Contra #MorganHousel on how to read:

https://blog.tripu.info/how-to-read/

#books #literature #TheGreatestBooks

@ihatebooks

If we consider “War and Peace” a single book, it’s the longest I’ve read too.

Otherwise, it would be “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Lord of the Rings” (tied if TLOTR is a single book), and then “Ulysses”, the third volume of “In Search of Lost Time”, “Dune”…

#books #TheGreatestBooks #literature

“The transition from a culture of the written word to a culture of images hinders what experts refer to as ‘deep literacy’. Digital leisure spares us from the slow, introspective solitude of #reading #TheGreatestBooks. […] Only #books of considerable substance imbue us with a detailed understanding of various subjects while enabling a dialogue with the past. […] That’s precisely what the great books offer. And ‘great books’ often happens to coincide with, well, ‘hefty books’. In return, they demand solitude, immobility, and no company other than combinations of letters arranged in horizontal lines, carefully stacked into paragraphs. Are we still capable of the level of concentration required for deep reading? […] We exaggerate the artistic merits of television series to mask a shameful and growing ineptitude for engaging with substantial literary works.”

https://www.elmundo.es/opinion/2023/05/23/646b7e2efc6c835a5d8b45ae.html

(Translation from the original by #ChatGPT)

https://blog.tripu.info/montaigne-2/

#literature #books #Montaigne #TheGreatestBooks

Volume III of #Proust’s “In Search Of Lost Time” feels like lost time indeed. I’m barely one fifth through it and I can’t see the end. It feels like I’ve been plunged into it for a very long year. Directions of use for some medicines are more thrilling than this.

…so far.

#books #TheGreatestBooks #allegedly #really #hopefully

I just finished reading the first volume of the #Essays by #MichelDeMontaigne, arguably the most important non-fiction work in all of world #literature.

Here are all my highlights (in 🇪🇸 #Spanish):

https://tripu.medium.com/montaigne-121ed878b0b7

#book #TheGreatestBooks #Montaigne #TheEssays

“What I look for in a #book is a voice that sounds fresh, a relationship with language that feels exciting, and a vision of the world that enlightens or challenges me, or, just occasionally, changes the way I see the world in some degree. When I find at least one of those things, then that’s what I’d probably call a good book. When I find all of them, then the adjective “great” may come to mind. But it’s an adjective I use sparingly. Tolstoy is great, and Shakespeare, and García Márquez, and Kafka, and Woolf, and Morrison, and Proust, and Joyce, and very few others. Good books are enough for most of us most of the time.”

— Salman Rushdie

#literature #books #TheGreatestBooks #SalmanRushdie

A recent article on #Quillette on #TheGreatestBooks, #books, #literature (and #audiobooks):

https://quillette.com/2021/07/28/listening-to-literature-what-we-gain-and-lose-with-audiobooks/

I felt identified with so much, that here go eight direct #quotes that I make my own, where I made just a few edits (between square brackets):

If I had the time, I would love to write and produce a very personal #podcast about #TheGreatestBooks.

I’ve been on a mission, for a few years now, to read the top twenty or so most important, most influential works of world #literature. Fiction top ten, plus non-fiction top ten. Because the meta-ranking I use as a reference updates regularly with new rankings published and with slight improvements to the algorithm, in going through the list I’m actually getting closer to reading the top forty books.

Each (short) episode would focus on one book: I would share my review, read some passages I highlighted, and my explain why the book is (or isn’t) that important and how it affected me personally.

Thoughts?

http://libgen.gs/
#book #TheGreatestBooks #NoteToSelf

I thought the language of #Proust's “Swann's Way” was affected, dense, convoluted. Then I started reading the second part of #InSearchOfLostTime, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”. Man, the twenty-line-long sentences containing several subordinate clauses, some of them eight lines long! Why? Why!?
📚 #French #literature #book #TheGreatestBooks