/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17556352]

What are some books to buy for your bookshelf to make you look smart?

[I hate women No.17556358]

>>17556352
The Bible

[Anonymous No.17556413]

>>17556352
Books about math

[Anonymous No.17556427]

Dictionary

[Anonymous No.17556435]

i dont know how people even have book shelves. all the good books ive read i have given out to my friends to read and i usually dont get them back

[Anonymous No.17556442]

>>17556352
Pick some old decorative books in different languages. Older and more decorative the better. It doesn't matter what's in them. Only the outside is what counts.

[Anonymous No.17556454]

>>17556435
They're pseuds who think of books more like trophies. They'd buy cardboard stand-ups if they knew nobody would touch them.

[Anonymous No.17556489]

>>17556435
I don’t have any friends, and even when I did, none of them read.

[Anonymous No.17556490]

>>17556352
anything that does not feature the author's photo on the cover

[Anonymous No.17556579]

>>17556352
If you really don’t read, fewer the better — and know them back to front.
>KJV
>Moby Dick
>Pick a Nabokov not-Lolita
You get the picture.

[Anonymous No.17556831]

[Anonymous No.17556947]

>>17556352
Some random set of used, hardcover classics from an incomplete set from a prestigious university. A French-English dictionary. Plenty of bulky Russian novels. Some books from German philosophers that are utterly incomprehensible. Books on Renaissance art, or something similar such as baroque. A couple textbooks on physics and math (not too many). And don't forget to add a few volumes of poetry that are all divided by author, rather than collected or topical volumes; it needs to say "Lord Byron" or "Yeats" right on the cover.

Now you can post it on /lit/ shelf threads and show off how much of an intellectual you are for karma.

[Anonymous No.17557026]

>>17556352
1000 copies of mein kampf

[Anonymous No.17557046]

>>17556442
This is sadly true.

[Anonymous No.17557161]

>>17556947
And what if someone asks you about them? You're fucked then

[Anonymous No.17557177]

>>17556352

Books from ancient civilisations, written in their original language, and a lot of mathematics and physics books.

As for the format of the books, either:

>battered, heavily anotated paperbacks that makes it seem like you're always studying intensely
>pristine hardcovers (ideally leatherbound) that make it seem like you value your sources of knowledge a lot

Whatever you do don't go for the halfway between those two extremes and have pristine (or near-pristine) paperbacks, as those will give the imprerssion that not only do you not read often, but you also don't find the knowledge contained within the books as important enough to buy a hardcover.

[Anonymous No.17557197]

>>17556352
basically the greeks and romans, as well as
>Goethe's Faust
>the divine comedy
>collected works of either descartes or spinoza
>critique of pure reason
>complete works of shakespeare
>leviathan
>two treatises on government
>the decline and fall of the roman empire
>the bible
>moby dick

[Anonymous No.17557248]

>>17557197
>paradise lost
>anything by hegel
>the wealth of nations
>biography of benjamin franklin
>biography of some important founding figure in your countries history
>biography of your favorite roman emperor
>some sort of latin grammar book
>encyclopedia
>the great gatsby
>infinite jest

[Anonymous No.17557258]

>>17557248
things you should not have:
>any work on politics written in the past five years
>any fantasy (tolkien gets a pass but hes on thin ice)
>most scifi

[Anonymous No.17558003]

>>17556352
1984, fahrenheit 451, Brave New World

[Anonymous No.17559491]

>>17556352
Harry Potter

[Anonymous No.17560231]

>>17556352
3 copies of infinite jest

[Anonymous No.17560756]

>>17556352
Nigganometry
Vol. 1

[Anonymous No.17560768]

>>17556454
You're so smart, bro. Please tell us more. I assure you, we are impressed.

[Anonymous No.17561017]

>>17557161
Read many wikipedia pages so that you're capable of expressing superficial, non-controversial knowledge of various authors and their works. Just like /lit/ does.

[Anonymous No.17561061]

>>17556352
Schopenhauer would tell you owning a book isn't the same as reading its contents.

[Anonymous No.17561438]

War and Peace - Tolstoy
A Song of Ice and Fire - G. R. R. Martin
Ficciones - Borges
Shakespeare's Complete Works
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Anthology of Romantic Poetry
The History of Rome - Mommson
The God Delusion - Dawkins
Applied Differential Equations - Dobrushkin
Atlas Shrugged - Rand
A Brief History of Time - Hawking
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Diamond
Milk and Honey - Kaur
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
Complete Esperanto - Owen, Meyer
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.17561953]

>>17556352
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno
History and Class Consciousness by Lukacs
Grundrisse by Karl Marx
Time, Labor, and Social Domination by Moishe Postone
Law and Marxism by Pashukanis
The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher
Studies in Resource Allocation Processes by Kenneth J. Arrow
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Montaigne's Essays
Pensees by Blaise Pascal
The Major Works by Thomas Browne
Everything by Henry James
Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, Uncollected Prose LoA by Herman Melville
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov
Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner
The Dialogic Imagination by Bakhtin
The Geography of Imagination by Guy Davenport
The Rhetoric of Fiction by Booth
Theory of Prose by Victor Shklovsky
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century volumes by Braudel
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II volumes by Braudel
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W. E. B Du Bois
The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso
History of the Byzantine State by George Ostrogorsky
Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead
Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Principles of Psychology by William James
Essential Peirce
Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information by Simondon
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Science of Logic by Hegel
Truth and Method by Gadamer
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics by Paul Ricoeur
Three Critiques by Kant
The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze
Letters of Ted Hughes
Letters of Gustave Flaubert
Complete Poems and Prose by John Donne
Complete Works by George Herbert
Complete Poems and Prose by John Milton
Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Paterson by William Carlos Williams
"A" by Louis Zukofsky
The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill
The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson

[Anonymous No.17561982]

>>17561953
/thread

[Anonymous No.17562093]

>>17556352
Bronze Age Mindset

[Anonymous No.17562280]

>>17556352
Ted's Manifesto

[Anonymous No.17562610]

Just buy 20 copies of Infinite Jest

[Anonymous No.17562653]

>>17562610
Limewire not being round always bothered me

[Anonymous No.17562682]

>>17556352
Literally anything. If your friends are stupid, they will not know what the books are about, so anything will make you look smart. If your friends are smart, then they will know you don't know shit and got recommendations from here.

[Anonymous No.17562749]

>>17556435
Extremely based anon.
Gracq has a very good paragraph about this in La littérature à l’estomac if you can read French.

[Anonymous No.17563006]

>>17556352
1984

[Anonymous No.17563381]

After Babel by George Steiner

[Anonymous No.17564348]

>>17556352
James Joyce

[Anonymous No.17564355]

>>17556352
Josephus

[Anonymous No.17564369]

>>17556352
Emerson
Walden

[Anonymous No.17565207]

Milton

[Anonymous No.17566375]

>>17556454
Can you walk off a cliff.

[Anonymous No.17566382]

ones you've read

[Anonymous No.17566657]

>>17562682
How can you tell if someone was influenced by this board by looking at their bookshelf? excluding any of the meme books

[Anonymous No.17566798]

>>17562682
all the books recommended here are midwit or above books

[Anonymous No.17566843]

>>17556352

[Anonymous No.17566889]

>>17566657
Not him but I'd like to answer this question in two parts
1. People who read look at bookshelves the same way other hobbyists "read" someone's collection. People who collect toys can tell a rich pseud from a poor genuine enthusiast. People who play vidya can tell by your set up what you're into. Anime fans can tell if someone's ordering direct from Japan or not. The only people you can fool in most hobbies are the people who aren't that into it. Someone who has been making ships in a bottle for 20 years is not going to be fooled by your made up on the spot lies about matchstick assembly.
2. This board is small and attracts a lot of people who need to appear well read to the casual observer, which includes booksellers. If I want a book to show up in my local hipster bookseller, I rec it on here like it's an obscure gem and don't have to talk to the hipster behind the counter, because he will order ten of them for stock.