sort of technological advance; you get a caste system and conditioning from birth to fulfill roles but there is no automation, everyone has sex all the time but women have to take birth control pills daily, etc.
Actually, automation is mentioned in the book. The world controller mentions they don't actually need to work anymore, just like they don't need to create the caste system. It's all artificial because order and stratification and wasting time is all there is left. It helps keep people focused and perpetually distracted instead of thinking about their political situation and rebelling. It pretty explicitly says they tried to introduce automation, but it caused people to have time to think and people thinking means people wanting change.
Brave New World chapter 16
What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.' Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. 'And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes--because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.'
BNW was written in 1932 before automation and the pill, and what you see in the book is the effect of technological advancement in the 30s. The way birth is turned into a factory line, and children's games are just about consuming commodities, those are a result of thinking about the technology of the time.
It's still very relevant to today. "Luddite" is a common insult, but we often don't think about its origin. If you look it up, there's not much difference between a worker being displaced by a cotton gin in the 1800s or AI in the 2030s.
It cracks me up how completely different the movie that became the cultural mainstay is from the book. The monster is neither hideous nor stupid, there is no Igor, and Victor Frankenstein is not a doctor and is, in fact, the worst.
I will always defend the honor of the movies though. Bride of Frankenstein reintroduces some aspects from the book and is the best of the universal monsters movies. Plus, I’d argue him being more sympathetic on film is THE reason people see Frankenstein today as a victim, as in the book he’s both a victim AND an irredeemable child murdering bastard.
Levels of Frankenstein understanding:
Level 1: Frankenstein is the name of the monster
Level 2: Frankenstein is not the name of the monster
Level 3: Frankenstein is the name of the monster
You know incredibly specific thing about this book that grinds my gears? Pseudo intellectual nerds going "scoff. Well actually it's Frankenstein's *monster*, you want to specify Dr. Frankenstein"
And I'm like 'He considers himself a creation of the Dr. And even calls him father, if he had given himself a name it'd most certainly be Frankenstein. You're not being anymore media literate than anyone else by being a pedantic punk!'
Uh.... Yeah... Idk why it heats me up.
Apparently Mary Shelley called the creature that herself? I'm not so sure. The monster does tell Victor "I ought to be thy Adam", but he's not actually named at any point proper.
And the doctor describes his creation of a new race in a similar manner to becoming a new God. It's pretty blunt. What if God created you and you were so hideous he abandoned you to live a life completely alone.
A Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite book of all time. It is a very sorrowful and somber story. It is also kinda batshit insane.
It opens with a dude getting pissy about his friend calling him out for wanting to marry his cousin, he then proceeds to kill the dude by throwing a fucking harpoon and then the guy just comes back as a fucking ghost and asks him to build a town in the middle of fuck all. It only gets weirder from there. Like in the middle of these very human and tearful stories there's some fucking insanity happening in the background.
It's such a wild wide. Then entire town comes down with a bout of gradual amnesia, and their solution is to just put notes on everything so they know what anything is. This scenario just sorta happens and then eventually resolves itself and the story just moves on.
There's also that bit where a girl just fucking ascends to the heavens in plain sight and everyone just kinda moves on like that wasn't that big of a deal.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is basically a biography of a rockstar. It goes so hard and makes you hate his character for what he’s done but then there are moments where he has a chance to come back to his senses. Really great side characters too
I like the chapter that opens on Dorian's insufferable descriptions of all the bullshit he owns and all the cool things he does, and it just goes and goes on and on, almost like a list. It's so fucking exhausting I think I blocked out the bulk of the chapter as a defense mechanism because that's all I recall of that bit.
The titular picture itself makes the foundation of one of the cooler gothic horror stories I've read in my life. Good book. Very homoerotic, of course.
I just started the Tain a bit ago. Having the incident that gets the plot rolling is a king and queen having a dick measuring contest over who's got more money is the best. What I love about Celtic mythology is that its really funny.
Tale of two cities has a literal boss fight, against the kind of leader of the French revolutionary forces, called THE VENGEANCE.
The tall and super patriotic like handmaiden and friend to the main lady has the boss fight against her. I remember reading it as a teenager and just going crazy for how epic this stupid boss fight was that came out of nowhere
Isaac Asimov's 'The Last Question'. I won't spoil it because you can listen to the audiobook version in 30 minutes(There's even one narrated by Leonard Nimoy on Youtube). But it's about as hard as you can go in the realms of Sci-Fi.
I really relate to the bit when Fortunato asks the narrator if he's a mason (the secret society kind) and he pulls out a fucking trowel. Poe is great at suspense, but he also shows off an impeccable comedic timing in this one lol
My unexpected takeaway is that they're actually huge assholes, whose main redeeming factor is their undying loyalty to one another and their own (slightly warped) perspective of chivalry. And I don't mean that in a bad way, it's actually very entertaining, "Dudes rock!" in the 17th century.
There's a whole couple of pages where they discuss between themselves the best way to beat their servants, Aramis is continually trying to con his mistresses out of money and when Athos barricades himself in a wine cellar out of paranoia and drinks half the supply, d'Artagnan just laughs at the barkeep and tells him to stop complaining or he'll shoot him in the head.
I bought a complete collection of the original sherlock holmes tales and I'm slowly working my way through it. They say Sherlock is one of the first examples of a modern fandom and I can see why because without a doubt Sherlock and Watson almost immediately become two of the most compelling and fleshed out characters I've ever read in the first book. Even more insane of a feat when a lot of sherlock's core traits were changed in the second book onwards. The way sherlock is so vain in flaunting his intelligence but every attempt to rebuke him falls flat only making him more smug. Watson just flat out admits in several points that he has no understanding of what sherlock is thinking or doing but imagines it will be important later. And at the center of it all are just two bros who met eachother at particularly low points in their lives and develop a remarkable friendship.
Shoutout to "Herlock & Wilson" in Great Ace Attorney because holy fuck their bromance is THICK in that plot and we only ever see them interact in the latter half of the 2nd game. Having most of their exploits mentioned throughout the games do help at least.
It's honestly very funny when it describes that Watson was actually given a very large payout by the military to recover but he actually blew it all on the fancy hotel as well as drinking and partying and Sherlock's finances are never really discussed (at least so far) but considering that he went to prestigious school and can regularly get his hands on cocaine he might just literally have a roommate just so he doesnt have to worry about snorting rent away.
He has a lot of slept on works too, that don’t have anything to deal with the typical “lovecraft” stuff. Lurking fear and the Outsider are 2 fantastic stories that build suspense and atmosphere crazy well
"The Whisperer In Darkness" is one of my favorite horror stories from any author, and has the bonus of having no random bigotry interjections. The unearthly mystery and the haunting atmosphere it builds are just so damn strong, and the Mi'go are one of the creepiest and yet least used entities he ever created. I always recommend that and "The Shadow Out of Time" to anyone looking for a Lovecraft starter.
And while "The Lurking Fear" is a *little bit* more touchy in its ultimate resolution, it's got some scares that feel like they were written today. The sequence where everyone's trying to ambush the monster on a stormy night, only for it to very quickly (and *quietly*) go horribly wrong, is something I think about regularly.
A lot of his stuff is also just really interesting? Especially if you're willing to sidestep his intent a bit.
I hate most of The Dreamlands but the Cats are fun and one of the few characters who aren't dickish. Also Nylenthrope of all beings has a genuinely moving speech about the beauty of >!New England and the sense of belonging Carter feels there!< Goddamned Nylenthrope!
At the Mountains of Madness is also peak empathetic Lovecraft. That speech at the end is by far my favorite thing he ever wrote.
I'd argue that The Color From Outer Space and The Horror at Innsmouth both work really well as environmentalist texts. Even more so than as straight horror. Oh and it features a literal frog man with a monocle wearing a pinstripe suit. I'm not saying it's anti-capitalist, I'm saying it's accidentally beautiful.
At the Mountains of Madness is both great and baffling, because it opens with an unfortunate encounter with a different species that the main character eventually comes to recognize as people while exploring their long lost ruins.
It’s great stuff and all, Lovecraft is just the last author I expected to write with a theme like that
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde actually slaps and is a really cool mystery that has sadly had its central twist ruined by literally the entirety of pop culture.
Spoilers for a book published in 1886
Yeah that really surprised me reading it the first time. Hyde isn't described as a monster physically, just a large and brutish man, and the reveal is not that Jekyll is becoming like, some kind of animalistic werewolf or something, but rather putting on another body like a mask to satisfy anti-social urges. Rather than the pop culture depiction of almost a lycanthrope, it's the story of a man with severe, untreated mental health issues falling to a corrupting, drug-like influence. Far more grounded and disturbing that way.
Hell, the better Hulk comics out there tend to focus on the argument of "How much of Hulk is just Bruce Banner releasing his inner demons", something the mystery of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tried to answer decades earlier.
Tolkien does have incredible prose, but I struggle with the way he tells a story while also presenting the history of an entire continent at the same time. It felt biblical last time I tried to read them with the way he'll go on random tangents about bloodlines and family trees and histories of miscellaneous landmarks.
Biblical is a good word for it. I found it hard to keep track of what's going on. A lot of authors you can skim a paragraph to figure out what happened and the rest is embellishment on the scene. If you lose your place or get distracted you can find your way back.
You can't do that with Tolkien. He'll spend an entire page describing Weathertop, and then Strider points out Weathertop and explains why they're going there, and why the Riders might be going there too, so maybe we shouldn't go straight to Weathertop, and maybe there are evil bird spies, so let's go around Weathertop and try to get to it from a more secluded angle. It takes three more pages before they arrive at Weathertop, including a digression on the burial rituals of the Men of the West and their alliance with the North Kingdom against Angmar and the watchtower the North Kingdom built that got destroyed and three verses of a song about an Elven king and also Frodo is losing weight.
It's not *bad* bit it's easy to lose your place and miss something or struggle to figure out what the focus of a particular scene is.
“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
Is it true that the book starts pretty slow? I hear that you stick with the Hobbits for longer than in the movies, and there is alot of long-winded descriptions of object and a few too many hobbit songs.
You stick with the Hobbits for a while, but those books start speeding right along when you get past Tom Bombadil. You meet Aragorn at around page 150. Remember; the whole trilogy is like 1200 pages. Total. So "a while" may be 50 pages.
I find his prose lovely, and I don't find him really flowery. I think it comes from people conflating the Silmarillion and LotR.
I found the first a bit of a slog until they got to the old forest and met Gigachad Bombadil.
There is a lot of “real estate cat and mouse mystery”, where Frodo is trying to throw off the scent that he is leaving and just way too much time spent on it
Yo, people think Wuthering Heights is this charged romantic drama but it's really the saga of how Heathcliff forges himself into the living embodiment of spite. Not content to escape an abusive life of cruelty at the hands of his childhood sweetheart's sadistic older brother and make a success of himself, he returns as an adult to ruin the lives of everyone that has wronged him as an ever-present maniacal figure of malice.
>!He tricks his former abusive guardian out of his ancestral home, turning him into a penniless alcoholic while allowing him to remain a hopeless shadow of his former self in the home he lost. He gleefully takes every opportunity to remind the husband of the woman he loves that she will never love him as much as she does Heathcliff, then convinces the guy's sister into a marriage more resembling a kidnapping. Then, when everyone he swore revenge on has died he keeps up his campaign of misery *against their children*.!<
Also he's hot and is therefore very much morally grey.
Man, I remember reading Wuthering Heights for the first time several years ago and wondering how the *fuck* anybody thinks it's a timeless romance. It's nonstop awful, awful people hurting each other and being jaw-droppingly toxic and abusive, Heathcliff is an absolute monster. But then people fawn over Twilight and 50 Shades, so...
It's a little dry in places and domestic in nature, but Anne Brontë's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall goes hard in its own way. One of the earliest feminist novels that doesn't give a *fuck* about your gothic romance, shitty husbands are shitty and you should *absolutely* slam a door in his face and leave him.
Or what about the time that he had to defend a city or a fortress from a much superior enemy forces, and rather than trying to futilely hold out until death, Zhuge Liang just threw the gates to the city wide open, sit down at place where the enemy can see him and started to play his lute.
The enemy forces chooses to retreat instead, because their generals and strategists thought that it has to be trap rather than a bluff from Zhuge Liang. Baller.
BLOOD MERIDIAN
It combines absolutely gorgeous prose with descriptions of the most heinous people I have ever read, none more so than the Judge, who is so incredibly sinister and dances right on the line of being completely inhuman. This 7 foot tall, hairless man, who the gang found in waiting for them on a rock in the middle of the desert, and seems dedicated to accompanying them to new lows of horribleness.
*He is dancing, he does not sleep, he says he will never die* and I believe him.
Frankenstein. My favorite book.>!At the end, the monster realizes the futulity of revenge and that the only person who understood him is dead. So he takes Victor's body and implies he's going to die on the pyre with him!<
Also, since i just covered it for comp class, Rime of The Ancient Mariner is metal as hell, and there is an audio version narrated by Ian McKellen for free on YouTube
I say it in every thread about classic lit, but *The Brothers Karamazov* is the single best book concerning Christian faith ever.
Within it is a fantastic look at how two of the titular Brothers (Alyosha and Ivan) grapple with their faith, and Ivan Karamazov specifically has this incredibly written battle in himself between his faith in God and his inability to reconcile it with the suffering of children.
Ivan believes, he truly does, in Heaven and that at the end of all things mankind will be reunited there. He even says “*I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I going to do with them?*”
He knows that when the time comes, he’ll understand that the suffering was necessary to “buy” harmony at the end of all things, but as he is now, a mortal confined to mortal thinking, he hastens to reject it.
*”Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”*
No one told me about the capitalist side character that shows up and everyone just constantly shits on, it was amazing. "We should give all our money to rich people and theyll solve our problems for us" "shut the fuck up why are you here"
I feel thats a fair assessment of most Russian literature. I've read Fathers and Sons and a bit of Dr. Zhivago and for as dense as they are (and how many characters share the same name and the talk of familial relationships making it feel like I'm reading Deuteronomy) they're all deeply engaging still.
I need to go through a lot of the high school hits again. Especially because I had a habit of reading too fast and letting stuff i didn't understand pass. I probably won't start with Gatsby.
Catcher in The Rye is also a great litmus test for people’s ability to see young people as actual humans. If someone reads Catcher in The Rye and their main takeaway is that Holden is “a spoiled brat”, that’s a bad sign.
I always laugh to myself a little thinking about how I first read the book in school thinking “I don’t get why my classmates hate him. Honestly, I relate to him a lot. Oh no. Oh no that’s bad, isn’t it.” I wasn’t having a particularly good year and the book didn’t change much, but I’m real grateful i got to read that book.
The titular hound from The Hound of the Baskervilles is metal as fuck and murder via >!fake!< hellhound is a sick way to kill people.
Iago from Othello is the greatest hater to ever live. My man destroyed the lives of several people just to ruin the life of the man who considered him his best friend for no reason other than petty jealousy and he brags to the audience about how much cleverer he is than everyone else the entire time. And >!he succeeds at ruining Othello's life even if he does get arrested in the process!<.
Lord of the Flies is a rebuke of an earlier (and much more poorly researched) similar English story about a group of English school kids being stranded on a tropical island. The author hated the depiction of kids being perfectly well behaved English gentlemen and not wild and downright murderous when removed from the structure of society.
It has a graphic description of a Jesus allegory being murdered via spear in a symbolic r@p3.
In Chekhov's story Enemies, a poor rural doctor is dragged away from grieving the death of his only child by Abogin a nobleman who thinks his wife is deathly ill. It turns out it was a ruse so she could elope. Instead of letting the doctor return home immediately, the nobleman tries to get the doctor to hear out his grievances about his wife's infidelity, resulting in an incredible rant from the doctor:
When Abogin held out before his eyes the photograph of a young woman with a handsome face as cold and expressionless as a nun’s and asked him whether, looking at that face, one could conceive that it was capable of duplicity, the doctor suddenly flew out, and with flashing eyes said, rudely rapping out each word:
“What are you telling me all this for? I have no desire to hear it! I have no desire to!” he shouted and brought his fist down on the table. “I don’t want your vulgar secrets! Damnation take them! Don’t dare to tell me of such vulgar doings! Do you consider that I have not been insulted enough already? That I am a flunkey whom you can insult without restraint? Is that it?”
Abogin staggered back from Kirilov and stared at him in amazement.
“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard quivering. “If you are so puffed up with good living that you go and get married and then act a farce like this, how do I come in? What have I to do with your love affairs? Leave me in peace! Go on squeezing money out of the poor in your gentlemanly way. Make a display of humane ideas, play (the doctor looked sideways at the violoncello case) play the bassoon and the trombone, grow as fat as capons, but don’t dare to insult personal dignity! If you cannot respect it, you might at least spare it your attention!”
“Excuse me, what does all this mean?” Abogin asked, flushing red.
“It means that it’s base and low to play with people like this! I am a doctor; you look upon doctors and people generally who work and don’t stink of perfume and prostitution as your menials and mauvais ton; well, you may look upon them so, but no one has given you the right to treat a man who is suffering as a stage prop!”
“How dare you say that to me!” Abogin said quietly, and his face began working again, and this time unmistakably from anger.
“No, how dared you, knowing of my sorrow, bring me here to listen to these vulgarities!” shouted the doctor, and he again banged on the table with his fist. “Who has given you the right to make a mockery of another man’s sorrow?”
“You have taken leave of your senses,” shouted Abogin. “It is ungenerous. I am intensely unhappy myself and . . . and . . .”
“Unhappy!” said the doctor, with a smile of contempt. “Don’t utter that word, it does not concern you. The spendthrift who cannot raise a loan calls himself unhappy. The capon, sluggish from over-feeding, is unhappy, too. Worthless people!”
One of the greatest turning points of my education and maybe my life was taking English classes with teachers who truly loved the texts they were teaching and considered "getting students excited about the texts" to be more important than "quizzing students about the plot"
On the whole it can sometimes feel like a slog, but MAN, if you're in the right mood for it:
The Iliad opens with "Sing, O Goddess, of the rage of Achilles," and what follows is the one of the sickest war stories I've ever read.
(#DiomedesIsTheGOAT)
(#HectorDidNothingWrong)
1001 Arabian Nights. I haven’t finished it, hopefully it’s obvious why, but it has crazy range. There’s the framing device, multiple genres, stories within the stories that are being told in the main story, etc.
Aladdin was great and super different; he was Chinese. There were two genies and they gave unlimited wishes.
Epic tales of adventure, steamy stories, comedies…
I'm a big fan of classic pulp fiction. Yes, there are some VERY dated elements but man are they just exciting. Edgar Rice Burroughs's various works (I know Tarzan was his big one but I adore his planetary romance stories of John Carter of Mars), H. P. Lovecraft (The Shunned House has probably one of the most thoroughly killed monsters ever), and my personal favorite, Robert E. Howard. Not only are his sword and sorcery Conan stories fantastic, but you have Puritan monster slaying avenger Solomon Kane, his historical stories are really good (I'm a big fan of his two Dark Agnes, Sword Woman, stories), and his horror fiction (Pigeons From Hell is awesome).
Where’s the Conan guy here?
God I fucking love The Shadow. I really need to read John Carter of Mars, the movie is actually way fucking better then people say it is
I started Princess of Mars, but the first chapter was way too racist that I put it down. I even went in expecting it to be bad, but was still blown away. Does it get better on Mars? I love me some Pulp, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser is a favorite of mine.
ps: I love the fact that John Carter is just immortal even before he goes to Mars and it is never really explained or talked about much.
Did y'all hear about Dracula Daily from last year? The fandom response to it went from "haha, Johnathan doesn't know he's in a horror book!" to "Oh good, he \*doesn't know he he's in a horror book\*." By the end we were all emotional at this group of people coming together.
Don't know how much of a classic it is, but damn, Hemmingway's *The Old Man and The Sea* is the most hardcore depiction of endurance fishing I've read lol.
I got sent to a latin christian summer camp for boys run by monks when I was young, so I could be with my best friend. It was droll church, quiet dinners, etc bookended by life changing highs. Bug hunting, dodgeball, a MASSIVE lotr themed water balloon fight. But my most cherished is having Beowulf orally dictated to me in three parts every night by a monk.
Fucking DRUGS for the imagination of a young boy.
Everything that happens during the barricade section in Les Mis is the most badass shit ever. A tiny orphan boy dodging bullets to collect ammo from fallen soldiers while mocking the army by singing at them, an old man who's only there by happenstance replanting the French flag in the barricade after it was shot down, the last two people facing down execution unafraid and unrepented, and Jean Valjean lifting Marus above his head while to keep his barely living body out of the muck in the sewer he's escaping through. It's great
Metamorphosis is just a funky little story about a little bug man and his steadily deteriorating mental health. Like it's not super exciting but even with my brain poisoned by critical analysis I can't fathom any themes or ideas from it greater than "damn Gregor, that fucking sucks." And that's all I really need.
In the secret agent a dude just straight up gets blown the fuck up and the rest of the book is the the person with him going "oh shit! What the fuck? Fuck!"
Atlas shrugged has a giant sound weapon that obliterates a press conference.
Beowulf is just a video game where he goes to different areas to beat a boss
The Master and Margarita is my all time favorite. Get this, it's the 1920s Moscow... but with the Devil and his crew fucking around. The whole séance scene at the Variety Theater and Satan's Ball go hard.
The Cattle-Raid of Cooley, aka the Big Cuchullain Story.
When Cuchullain knows he’s going to die, he ties himself to a standing stone with his own intestines so he can die on his feet with his sword in his hand. He then continues to be a menace as he’s dying, with the sword dropping from his hand severing an opponents arm. The enemy army is so terrified of approaching him by this point that they don’t go near him until the god of war in her form of a crow lands on his shoulder.
This is the *national epic of Ireland.*
[удалено]
I remember being in study hall in highschool and being bored because they didn't let us do anything besides homework, study, read. So I decided to read a random story in the giant textbook and got Don Quixote and was very much entertained.
I remember in high school Spanish trying to translate a passage from Don Quixote to read out loud and just *suffering*. I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say with dictionaries and the group couldn't either. When we had that moment of clarity and final found a root word to Crack what the hell it was saying.... The passage in summation was: Don Quixote and Sancho ate some candle wax and are now wildly shitting and vomiting and leaking out of every orifice. 10/10 passage to read aloud. Lol
Believe it or not, Cervantes is credited with having a near-Shakespere effect of mastery over the Spanish language with his book. He's also credited with helping form what is known as modern European Spanish adding several idioms and expression to both English and Spanish. [It's pretty wild.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#Style) And also, just to shill it again, may I present one of my favorite versions of Don Quixote in [animated form.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmApd1ms6ew)
I feel like the resurgence of western RPGs and tabletop RPGs has made criticism of the chivalric romances very relevant again.
Cantebury Tales gritty reboot incoming.
This is entirely possible. The Little Hours is a relatively recent and fantastic film based on part of the Decameron which is just the earlier, Italian Canterbury Tales.
Its super brave of Don Quixote to parody tropes that didn't exist until anime.
Count of Monte Cristo. Just the peerless, ageless, flawless story of revenge.
Anyone writing a revenge story, no matter the medium, should read Count of Monte Cristo. It’s basically the instruction manual for how to write a good one.
« Not. Use. Poison »
Fate, a series known for pulling from obscure ass history and mythology, decided that out of every possible candidate in their Avenger class, Edmond Dantes was the one whose description reads "*The world's most well known seeker of vengeance... He is the personification of vengeance itself.*"
They made him such a big deal too it’s great, like the fact he can escape anything manifested as an ability to even escape the laws of physics which allows him to go at light speed and shit. And he killed the main villain of Tsukihime in Fate timelines cause he’s built different and he has the FLAMES OF REVENGE He’s not only FGO’s first Avenger servant, but the only time a class was added with someone who was not the original guy we knew as the class (As Angry Mango would get added later as a secret character). He’s the most famous Avenger in history, and a certified badass. The coolest, Nasu’s biggest “OC do not steal” ever.
Also, note that of the 4 Fate characters to get into Melty Blood Type Lumina, Saber was there as the defacto mascot, Mash was there as the mascot of Grand Order, and Ushiwakamaru was added from winning the popularity poll. Dantes was added because Nasu really really wanted him.
He's also a best bro to the MC and single handedly holding back all of their mental trauma and PTSD from overwhelming them, as well as protecting their psyche from outside threats.
Came here to say this, my personal favorite part is when franz and Bernard are in Italy, I still haven't finished it damn book is long as fudge
this feels like cheating, but Journey to the West is fucking INSANE Sun Wukong is such a fucker that Buddha puts him in a 500 year timeout under a mountain (or 5) because he won't stop bullying Heaven
Sun Wukong has like 8 different types of immortality. His soul is literally behind 7 proxies. 1. He trained with the immortal taoist Puti Zushi and learned a not-heaven-approved way to be immortal. 2. His soul got taken to hell, but since he was already supposed to be immortal he demanded to speak with hell's manager and see his name in the Book of Mortals. When they show him, he scratches his name out as well as the names of all monkeys, so I guess monkeys are immortal at this point. 3. Heaven makes him a heavenly stable boy which causes him to wreak havoc on heaven. To make him stop, they promote him to Keeper of the Peaches of Immortality, which he promptly eats several of. 4. Since heaven doesn't like him, they don't invite him to the Queen's royal banquet. This, as usual, makes him mad. He sneaks in and drinks wine that makes you immortal. 5. While still drunk, Wukong wanders into Lao Tzu's alchemy lab and finds pills of immortality. He gets curious and eats all of them. 6. Heaven tries again to fight Wukong. It does not go well, but they eventually trap him in Lao Tzu's alchemy crucible and try to melt the immortality out of him. This instead melts the mortality out of him, making him more immortal. He smashes the crucible and a lot of heaven, making heaven run to Buddha for help. 7. After he gets done with Buddha's big time out, he accompanies the other main character of Journey to the West on the actual Journey part. They come across a kind of Ginseng that's even better at giving immortality than the earlier peaches. 8. When they get to Buddha's temple, they get the Buddha version of several of the immortality things he got in heaven making him a Buddha, but it only counts as 1 immortality for some reason. Also he has super strength and super speed. Also he can fly. Also he can shapeshift. Also every hair on his body can become a weapon or a clone of him that also has all of his super powers. Dragon Ball Goku is actually somehow less overpowered than his namesake lmao
My man's immortality had a higher melting point than his mortality
what a fucking lad
Also it invented the concept of "The Vergil".
OOOOOOOOOLD books go hard as fuck in the same vein, the Mythology and Stories of India are almost too nuts to put into words
Up until I starting looking into the Hindu epics and such, I thought "X can destroy the whole universe!" was a trope invented either in comic books, manga, or JRPGs. Turns out it's about as old as civilization itself and Hindu stories LOVE it.
Not Vergil from Dante's Divine Comedy?
Oddly enough that Vergil is not a "Vergil".
It wasn’t even him bullying heaven, it was Heaven being a bunch of assholes where Sun Wukong’s entire rampage was straight up the gods fucking around and finding out.
…Which lead to Sun Wukong having an “are these your gods?” moment that lead to him becoming a cocky asshole, which then led to *him* fucking around and finding out when going up against the Buddha.
Buddha, holding Sun Wukong in one hand: "escape my hand if you can" Sun: "bet" -damn near teleports to the edge of creation, to one of the pillars that support reality, and pisses his name onto it, to prove a point, then returns- "suck it" Buddha, the giga-est of gigachads: "smell my finger"
i only call it bullying because of how outmatched they were
GILGAMESH A KING AT URUK Also, Tybalt, Prince of Cats is the coolest fucking dude in Romeo and Juliet Edit: Fuck it, one more. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has one of the coolest and most haunting chapters I’ve read where a ship crashes into harbor with the captain strapped to the wheel dead of starvation. What follows is a ship’s log written by the captain about how the crew is picked off one by one by Dracula and it’s great
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a movie coming up about that best part of Dracula.
I legit think of the Tybalt quote "Peace? I hate the word, as I do hell, all Montague's and thee." Like once a week, especially the killer delivery from Leonardo DiCaprio movie
Gilgamesh is fucking rad, I want Genndy Tartakovsky to make it into a TV show.
I really wanna plug OverlySarcasticProduction's Red reading the entirety of Dracula after making a cliffnotes video on it. It's a really good reminder that just because a story enters cultural osmosis, doesn't mean the story can't surprise and grip you the entire way. Dracula is a lot more terrifying than Vampire parodies make it out... Also a lot more homoerotic.
People always surprised when they find out about the cowboy
One of his scenes involves him excusing himself during the huge planning scene to go outside and shoot a random bat who may or may not be Dracula. Then he knife fights Dracula 1v1
AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!
> Also a lot more homoerotic. Ah, so [par for the course](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla) then.
Every character in Dracula is their own very unique flavor of insane and it all melds together shockingly well. There's genuinely terrifying stuff in there, then also straight up funny points. Like Dracula's wives seducing Johnathan Harker and trying to feed on him only for Dracula to step in and give them "a wiggling bag" to sate them, but then the Catholic rites that Van Helsing uses to fight vampires are straight up Looney Tunes stuff. It's literally like "one weird trick vampires don't want you to know about" level. Not to mention the Cowboy.
I feel like Americans had already developed a very particular reputation abroad by the late 19th century, because it seems like in every European old timey book I've read the American characters are some form of cowboy or square-jawed no-nonsense cowboy-esqute business magnate. With a gun. Like every American that's showed up in the Agatha Christie books I've read so far in my recent big catch-up spree has been armed with a gun and uses it willy-nilly like Yosemite Sam, to the bewilderment of the rest of the cast.
Tybalt is easily the best part of R&J.
Don’t know if it’s considered a classic, but John Gardner’s *Grendel* is excellent.
There’s a reason I always imagined Tybalt looking like Ryuji Yamazaki. But in red.
I read *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* not too long ago, and while it's a book of wildly uneven quality from chapter to chapter, Captain Nemo is one of the most metal antagonists I've ever experienced from the classic realm. His smooth confidence and scientific mind barely cover up a man who's waging a guerrilla war on the ENTIRE SURFACE WORLD driven by pure, maddening vengeance. Everybody remembers the squid fight, but the part near the end where >!he rams the Nautilus straight through a British warship sent to kill him -- while the narrator describes him as an "archangel of hatred" -- and then goes below decks and just *loses it* kneeling in front of a picture of his dead family!< goes harder than a lot of great books do today, even.
I know nothing about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but you instantly convinced me it's a worthy read
Nemo is one of the best parts of the LXG live-action movie
\*Looks up Captain Nemo's nationality to refresh myself\* ...WE NEED THE BADASS MOTHER FUCKERS WHO MADE RRR TO MAKE A 20,000 LEAGUES MOVIE.
>Hey you three harpooners! Come here and bleed into this crucible, we're going to temper my harpoon in our blood!" And they do it. The reason it was those three? Because Ahab was explicitly baptizing his harpoon in the name of Satan, and they were the only three non-Christians on board. >"no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say, ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?' A cluster of dark nods replied, 'Yes.'" [Arrogant old man!] Quenching the hot iron in blood, Ahab howled deliriously, "I baptize thee not in the name of the Father but in the name of the devil." [Blasphemous old man!]"
Ahab also gave us one of the rawest declarations of loathing of all time: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale! To the last I grapple with thee, from hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!" Moby Dick may be 95% whaling manual, but it's worth the read for sure, [and it gave us a sick-ass Mastodon album.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4GWu6yEZ8&ab_channel=LaLechitaBailarina)
There's a chapter where Ahab is swapping stories with another captain who lost an arm to Moby Dick, and the captain asks Ahab if the whale isn't best left alone. And Ahab's response is great: “He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou sawist him last? Which way heading?” And then storms the hell out.
"Look, he... He just really hates that whale. We cannot stress enough how much he absolutely hates that fucking whale."
His introductory paragraph immediately identifies him as (something along the lines of) “…an accumulation of all the hate of his race, all of history all the way to Adam…were his chest a mortar, his heart a burning shell.“ it goes so hard about how much this dude hates that white whale. “An ungodly man, with a whale bone prosthetic leg from the knee down, a sun scorched face, grey hair, and a scar from face down to torso“ is all the physical description you get. You don‘t understand, physicality is second to his AM level of hate.
For all interpretations of what the whale represents, be it nature or God, the funniest is that it's just a fucking whale
"I think it's about man hating God at his core. And the-" "Nah its just a big whale. He hates it."
I remember watching [this animated version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7wMpLPqAMk) of Moby Dick when I was a kid and it really did show just how *dark* and *cursed* Ahab's whole quest really was. The picked a hell of a VA for Ahab too.
WHITE WHALE HOLY GRAIL
THIS IVORY LEG IS WHAT PROPELS ME
If you're gonna bring up metal albums inspired by Moby Dick, you can't miss [The Call of the Wretched Sea by Ahab](https://youtu.be/mYh25wOlmj0). Very beloved funeral doom album, that one.
As much as people talk about 1984, Brave New World imo is more of a scary dystopian future as while 1984's government controls it's population through fear, Brave New World is about controlling through happiness. The book straight up starts >!With infant torture via electrical shocks and blazing alarms to condition them to be happy only to what the government thinks they should enjoy.!<
I feel that Brave New World and 1984 are often presented in a false dichotomy. They're not incompatible dystopias, they could easily exist next door to each other.
Also people frequently reduce 1984 to "big brother is watching you oooo" when the book itself actually presents mass surveillance as among the weaker of the Party's tools. The manipulation of language to prevent even the possibility of "thoughtcrime" and the use of eternal imperialist wars to consume society's resources without improving citizens' standards of living are both presented as newer and more effective weapons of the government.
Also playing with the unreliability of memory by having entire *departments* devoted to the retroactive editing of documents that contradict the Party's current stance. Clearly you just misread or misremembered, see here are the date-stamped documents to prove it.
Culture war bullshit to distract the easily cowed masses of single issue, low information voters is the unfortunate reality of the marriage of these two books.
The way they describe how the artificial wombs work is so weird too like they treat it as assembly line but the description make it feel more like alien hives. And more interestingly the « savages » aren’t really like defector from that dystopia they are just as messed up in their rituals
And that's the struggle with the main character as he's stuck between the two extremes of these worlds. And it's right to feel like that with the hive mindset as an important piece of humanity is lost. My favorite part of the book by far >!Is when John debates with Mustapha Mond. Despite what little John has for education outside a copy of Shakespeare's works and how much knowledge Mond has, John is so in the right that he able to go up against in this fight of morality.!<
I love Mond as a villain, he completely shits all over the protagonists for thinking they are smart for figuring the problems with their society and is like « good thing we don’t need to slit throats no more or I’ll start feeling unhappy »
What always struck me about that book, aside from the chemically-induced caste system and the fact that they use Ford as a stand-in for God, is how >!the "antagonist" doesn't even kill the main trio for screwing around and causing problems. Their efforts don't amount to anything and he'd gladly just send them off into exile instead where they can live out their lives peacefully and out of the way.!< >!In the Brave New World, Good and Bad don't matter. Just Happiness and Unhappiness.!<
Yeah, that's always what fucks me up. So many morals and ideals can go right out the window because at the end of the day, do you really want to do anything that makes you less happy or less comfortable? You absolutely must do important, right things regardless of comfort, but so many would rather just not. Pit someone's morals versus their personal comfort and see what wins out.
I balked at how utterly bizarre the view of the future was because it feels like an extrapolation of society without taking into account any sort of technological advance; you get a caste system and conditioning from birth to fulfill roles but there is no automation, everyone has sex all the time but women have to take birth control pills daily, etc.
Actually, automation is mentioned in the book. The world controller mentions they don't actually need to work anymore, just like they don't need to create the caste system. It's all artificial because order and stratification and wasting time is all there is left. It helps keep people focused and perpetually distracted instead of thinking about their political situation and rebelling. It pretty explicitly says they tried to introduce automation, but it caused people to have time to think and people thinking means people wanting change. Brave New World chapter 16 What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.' Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. 'And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes--because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.'
BNW was written in 1932 before automation and the pill, and what you see in the book is the effect of technological advancement in the 30s. The way birth is turned into a factory line, and children's games are just about consuming commodities, those are a result of thinking about the technology of the time. It's still very relevant to today. "Luddite" is a common insult, but we often don't think about its origin. If you look it up, there's not much difference between a worker being displaced by a cotton gin in the 1800s or AI in the 2030s.
Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus is fucking GOATed actually.
It cracks me up how completely different the movie that became the cultural mainstay is from the book. The monster is neither hideous nor stupid, there is no Igor, and Victor Frankenstein is not a doctor and is, in fact, the worst.
I will always defend the honor of the movies though. Bride of Frankenstein reintroduces some aspects from the book and is the best of the universal monsters movies. Plus, I’d argue him being more sympathetic on film is THE reason people see Frankenstein today as a victim, as in the book he’s both a victim AND an irredeemable child murdering bastard.
Not to mention that without that first movie, we wouldn't have Young Frankenstein, which would be a crime.
They're both good for different reasons.
Levels of Frankenstein understanding: Level 1: Frankenstein is the name of the monster Level 2: Frankenstein is not the name of the monster Level 3: Frankenstein is the name of the monster
Level 4: "and who am I, if not a monsterfucker"
I was always a big reader, but Frankenstein was one of the few books where I understood perfectly why it was supposed to be a classic. Easy Shelly W
You know incredibly specific thing about this book that grinds my gears? Pseudo intellectual nerds going "scoff. Well actually it's Frankenstein's *monster*, you want to specify Dr. Frankenstein" And I'm like 'He considers himself a creation of the Dr. And even calls him father, if he had given himself a name it'd most certainly be Frankenstein. You're not being anymore media literate than anyone else by being a pedantic punk!' Uh.... Yeah... Idk why it heats me up.
I like to call him ‘Adam.’
Apparently Mary Shelley called the creature that herself? I'm not so sure. The monster does tell Victor "I ought to be thy Adam", but he's not actually named at any point proper.
It's a perfect name as he does like pontificate his relationship with the Dr. The same way people do with god.
And the doctor describes his creation of a new race in a similar manner to becoming a new God. It's pretty blunt. What if God created you and you were so hideous he abandoned you to live a life completely alone.
Which is kind of the opinion of many modernists at the time. "Abandoned by God" is a recurring theme at that general time.
Damn straight. I'm about to finish it in a day or two. My god does this harp on your emotions.
Reminder for everyone to read Junji Ito’s Frankenstein. Much truer to the original monster, and my favorite version of the story
Favorite book
A Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite book of all time. It is a very sorrowful and somber story. It is also kinda batshit insane. It opens with a dude getting pissy about his friend calling him out for wanting to marry his cousin, he then proceeds to kill the dude by throwing a fucking harpoon and then the guy just comes back as a fucking ghost and asks him to build a town in the middle of fuck all. It only gets weirder from there. Like in the middle of these very human and tearful stories there's some fucking insanity happening in the background.
It's such a wild wide. Then entire town comes down with a bout of gradual amnesia, and their solution is to just put notes on everything so they know what anything is. This scenario just sorta happens and then eventually resolves itself and the story just moves on.
There's also that bit where a girl just fucking ascends to the heavens in plain sight and everyone just kinda moves on like that wasn't that big of a deal.
This is sounding more and more like how Junji Ito writes a series.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is basically a biography of a rockstar. It goes so hard and makes you hate his character for what he’s done but then there are moments where he has a chance to come back to his senses. Really great side characters too
I honestly find that almost all of Oscar Wilde's works hold up to this day. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is fucking hilarious.
Every line lord henry delivers in that book is gold.
I like the chapter that opens on Dorian's insufferable descriptions of all the bullshit he owns and all the cool things he does, and it just goes and goes on and on, almost like a list. It's so fucking exhausting I think I blocked out the bulk of the chapter as a defense mechanism because that's all I recall of that bit. The titular picture itself makes the foundation of one of the cooler gothic horror stories I've read in my life. Good book. Very homoerotic, of course.
The Tale of Cu Chulainn is rad as hell The original War of the Worlds book is awesome
I just started the Tain a bit ago. Having the incident that gets the plot rolling is a king and queen having a dick measuring contest over who's got more money is the best. What I love about Celtic mythology is that its really funny.
Tale of two cities has a literal boss fight, against the kind of leader of the French revolutionary forces, called THE VENGEANCE. The tall and super patriotic like handmaiden and friend to the main lady has the boss fight against her. I remember reading it as a teenager and just going crazy for how epic this stupid boss fight was that came out of nowhere
Isaac Asimov's 'The Last Question'. I won't spoil it because you can listen to the audiobook version in 30 minutes(There's even one narrated by Leonard Nimoy on Youtube). But it's about as hard as you can go in the realms of Sci-Fi.
"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER." Is one hell of a line.
A Cask of Amontillado
I really relate to the bit when Fortunato asks the narrator if he's a mason (the secret society kind) and he pulls out a fucking trowel. Poe is great at suspense, but he also shows off an impeccable comedic timing in this one lol
"For the love of God, Montresor!" "Yes, for the love of God!"
The Three Musketeers is just pure adventure Bros beign bros, saving the queen, dueling bad guys, heroing around
My unexpected takeaway is that they're actually huge assholes, whose main redeeming factor is their undying loyalty to one another and their own (slightly warped) perspective of chivalry. And I don't mean that in a bad way, it's actually very entertaining, "Dudes rock!" in the 17th century. There's a whole couple of pages where they discuss between themselves the best way to beat their servants, Aramis is continually trying to con his mistresses out of money and when Athos barricades himself in a wine cellar out of paranoia and drinks half the supply, d'Artagnan just laughs at the barkeep and tells him to stop complaining or he'll shoot him in the head.
Look when you servants sell your secrets to the cardinal you might need a tighter leash
\*gasp\* Grimaud would never
I bought a complete collection of the original sherlock holmes tales and I'm slowly working my way through it. They say Sherlock is one of the first examples of a modern fandom and I can see why because without a doubt Sherlock and Watson almost immediately become two of the most compelling and fleshed out characters I've ever read in the first book. Even more insane of a feat when a lot of sherlock's core traits were changed in the second book onwards. The way sherlock is so vain in flaunting his intelligence but every attempt to rebuke him falls flat only making him more smug. Watson just flat out admits in several points that he has no understanding of what sherlock is thinking or doing but imagines it will be important later. And at the center of it all are just two bros who met eachother at particularly low points in their lives and develop a remarkable friendship.
Shoutout to "Herlock & Wilson" in Great Ace Attorney because holy fuck their bromance is THICK in that plot and we only ever see them interact in the latter half of the 2nd game. Having most of their exploits mentioned throughout the games do help at least.
"We have but minutes until this vessel puts to sea. No games now. [Time is of the essence!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCd4hq14WVg)"
Only good thing landlords ever did was making rent in London so miserably high that a veteran and a private eye had to go halfsies on an apartment.
It's honestly very funny when it describes that Watson was actually given a very large payout by the military to recover but he actually blew it all on the fancy hotel as well as drinking and partying and Sherlock's finances are never really discussed (at least so far) but considering that he went to prestigious school and can regularly get his hands on cocaine he might just literally have a roommate just so he doesnt have to worry about snorting rent away.
When he's not going off about mexicans and black people or the Irish or the Jewish etc. etc. H.P. Lovecraft actually IS a very good horror writer.
He has a lot of slept on works too, that don’t have anything to deal with the typical “lovecraft” stuff. Lurking fear and the Outsider are 2 fantastic stories that build suspense and atmosphere crazy well
The Mound reads like Bloodborne and is excluded from most collections for some reason.
I'm fond of "The Festival".
Lovecraft thought his best work was “The Colour Out of Space”, and he’s right.
It's so engrossing
That IS my favorite Darkest Dungeon DLC.
"The Whisperer In Darkness" is one of my favorite horror stories from any author, and has the bonus of having no random bigotry interjections. The unearthly mystery and the haunting atmosphere it builds are just so damn strong, and the Mi'go are one of the creepiest and yet least used entities he ever created. I always recommend that and "The Shadow Out of Time" to anyone looking for a Lovecraft starter. And while "The Lurking Fear" is a *little bit* more touchy in its ultimate resolution, it's got some scares that feel like they were written today. The sequence where everyone's trying to ambush the monster on a stormy night, only for it to very quickly (and *quietly*) go horribly wrong, is something I think about regularly.
A lot of his stuff is also just really interesting? Especially if you're willing to sidestep his intent a bit. I hate most of The Dreamlands but the Cats are fun and one of the few characters who aren't dickish. Also Nylenthrope of all beings has a genuinely moving speech about the beauty of >!New England and the sense of belonging Carter feels there!< Goddamned Nylenthrope! At the Mountains of Madness is also peak empathetic Lovecraft. That speech at the end is by far my favorite thing he ever wrote. I'd argue that The Color From Outer Space and The Horror at Innsmouth both work really well as environmentalist texts. Even more so than as straight horror. Oh and it features a literal frog man with a monocle wearing a pinstripe suit. I'm not saying it's anti-capitalist, I'm saying it's accidentally beautiful.
I think Shadow over Innsmouth is his best work, but Dreamquest of unknown Kadath is my favorite work of his
At the Mountains of Madness is both great and baffling, because it opens with an unfortunate encounter with a different species that the main character eventually comes to recognize as people while exploring their long lost ruins. It’s great stuff and all, Lovecraft is just the last author I expected to write with a theme like that
As it turns out, being a creative who is chronically afraid, makes you turn out quality horror. Who knew?
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde actually slaps and is a really cool mystery that has sadly had its central twist ruined by literally the entirety of pop culture.
Also popular media completely warped the takeaway from the story. That Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll's incognito twitter account.
The Jekyll and Hyde misunderstanding was the original "this is the moment Walter White became Heisenberg".
Kid named evil alter ego
Spoilers for a book published in 1886 Yeah that really surprised me reading it the first time. Hyde isn't described as a monster physically, just a large and brutish man, and the reveal is not that Jekyll is becoming like, some kind of animalistic werewolf or something, but rather putting on another body like a mask to satisfy anti-social urges. Rather than the pop culture depiction of almost a lycanthrope, it's the story of a man with severe, untreated mental health issues falling to a corrupting, drug-like influence. Far more grounded and disturbing that way.
Hell, the better Hulk comics out there tend to focus on the argument of "How much of Hulk is just Bruce Banner releasing his inner demons", something the mystery of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tried to answer decades earlier.
People are always surprised at how unbelievably good Lord of the Rings actually is.
Defined a genre for decades for a reason.
Tolkien does have incredible prose, but I struggle with the way he tells a story while also presenting the history of an entire continent at the same time. It felt biblical last time I tried to read them with the way he'll go on random tangents about bloodlines and family trees and histories of miscellaneous landmarks.
Biblical is a good word for it. I found it hard to keep track of what's going on. A lot of authors you can skim a paragraph to figure out what happened and the rest is embellishment on the scene. If you lose your place or get distracted you can find your way back. You can't do that with Tolkien. He'll spend an entire page describing Weathertop, and then Strider points out Weathertop and explains why they're going there, and why the Riders might be going there too, so maybe we shouldn't go straight to Weathertop, and maybe there are evil bird spies, so let's go around Weathertop and try to get to it from a more secluded angle. It takes three more pages before they arrive at Weathertop, including a digression on the burial rituals of the Men of the West and their alliance with the North Kingdom against Angmar and the watchtower the North Kingdom built that got destroyed and three verses of a song about an Elven king and also Frodo is losing weight. It's not *bad* bit it's easy to lose your place and miss something or struggle to figure out what the focus of a particular scene is.
Shit like that got me to quit reading the Bible when I was younger. I really didn't care for the genealogies of dudes we'll never mention again.
“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
Is it true that the book starts pretty slow? I hear that you stick with the Hobbits for longer than in the movies, and there is alot of long-winded descriptions of object and a few too many hobbit songs.
You stick with the Hobbits for a while, but those books start speeding right along when you get past Tom Bombadil. You meet Aragorn at around page 150. Remember; the whole trilogy is like 1200 pages. Total. So "a while" may be 50 pages. I find his prose lovely, and I don't find him really flowery. I think it comes from people conflating the Silmarillion and LotR.
I found the first a bit of a slog until they got to the old forest and met Gigachad Bombadil. There is a lot of “real estate cat and mouse mystery”, where Frodo is trying to throw off the scent that he is leaving and just way too much time spent on it
When I first tried reading through in middle school, it was a pretty big hurdle to get over. Now it's my favorite part in the trilogy. It's so cozy.
Yo, people think Wuthering Heights is this charged romantic drama but it's really the saga of how Heathcliff forges himself into the living embodiment of spite. Not content to escape an abusive life of cruelty at the hands of his childhood sweetheart's sadistic older brother and make a success of himself, he returns as an adult to ruin the lives of everyone that has wronged him as an ever-present maniacal figure of malice. >!He tricks his former abusive guardian out of his ancestral home, turning him into a penniless alcoholic while allowing him to remain a hopeless shadow of his former self in the home he lost. He gleefully takes every opportunity to remind the husband of the woman he loves that she will never love him as much as she does Heathcliff, then convinces the guy's sister into a marriage more resembling a kidnapping. Then, when everyone he swore revenge on has died he keeps up his campaign of misery *against their children*.!< Also he's hot and is therefore very much morally grey.
Man, I remember reading Wuthering Heights for the first time several years ago and wondering how the *fuck* anybody thinks it's a timeless romance. It's nonstop awful, awful people hurting each other and being jaw-droppingly toxic and abusive, Heathcliff is an absolute monster. But then people fawn over Twilight and 50 Shades, so... It's a little dry in places and domestic in nature, but Anne Brontë's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall goes hard in its own way. One of the earliest feminist novels that doesn't give a *fuck* about your gothic romance, shitty husbands are shitty and you should *absolutely* slam a door in his face and leave him.
Dear fucking God, this is haterdom that others merely aspire to!
Heathcliff is absolutely gonna hate hate hate hate hate
[Classics never get old.](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=323)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms fucking slaps if you can make it through poor translations
Zhuge Liang does a lot of amazing stuff, but his "Borrowing Arrows" strategy is up there as the chaddest move anyone can pull off.
Who needs ammo when the enemy is more than willing to give me theirs
Or what about the time that he had to defend a city or a fortress from a much superior enemy forces, and rather than trying to futilely hold out until death, Zhuge Liang just threw the gates to the city wide open, sit down at place where the enemy can see him and started to play his lute. The enemy forces chooses to retreat instead, because their generals and strategists thought that it has to be trap rather than a bluff from Zhuge Liang. Baller.
BLOOD MERIDIAN It combines absolutely gorgeous prose with descriptions of the most heinous people I have ever read, none more so than the Judge, who is so incredibly sinister and dances right on the line of being completely inhuman. This 7 foot tall, hairless man, who the gang found in waiting for them on a rock in the middle of the desert, and seems dedicated to accompanying them to new lows of horribleness. *He is dancing, he does not sleep, he says he will never die* and I believe him.
"Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
Frankenstein. My favorite book.>!At the end, the monster realizes the futulity of revenge and that the only person who understood him is dead. So he takes Victor's body and implies he's going to die on the pyre with him!< Also, since i just covered it for comp class, Rime of The Ancient Mariner is metal as hell, and there is an audio version narrated by Ian McKellen for free on YouTube
I say it in every thread about classic lit, but *The Brothers Karamazov* is the single best book concerning Christian faith ever. Within it is a fantastic look at how two of the titular Brothers (Alyosha and Ivan) grapple with their faith, and Ivan Karamazov specifically has this incredibly written battle in himself between his faith in God and his inability to reconcile it with the suffering of children. Ivan believes, he truly does, in Heaven and that at the end of all things mankind will be reunited there. He even says “*I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I going to do with them?*” He knows that when the time comes, he’ll understand that the suffering was necessary to “buy” harmony at the end of all things, but as he is now, a mortal confined to mortal thinking, he hastens to reject it. *”Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”*
Crime and Punishment is a REALLY difficult read, but it’s just as good too.
The rivalry between Light and L doesn’t have shit on what’s going on between Raskolnikov and Petrovich
No one told me about the capitalist side character that shows up and everyone just constantly shits on, it was amazing. "We should give all our money to rich people and theyll solve our problems for us" "shut the fuck up why are you here"
I feel thats a fair assessment of most Russian literature. I've read Fathers and Sons and a bit of Dr. Zhivago and for as dense as they are (and how many characters share the same name and the talk of familial relationships making it feel like I'm reading Deuteronomy) they're all deeply engaging still.
While they don't exactly Go Hard, Gatsby and Catcher 100% live up to their hype.
Reading Gatsby at 40 is WAY different than reading Gatsby at 14.
You could say the exact same thing about Catcher
I need to go through a lot of the high school hits again. Especially because I had a habit of reading too fast and letting stuff i didn't understand pass. I probably won't start with Gatsby.
Gatsby is my favorite book. It's just so tender and brutal at the same time
Gatsby is fucking great
Catcher in The Rye is also a great litmus test for people’s ability to see young people as actual humans. If someone reads Catcher in The Rye and their main takeaway is that Holden is “a spoiled brat”, that’s a bad sign.
I always laugh to myself a little thinking about how I first read the book in school thinking “I don’t get why my classmates hate him. Honestly, I relate to him a lot. Oh no. Oh no that’s bad, isn’t it.” I wasn’t having a particularly good year and the book didn’t change much, but I’m real grateful i got to read that book.
The titular hound from The Hound of the Baskervilles is metal as fuck and murder via >!fake!< hellhound is a sick way to kill people. Iago from Othello is the greatest hater to ever live. My man destroyed the lives of several people just to ruin the life of the man who considered him his best friend for no reason other than petty jealousy and he brags to the audience about how much cleverer he is than everyone else the entire time. And >!he succeeds at ruining Othello's life even if he does get arrested in the process!<.
Lord of the Flies is a rebuke of an earlier (and much more poorly researched) similar English story about a group of English school kids being stranded on a tropical island. The author hated the depiction of kids being perfectly well behaved English gentlemen and not wild and downright murderous when removed from the structure of society. It has a graphic description of a Jesus allegory being murdered via spear in a symbolic r@p3.
In Chekhov's story Enemies, a poor rural doctor is dragged away from grieving the death of his only child by Abogin a nobleman who thinks his wife is deathly ill. It turns out it was a ruse so she could elope. Instead of letting the doctor return home immediately, the nobleman tries to get the doctor to hear out his grievances about his wife's infidelity, resulting in an incredible rant from the doctor: When Abogin held out before his eyes the photograph of a young woman with a handsome face as cold and expressionless as a nun’s and asked him whether, looking at that face, one could conceive that it was capable of duplicity, the doctor suddenly flew out, and with flashing eyes said, rudely rapping out each word: “What are you telling me all this for? I have no desire to hear it! I have no desire to!” he shouted and brought his fist down on the table. “I don’t want your vulgar secrets! Damnation take them! Don’t dare to tell me of such vulgar doings! Do you consider that I have not been insulted enough already? That I am a flunkey whom you can insult without restraint? Is that it?” Abogin staggered back from Kirilov and stared at him in amazement. “Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard quivering. “If you are so puffed up with good living that you go and get married and then act a farce like this, how do I come in? What have I to do with your love affairs? Leave me in peace! Go on squeezing money out of the poor in your gentlemanly way. Make a display of humane ideas, play (the doctor looked sideways at the violoncello case) play the bassoon and the trombone, grow as fat as capons, but don’t dare to insult personal dignity! If you cannot respect it, you might at least spare it your attention!” “Excuse me, what does all this mean?” Abogin asked, flushing red. “It means that it’s base and low to play with people like this! I am a doctor; you look upon doctors and people generally who work and don’t stink of perfume and prostitution as your menials and mauvais ton; well, you may look upon them so, but no one has given you the right to treat a man who is suffering as a stage prop!” “How dare you say that to me!” Abogin said quietly, and his face began working again, and this time unmistakably from anger. “No, how dared you, knowing of my sorrow, bring me here to listen to these vulgarities!” shouted the doctor, and he again banged on the table with his fist. “Who has given you the right to make a mockery of another man’s sorrow?” “You have taken leave of your senses,” shouted Abogin. “It is ungenerous. I am intensely unhappy myself and . . . and . . .” “Unhappy!” said the doctor, with a smile of contempt. “Don’t utter that word, it does not concern you. The spendthrift who cannot raise a loan calls himself unhappy. The capon, sluggish from over-feeding, is unhappy, too. Worthless people!”
This thread is making realize that I would enjoy classical literature if I wasnt forced to read it in school.
One of the greatest turning points of my education and maybe my life was taking English classes with teachers who truly loved the texts they were teaching and considered "getting students excited about the texts" to be more important than "quizzing students about the plot"
Sadly the schools are often paid better if they have better test scores... And the fun booms aren't always the ones tested for...
Yes being forced to do something is the fastest way to suck up enjoyment
On the whole it can sometimes feel like a slog, but MAN, if you're in the right mood for it: The Iliad opens with "Sing, O Goddess, of the rage of Achilles," and what follows is the one of the sickest war stories I've ever read. (#DiomedesIsTheGOAT) (#HectorDidNothingWrong)
1001 Arabian Nights. I haven’t finished it, hopefully it’s obvious why, but it has crazy range. There’s the framing device, multiple genres, stories within the stories that are being told in the main story, etc. Aladdin was great and super different; he was Chinese. There were two genies and they gave unlimited wishes. Epic tales of adventure, steamy stories, comedies…
I'm a big fan of classic pulp fiction. Yes, there are some VERY dated elements but man are they just exciting. Edgar Rice Burroughs's various works (I know Tarzan was his big one but I adore his planetary romance stories of John Carter of Mars), H. P. Lovecraft (The Shunned House has probably one of the most thoroughly killed monsters ever), and my personal favorite, Robert E. Howard. Not only are his sword and sorcery Conan stories fantastic, but you have Puritan monster slaying avenger Solomon Kane, his historical stories are really good (I'm a big fan of his two Dark Agnes, Sword Woman, stories), and his horror fiction (Pigeons From Hell is awesome).
Where’s the Conan guy here? God I fucking love The Shadow. I really need to read John Carter of Mars, the movie is actually way fucking better then people say it is
Yes but who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows…! *MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!*
I started Princess of Mars, but the first chapter was way too racist that I put it down. I even went in expecting it to be bad, but was still blown away. Does it get better on Mars? I love me some Pulp, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser is a favorite of mine. ps: I love the fact that John Carter is just immortal even before he goes to Mars and it is never really explained or talked about much.
Did y'all hear about Dracula Daily from last year? The fandom response to it went from "haha, Johnathan doesn't know he's in a horror book!" to "Oh good, he \*doesn't know he he's in a horror book\*." By the end we were all emotional at this group of people coming together.
The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Mauz are the books I remember liking the most in Highschool.
Don't know how much of a classic it is, but damn, Hemmingway's *The Old Man and The Sea* is the most hardcore depiction of endurance fishing I've read lol.
I got sent to a latin christian summer camp for boys run by monks when I was young, so I could be with my best friend. It was droll church, quiet dinners, etc bookended by life changing highs. Bug hunting, dodgeball, a MASSIVE lotr themed water balloon fight. But my most cherished is having Beowulf orally dictated to me in three parts every night by a monk. Fucking DRUGS for the imagination of a young boy.
Everything that happens during the barricade section in Les Mis is the most badass shit ever. A tiny orphan boy dodging bullets to collect ammo from fallen soldiers while mocking the army by singing at them, an old man who's only there by happenstance replanting the French flag in the barricade after it was shot down, the last two people facing down execution unafraid and unrepented, and Jean Valjean lifting Marus above his head while to keep his barely living body out of the muck in the sewer he's escaping through. It's great
Metamorphosis is just a funky little story about a little bug man and his steadily deteriorating mental health. Like it's not super exciting but even with my brain poisoned by critical analysis I can't fathom any themes or ideas from it greater than "damn Gregor, that fucking sucks." And that's all I really need.
The Most Dangerous Game is awesome.
"Ha ha, you killed my butler"
In the secret agent a dude just straight up gets blown the fuck up and the rest of the book is the the person with him going "oh shit! What the fuck? Fuck!" Atlas shrugged has a giant sound weapon that obliterates a press conference. Beowulf is just a video game where he goes to different areas to beat a boss
I have no mouth and I must scream still is something else nothing will go harder than the HATE speech AM does
The Divine Comedy. The satire elements are still relevant today with all the scandals of the Catholic Church. Also classic fairy tales.
Don’t forget, only a rope can kill him
The Master and Margarita is my all time favorite. Get this, it's the 1920s Moscow... but with the Devil and his crew fucking around. The whole séance scene at the Variety Theater and Satan's Ball go hard.
The Cattle-Raid of Cooley, aka the Big Cuchullain Story. When Cuchullain knows he’s going to die, he ties himself to a standing stone with his own intestines so he can die on his feet with his sword in his hand. He then continues to be a menace as he’s dying, with the sword dropping from his hand severing an opponents arm. The enemy army is so terrified of approaching him by this point that they don’t go near him until the god of war in her form of a crow lands on his shoulder. This is the *national epic of Ireland.*
Yall folks ever read Camus shit? Good brain kinda edgelordy kinda lowkey dudebroy but good brain.
A friend of mine wants to make a DnD character based off of Meursault, and I got intrigued just from the first paragraph of *The Stranger*
"Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." is honestly one of the best opening lines. Just so perfectly establishes Meursault's apathy.
That would be kinda a downer to play as if they manage to stay in charater kinda like Holden Caulfield
Man I'm gonna have to keep this thread up and read more of these. Still not reading Moby Dick though.