if you want to do this, at least do it right
see vid related
that reminds me of that student in my uni that, when asked if he read the book he had to talk about, answered "not personally"
I've read nothing but short stories and essays in the past ~2 years
Poe, Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Bierce, Saki, Kipling, Samuel Johnson etc
Longest work I've read must've been Benito Cereno which is about 100 pages
I only read books to try and emulate prose instead of actually enjoying it or finding it stimulating in any way whatsoever, I read purely from a standpoint of trying to challenge myself instead of anything else. In fact, I hate books and I hate the people that talk about books, I think they're morons and likewise I find everyone on this board moronic.
dude the paper quality makes me seeth so much. its the cheapest china shit u can think of. the other day i got a houellebecq book printed in germany in the 90s for like 2 bucks... dat paper so thicc its like cardboard compared to those onions editions
For the past year i have been reading all the IQfy books and taking extensive notes. Gardner, Card, Waldun, Woolston, Nesmer, Zulu, i've read all of them and made notes.
My plan is to self publish a scholarly book on the subject. My working title is "The lunatics are publishing the asylum: a study of the IQfy renaissance" i'm nearly finished writing it and will probably publish before Christmas but i have the nagging feeling that i'm wasting my life.
Well i'm basically NEET since finishing my English degree so i don't have much else going on. I do wonder if this is going to be worth the effort. Is anyone actually going to read this?
In the midst of getting my BA in English tell me more
8 months ago
Anonymous
it turns out nobody is willing to hire me to write essays about the cultural impact of William Burroughs and since i can't bring myself to work a normie job it's NEET life for now. My Mom is getting on my case though, she keeps mentioning that McDonald's is hiring and you don't even need any experience and it would at least put SOMETHING on my resume so i can forsee what the future holds for me.
It's real. I am going to self publish this book sometime before Christmas. I don't hold out much hope of it being a bestseller but i need to finish a project for my own self esteem if you catch my drift.
I'll endlessly shitpost and shill it here once it's released. I'll fit right in with all the other IQfy authors.
Why does ANYONE get an English degree or any humanities degree for that matter? Get a real job and just self teach and post your writings for free if your truly passionate. There now you can do whatever you want with your passion.
For the rigor, obviously. Most people are not disciplined enough to carry out the kind of work that a good college program will demand of you. People also tend to be bad judges of their own work. Either they are irrationally self critical or can't recognize their flaws. Having an objective eye examine your work is extremely valuable as a writer. The writing workshop classes I took in college were valuable purely for the feedback I got from my peers and the professors. Such feedback is hard to get when you're on your own.
Go online. Find some kind of writing club. Or some lovely friends that’s willing to read your shit (very hard!). If that’s literally all you got of college then that’s a waste ngl. As for the discipline, just get good. IQfy gays and some people in general love talking about being a real person, and judging everyone else but don’t have the discipline to even teach themselves their passion. It’s truly disgusting.
>not good at math >not interested in engineering or medicine >study as a humanities major >put yourself into years of progress and mountains of financial debt until you realize that it will be hard to find a job afterwards >too late to switch unless you want even more debt and depression
This is how it goes for plenty of humanities majors. Once the regret kicks in it's usually too late, you're already on a leash by the government because the same boomers in charge of the system are the same people that went to college for the price of a PlayStation 5
I claim to have read classics I have no interested in reading, that are so ingrained in the mainstream culture no one will question me on any of the specific details about the books because most normies have also only pretended to read them. For example, 1984 and crime in Punishment. If I somehow am questioned on a specific section, I simply say I don't remember as it's been years since I last read them.
I'm only really interested in ya, romance, sci fi, fantasy. Only nonfiction I read is sports. Pic related is what I've read this year
I also used Spark Notes to get through my philsophy courses in college. I got As in all of them and never once actually read the material. I did the same thing for many of my english/literature courses.
I was really looking forward to reading 2666 but then the first chapter was page after page of literature shit I don't care about, so I dropped it.
I can't stand fiction that is about literature, as in, books about people fascinated by translation or poets or philosophers. Or rather, books written by highly read, highly intelligent people about highly read, highly intelligent people. I can't read Jorge Luis Borges because his books bore me to tears.
I didn't start reading for fun until 25 with Lord of the Rings, I tried to read The Shining in high school but didn't get enough time to finish it myself so I cheated on my book report and used information from wikipedia
i wanted to read 1 stendhal, 1 balzac, 1 flaubert but i'm stuck on red and black which is awfully boring. i cannot grande littérature and should stick to sci-fi slop
I started reading Ulysses in 2016, on Bloomsday (coincidence), and I have been stuck in the Oxen of the Sun chapter since roughly middle of july of that same year.
Nonetheless, I will write long essayposts either denigrating and ridiculing Joyce's work, calling it a perfect analogy to his addiction to huffing farts, or cherish and praise it as the greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. Whichever position I take is decided by the mood of the thread - if it is pro-Joyce, I will be outrageously polemic about how shity Ulysses is, if it is anti-Joyce, I will call everyone a pleb who has read less than 40 books in their entire lives.
>and I have been stuck in the Oxen of the Sun chapter
if you want some constructive advice - just skim over the most difficult part in the beginning and read a summary/analysis. Then you can continue with the rest of the book.
Yeah, that's my plan as well, but starting from the beginning again - I have no doubt it deserves it. I do recall the Sirens chapter being some of the most musical prose I have ever read, but at that point in time it just angered me to see how great he could be, and then throwing it away for some other gimmick which I thought was cheap, like the birth of the english language in Oxen of the Sun.
I've read nothing but short stories and essays in the past ~2 years
Poe, Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Bierce, Saki, Kipling, Samuel Johnson etc
Longest work I've read must've been Benito Cereno which is about 100 pages
I haven’t read much since early 2022. I’m addicted to browsing the web and I waste most of my day that way. I don’t know how to break the spell (I have an addictive personality, maybe). Only books I finished this year were Jim and the Giant Peach and Narnia #1 (I planned to be a writer of children’s fiction so I started with the famous ones to study them). That project is on hold. Now I’m randomly reading Frankenstein and surprisingly enjoying it. I’m a 27 yo neet who just finished uni. The future looks bleak.
Did you choose to write children's fiction because you were interested in writing whimsical stories for all ages or because you didn't believe you could write adult-oriented books?
Just tap on the reverse button on any of the music player on Android it'll take to or pull back the audio a certain seconds back or the amount of time to pull backwards which you've set in the settings.
I bought a physical copy of Conrad's Nostromo but I still end up reading other stuff on my phone instead of dedicating my time to finishing what has been sitting on my shelf for a few months now. In fact, I would argue that there aren't many downsides to reading on a phone other than the size of the screen and the gradual damage to your eyesight. It's quick and practical.
How do you possibly read long form on a phone? Maybe I'm old but the tiny screen absolutely kills any enjoyment I have from reading. You can have a larger font but even then the proportions give you a few words on a line which I can't stomach.
There is no other explanation other than I've gotten used to it. It does somewhat break the flow of the pages when you're dealing with an author who is very deliberate about how the words are supposed to be spread out, but I'll take what is available over nothing at all.
I dropped pretty much every acclaimed fantasy novel. I love fantastical settings but the writing always feels so up its own ass with the drama and the way the characters talk.
I bluffed my ENG211 college professor and stated I knew Latin. He then stated a phrase in Latin to which I pulled from some base English pieces out of and guessed correctly. >sig sampas tyrannosaurus
I was curious about female-oriented fanservice, so I went to Barnes & Noble and asked the (female) clerk for advice (didn't want to go by myself in an aisle full of women, lest I look like a creep), and made up a convenient lie that my gf liked romance novels so I wanted to read some and surprise her and talk about them. She squealed "You're the best boyfriend ever!" and dragged me into the aisle and started explaining popular authors/titles. I bought one of her recommendations to be polite (returned it later), but all I was after was her list of authors. Used that to explore, and read over 250 volumes of smut. Mission accomplished, I've now experienced female degeneracy, but I am a bit ashamed.
I think Yeats is the finest 20th Century poet and I teach Yeats in classes where he barely belongs so I can force several sections of gen ed students to work through his schizo mysticism
This has done nothing to advance my career and I have never even attempted to publish on Yeats, even tangentially. Despite that I used Yeats stanzas for epigraphs to several published essays.
I'd say he's one of the best in the 20th century, but definitely not THE best. He pales in comparison to people like David Park Barnitz and CA Smith.
The 20th century was a bleak time for poetry.
I hardly ever read books that I would like to read. I just go through eight huge lists that I set as my life projects and I don't even enjoy most of those books.
we were discussing a book in a literature class and I've happened to read an essay explaining it beforehand so I nailed it in class. In my defense I've nailed many other books before without reading anything extra.
I use AI to generate ideas and plot for books, then write everything myself because AI is filled with overwhelmingly moronic notions and illogical points, then use AI to generate further, then hate what it generated and rewrite everything effectively extending my writing time to 2X.
As per reading sins, I mostly read fantasy or speculative biology/psychology books, because I am simply not captivated by anything that doesn't introduce a completely new, learnable concept to it's reader.
Father, I have sinned. I read the summary of a book, then I claim to have read the actual book.
if you want to do this, at least do it right
see vid related
/lit/really me
that reminds me of that student in my uni that, when asked if he read the book he had to talk about, answered "not personally"
That's just 95% of posters on IQfy
this thread is for plebs not for cool people
>Confess your IQfyerary sins?
I sometimes bump threads on page 10.
I only read books to try and emulate prose instead of actually enjoying it or finding it stimulating in any way whatsoever, I read purely from a standpoint of trying to challenge myself instead of anything else. In fact, I hate books and I hate the people that talk about books, I think they're morons and likewise I find everyone on this board moronic.
I have not read a non-fiction book this year, and half the fiction I've read is genre.
i own one of those barnes & noble cringe editions
I do to. Like 10+ pages were completely scrambled and out of order. I think the book was like 50 dollars. Fricked up.
dude the paper quality makes me seeth so much. its the cheapest china shit u can think of. the other day i got a houellebecq book printed in germany in the 90s for like 2 bucks... dat paper so thicc its like cardboard compared to those onions editions
I’ve never finished a book voluntarily yet but I still cannot stop buying them
I thought The Stranger sucked ass.
I like reading battletech novels.
Pew pew
For the past year i have been reading all the IQfy books and taking extensive notes. Gardner, Card, Waldun, Woolston, Nesmer, Zulu, i've read all of them and made notes.
My plan is to self publish a scholarly book on the subject. My working title is "The lunatics are publishing the asylum: a study of the IQfy renaissance" i'm nearly finished writing it and will probably publish before Christmas but i have the nagging feeling that i'm wasting my life.
You’ve done all that in just a year? Pretty impressive imo
Well i'm basically NEET since finishing my English degree so i don't have much else going on. I do wonder if this is going to be worth the effort. Is anyone actually going to read this?
In the midst of getting my BA in English tell me more
it turns out nobody is willing to hire me to write essays about the cultural impact of William Burroughs and since i can't bring myself to work a normie job it's NEET life for now. My Mom is getting on my case though, she keeps mentioning that McDonald's is hiring and you don't even need any experience and it would at least put SOMETHING on my resume so i can forsee what the future holds for me.
Im interested, how will you be publishing it? Where would I be able to read it?
pls be for real
It's real. I am going to self publish this book sometime before Christmas. I don't hold out much hope of it being a bestseller but i need to finish a project for my own self esteem if you catch my drift.
I'll endlessly shitpost and shill it here once it's released. I'll fit right in with all the other IQfy authors.
frick yes sounds cool
sounds fun
I'll buy it if it's cheap enough
Why does ANYONE get an English degree or any humanities degree for that matter? Get a real job and just self teach and post your writings for free if your truly passionate. There now you can do whatever you want with your passion.
Lack of guidance. People tend to get a clue when it's too late to redeem the situation.
i'm too tired from manual labor all day to write :/ i also hate my writing when i'm actually in the process of it.
my lit confession is that i listen to audiobooks at work and that's about 60-70% of my reading.
For the rigor, obviously. Most people are not disciplined enough to carry out the kind of work that a good college program will demand of you. People also tend to be bad judges of their own work. Either they are irrationally self critical or can't recognize their flaws. Having an objective eye examine your work is extremely valuable as a writer. The writing workshop classes I took in college were valuable purely for the feedback I got from my peers and the professors. Such feedback is hard to get when you're on your own.
Go online. Find some kind of writing club. Or some lovely friends that’s willing to read your shit (very hard!). If that’s literally all you got of college then that’s a waste ngl. As for the discipline, just get good. IQfy gays and some people in general love talking about being a real person, and judging everyone else but don’t have the discipline to even teach themselves their passion. It’s truly disgusting.
>not good at math
>not interested in engineering or medicine
>study as a humanities major
>put yourself into years of progress and mountains of financial debt until you realize that it will be hard to find a job afterwards
>too late to switch unless you want even more debt and depression
This is how it goes for plenty of humanities majors. Once the regret kicks in it's usually too late, you're already on a leash by the government because the same boomers in charge of the system are the same people that went to college for the price of a PlayStation 5
I've been tutoring this girl in Russian, while bluffing my way through vast sections of Russian lit I simply haven't read.
I claim to have read classics I have no interested in reading, that are so ingrained in the mainstream culture no one will question me on any of the specific details about the books because most normies have also only pretended to read them. For example, 1984 and crime in Punishment. If I somehow am questioned on a specific section, I simply say I don't remember as it's been years since I last read them.
crime and punishment*
I'm only really interested in ya, romance, sci fi, fantasy. Only nonfiction I read is sports. Pic related is what I've read this year
I also used Spark Notes to get through my philsophy courses in college. I got As in all of them and never once actually read the material. I did the same thing for many of my english/literature courses.
I do this as well
I was really looking forward to reading 2666 but then the first chapter was page after page of literature shit I don't care about, so I dropped it.
I can't stand fiction that is about literature, as in, books about people fascinated by translation or poets or philosophers. Or rather, books written by highly read, highly intelligent people about highly read, highly intelligent people. I can't read Jorge Luis Borges because his books bore me to tears.
i read and enjoyed 5 million words of mlp fanfic
Dairy of a wimpy kid was the only book I finished as a child. It wasn't until I was 21 that I started reading again. (It was I am legend btw)
I didn't start reading for fun until 25 with Lord of the Rings, I tried to read The Shining in high school but didn't get enough time to finish it myself so I cheated on my book report and used information from wikipedia
i wanted to read 1 stendhal, 1 balzac, 1 flaubert but i'm stuck on red and black which is awfully boring. i cannot grande littérature and should stick to sci-fi slop
I recommend books based on hearsay, without having personally read them
I started reading Ulysses in 2016, on Bloomsday (coincidence), and I have been stuck in the Oxen of the Sun chapter since roughly middle of july of that same year.
Nonetheless, I will write long essayposts either denigrating and ridiculing Joyce's work, calling it a perfect analogy to his addiction to huffing farts, or cherish and praise it as the greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. Whichever position I take is decided by the mood of the thread - if it is pro-Joyce, I will be outrageously polemic about how shity Ulysses is, if it is anti-Joyce, I will call everyone a pleb who has read less than 40 books in their entire lives.
>and I have been stuck in the Oxen of the Sun chapter
if you want some constructive advice - just skim over the most difficult part in the beginning and read a summary/analysis. Then you can continue with the rest of the book.
Ulysses is worth finishing
Yeah, that's my plan as well, but starting from the beginning again - I have no doubt it deserves it. I do recall the Sirens chapter being some of the most musical prose I have ever read, but at that point in time it just angered me to see how great he could be, and then throwing it away for some other gimmick which I thought was cheap, like the birth of the english language in Oxen of the Sun.
I haven't read The Americans
>besides Melvile, Lovecraft, and MNM DR
But that's one of the best chapters
I've read nothing but short stories and essays in the past ~2 years
Poe, Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Bierce, Saki, Kipling, Samuel Johnson etc
Longest work I've read must've been Benito Cereno which is about 100 pages
I haven’t read much since early 2022. I’m addicted to browsing the web and I waste most of my day that way. I don’t know how to break the spell (I have an addictive personality, maybe). Only books I finished this year were Jim and the Giant Peach and Narnia #1 (I planned to be a writer of children’s fiction so I started with the famous ones to study them). That project is on hold. Now I’m randomly reading Frankenstein and surprisingly enjoying it. I’m a 27 yo neet who just finished uni. The future looks bleak.
Did you choose to write children's fiction because you were interested in writing whimsical stories for all ages or because you didn't believe you could write adult-oriented books?
I can't think of a good refute to the claim that audibooks are just as good as reading.
You can't reread a line in an audiobook. That's why I never touch them personally.
Just tap on the reverse button on any of the music player on Android it'll take to or pull back the audio a certain seconds back or the amount of time to pull backwards which you've set in the settings.
homosexual
Satan
You need to go back.
You’re not reading
phone
You must be 18 to post here.
I bought a physical copy of Conrad's Nostromo but I still end up reading other stuff on my phone instead of dedicating my time to finishing what has been sitting on my shelf for a few months now. In fact, I would argue that there aren't many downsides to reading on a phone other than the size of the screen and the gradual damage to your eyesight. It's quick and practical.
In addition to that the inky deep, pristine blacks due to OLED make it a sheer joy to read on my phone.
(S23 base)
>S23
That's way too overpriced
How do you possibly read long form on a phone? Maybe I'm old but the tiny screen absolutely kills any enjoyment I have from reading. You can have a larger font but even then the proportions give you a few words on a line which I can't stomach.
There is no other explanation other than I've gotten used to it. It does somewhat break the flow of the pages when you're dealing with an author who is very deliberate about how the words are supposed to be spread out, but I'll take what is available over nothing at all.
I have at least 40 unread books at home and even more unread gifted ones
I haven't read a novel in years because I'm afraid that I'll just copy those novels in my writing
I like the novels of Guy Des Cars. Octave Banicou is literally me.
I read voraciously but anytime a story mentions romance I put it down
I dropped pretty much every acclaimed fantasy novel. I love fantastical settings but the writing always feels so up its own ass with the drama and the way the characters talk.
Every book I’ve read in my modern life have been on my phone. Most of them downloaded for free in some way.
I never finished Lord of the Rings because I thought it was boring. Made it to the third book and quit.
I false flag as polcels and troonys and I have drawn a lot of ire to each group here
I joined some IQfy discord servers and I hate every single one of you.
I bluffed my ENG211 college professor and stated I knew Latin. He then stated a phrase in Latin to which I pulled from some base English pieces out of and guessed correctly.
>sig sampas tyrannosaurus
I skip to the last page of every novel first so I can read the whole thing as a prequel
I was curious about female-oriented fanservice, so I went to Barnes & Noble and asked the (female) clerk for advice (didn't want to go by myself in an aisle full of women, lest I look like a creep), and made up a convenient lie that my gf liked romance novels so I wanted to read some and surprise her and talk about them. She squealed "You're the best boyfriend ever!" and dragged me into the aisle and started explaining popular authors/titles. I bought one of her recommendations to be polite (returned it later), but all I was after was her list of authors. Used that to explore, and read over 250 volumes of smut. Mission accomplished, I've now experienced female degeneracy, but I am a bit ashamed.
Any recs?
they're really bad, only distinguishing feature is the tags. And holy shit was I not expecting the most common tag to be rape or forced/compelled sex.
Curious to know what were some of the oddest (to you) recurring points/tropes you bumped into through your explorations
I skimmed through Ulysses, Gravitys Rainbow and Infinite Jest in like 2 weeks each. I can't remember a single scene from any of them
I'd like to one-up Faust Pt.2 in terms of outrageousness. I think it would be great fun to offend almost everyone.
I think Yeats is the finest 20th Century poet and I teach Yeats in classes where he barely belongs so I can force several sections of gen ed students to work through his schizo mysticism
This has done nothing to advance my career and I have never even attempted to publish on Yeats, even tangentially. Despite that I used Yeats stanzas for epigraphs to several published essays.
I'd say he's one of the best in the 20th century, but definitely not THE best. He pales in comparison to people like David Park Barnitz and CA Smith.
The 20th century was a bleak time for poetry.
I hardly ever read books that I would like to read. I just go through eight huge lists that I set as my life projects and I don't even enjoy most of those books.
I'm a midwit
we were discussing a book in a literature class and I've happened to read an essay explaining it beforehand so I nailed it in class. In my defense I've nailed many other books before without reading anything extra.
I only read histories and pulp horror fiction.
I use AI to generate ideas and plot for books, then write everything myself because AI is filled with overwhelmingly moronic notions and illogical points, then use AI to generate further, then hate what it generated and rewrite everything effectively extending my writing time to 2X.
As per reading sins, I mostly read fantasy or speculative biology/psychology books, because I am simply not captivated by anything that doesn't introduce a completely new, learnable concept to it's reader.
Looked up synonyms while writing poetry
I dropped The Sound and Fury. It's fricking unbearable.
I bought a book without knowing what it was about, turns out to be painfully gay.
I always end up accidentally damaging my books through my own sleep-deprived carelessness
I don't really read much