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/lit/ - Literature

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18220569 No.18220569 [Reply] [Original]

Unpopular /lit/ opinion: life is too short to read what you don't enjoy. If you begin reading a book and you don't find it compelling after a few attempts you shouldn't feel obligated to struggle on. Drop it and find something else.

>> No.18220607

>>18220569
I mostly agree, although if the book is considered a classic, I always try to finish it.

>> No.18220620

I agree if it’s not a beloved classic. I will always push through to the end on classic literature because if I don’t like it at any point I know that I am wrong and need to judge it as a whole piece. Take Ulysses for example. It was painful to read at times but at the end I was glad to have read it and want to read it again someday with a guide book

>> No.18220625

>>18220620
>with a guide book
Is there any point in reading it without a guide book?

>> No.18220639

>>18220569
Yes. I'll give any book a chance for exactly 55 pages.

>> No.18220656

>>18220620
I found Ulysses compelling from the first word.
>>18220625
Once you've read through it once with a guide it becomes better and better. It's truly one of the greatest pieces of writing to ever grace mankind.

>> No.18221177

>>18220569
>life is too short to read what you don't enjoy
The problem is that if you take this "do what you enjoy at any given moment", which is something everybody already does, to its logical extreme then I have little reason to ever better my life. This is what DFW meant by your "default setting" in This Is Water, to learn to be able to reject the path of least resistance. To learn to be comfortable by yourself, to learn not to be pissed off all the time even if it ironically enough feels better to call some guy driving slow a dickhead, or think about ways you could kill the guy paying with change in front of you. Same with books. What if there's a world where I force myself, against my better enjoyment, to get into the habit of reading? What if that habit leads to more enjoyment later?

>> No.18221192
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18221192

Sucks to be you. I enjoy all books and have absolutely zero standards when it comes to literature.

>> No.18221195

>>18220569
Dumb opinion. If I'd followed your advice I would never have read a number of books that turned out to be some of my favorites.

>> No.18221226

Remember when you heard that band's single and you absolutely loved it and became obsessed with it? Remember when you bought the album and skipped the tracks to get to the ones you liked? Remember when those big hits got boring and you let the other tracks play? Remember when those tracks became your favourite and you no longer enjoy the singles as much?
Well that's what reading can be like. You think you know what you like until you don't. So stick through that book, don't skip those tracks, give everyone their dues because you probably don't know shit.

>> No.18221227

>>18221177
>What if there's a world where I force myself, against my better enjoyment, to get into the habit of reading? What if that habit leads to more enjoyment later?
a habit of reading in general is one thing, but the idea of improvement coming from reading things you don't enjoy seems misguided. this is not a diet where eating stuff that doesn't taste good to you still gives you the right nutrients, if you just feel boredom during reading then your brain is actually not engaging with/processing what's being read, you're just moving your eyes across pages so you can say you did. boredom is your brain not getting anything from an experience and just prolonging the experience is not addressing the problem of why your brain is rejecting it in the first place. go read other things and try again in 5 years.

>> No.18221345

>>18221226
what you're failing to take in to consideration is that the experience of getting everything you could out of the singles by focusing on them first might be what enabled you to appreciate the more subtle tracks and that forcing yourself to sit through them before you had the right mindset to enjoy them would have been a waste of time.

like, just trust your own brain for once. maybe it wants to hear the single again because there's something worthwhile there that it's still in the process of figuring out and you should let it happen and then move naturally to the less obvious tracks now that you understand the band's style through repeated exposure to the singles. it's the same with developing your literacy.

at the end of the day there's a million things you could be devoting your attention to and you can't just slowly move through everything from a to z because you'll be dead before you get to absalom absalom. you have to trust yourself and develop your own instincts or else you'll just be slavishly going though /lit/ charts forever and wondering why you're still an idiot after you've forced your eyes to move across all of plato.