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I've heard both George Bernard Shaw and Henry James (a friend of Wilde's) compared to him in a very positive way. I've never read Henry James but I've read several of Shaw's plays and would agree. I'd recommend getting a collection of his plays. The best ones I've read are "Man and Superman", "Heartbreak House" and "Pygmalion". As for the rest of the authors I'll mention... the similarity to Wilde may vary, some may even have very dark humor, but I find them all just as amusing (though perhaps in different ways).


Mark Twain has as many (maybe more because he was so prolific) hilarious one-liners and is overall filled with mordant observations. I'd recommend reading Huck Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Letters from the Earth and any of numerous collections of his short stories. I'm sure there's more by him to recommend but that's mostly what I've read. If you're fond of irreverence there's also some good collections of his writings about religion that are very amusing, but he pokes fun of every aspect of society.

P.G. Wodehouse is probably one of your favorite author's favorite authors. He's credited as Douglas Adams chief literary inspiration, and Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens have both written essays on how much they love him. I have collection called "The Most of P.G. Wodehouse" which is a great introduction to him, "Right Ho, Jeeves" and "The Code of the Woosters" are his most well known works. Also, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie starred in a show that adapted stories about two of his characters called "Jeeves and Wooster".

H.L. Mencken might be the most controversial one. Kurt Vonnegut said he was the closest America got to a second Mark Twain. Christopher Hitchens called him "a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, [...] an antihumanist [..], a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others".(replace German with American and I think Hitchens words apply to himself as well) I agree with them both, actually. I don't like his politics and some of what he says is downright cruel... but the guy knows how to write. He's genuinely funny, even when I disagree with him. The best books to start with for him are The Vintage Mencken and Chrestomathy



Others: Voltaire, (a collection of "Candide and other stories" is the best place to start with him), Jonathon Swift (Gulliver's Travels and any collection of his "best" works are the best place to start) Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide series and Dirk Gently series), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces), and Kurt Vonnegut (Everything, starting with Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse 5).

Okay, that was probably a bit more than you were after, but I hope you find some things of value in it.

Most of these recommendations are sort of peripherally queer, so they may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I figured I'd throw them out there in case you're interested.

I admit I'm not a big fan of it, but Virginia Woolf's Orlando is definitely a queer text. The titular character changes from male to female, and the book itself is often read as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the woman with whom Woolf had a love affair. I had trouble getting engaged in it myself, but your mileage may vary.

Santa Olivia (and the sequel, Saints Astray) by Jacqueline Carey features a lesbian romance. Not super heavy, but they're fairly quick, fun reads. Carey's Kushiel series (beginning with Kushiel's Dart) might qualify as queer, in that it embraces and celebrates all types of relationships and sexualities (they are set in a society where the gods' most sacred precept is "Love as thou wilt," and bisexuality and open relationships are typical). The primary love stories are heterosexual, but the characters also often engage in same-sex relationships (both sexually and emotionally), and there are supporting characters of various sexual persuasions.

The Tamir Trilogy by Lynn Flewelling is about the rightful heir to the throne in a troubled kingdom. Born female, she was magically disguised as a boy in order to protect her (the usurper king has been making noblewomen disappear in order to protect the succession of his own son). It maybe doesn't explore the consequences of Tobin/Tamir being essentially transgendered as deeply as it could, but it's an interesting and enjoyable read.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin is a sci-fi classic that plays with gender and sexuality. The basic concept is that, on the planet of Winter, everyone is hermaphroditic. Le Guin's thoughtful exploration of this world was incredibly groundbreaking at the time it was written, and it remains a really enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

Octavia Butler's work also often embraces feminist and queer themes, playing with sexuality and gender. Fledgling and the Xenogenesis Trilogy are some you might find interesting.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ is an explicitly feminist book with some queer themes. It follows women from four alternate realities (one of which is a utopia populated entirely by women) as they cross over into each others' worlds. It's not always an easy read--it can be very fragmetary--but it's totally worth it.

I also just stumbled across this self-proclaimed Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn't Suck. Some of the above books are listed, and there are a bunch more sci-fi/fantasy titles that might be of interest.

Happy reading!

In addition to reading, reading, and more reading: interact with your reading. Write notes during and after you read a novel. Write all over the margins (if you dare). Think about what you've read. This might sound crazy, but have a conversation with your book. Your author is trying to have a conversation with you, so go ahead and reciprocate. What are they talking to you about? What questions are they asking you?

Act like you're filling out the major sections of a Spark Notes book.

• What was the overall plot?
  
  
• What were the major themes?
  
  
• What were major symbols that helped support those themes?
  
  
• Are there things that feel significant but you're unsure where they fit? Continue thinking about it. If you have even the slightest inkling that maybe a particular passage or event is significant in any way, run with it until you hit a wall. Even if you don't get it all, it's still practice.
  
  The more you learn, the more questions you'll ask yourself. The more you read, the more you'll find that the answers to these questions often come from particular places. There are patterns that authors use when crafting the answers to those questions (rest assured they are thinking about them always), and the more you read the more you'll pick up on those particular patterns.
  
  If you've ever read something and thought that a passage seemed significant in any way, you've already started picking up on those patterns. You might think the author spent a peculiar amount of time describing some mundane thing, or the author seems to be using a lot of the same imagery, and so on. These are all ways the author is communicating to you through more than just the story. The more you read, the more obvious these become.
  
  Keep a "reading journal" where you write these ideas down. It doesn't matter if you never go back to them, because the act of writing forces you to think about it a little longer, and helps solidify these patterns in your mind. You'll find that it's easier to analyze the works you read and you'll get more enjoyment from them.
  
  Talk to others about a book if you can. I've begun to think that reading (or appreciating any art) is a communal act more than a solitary one. Learning what others have to say about a particular piece will help you learn new ways of viewing material that you couldn't come up with on your own, and therefore find new ways to view material in the future.
  
  Don't worry about being behind in your class. Many of them have their own ideas for sure, but I'd be willing to bet a few of them are just reading Spark Notes before they come in to class. Either way, as I said before, other people have different ways of reading material and different levels of experience reading. This doesn't make you any more or less behind in your expertise. You have your own, very unique, background in life that gives you a unique perspective and therefore unique insight into every piece of literature (or otherwise) that you pick up. What you find significant in a novel, even if it's totally different than everyone else, is just as valid as anything else. (A professor may like strong support for your arguments so you may have to give a little there, but with for-pleasure reading it still holds)
  
  Finally, after you've read the book and thought about it and wrote your own notes about it, go ahead and read the Spark Notes on it. I loved Slaughterhouse Five and picked up on a lot of things, but reading those Spark Notes blew my mind! Just like conversing with friends, Spark Notes help you view the material in new ways and even provide overwhelming support for their claims.
  
  I also want to add (and it's been posted before), I cannot recommend How to Read Literature Like a Professor enough. It will help you immensely, even if you think you already understand literature.

Come now, I'm trying to engage you. Like this entire time.

ALL I SAID WAS HAVE SKILLS THAT CAN MAKE YOU STABLE AND HELP YOU HAVE A DAYJOB SO YOU CAN WORK ON YOUR DREAMS IN STABILITY.

Like I said that four times or something like that.

Over and over again.

Have skills people will pay for. Make sure you don't hate those skills but you don't have to have a passion for it. Work on your fun thing. It's unlikely to be the next Beatles because there's not enough brain space, but if it makes you happy, hobbies are great!

Somehow that came out

>NOBODY SHOULD EVER BE HAPPY. ALL ARE SLAVES!

Or something. I'm not sure how I could be more clear.

Anyone I know I haven't cited much here's an info dumb

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS Tyler Cowen is one of the World's best most sober economists. You should fall in love with him (even if he sounds autistic)

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI

Machines might be becoming substitutes instead of completments. This could cause problems even if we were socialists. We have no idea how to handle that

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/ All the best happiness research in one post

http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-ebook/dp/B006N0THIM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194677&sr=1-1 A good book about the economics of college degrees

http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-ebook/dp/B003E749TE/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194701&sr=1-1-spell

Jonathan Haidt is sexy and cool and also a psychologist.

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html How to do what you love only also be practical and not ruin your life.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html How to get fuck you money if you can identify a good start up and work that hard. (also finance

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-ebook/dp/B00139XTG4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194849&sr=1-1 Why all the advantages of artists go to a few while most are forgotten because they have trouble finding a fanbase

http://www.amazon.com/The-Consolations-Philosophy-Alain-Botton/dp/0679779175/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194919&sr=1-3 How Ethical Philosophy can help with not having your favorite external circumstances.

Why modern therapy owes much of it's usefully to ideas generated by old greeks

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy-Psychotherapy-ebook/dp/B005TQU5KA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194962&sr=1-1

So yea, I hope that made up for claims you find spurious.

This book is generally considered to be the Ulysses bible - the end all guide to understanding all the references, jokes, minutiae, etc. I think it's better to have a guidebook that you can reference occasionally, rather than blunder blindly through what is known as one of the most difficult novels in the English language. That's just what I would do, but of course you have to be careful not to get too obsessed and just to enjoy it as well. Good luck and have fun!

I agree with this! Russian literature has been my main focus for years and I bought Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature to see what he had to say about my favorite authors. It was so mindblowing that I ended up buying his Lectures on Literature, which covers a wide variety of proper literature, and since I didn't want spoilers, I just worked my way through most of them. It widened my scope a lot and I felt more safe to just enjoy and experience the novels because I knew I'd get a proper analysis immediately afterwards.

In the longer-term, reading both of those books and the books they were about, significantly improved my ability to understand literature.

Reading Arno Schmidt's - Collected Stories and really enjoying them so far. It's my first dip into his writing and I am loving his playful prose and extreme use of punctuation. I have just gotten to the more experimental "Country Matters" section and love it so far. I'm curious to once I'm done check out his novels to see how he tackles more long form stories. Anyone else read Arno Schmidt?

Interspersed with this I am reading Borges' - Collected Fictions and I am not enjoying them quite as much. I'm wondering is it just the nature of the chronology of them? seeing how everyone fawns over ficciones but not necessarily his whole oeuvre of short stories. Will the later ones get better? I'm interested in Borges because I know Italo Calvino was basically obsessed with him.

I should probably be more clear; I mean it's best to read The Crying Lot of 49 to get an idea of what constitutes heavily-thematic content that Pynchon created based on popular culture (the anarchist in/and Porky Pig, the Trystero play, literalizing Maxwell's Demon) and what constitutes content that Pynchon put in simply referencing popular culture for the fun of it (the mock-british boy-band, Dr. Hilarius' voices). Ultimately, I'm trying to draw a line between so a younger reader (ie, one who does need to hunt down the references) doesn't get bogged down by assuming everything is structural and nothing contingent.

I don't think this is too reductive a method...(feel free to tell me otherwise)

If I'm wrong, or just in any case, OP, there is Pynchonwiki if you're at a loss for research of any stripe. Try to avoid the "Reader's Companions". The only formal Pynchon Study still worth reading is Joseph Slade's.

Also, speaking of technology, have you (/u/winter_mute) ever read Hart Crane's The Bridge? If you are familiar Slade points out some really incredible parallels between them that really struck me...

The version you want (not actually the one you're looking for) is the Durling-Martinez edition.

All three volumes are now in print.

The translators are not poets-with-an-agenda but scholars, so the translations are as readable and accurate as possible. They are "facing page" with the Italian so if you have any romance languages or Latin you can understand a great deal more about what Dante was doing.

Also each canto is followed by copious notes (about 1.5-2x more notes than poetry, actually) so any misunderstandings or difficulties can be easily cleared up.

I agree with what a lot of people have said about just reading it for the language, and letting go of understanding every sentence. However, if you're curious about the connections to The Odyssey, and also want to know as much as possible about every reference in the novel, I recommend Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. I liked having it on hand to use if I felt like referencing a place, name, or slang word, or when I just was trying to figure out what the hell is going on at certain points.

You could start with a book like this: E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy or Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book or How to Think About the Great Ideas.

Or you can, like you've said, gather some info. about certain historical periods or cultural eras and decide to learn more about them. It's not easy, but you're living in a time where you can easily and freely access a lot of information.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Divine-Comedy-Dante-Alighieri/dp/0195087445

This is the edition that I've read and I found the annotations extremely helpful. I'm certainly not a Dante scholar tho so if anyone has better recommendations I'd be curious as well

It's not from Pynchon but THIS is a fantastic guide to the book which provides an overwhelming wealth of detail. In some ways this guide is as dense and as heady as GR itself.

I read everyday with my coffee. I also carry a book with me everywhere and read on line, in waiting rooms, etc. Try some of the advice in How to Read More - A Lot More by Ryan Holiday.

For heavy texts, my approach depends on the type of book. I mostly follow the method Mortimer Adler set out in How to Read a Book.

I set my objectives with the book. Look at the table of contents, back, index, etc. get an idea of what is in the book, skim and dip, then I plow through the whole book not spending too much time getting sidetracked or looking stuff up, take some notes, re-read at a slower pace. Try to get the 'unity' of the book; what is the author trying to say?

For fiction, poetry and plays, I just plow through on a first read. Don't get too worried about missing things or understanding everything. In a re-read, I create an outline of major characters and plot points.

You'll never get everything out of a great book on the first read. Accept that and try to get at least something out of it.

Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature is a book of lectures that immediately comes to mind. Haven't read it myself (yet) but I'm a big fan of his novels and he's a pretty popular critic. Fair warning, he doesn't like Dostoevsky.

Mortimer Adler put together a great [list] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books#Sample_list)
He also makes an important distinction between being well read and being widely read. (It's about what you can get out of it)
So i would advise his inimitable [how to read a book] (http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/dp/0671212095)

This book changed the way I read literature and I actually began to enjoy it--as an investigator enjoys solving a murder!

Here's a free Kindle ebook download link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RP93B63

Get it before the offer expires.

Don't stop there, just get all of his work.

"How to Read a Book"

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095

Check out this book.

Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book is a classic.

This helped immensely with my Ulysses read-through.