>>851 What actually makes a board appear on the home page "top boards" section? I saw a few boards that were less active than /lit/ on it but not /lit/, I had to search for it.

>>994 A combination of page views and posts, so more lurkers can make boards higher on the list even if slightly lower or same level of pph

This novel is a weird mish-mash of genres and disparate ideas. It feels like it could have been at least five different novels, but instead it has all these plots running in parallel. The main premise is that in an alternate history Britain an inventor builds a machine that creates portals into fictional works, allowing real people to step inside books and fictional characters to enter the real world — then, a league of criminals led by a maniacal supervillain steals the machine and starts blackmailing the world by threatening to kill beloved characters from literature. Enter Thursday Next, the literary detective whose job becomes to rescue the kidnapped Jane Eyre, return her to the book she came from and prevent Super Evil Psychoman (not his actual name, but might as well be) from causing further damage to the classic novel. And that's just what the main story is about, the side stories are almost equally wacky. If the reality-hopping portals didn't make things confusing enough, there's time travel too. Throw in vampires and werewolves because why not. An interesting choice is making the book people conscious of the fact that they're fictional characters following a predetermined script. I didn't expect it, but it may have made things more interesting by introducing some twists to the plot's science fiction logic. The book world follows its own rules. The characters are locked into doing whatever the writing on the pages says, but only when they're under the author's narrative focus. It's convenient that Jane Eyre is written in first person, as that means the other characters are free to do whatever they wish when they're not seen or heard by Jane. This limited free will proves useful as the other book characters can help Thursday Next plot against the interloping supervillain behind the scenes to protect the narrative of their own book, unbeknownst to the reader. Make no mistake, this book is total slop. But it's entertaining at the very least, and sometimes manages to elicit a sensible chuckle, though I would not crown the author a master of comedy. I think the one gag I laughed the hardest at was one of his villains literally being named Jack Schitt. His approach to humor is basically flood the zone, sling enough absurd shit on the page at a fast enough pace and keep escalating and some of it is bound to be funny.

It's somewhat impossible to talk about this novel without also talking about the long shadow cast by the 1972 film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Whenever I bring up the movie in discussion, I unmask one or two Lem fans who always, without fail, bring up how the book is better. I politely nod and mumble about how I should read it, while internally recoiling in skepticism. That Stanislaw Lem? The author of the Cyberiad? Now, having finally read it, I can confirm my gut feeling was right. I should have known I was being memed. Now, it's by all means, not a bad story. But I wouldn't really call it "better". It's certainly different from the movie, which took a lot of liberties, partially due to budget constraints, and 1970s special effects technology being entirely insufficient to portray the strangeness of the alien ocean, or the floating station levitating close to its surface. The filmmakers solved it by turning the station into a more conventional orbiting outpost and simply ignoring the pages and pages of autistic descriptions of the bizarre forms spewed forth by the alien intelligence's strange creative powers (aside from the one part with the pilot describing his encounter with the giant "form" in front of a committee, which is one of the most powerful moments in the movie, despite it just being a guy monologuing in front of a camera). It turns out none of the core story requires the station to be physically next to the ocean, anyhow. I always wondered how the visitors reached the station from the planet surface, and expected the book to be more grounded somehow, but how they got inside is left as a mystery here, as well. I also prefer the movie's bleaker, more enigmatic ending note. I have to voice how much I dislike the whole concept of the station being held aloft by anti-gravity repulsor lifts. It's some kind of a cousin of the Cloud City. Come on, it's a planet both with an ocean and an atmosphere. If this had been written by Arthur C. Clarke, the station would have been either some kind of a blimp, or just a regular boat. But no, we must smuggle antigravity technology into a story that doesn't need it. Of course, the movie kept the station's disc shape, implying generated gravity, but that's a pretty common trope in the live action medium and they obviously didn't have the budget for a 2001 style rotating wheel station. It's easier to ignore. While Lem has a talent for describing the strange in visually evocative ways, I feel in the case of this story, he ends up wasting the reader's time and patience trying to explain something that fundamentally cannot be explained. The entire premise of Solaris is absurd. A sentient ocean is absurd. An alien intelligence creating homunculi from the memories of a station crew is absurd. When this is the matter your story is composed of, it's best to not even try to pretend it's scientific. It's basically a spooky ghost story in space. When stripped of Tarkovsky's genius cinematography, it's an above average Star Trek episode. Using fewer words makes the mystery more compelling.

I appreciate your reviews, anon.

>>997 If you use markdown/pandoc you can still have formatting, just not directly. I just use the text editor that comes with Mint, and convert it to HTML/DOCX or whatever with pandoc. Text is good because it'll always work.

>>620 (OP) >>867 Emacs for me, especially org-mode. I can't live without the ability to collapse/expand entire categories and easily navigate my documents with evil-mode keybinds, also using internal links to reference characters, places, events...

Well anyway. How is your book going, lads? Surely you'll get published this year, right?

Hour of the Dragon is unbelievably good. The last Conan story Howard ever wrote I think, and easily his finest.

>>1024 The subject matter sounds miserable, but at the same familiar. I feel like a fish being told he swims in water, and what kind-of water it is that he swims in. I'll make an attempt at reading it Anon, I can't promise I'll finish it. From what you've written it sounds like an enlightening read on the separation, and gross individualism in contemporary western society; but also a very sad one, Houellebecq explains why it is, but I don't see any way out — on a social or individual level — other than to grit one's teeth and keep going. I do apologize if I sound too sullen, you've written a short, perfectly understandable summary of the book — an interesting one at that. Thank you.

>>1022 I finished Harassment Architecture. Mike Ma is prone to magical thinking, hypocrisy, and fatalism, but some points he makes are interesting. For example, Hurricane Katrina being what ended the 90s, and the decay of aesthetics and sincerity in society causing psychological decline. However, I wouldn't hold him as a great, or even good, writer from this work. Not only is it barely a work, it slowly dissolves any narrative form until the very end as he expresses fantasy after fantasy beginning with an overly long manic episode by his self-insert protagonist. Many of his points are trite, and quite a few come off as wignat-ish. For someone who had all of the Unabomber's works on his website, he doesn't understand the points conveyed in those works, and what he does understand isn't expounded upon further than pseudo-religious babble and repetitive critiques made by others in better form for over a century. The violent scenes and descriptions of people were entertaining. I don't think I could recommend this book to anyone. How he opens the book, with disclaimers that someone smarter than him should and could make a better narrative out of his work, is masturbatory on his part but necessary for anyone who wishes to read it.

>>688 (OP) Obligatory Faggot classic.

The Great Mirror of Male Love is good. More anti-woman than pro-gay though honestly.

>>883 I'm not that anon, but Bret Easton Ellis is a gay man who wrote the novel as a means to express his rage for living a lifestyle similar to the one described in the book. In doing so, it is a projection of homosexual promiscuity and superficial aesthetics onto straight men as well as a means of expressing Ellis's struggles with the influence of his father, who introduced him to the Bateman-esque lifestyle and left a suffocating legacy on him. From a lens removed from homosexuality, it's about the struggle of someone successful who was corrupted by New York but still yearns for liberation through violence against others and pursues this liberation or suffers a breakdown as he's unable to cope with how he can't free himself, depending on your interpretation. The movie refines the work's points on this fairly well. Consider the card scene and how Paul Allen is treated later. Patrick is capable of killing many, many people. He's capable of killing scores of people brutally and joyfully. In nature, Patrick could leap across the table when Paul Allen shows his card and kill him there, establishing the authority he desperately wants. Instead, he has to play stupid games about cards and music and restaurants and girlfriends. All of the effort he puts into his appearance isn't for some self-satisfying aesthetic desire or to be able to express primal supremacy better. It's so he can continue playing these games in order to accrue material wealth and social status unnaturally. From a homosexual lens, Patrick wants to sleep with Paul and his coworkers and expresses this desire that's incompatible with his lifestyle by sleeping with and killing women. Removed from homosexuality, this misogynist behavior is something else entirely. >TL;DR American Psycho is a book by a then closeted gay man to express his frustrations with the paradoxically feminine behaviors required of the generally seen as masculine New York lifestyle idealized in the 1980s, having been written throughout the latter half of the 80s and been released in 1991. The author of Fight Club, also a gay man, did something similar for the decaying white collar atmosphere of the 90s.

>>772 (OP) Seen it on my wishlist but never picked it up

>>785 its freeeee

>>898 Searles idea of language dependent reality is somewhat convincing but doesn't count for the nonhuman natural world as much

opinion on the modern Diogenes?

>>1020 >one guy two sausages

From what I remember, and this way years back. The second arc is about curing Mary Jane, and using her telepathic powers or something, this ties in to the smaller third arc where the MC and his friends kill Dracula when he arrives on England. Even then the third-arc is so-so, I don't think they even confront him in person. I get the feeling the first arc in Transylvania is what most people remembered, and with good reason. The two later arcs are just passable imo, in comparison to the first. Frankly, gothic / 19th century horror in general seems pretty overrated from what I read.

>>993 (OP) The middle act, about everyone trying to cure Lucy, definitely drags. The final act, where the protagonists actually start taking action, picks up more.

Ben writing. Very slowly. I'm stuck between writing the first draft and writing the skeleton draft outline. I want to write a separate microfiction in the same universe but just so little time.

Half way through my second volume, working on another series at the same time. Unfortunately, I get distracted much too easily. Maybe I should get into a more isolated space where tv and videogames aren't as accessible.

>>740 Duh ? Organize yourself spacially but also temporally: define clear perios where you have nothing to do but write, at the end of which you should have a sort of treat. If you happen to have interesting ideas outside the designated writing moments/days, take notes to be able to recall the idea when you read the note during the next writing session.

Chan is back people. See you over there

I'm here.

>>996 Nah, fuck em

>>959 The other two books I'm reading are more philosophy than history though

was thinking of doing a "meta-reading" of this as someone who leans right and is in the middle of the populist-elitist axis to understand what the left thinks of us in terms of political knowledge acquisition.

>>856 (OP) If you're interested in primary sources, check out Claudius of Turin's work in translation.

>>1002 If you're looking for something like the Iliad, check out the Aeneid. Poetry collections tend to be hit-or-miss unless they really resonate with you. Try picking one of the poems you did like in that collection and then asking copilot/chatgpt/deepseek for poets/poems with similar themes or style. I found some interesting stuff that way.

>>1004 Not a big fan of using AI - aside from one particular use. But I figure asking for poem recommendations won't do too much harm. Where do people on the internet even talk about poetry anyways? With attention-spans being shot to shit as they are nowadays you'd think there would be that much more interest in poetry. Thanks for recommending me the Aeneid. From what I recall it's essential a Roman sequel to the Iliad, written centuries later, and featuring one of the Trojan allies as main character and ancestor of Rome (don't want to spoiler a millennia year old work :^) ). So I expect a plot-structure and style not too different from the Iliad. Speaking of structure, one of the scenes that stuck with me in it was two heroes on each side bantering with one another for several stanzas, until Agamemnon - I think - told the Greek hero to cease the banter and get to fighting. This in a work where the dialogue pre-battle can take up three times the verses the actual fighting does.

>>1005 X has a lot of people talking about poems/poetry. Unfortunately it's also a cesspool of pontification and preening. If you look past that, you'll find plenty of people posting pictures of poems they like, giving recs, etc. Just beware of pseuds as usual.

It'll come out within the next 3 years for esoteric reasons I cannot fully articulate. Yet I am certain it's coming any day now. The next war against the chtorr book is also on the way.

>>328 >2021 Legends say he is reading The Screwtape Letters to this day.

>>812 It's a good book.

Also very short, I read it in one sitting at a Starbucks with a friend. Still very memorable.

>>973 Aye, most books by this logic are a waste of time, why are you here on a forum dedicated to discussing literature? Go back to Ticku Tocku and YouTube

>>973 May Onufry Zagłoba place you between Cado's coinslot to be sucked into the void within.

>>973 The way you phrased this is really weird so I can’t tell if I agree or not.