/lit/ - Literature

>>9496432
Genre fiction is fun, and worthwhile because it's enjoyable to read.

>>9496432
Marx was obviously a satirist.

>>9496477

On this I think genre fiction is a sign of a mature reader. I do not mean only a genre fiction reader but if you can enjoy the occasional mystery you are doing just fine.

>>9496478
Makes sense actually. Satire is pretty much all about making fun of the norm and at the end of the day having a point for why the norm is stupid.

If true, this makes Marx one of the great satirists. A genius.

>>9496432
Twilight was a good book.

Novels and poems are to be consumed in the same manner as films and video games
Non-fiction will always be more important to people who appreciate human improvement over entertainment

>>9496432
Hemingway is not that interesting. The Sun Also Rises was the only one I liked and thats cause Brett is every thottie ever

>>9496432
The Savage Detectives > 2666.
Invisible Cities is not even close to Calvino's best.
Hunger is one of Hamsun's weakest works.
Kerouac is pure, unadulterated shit.
Madame Bovary > Sentimental Education, no matter what Flaubert said.

>>9497074
I haven't read SD to compare it to 2666 but I low key love the later so it'll be a hard opinion to press

completely agree about kerohack though (and low key calvino but that's just me )

>>9496432
Chick fil a used to be spelt chic fil a.

>>9497159
SD is much lighter than 2666 (what isn't really) and while it has a more limited scope, it is my favourite Bolaño.

2666 is an amazing book but I think it shows that it was published posthumously. The whole idea of the "river novel" is done in the second part of TSD (the part about the interviews) in a more original and tasteful way IMO. I think that, at least from a formal point of view, theI interviews are the best and most interesting thing that Bolaño ever wrote.

Alli in all, if you liked 2666 you really should read TSD.

>>9497074
>>9497159
you both didnt undertand invisible cities

>>9496432

My colleagues and I in our vast wealth are having trouble dealing with a troublesome tangle of lies. We have full sway to manipulate the way things will go but have to limit ourselves to perpetuate a lie that is our own doing, and also an ironic contrast to the reason why we lied in the first place.

Also, I don't think being called a chicken is an insult. But also I believe to insult someone you have to say it directly to them or you're just being a passive aggressive pussy.

>>9497209
I don't think that "monkey" or "pussy" are insults.

>>9497207
Okay then

Journey to the End of the Night is a much better version of Catch 22.

>>9497049
motivate your answer

>>9497362
made me cum without touching myself multiple times

>>9496487
>On this I think genre fiction is a sign of a mature reader. I do not mean only a genre fiction reader but if you can enjoy the occasional mystery you are doing just fine.
Your writing treads the line between Sudaca who can't speak English and 14-year-old pseud trying to sound sophisticated but misusing phrases, which is a very rare line to tread. Well done.

>>9497074
totally disagree on Hamsun. I think Hunger is a very different work from most of his others, but what he tried to do with Hunger, he did perfectly. He was also ahead of his time with this modernistic work, and is rightfully viewed so today.

>>9496432
The literary canon is too restricted and doesn't have a wide enough variation in writing techniques.

I don't think a woman has ever written anything worthwhile.

I once read a good book, but after finding out it was written by a woman I realized how shit it was.

>>9496432
>The Republic is obviously satire
>The Prince is subversively against tyranny
>Gravity's Rainbow is boring, unfunny, and not that well written
>Dune is the most overrated SF novel of the 20th Century
>Edgar Rice Burroughs was the most influential writer of the 20th Century and deserved it
>Tolkien was a better writer than most admit, but the crap imitations tarnish his profile

>>9497669
House of Mirth is good for being a polemic, but the dumb bitch apologized for how hot fire it was later in life after the dandies got on her case--ruining the whole thing.

>>9497597
I mean I like Hunger myself and I could subscribe everything you said. I still consider it to be among his weakest works, even if it is probably his most influential.

I just love his more lyrical work I guess.

>>9496432
Philosophy is shit.
Anything that isn't entertaining/useful/timeless is worthless.

Charles Dickens is a pompous bore. His stories may sometimes have intriguing themes, but his style of writing is just fucking repellant to me. Compare him to Herman Melville of the same time period, who is similarly flowery but still elegant and precise.

>>9497685
Can only comment on your last 3 points, but i agree...

does that mean I have to change my mind?

>>9497063
I like anything and everything in the western canon and I can't tell whether it's because I'm too afraid to form an opinion, but honestly everything I've read is of merit. I see people on lit ragging on Hemingway, Salinger, the rest of the Americans, the French, the Greeks, the Romans, Joyce, even fucking Shakespeare if they're not trolling, and I like it all.

Oh-- but I haven't read Sartre or Bertrand Russell but I hate them.

Reading must be fun and entertaining and yes, you do read for the plot and also for the prose. Rereading is overated (fiction), constantly finding new works and reading better books is the way to go.
Don't know if contrarian but I strongly believe that passionate readers divide into two groups: fiction and nonfiction readers. I've met people who get extremely bored if they read anything than nonfiction. And I can't finish a history or philosophy book without going sleepy.

>>9497704
Some people are entertained by philosophy, you fucking pleb. Just because it hurts your head and frustrated you doesn't mean that other people don't enjoy the challenge.

>>9497764
>entertained
>philosophy
not even against all philosophy but those who read it for "entertainment" are a special kind of boring idiot.

>>9497779
If you don't have fun being challenged intellectually, you are the definition of a brainlet desu

>>9497789
>entertainment
>intellectual
It's like you got all of the autism but none of the intellect.

>>9497641
Never thought of that

>>9497816
Not everyone has to pretend to read difficult things to look smart. I get much more enjoyment and reward from reading something dense and Philosophical than I do reading something plot-driven. It's not entertainment in the way a movie is, but it is rewarding, which is its own kind of entertaining. I figured others here would feel the same. I'm a little disappointed. Do you not enjoy philosophy? Interesting.

>>9497685
>The Republic is obviously satire
How did you arrive at this conclusion

>>9497669

>>9497831

10/10 I absolutely agree, the guy arguing with you confirmed brainlet

>>9496432


chic fil-a should be open on sunday

>>9497938
It makes me legitimately sad, to by honest. The anti-intellectuals are the ones ruining art, and they fucking brag about it. Brainlets unknowingly being proud of being brainlets.

>>9496477
90% of what I read is serious literature, but I have a collection of 1960s and 70s pulp scifi novels. It's a nice break to kick back and read a simple 200 page story. It recalls the feeling of watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid.

>>9496432

Reading books for plot is not a plebeian thing to do because real writers understand the difficulty of creating a plot that is unique or attention grabbing (without holes). Also plot is fun.

The definition and stigma of purple prose has become completely overblown and has reduced our expectations and judgements of literature into minimalist dogshit with no style or love.

Drugs and alcohol don't improve your creative output they in fact halter it from being the best it can be.

Joyce is not the end-all be-all of literature.

>>9498061
>Joyce is not the end-all be-all of literature.
Sacrilege

>>9498061
>The definition and stigma of purple prose has become completely overblown and has reduced our expectations and judgements of literature into minimalist dogshit with no style or love.
I disagree, the issue is not that we've vilified purple prose, but that everyone and their mom believes they are Earnest Hemingway.
I love Hemingway and his style but I'm also not so stupid as to believe I have one tenth the gravitas to write so directly. Highschool age pseuds and the people they grow up to be, on the other hand, find it an easy way out of spending large amounts of time editing and re-editing their work.

>>9497669
That's not a contrarian opinion among smart people.

Henry James is the only American writer superior to Jane Austen

>>9498231
This.

This is not reddit, we are on 4chan, where being redpilled and outing women and sexually active people as inferior is not considered "contrarian".

i would say "poetry has lost its way and isn't relevant anymore" but that's hardly contrarian.

i guess i'll go with "bukowski has strong literary merit".

>>9497954

Its because you don't even begin to climb the bell curve of intelligence until you realize you have a long way to go in actually being intelligent. Then you have to specialize in a field. People like to disregard literature because it isn't science, but its ironic, because these same people couldn't tell me the molecular mass of fucking water without Google.

> Kafka is enormously overrated.
His only enjoyable work is Metamorphosis.

>>9497063
If you haven't yet done it you should check out his short stories. And also A Moveable Feast, it's something totally different from the rest he wrote and really comfy.

>>9496432
Christopher Tolkien is a better writer than his father and it shows in all his stand alone versions of his works.

Genre fiction CAN BE (read: is not necessarily) quality literature

>>9497058
non-fiction is the real life equivalent of excessive worldbuilding in bad sci-fi.

>>9498526
Read his shorter works and aphorisms.
The Penal Colony, The Silence of the Sirens and whatnot are all amazing.

I don't care much for his longer and unfinished stuff but I can see why they are so highly rated merely because of how influential they were

>>9498796
Give some examples of gtfo

>>9498828
Raymond Chandler
Robert Louis Stevenson

>>9498843
Sorry, I meant examples of actual quality literature.

>>9498828
>Steven Erikson
>Frank Herbert
>Lovecraft
>Matthew Stover's non-spinoff stuff
>Tolkien
>Mervyn Peake

>>9496432
chick-fil-a is so good

yummy

>>9498828
Three Musketeers
Count of Monte Crisco

>>9498828
Michael Moorcock

>>9498878
>not rating Chandler
Top pleb desu

The best place to read the highest of literature (Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse and so on) is Denny's at night - preferably after mid-night and in the next town so you are unlikely to be recognized - with a tall and chilled glass of cola to keep you company. Yes, it's okay if other people are there.

You will find the atmosphere of the restaurant most copacetic to the intellectual labor of moving your eyes from the first sentence of your chosen work to the second, and perhaps even to the third. Once you have given up on reading for the night, you can enjoy your cola drink and perhaps a meal item of your choice.

You really can't lose. Denny's.

>>9498949
no joke I'm going to try this
will report back with result if the thread is still here

>>9498949
Wtf I love Denny's® now

Free verse isn't poetry, and Walt Whitman should be tossed from the poetry canon.

>>9497439
btfo

>>9498949
>Not reading at Waffle House.

>>9497685
>The Prince is subversively against tyranny
yes
>Gravity's Rainbow is boring, unfunny, and not that well written
"no"

>>9499143
*blocks your light*
>whatchu readin' fir?

Wat do?

>>9497962
For me, it's the other way around.

I only read for entertainment, and the thing I find most entertainment is cheap, paperback fantasy novels.

>>9496432
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a bad album.

>>9500294
Gravity's Rainbow is a poor mans Catch 22

>>9496477
>>9496487
But that's wrong. Genre fiction isn't even remotely fun. If we mean "literature which people on /lit/ meme as genre fiction", like Wolfe or Tolkien, then sure. But if you literally mean airport novels and Eragon then you're really bad at having fun.

>>9497074
>Kerouac is pure, unadulterated shit.
CONTRARIAN

there are so many undergrads in this thread

Camus and Sartre are painfully overrated as writers and only work in a cold war-era world

>>9496432
Romanticism is in most cases dull and boring.

>>9496432

Middlemarch is far less great than university professors would like you to think.

>>9500706
Tolkien is genre fiction. I haven't read Wolfe, but be adult, stop deserving the sight of my fecal matter tumbling onto the faces of your loved ones with their lips sliced off, you fucking born victim, you peasant, you untermenschen, you fucking mongoloid cum dribble.

>>9498526
de
le
te
th
is

>>9497685
All of this is shit except the first one.

Why do pseuds feel the need to dampen Machiavelli by rationalising him as some satirist, or worse, subversive rebel?

>>9500724
trying too hard buddy
>>9498949
What the fuck is a Denny's

translate this

>>9500721
Why?

Tolstoi is the worst writer in the Western Canon. This is obvious.

>>9500734
Because he's a self-affected PoMo

>>9498949
come back :(

I secretly love Warhammer 40,000 books. Unironically.

Pulp stories are underrated and Howard and Lovecraft are literature

philosophy is boring

Part one of Don Quixote is boring, overlong, and badly paced and it's ok to read a summary and then skip to the much better second part.

>>9496432
ts eliot is mediocre

>>9496432
Constance Garnett > Pevear & Volokhonsky
Pynchon isn't worth the effort

>>9496478
He certainly has a wonderful sense of humor, which is mentioned about as often as the fact that Engels was a beautiful stylist, and deserves a place on the tier Proust occupies for litetature, and Schopenhauer for philosophy. Someone (Rouseau, maybe? Can't remember) read Machiavelli as an ironist, which is just as plausible. Good eye, anon. It's not too late to make him one..

chick fil a is great, wish we had it in the north

>>9497074
How would you rank calvinos work? Out of what you've read

>>9501981
Constance was the mother of Edward and David-- the former perhaps the great editor of his day, most known now for his editing of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars, the latter the author of some wonderful short fiction few read these days. Some David recs- Aspects of Love, Go She Must, Lady into Fox.
Have always had a soft spot in my heart for Constance therefore, in despite of preferring more modern translations.

Haruki Murakami is a good writer. /lit/ just doesn't like him because he's popular / the first japanese author people hear about

>>9502115
Huh, didn't know that. All the pictures of her make her seem like a lovely Victorian mom.

>>9502105
Best for me would be If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and Under the Jaguar Sun.

I also really enjoyed his collection of italian folktales but that may just be because I was really into the subject matter.

Invisible Cities would fall between these and stuff like Cosmiconomics, The non-existant knight and whatnot. This is all just my opinion of course.

>>9502130
>Haruki Murakami is a good writer
I agree
He's not a great writer by any measurable standard though

>>9502079

Satirists don't typically write massive philosophical treaties or start Cominterns but whatever.

>>9501894
Part one is the best part, delet yourself

>>9498526
The only one I liked is the trial. I know how he feels every time I go to the IRS to pay taxes or get pulled over.

J.R.R. Tolkien and E.A. Robinson are my favorite poets.

>>9496432
Dostoevsky > Tolstoy

>>9502231
Delete this and don't ever post here again

>>9502613
No. Get out of the contrarian thread if you can't handle it.

>>9496477
>>9497685
>>9498061
>>9498526
>>9498796
>>9500825
>>9501037
>>9501894
>>9502231
You don't seem to realize how /lit/ used to be great, before beasts like you ruined it. Now the mods side with the mediocre, with the rabble, with you ; they will ban anyone telling your kind to get the fuck out. They helped make this place more like reddit ; and it just keeps getting worse, as reddit users come, and just see the garbage, the retarded shit, the dumb sci-fi, fantasy, pleb threads, and go "woah this board is actually quite like reddit but with another template," so we have to deal with them, and they start to form sort of gangs, and will side against anything rare or noble to further wallow in their mediocrity like an animal in its shit. Most of them must be fat fucks, gamers and losers.
Some of them can be reared into respectable people, but they must encounter anons with unfathomable arrogance backed up by true knowledge of the subject matter. The good ones will feel terrible about themselves, and will remake themselves. They will read the good books, they will despise their former selves, and attempt to create a new personality, bringing about their maturity.
The others are just too low-blood to make it, probably the descendants of products of incest or the sludge of some peasant caste in a past age, the kind with big foreheads and squinted faces, who hunker through the streets and yell at anyone they deem "tryhard" or "hipster," words true for some but used falsely by them against anything or anyone remotely Olympian. These must be simply embarrassed with ad hominems, doxes, literary gang rape and dunce caps until they get the fuck out for good. That's all they can understand, so we speak their language.

Since we stopped doing this like we used to, the board now lacks the atmosphere of an old e/lit/e french salon fused with the violent Greek ἀγών which it once possessed.

We don't have experts to come in and shit on newplebs, tell them to go back to reading catcher in the rye: we've let people who fap off to DFW actually have threads and not shame them out of here, and the American election has made everyone care about petty politics more than the canon, so you get effete antifa wannabees and braindead alt-right meme-spouters bickering about who is more sophisticated when neither of them read anything written prior to the nineteenth century.

If we want the board to be good we have to shit on people all the time and cultivate a culture of elitism again.

In order to achieve this, we must make the reddit users feel not welcome, and ruin their chances at an actual discussion of whatever their mediocrity brought them to enjoy. They must lose all incentive to come here. This incentive is fundamentally that they find a platform which allows to partake in such discussion. This platform must be destroyed ; we must insult, humiliate and harass them until they can no longer find any pleasure in coming here.

>>9502735
Neat pasta.

>>9502711
Don't ever reply to me again you fucking plebeian

>>9500522

>>9502130
this.

the japanese books ive read that were translated were all usually fun to read. im reading six four now and its one of the best things ive read this year

>>9502735
Unironic fuck yeah

>>9496432
reading culture as a whole desperately needs to be revamped and i think genre fiction is honestly doing a lot of good for it

>>9497685
>The Prince is subversively against tyranny
How is this even contrarian? Have people not read anything else from the guy?

>>9503341
Explain how?

>>9496477
The idea that all literary fiction is better than all genre fiction is absurd, since it implies that a fun, well-written story set on board a spaceship in the future is inferior to a boring, poorly-written story about a guy living through an ordinary day in today's America. Indeed, the idea that all stories set in the future and dealing with the consequences of hyper-advanced technology belong to a single genre is already absurd.

Murakami is a great writer.
Borges has the best prose the Spanish language has ever seen.
Snow Country is the best book of the past century.
Cortázar is fine, but vastly overrated.

>>9502735
agreed

>>9497731
M-me too

>>9496432
I really enjoy Brandon Sanderson and John Green.

/lit/ is just a bunch of stuck up pricks who don't like fun.

>>9502882
>goes into contrarian thread
>gets triggered by contrarian opinion
I don't know what you expected.

Just honestly sharing my taste. I'd be willing to explain my reasons, but I don't think anyone would be interested.

>>9502735
This reads like an oldfag trying to sound like a newfag.

/lit/ has always be shit and if you claim otherwise you obviously haven't been here that long.

>>9503764
>that time in which /lit/ unironically loved BEE

>>9502735
>
it brought a tear to my eye

>>9496432
lol

>>9496432
dongs

>>9496432

The Moratorium on Brains from Atlas Shrugged is one of the best chapters ever written

Baudrillard is right about everything.

>>9502735
I wish this would happen.

>>9503763
I said get out, tard

>>9498270
Hello have you read Moby Dick?

>>9497694
Then I think I misunderstood what you meant with "weakest works", because I agree with you here

>>9502173
Actually, youre right. It's a pretty damning observation, and I am the person addressed.
Nonetheless I do like his humor, especially when he becomes impatient or even, on occasion, exasperated.

>>9502735
I agree wholeheartedly. We should drive out the plebs and reclaim the board for true connoisseurs like you and I.

Right now, I am currently reading Homer in the original Latin.

>>9497177
Stop it Mandela

>>9498061
>Drugs and alcohol don't improve your creative output they in fact halter it from being the best it can be.

Expound, pls.

>>9498526
Some of his short stories are dank af, tho.

>>9497816
This post is actually fucked up. Please stop posting desu.

>>9502095
cuck

>>9506621
>reading Homer
>Not hearing recited in your local agora, as Homer intended
Never gonnae make it bro

God is not dead
9

>>9502150
>Under the Jaguar Sun as Calvino's best
wew lad

>>9498949
David Foster Wallace did this. He even thanks his local Denny's in the publishing notes of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

>>9500522
Listen to it again. You'll see soon enough.

>>9501894
Go fuck yourself, both parts are wondrous and if you can't appreciate that, maybe you shouldn't be on a forum for Don Quixote fan-fiction.

>>9498949
Denny's is very underrated. In my opinion it has better food than IHOP and is also more affordable.

>>9502735
preach

>>9498061
Drugs and alcohol are often necessary at the start, but yes, the final step is sobriety if you can find enjoyment in it