Personally, what I like is that while Nisio Isin loves to utilize digressions and puns - he is also able to throw in a tightly plotted mystery story at the same time, and usually mixes it in with a character study. He is also insanely prolific and does one volume a month, or something like that. At his best, his work is thrilling, with just the correct amount of convolution and psychology, but also a pressing forward momentum that makes it entertaining.
Linguistics eh? One of the reasons why I'm interested in that field is actually due to the possibilities of writing 'etymological mysteries' like the Monogatari Series or the novels of Natsuhiko Kyogoku. Japanese Folklore is involved in utilizing homonyms and puns to create a varied set of mythologies, and these novels make use of those.
An example would be the first arc of Bakemonogatari, which involves a girl who has lost her weight (omoi = 重い) to a crab. In actuality, the removal of weight is related to her own repressed memory (omoi = 思い) due to a traumatic event that happened in her past. She regains her 'omoi' when she willingly faces up to her traumatic past. Nisio Isin was influenced by Kyogoku, who is known for his mystery stories revolving around a ridiculously detailed net of associations related to Japanese Youkai. If you watch the Anime Moryou no Hako (Box of Moryou), an entire episode is spent pulling apart the etymology of the spirit called the Moryou.
Chinese also has the same tradition. We say, for example, that we want to have fish every year （年年有鱼） - because the word 鱼 (yu = fish) and 余 (yu = surplus) have the same sounds. It's too bad that languages like English aren't tonal, so there's less room for punning like this. This aspect also supposedly makes many Chinese Classics extreme hard to decipher because you must twist apart the tightly connected web of puns and allusions to see the full literary net.
In the case of German, I heard there was a famous Linguist who became a mystery writer called Wolf Haas. He seems to use a lot of wordplay and colloquial speech - and his works enjoy a wide readership over there, especially his novels based around the detective Simon Brenner. You can read an analysis of his work over here:
Sadly, for my uni course I have quite a lot of stuff to do – so that’s restricting me to strictly reading Japanese books, academic books, or short stories (trying to get through all of Chekhov & Ray Bradbury). I’m less interested in the strictly literary, since I want to try and learn how to write powerfully intelligent thrilling plot-driven fiction (like the ‘Faust Style’ as depicted here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDvwE8nyyng) but I’ll check out your recommendation if I have the time.
I think I forgot to add as a caveat that my method of learning by translation was significantly easier for Japanese since I was used to Chinese characters already. But now I’m going for an actual structured course in my uni to pick up any holes that I might have missed – starting from level 1. Especially since my method of purely reading, and tailoring to English, meant that I wasn’t good at writing or speaking it. But good luck if you're trying to pick up German!
Lately I randomly decided to try and pick up the Cyrillic Alphabet to get into Russian Fiction. But Russia’s extremely complex verb conjugations and its dizzyingly difficult pronunciation rules (a mere difference in stress can completely change the meaning of the word) makes me think that, for that, I should probably start bottom-up normally. Especially since Russia doesn’t have stuff like Visual Novels, where you can see the text and hear the corresponding word. In the meantime, I’m also turning back to my long underused mother tongue, as well as its Classical Chinese variant.
Given that my course involves me picking up both web design & digital photography & Photoshop (and drawing) – which are all horribly deep skills as well – I’m truly juggling many fields of study at once.
(I still want to pick up on Military History & Asymmetric Warfare! Quantum Physics! Speculative Realism! Cognitive Science! Ethnology! Folklore! Variants of Confucian Philosophy! Psychology! Political Maneuvering! Corporate Espionage & Red Teaming! Memory Enhancing Mnemonic Techniques! Meditation! Mysticism! Social Engineering! Cryptography! Hacking! Graphic Design! Economics! Writing Fair Play Mystery Stories! Linguistics! – all for the sake of being able to write nonsensically complex pulp fiction like Nisio Isin).
I guess that’s what it’s like to live as a 21st century ‘Global citizen’.
Don’t worry, I study philosophy to nourish my own half-assed literature too. Although I consider it in a different way from how other people (like Camus) think of using philosophy to write literature. I’m interested in fantasy writing, but I hate the boringness of all that sword & sorcery stuff. I keep wondering why – in a genre that purports to be about anything possible – people’s imaginations are so boring. Anyway I read philosophy because it helps when you want to think of interesting ideas for fantasy, since fantasy is merely a swap in the metaphysics of a world. Borges taught me that with his crazy short story Tlon Uqbar Orbius Tertius.
Stevens is definitely this vast peak to conquer in terms of poetry - and he himself was a friend of philosopher George Santayana. He's probably one of the poets where reading a bit of philosophy helps, although he can be understood in itself if you think about it enough. He writes in such a way where every line can have a different image from the last, but it all builds up to the same theme or idea
Example:
This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.
An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time.
This poem happens to (superficially) be about growing old and finding new love (it may also be about middle-aged infidelity. Stevens is always an enigma). You wouldn’t know that from the stanza if you aren’t careful, because of how fast the ideas change (fruit – earth – Eve – juice – skull – book – skull – ground – fruit – book – read).
Still, my favorite poet is probably Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow translation) from the sheer strength of his lyricism and images.
In terms of starting poets, Sheremet says Countee Cullen is a good start here:
Incidentally Alex Sheremet is a protégé of probably the most vicious critic on the internet – Dan Schneider. Schneider critiques poetry and film, as well as other stuff. He has this archive of articles where he takes bad poetry and rewrites them over here:
He advocates, to learning poetry, reading the bad poem, then guessing which lines he’ll edit, then reading to check what he changes. Schneider himself claims to have more than a thousand great poems, but he’s unpublished because his viciousness has gained him too many enemies in the publishing world.
Anyway Schneider gives quite a good list of poets over here (while condemning a whole lot of others):
Both Sheremet and Schneider are true critics outside of academia who believe in no bullshit to art. They also believe that aesthetic subjectivity is bullshit – in the same vein as this quote from Confucius:
“There are few men under heaven who can love and see the defects, or hate and see the excellence of an object.”
So you can like an object for its aesthetics, but there is a quality to great art that can be acknowledged even if you hate it.
The more I read them, the more I find myself agreeing to this viewpoint. The problem is that greatness is not a quantitative judgment, which is why it’s so hard to grasp it. It does not come from either addition or subtraction, but precision. Hitting the mark perfectly. That’s why Sheremet argues that Countee Cullen’s Heritage, though not as complex in its words, is able to use simple words to get at a powerful idea.
As for labels, yeah they’re helpful merely in terms of usage, but not in rigid categorization. I guess the Taoists (with their category destroying koans), Wittgenstein or Nietzsche are the ultimate advocates of breaking from that framework.
You should just read everything on Sheremet’s site. He provides criticism of art you can actually act upon and his critiques of politics are super spot on.
Sheremet is also one of the most solid critics out there - for everything from politics to art to literature. You should read his critiques because they find a way to express substance without relying on jargon - even for things like Taoism or Confucianism. He's one of the critics that I've learnt the most from. You can even sense the change if you look over my reviews - there's a change away from abstracts to concretion (although I also love to dive back into abstract sometimes for fun). Incidentally, even though my Aku no Hana review is the most famous, it's also the review that I've separated myself away from the most - I've changed a lot of my opinions over time.
Be warned - he's also one of the most brutal critics out there and will have no qualms savaging those things he does not like, although he does it very fairly. I consider his take on Evangelion to be one of the best reviews of Anime hands-down, and also one of the best examinations of what Art means.
I especially like his characterization of Art here: "Art is not ‘truth,’ but a dupe’s game wherein the best sleight-of-hand wins, and utterly un-real concoctions — wonderfully sketched characters, poetic dialogue — trick the consumer into accepting them as real, thus lowering one’s autonomic defenses against feeling manipulated or ‘cheated,’ defenses that were engineered into us for reasons of survival, but still come out, now, at the slightest suggestion of deceit. This is why the worst art feels so cheap, so exploitative of people’s emotional weaknesses, and why self-conscious (i.e., pretentious) art, if done well, is so bravissimo, for it STILL manages to get to the core of reality despite its artifice, thus signaling to the viewer a level of technical mastery few art-works can achieve."
This is how he describes the art of Francis Bacon in another one of his analyses:
"Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (1944) fares better, and is instructional re: how this sort of art might work, on both technical and narrative levels. The first figure (as per most of the Crucifixion series) is somewhere between a creature and man, and seated on a chair or some other thing. Interestingly, the figure’s head can be interpreted in two ways: that of a head twisting back, as if in torture or to look at something, or no head at all but a suggestion of two arms being tied/held together behind the figure’s back. The eye is able to take in both possibilities, and it forces the brain to work, as opposed to merely take things in passively. The cloth, too, at the end of the chair is immediately seen as legs/feet by the eyes, depending on how the figure is being interpreted, revealing the sorts of tricks that Francis Bacon was capable of: mirages that, with a greater artist, would remain hidden and difficult to decipher, since they’d be so deeply married to a painting’s content that they’d be hard to isolate and study on their own. By contrast, they are quite ripe for analysis here, as in the second of the two figures (a neck wrapped in a towel, made unfamiliar by its mouth and the surrounds), and the last, which re-arranges ordinary human features in a way that is both seemingly illogical and immediately recognizable. The fact is, our brains are capable of entertaining multiple possibilities at once, and artists that know and exploit this vulnerability can learn to maximize their effects."
If you take Sheremet's path, then he'll say that philosophy as a whole is really just a superfluous game, and provides nothing but inert ideas that are clunky and don't move. He believes that other than the most poetic variants of philosophy (Chinese Philosophers, Plato and Nietzsche), the best Literature is far superior to it as a whole. In terms of the training logic side, he advocates just doing Science.
I agree with Sheremet, although I also have a personal interest in reading philosophy, so I do it for fun. That's why I have no qualms with reading philosophy sideways and all over the place, because I'm not there to learn philosophy on its terms, but I'm there to carnivorize the best bits for my own uses - to make my own Literature.
Anyway the bottom line is - don't believe that you need to learn certain terms like 'mono no aware' or 'wabi-sabi' to explain why something works. Sheremet has been able to do it in the most concise and concrete way over pretty much all of his reviews - even when he's describing something ambiguous! Over here he takes one of the most ambiguous and constantly shifting poet in the English language - Wallace Stevens - and explains one of his poems thoroughly: http://alexsheremet.com/wallace-stevens-rabbit-king-ghosts/
I think you probably shouldn't approach it with so much anxiety (although I understand that anxiety to make yourself larger, and I'm still going through loads of it). Especially don't idolize books - they're only a pathway and won't necessarily give you the answers (well, they do, but from what I've learnt, you won't realize it until the time is correct). It doesn't really matter whether you go into plenty of digressions as long as the end result - of you developing yourself and perfecting yourself - is the same. To me, even if I don't know the culture fully, it's what I co-opt from my learning that is more important. Developing oneself should be a process of joy more than a process of misery.
Read this brilliant short story called The Sum Of Others. It's one of the best ruminations I've ever seen on the issue of misguided love for the classics merely for the sake of its classicism.
Of course, it's a different thing if your digressionary nature is symptom of a larger problem. If you can't concentrate on books its okay. If you find yourself not being able to concentrate on everything else, such that you take up a whole load of ambitions and ideas, and then find yourself being unable to keep up with them - then I don't think any amount of Philosophy or Literature will help with that. That kind of thing probably needs will training like meditation or exercise or just doing focused work in general. It could be that what you're actually worrying about is not just a lack of focus on books, but an general lack of focus. In that case I would suggest you to read something like Roy F Baumeister's Willpower or Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow instead - which are more practical.
My advice on all that is really just to read whatever you feel like reading. I don't believe there are any good 'movements' because greatness can be found in any style. You can be a complete realist, or you can write in poetic prose, or you can even go all the way into comedy, and you'll find some works that do it well, and a lot of works that fail at it.
The most important thing to develop your understanding is to try and think why something works for you, or why it doesn't - then you can guess whether it's personal bias or whether it's an actual flaw in the work that makes it fail.
I think your method is going quite well on the Literature side. You should always switch to something that is out of your comfort zone to develop your own sensibility - although if its becoming a slog for you, I suggest you drop the book - either its a book that doesn't work, or your sensibilities haven't built up to appreciate it yet. I found myself in this situation with the poetry of John Donne. I completely didn't understand how his poetry worked because he would shift from metaphysical image to metaphysical image abruptly, and some of his poems are structured such that the last part refutes the first part. Eventually, when I loosened by poetic sensibility, I was able to appreciate him.
So if you find yourself veering towards something that's overtly poetic (like Mishima), then try skipping to a writer that writes more naturalistically or minimalistically, like Kawabata. If you read something that's bleeding with angst like Dazai, Plath or Salinger, read a writer that makes fun of it like some stories of Chekhov.
For philosophy it's a bit harder, because some philosophy is written in argument to ideas by previous writers, while other philosophy can work quite well on its own, although you find it's value increasing as you live longer. The former philosophers are there to develop 'logic' while the latter are there to develop 'wisdom'. The Taoists, I consider, to be the latter catergory. Their writings would, to a normal person, make no logical sense especially when they keep talking about Action being Inaction - but these are so short and so aphoristically written that you can find yourself returning to them in any situation. Like whenever I find myself getting too heated up about things, or caring too much about small things, I always remember that quote from the Tao Te Ching:
"The world is Tao’s own vessel
It is perfection manifest
It cannot be changed
It cannot be improved
For those who go on tampering, it’s ruined
For those who try to grasp, it’s gone"
On the other hand for something like Kant, you have to spend your time going through the system to see how one argument works with the other. I don't know whether its worth it though, if you're not a person looking to polish your logical juices - and especially when we have so many books of Science and Maths to help cover those. I would probably recommend going through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to just get the gist of the whole, so that you know what you should look out for. But remember, always be critical of what you're reading.
Are you doing writing? It's quite hard to tell you what kind of thing you should be aiming for in your style if I can't see your writing style. If you want, you can private message me if you need a critique or evaluation of your works. I can't promise complete objectivity, but I can at least promise that I'll try to be thorough!
All Comments (6) Comments
Linguistics eh? One of the reasons why I'm interested in that field is actually due to the possibilities of writing 'etymological mysteries' like the Monogatari Series or the novels of Natsuhiko Kyogoku. Japanese Folklore is involved in utilizing homonyms and puns to create a varied set of mythologies, and these novels make use of those.
An example would be the first arc of Bakemonogatari, which involves a girl who has lost her weight (omoi = 重い) to a crab. In actuality, the removal of weight is related to her own repressed memory (omoi = 思い) due to a traumatic event that happened in her past. She regains her 'omoi' when she willingly faces up to her traumatic past. Nisio Isin was influenced by Kyogoku, who is known for his mystery stories revolving around a ridiculously detailed net of associations related to Japanese Youkai. If you watch the Anime Moryou no Hako (Box of Moryou), an entire episode is spent pulling apart the etymology of the spirit called the Moryou.
Chinese also has the same tradition. We say, for example, that we want to have fish every year （年年有鱼） - because the word 鱼 (yu = fish) and 余 (yu = surplus) have the same sounds. It's too bad that languages like English aren't tonal, so there's less room for punning like this. This aspect also supposedly makes many Chinese Classics extreme hard to decipher because you must twist apart the tightly connected web of puns and allusions to see the full literary net.
In the case of German, I heard there was a famous Linguist who became a mystery writer called Wolf Haas. He seems to use a lot of wordplay and colloquial speech - and his works enjoy a wide readership over there, especially his novels based around the detective Simon Brenner. You can read an analysis of his work over here:
https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/110248/content/Geisler_asu_0010N_12620.pdf
Too bad I can't read any of the original, since it sounds so interesting!
Sadly, for my uni course I have quite a lot of stuff to do – so that’s restricting me to strictly reading Japanese books, academic books, or short stories (trying to get through all of Chekhov & Ray Bradbury). I’m less interested in the strictly literary, since I want to try and learn how to write powerfully intelligent thrilling plot-driven fiction (like the ‘Faust Style’ as depicted here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDvwE8nyyng) but I’ll check out your recommendation if I have the time.
I think I forgot to add as a caveat that my method of learning by translation was significantly easier for Japanese since I was used to Chinese characters already. But now I’m going for an actual structured course in my uni to pick up any holes that I might have missed – starting from level 1. Especially since my method of purely reading, and tailoring to English, meant that I wasn’t good at writing or speaking it. But good luck if you're trying to pick up German!
Lately I randomly decided to try and pick up the Cyrillic Alphabet to get into Russian Fiction. But Russia’s extremely complex verb conjugations and its dizzyingly difficult pronunciation rules (a mere difference in stress can completely change the meaning of the word) makes me think that, for that, I should probably start bottom-up normally. Especially since Russia doesn’t have stuff like Visual Novels, where you can see the text and hear the corresponding word. In the meantime, I’m also turning back to my long underused mother tongue, as well as its Classical Chinese variant.
Given that my course involves me picking up both web design & digital photography & Photoshop (and drawing) – which are all horribly deep skills as well – I’m truly juggling many fields of study at once.
(I still want to pick up on Military History & Asymmetric Warfare! Quantum Physics! Speculative Realism! Cognitive Science! Ethnology! Folklore! Variants of Confucian Philosophy! Psychology! Political Maneuvering! Corporate Espionage & Red Teaming! Memory Enhancing Mnemonic Techniques! Meditation! Mysticism! Social Engineering! Cryptography! Hacking! Graphic Design! Economics! Writing Fair Play Mystery Stories! Linguistics! – all for the sake of being able to write nonsensically complex pulp fiction like Nisio Isin).
I guess that’s what it’s like to live as a 21st century ‘Global citizen’.
Stevens is definitely this vast peak to conquer in terms of poetry - and he himself was a friend of philosopher George Santayana. He's probably one of the poets where reading a bit of philosophy helps, although he can be understood in itself if you think about it enough. He writes in such a way where every line can have a different image from the last, but it all builds up to the same theme or idea
Example:
This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.
An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time.
This poem happens to (superficially) be about growing old and finding new love (it may also be about middle-aged infidelity. Stevens is always an enigma). You wouldn’t know that from the stanza if you aren’t careful, because of how fast the ideas change (fruit – earth – Eve – juice – skull – book – skull – ground – fruit – book – read).
Still, my favorite poet is probably Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow translation) from the sheer strength of his lyricism and images.
In terms of starting poets, Sheremet says Countee Cullen is a good start here:
http://alexsheremet.com/on-countee-cullens-heritage/
Incidentally Alex Sheremet is a protégé of probably the most vicious critic on the internet – Dan Schneider. Schneider critiques poetry and film, as well as other stuff. He has this archive of articles where he takes bad poetry and rewrites them over here:
http://www.cosmoetica.com/top.htm
He advocates, to learning poetry, reading the bad poem, then guessing which lines he’ll edit, then reading to check what he changes. Schneider himself claims to have more than a thousand great poems, but he’s unpublished because his viciousness has gained him too many enemies in the publishing world.
Anyway Schneider gives quite a good list of poets over here (while condemning a whole lot of others):
http://www.cosmoetica.com/D30-DES21.htm
Both Sheremet and Schneider are true critics outside of academia who believe in no bullshit to art. They also believe that aesthetic subjectivity is bullshit – in the same vein as this quote from Confucius:
“There are few men under heaven who can love and see the defects, or hate and see the excellence of an object.”
So you can like an object for its aesthetics, but there is a quality to great art that can be acknowledged even if you hate it.
The more I read them, the more I find myself agreeing to this viewpoint. The problem is that greatness is not a quantitative judgment, which is why it’s so hard to grasp it. It does not come from either addition or subtraction, but precision. Hitting the mark perfectly. That’s why Sheremet argues that Countee Cullen’s Heritage, though not as complex in its words, is able to use simple words to get at a powerful idea.
As for labels, yeah they’re helpful merely in terms of usage, but not in rigid categorization. I guess the Taoists (with their category destroying koans), Wittgenstein or Nietzsche are the ultimate advocates of breaking from that framework.
You should just read everything on Sheremet’s site. He provides criticism of art you can actually act upon and his critiques of politics are super spot on.
Check out his views on Chinese Philosophy here: http://alexsheremet.com/confucius-lao-tzu-i-ching-chinese-history-some-inklings-of-the-future/
Be warned - he's also one of the most brutal critics out there and will have no qualms savaging those things he does not like, although he does it very fairly. I consider his take on Evangelion to be one of the best reviews of Anime hands-down, and also one of the best examinations of what Art means.
You can find it here, though, take note, don't read it if you haven't watched Eva: http://alexsheremet.com/neon-genesis-evangelion-place-animation/
I especially like his characterization of Art here: "Art is not ‘truth,’ but a dupe’s game wherein the best sleight-of-hand wins, and utterly un-real concoctions — wonderfully sketched characters, poetic dialogue — trick the consumer into accepting them as real, thus lowering one’s autonomic defenses against feeling manipulated or ‘cheated,’ defenses that were engineered into us for reasons of survival, but still come out, now, at the slightest suggestion of deceit. This is why the worst art feels so cheap, so exploitative of people’s emotional weaknesses, and why self-conscious (i.e., pretentious) art, if done well, is so bravissimo, for it STILL manages to get to the core of reality despite its artifice, thus signaling to the viewer a level of technical mastery few art-works can achieve."
This is how he describes the art of Francis Bacon in another one of his analyses:
http://alexsheremet.com/on-art-of-francis-bacon/
"Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (1944) fares better, and is instructional re: how this sort of art might work, on both technical and narrative levels. The first figure (as per most of the Crucifixion series) is somewhere between a creature and man, and seated on a chair or some other thing. Interestingly, the figure’s head can be interpreted in two ways: that of a head twisting back, as if in torture or to look at something, or no head at all but a suggestion of two arms being tied/held together behind the figure’s back. The eye is able to take in both possibilities, and it forces the brain to work, as opposed to merely take things in passively. The cloth, too, at the end of the chair is immediately seen as legs/feet by the eyes, depending on how the figure is being interpreted, revealing the sorts of tricks that Francis Bacon was capable of: mirages that, with a greater artist, would remain hidden and difficult to decipher, since they’d be so deeply married to a painting’s content that they’d be hard to isolate and study on their own. By contrast, they are quite ripe for analysis here, as in the second of the two figures (a neck wrapped in a towel, made unfamiliar by its mouth and the surrounds), and the last, which re-arranges ordinary human features in a way that is both seemingly illogical and immediately recognizable. The fact is, our brains are capable of entertaining multiple possibilities at once, and artists that know and exploit this vulnerability can learn to maximize their effects."
If you take Sheremet's path, then he'll say that philosophy as a whole is really just a superfluous game, and provides nothing but inert ideas that are clunky and don't move. He believes that other than the most poetic variants of philosophy (Chinese Philosophers, Plato and Nietzsche), the best Literature is far superior to it as a whole. In terms of the training logic side, he advocates just doing Science.
I agree with Sheremet, although I also have a personal interest in reading philosophy, so I do it for fun. That's why I have no qualms with reading philosophy sideways and all over the place, because I'm not there to learn philosophy on its terms, but I'm there to carnivorize the best bits for my own uses - to make my own Literature.
Anyway the bottom line is - don't believe that you need to learn certain terms like 'mono no aware' or 'wabi-sabi' to explain why something works. Sheremet has been able to do it in the most concise and concrete way over pretty much all of his reviews - even when he's describing something ambiguous! Over here he takes one of the most ambiguous and constantly shifting poet in the English language - Wallace Stevens - and explains one of his poems thoroughly: http://alexsheremet.com/wallace-stevens-rabbit-king-ghosts/
I think you probably shouldn't approach it with so much anxiety (although I understand that anxiety to make yourself larger, and I'm still going through loads of it). Especially don't idolize books - they're only a pathway and won't necessarily give you the answers (well, they do, but from what I've learnt, you won't realize it until the time is correct). It doesn't really matter whether you go into plenty of digressions as long as the end result - of you developing yourself and perfecting yourself - is the same. To me, even if I don't know the culture fully, it's what I co-opt from my learning that is more important. Developing oneself should be a process of joy more than a process of misery.
Read this brilliant short story called The Sum Of Others. It's one of the best ruminations I've ever seen on the issue of misguided love for the classics merely for the sake of its classicism.
http://www.cosmoetica.com/B950-AS5.htm
Of course, it's a different thing if your digressionary nature is symptom of a larger problem. If you can't concentrate on books its okay. If you find yourself not being able to concentrate on everything else, such that you take up a whole load of ambitions and ideas, and then find yourself being unable to keep up with them - then I don't think any amount of Philosophy or Literature will help with that. That kind of thing probably needs will training like meditation or exercise or just doing focused work in general. It could be that what you're actually worrying about is not just a lack of focus on books, but an general lack of focus. In that case I would suggest you to read something like Roy F Baumeister's Willpower or Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow instead - which are more practical.
The most important thing to develop your understanding is to try and think why something works for you, or why it doesn't - then you can guess whether it's personal bias or whether it's an actual flaw in the work that makes it fail.
I think your method is going quite well on the Literature side. You should always switch to something that is out of your comfort zone to develop your own sensibility - although if its becoming a slog for you, I suggest you drop the book - either its a book that doesn't work, or your sensibilities haven't built up to appreciate it yet. I found myself in this situation with the poetry of John Donne. I completely didn't understand how his poetry worked because he would shift from metaphysical image to metaphysical image abruptly, and some of his poems are structured such that the last part refutes the first part. Eventually, when I loosened by poetic sensibility, I was able to appreciate him.
So if you find yourself veering towards something that's overtly poetic (like Mishima), then try skipping to a writer that writes more naturalistically or minimalistically, like Kawabata. If you read something that's bleeding with angst like Dazai, Plath or Salinger, read a writer that makes fun of it like some stories of Chekhov.
For philosophy it's a bit harder, because some philosophy is written in argument to ideas by previous writers, while other philosophy can work quite well on its own, although you find it's value increasing as you live longer. The former philosophers are there to develop 'logic' while the latter are there to develop 'wisdom'. The Taoists, I consider, to be the latter catergory. Their writings would, to a normal person, make no logical sense especially when they keep talking about Action being Inaction - but these are so short and so aphoristically written that you can find yourself returning to them in any situation. Like whenever I find myself getting too heated up about things, or caring too much about small things, I always remember that quote from the Tao Te Ching:
"The world is Tao’s own vessel
It is perfection manifest
It cannot be changed
It cannot be improved
For those who go on tampering, it’s ruined
For those who try to grasp, it’s gone"
On the other hand for something like Kant, you have to spend your time going through the system to see how one argument works with the other. I don't know whether its worth it though, if you're not a person looking to polish your logical juices - and especially when we have so many books of Science and Maths to help cover those. I would probably recommend going through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to just get the gist of the whole, so that you know what you should look out for. But remember, always be critical of what you're reading.
Are you doing writing? It's quite hard to tell you what kind of thing you should be aiming for in your style if I can't see your writing style. If you want, you can private message me if you need a critique or evaluation of your works. I can't promise complete objectivity, but I can at least promise that I'll try to be thorough!