/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21400853]

>I like/dislike this book
>Why?
>Well....because.....Well I.......Uhm......

How do I solve this problem

[Anonymous No.21400883]

>>21400853
>>Why?
>the vibe just the vibe
Easiest cop out answer

[Anonymous No.21400892]

>>21400883
vibes is only a cop out answer if you don't actually care about vibes. I think vibes are extremely important, and it's how I find new books and presents for my friends and family.

[Anonymous No.21400897]

>I like/dislike this book
>Why?
>It did/didn't encourage me to strife towards what is beautiful and good.

[Anonymous No.21400900]

Read “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler.

[Anonymous No.21400902]

>>21400892
Define vibes.

[Anonymous No.21400916]

>>21400902
I can't. It's just automatic pattern recognition by the brain. There is no established criteria, and I don't know why you think that matters anyway.

[Anonymous No.21400936]

>>21400897
Weakest aristotelean today

[Anonymous No.21400943]

>>21400936
Platonist, ackchyually. And what is your answer to OP's question?

[Anonymous No.21400950]

>>21400936
>it didn’t reaffirm my moral relativism
Coddled child

[Anonymous No.21400960]

>>21400853
>How do I solve this problem
1. Start using your brain.
2. Write reviews/essays on each book you read.

[Anonymous No.21401003]

>>21400916
That just means you don’t understand it

[Anonymous No.21401017]

>>21401003
A vibe is a feeling, a groove, a flavour, a texture, an energy. This video gives off chaotic disaster

[Anonymous No.21401043]

>>21401003
What the hell are you talking about? I just said that vibes are micro patterns your brain picks up on. Do you ask people to define "gut-feeling"?

[Anonymous No.21401047]

>>21400853
I also struggle describing what I like about books, even with an English degree. I'm with this guy >>21400892 in responding strongly to the vibes of a book, which are always hard to articulate, because they're produced from countless different elements all working together in a kind of constellation. If you abstract a single element out of the tension of that mix, and examine it and try to hold it up as 'what you like about the book', it loses the life it had in the novel, when it was 'in the thick of it'.

I think one way to approach thinking about a book you like is to think about all the things you never would have thought to write had you tried to work from the same narrative premise. Like, in the below bit from Lawrence's The Rainbow, I never would've taken these feelings so seriously if I were writing (it's just a guy feeling guilty about lazing in bed with his wife), and I never would have found such simultaneously simple and unfamiliar language for it ('sitting with her among the ruins', 'he was strange and unused', 'buried like a seed in darkness').

>Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

>And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors, with everything to squander as they would. At first, he could not get rid of a culpable sense of licence on his part. Wasn’t there some duty outside, calling him and he did not come?

>It was all very well at night, when the doors were locked and the darkness drawn round the two of them. Then they were the only inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest were under the flood. And being alone in the world, they were a law unto themselves, they could enjoy and squander and waste like conscienceless gods.

>But in the morning, as the carts clanked by, and children shouted down the lane; as the hucksters came calling their wares, and the church clock struck eleven, and he and she had not got up yet, even to breakfast, he could not help feeling guilty, as if he were committing a breach of the law—ashamed that he was not up and doing.

> [...] he was strange and unused. So suddenly, everything that had been before was shed away and gone. One day, he was a bachelor, living with the world. The next day, he was with her, as remote from the world as if the two of them were buried like a seed in darkness. Suddenly, like a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience. He heard it in the huckster’s cries, the noise of carts, the calling of children. And it was all like the hard, shed rind, discarded. Inside, in the softness and stillness of the room, was the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent activity, absorbed in reality.

[Anonymous No.21401055]

>>21401017
>It's a boy!

[Anonymous No.21401065]

>>21401017
that's just flat out a chaotic disaster, no vibes about it.

This gives off intense mommy issue vibes that are off the fucking charts.

[Anonymous No.21401070]

>>21400853
I think it's useful to have some intellectual basis for your tastes because it helps you decide what how to read and what to read in future, but many of the most important aesthetic effects are of course totally ineffable, so not being able to formulate an answer is the correct response. It's like asking why you enjoy the look of a certain flower or a certain woman or the sound of a piece of music. It's immediate and doesn't need expaining, it can only be explained by the thing itself.

[Anonymous No.21401071]

>>21401017
How can subtract a vibe from a 30 second mute webm? Didn't feel any "vibes" whatsoever.

[Anonymous No.21401076]

>>21401071
maybe you're just really bad at it

[Anonymous No.21401081]

>>21401076
Ain't feeling your vibes bruh fr you aint bussin rn

[Anonymous No.21401089]

>>21400853
By learning how to break a text down into its constituent parts, ie. Plot, character, tone, style, form, etc..

Just a few examples:

>I didn’t like the book because I thought the protagonist was 1-dimensional and their character arc made no sense
>I liked the book for its formal innovation and stylistic experimentation
>I didn’t like the book because I thought the pacing was achingly slow and the conceit of the plot wasn’t strong enough to keep me engaged

90% of talking confidently about what you like is purely about vocabulary. Learn a bunch of literary terms, learn to apply them correctly, and you can actually start forming opinions that have real weight behind them

[Anonymous No.21401092]

>>21401065
How are there no vibes to it? You have the electric lights of some department store ('100%') and the rest of the city in the background, contrasted with the strange and ritualistic balloon, and a searchlight shooting through the smokey air -- all these lights bleary and blown-out by the shitty phone camera. There's this sense of the weird overlapping realities of capitalism and older modes of culture you get across the Global South. You can feel the hot night, here in this impromptu arena on the outskirts of the city, on the undeveloped land, fit for only shopping outlets and primal rituals. All the crowd huddled below the smoke and sparks looking for something intense and elemental, and they get it, the revenge of the material elemental world. It's the same vibes as this Elysia Crampton video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB1J4o2vT5s..

[Anonymous No.21401095]

>>21401081

[Anonymous No.21401096]

>>21401047
>>21401089
Good recs, thanks boyos

[Anonymous No.21401100]

>>21401092
I didn't say it didn't have vibes, I said it was just a flat out disaster. If someone is eating sushi they don't say "man, this reminds me of sushi!" even though technically, it does.

[Anonymous No.21401176]

>>21400853
>How do I solve this problem
Read “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler.

[Anonymous No.21401201]

>>21400950
>Aristotle
>moral relativism
Yeah maybe for smooth brains like you
>>21400943
I'm the vibe guy. And Plato? Nah - he was too vague on how to get to the happy-good. Aristotle is indisputably teleological.

[Anonymous No.21401209]

>>21400902
Mfka, if he uses this "vibe" word, do you seriously think he has any mental capacity whatsoever? Yet to DEFINE IT?

[Anonymous No.21401314]

>>21401209
If you deliberately ignore any feelings that you can't immediately produce an explanation for, or slot into your existing categories of thought, then I don't understand what you get out of art.

[Anonymous No.21402091]

>>21401314
What you don't get here is my problem with the word "vibe" and the type of "cultural demographic" that use it, to whom my statement we're addressed, and not the concept of "feeling" that above mentioned slang is synonym of

[Anonymous No.21402156]

>>21400853
think about it before you are asked

[Anonymous No.21403718]

>>21400897
Stupid frogposter

[Anonymous No.21403880]

>>21401176
>don’t know how to read book
>try to read “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler
>can’t read it because I don’t know how to read book
What a big help, thanks a lot.

[Anonymous No.21404090]

>>21401100
> no vibes about it

[Anonymous No.21404156]

>>21403880
I'd read it to you, big boy

[Anonymous No.21404215]

>>21400902
the energy dude

[Anonymous No.21404253]

Why? idk just go thru this check list.
>Plot
>Characters
>Major themes
>Prose
>Historical significance
>Author
>Memorable passages
That's is plenty.

[Anonymous No.21404271]

>>21400853
>i like this book
>why anon?
>because its good

[Anonymous No.21404274]

>>21400853
>I like/dislike this book
>Why?
>Refuse to elaborate further
>Leave