/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17268820]

Post classics you personally don't like

[Anonymous No.17268885]

This is honestly hot garbage. I’d much rather watch Apocalypse Now. Inb4 filtered low attention span; bitch this book is booty.

[Anonymous No.17269021]

>>17268885
What did you not like about it?

[Anonymous No.17269030]

>>17269021
It's just overly descriptive and there seems to be no point.

[Anonymous No.17269044]

Frankenstein

[Anonymous No.17269637]

>>17269021
Pretty much what the other Anon said, nothing exceptional about the prose either. That’s not to say Conrad was a hack, I just don’t personally like him.

Plus nigger

[Anonymous No.17269685]

The Great Gatsby
Pride and Prejudice
The Ugly American
Slaughterhouse Five

[Anonymous No.17269722]

>>17268820
Why?

[Anonymous No.17269734]

>>17268820

You have no heart

or the translation sucks

[Anonymous No.17269742]

>>17268820
Pleb

>>17268885
Pleb

>>17269685
Mostly patrician, Slaughterhouse 5 is overrated but still good.

[Anonymous No.17269748]

I used to really like Marques when I was younger to the point where 100ys was my favourite novel ever and was the reason I learned Spanish though I never actually read it in the original
When I tried to read Love in the Times of Cholera when the lockdowns first started, it just didn't do anything for me, dunno
As to the topic? Fathers and Sons, I like Turgenev's other stuff a lot but FaS just flew over my head

[Anonymous No.17269749]

>>17269742
>likes Vonnegut
>calls anon pleb

[Anonymous No.17269860]

>>17269748
It's Márquez, not Marques. García Márquez if you're patrician enough.

[Anonymous No.17269891]

>>17268885
Completely agree

[Anonymous No.17269920]

>Dude Eurocentrism lmao
fuck off

[Anonymous No.17269921]

My diary, desu.

[Anonymous No.17269943]

>>17269030
>there seems to be no point.

This is a dumb thing to say about "Heart of Darkness."

[Anonymous No.17269963]

>>17268820
>Post classics you personally don't like
moby dick
Tolstoy
sun and steel

[Anonymous No.17270200]

I do not like Anna Karenina and it has put me off reading Tolstoy any further.

[Anonymous No.17270240]

>>17270200
I finished it yesterday and loved it. What in particulary didn't you like? And did you finish the book?

[Anonymous No.17270241]

>>17268820
This.
Fuck Cervantes an fuck ancient Spanish too

[Anonymous No.17270247]

>>17269963
>moby dick
Why?

[Anonymous No.17270249]

/lit/ owes me 10 bucks

[Anonymous No.17270285]

>>17268820
I'm honestly sorry friends
I've read it,and sort of liked it?
But I've mostly hated my entire time reading it

Mostly I think,because of me thinking it's going to be an epic tale of the hunt for the white leviathan
But what I got is
>*Rolls up to ship*
>"Bro have you seen Moby dick"
>"Yeaahhh mate he fucked my crew up,go south"
>And so,with a limp foot and wheezing cough Ahab went on his way,staring ominously into the distant black sea
>Btw,wanna learn about whale anatomy bro?

I personally didn't really like it
But I can see why someone would.

[Anonymous No.17270312]

>>17270249
Does this even count as a classic? I guess cult classic

[Anonymous No.17270320]

>>17270240
Yes, though it's been sometime now since I read it. I didn't find it particularly engaging, I couldn't for the life of me sympathize with Anna though I felt that I was being encouraged to do so throughout the story. The only characters I felt any substance from whatsover were Vronsky, Alexei Alexandrovich and Stiva, the latter being the weakest of the three (I think I simply found his story to be cute and nothing more). Granted, the translation I read was by Garnett, who I am not a fan of, but despite my distaste for her work, when I read her translations of Dostoevsky's work I find that the heart of the story and the substance of the characters shines through anyway. Dostoevsky's characters perhaps don't feel as realistic as Tolstoy's, but they elicit a stronger emotional response from me and I am better able to sympathize and reconsider my prejudices and cynicism when I read Dosto's work.

[Anonymous No.17270455]

>>17270320
Aha that explains it... According to my Russian flatmate, liking Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is known to be an either-or thing.

Levin was certainly the most alive character and his courtship and marriage with Kitty did it for me. The structure of the prose was also very compelling with the narrative moving through the inner lives of very different characters, whilst seamlessly shifting focus to landscapes, costumes and the outer appearance of their interactions. The other characters were decent; though they all felt very real to me and varying approximations of people in real life.

[Anonymous No.17270488]

>>17270285
Are you in a landlocked state/country?
It hits different, especially the beginning, if you're from N E

[Anonymous No.17271054]

Anna Karenina as well.

[Anonymous No.17271069]

Things Fall Apart
The Bell Jar
PoC and womyn are trash and subhuman.

[Anonymous No.17271096]

>>17268820
There are so many...
I am easily annoyed by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Balzac, some of Dickens, plus many authors from my language who I'd rather not name.
I mostly despise prose that is too abstract and rhetorical. Only very great authors can do it correctly.
Furthermore, if you're going to be abstract you need to have new ideas, or else it's pointless. Those authors I mentioned, with the exception of Balzac, couldn't think much. Their brains were too tame. New ideas were allowed to flourish, but only went so far as a prisoner who extends his arms through the bars of his cell's green window: not far at all. You can see the climbing bindweed in some of Dickens, but you cannot embrace it without feeling the bars between your arms and your chest.
At least that's my impression from the books I've read from those authors: Northanger Abbey, Silas Marner, Great Expectations, Eugenie Grandet.

And they always use too many words, too many words, too many words. I've grown to mistrust non-academic books that are more than 500 pages long.
No one can possibly fill 500 pages *and* make every single sentence be worth reading, unless we're talking about a life's work. For instance, my volume of the collected stories of Borges is around 500 pages long, but he took decades to compose all of that. Shakespeare himself only wrote around 2500 pages in all of his life, and a lot of it (Titus Andronicus etc.) is trash. Dante, who never wrote trash, composed even less. He spent 21 years writing a 400 page book.

I admit that as a humorist Dickens was a genius. I only wish his books were solely humorous, and free from all that sentimental idiocy. If anyone knows of a book of his that is solely humorous, feel free to recommend it to me.

>>17269030
>overly descriptive

If the description is good, it cannot be overly descriptive. It might be too charged, in which case you should perhaps read it a few pages at a time, like you'd do with Petrarch's sonnets or Pound's Cantos. But there is no such thing as overdescription because life is infinite, and therefore there are always new things to describe.
Look how perfectly Conrad does it:

>They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.

I wish to write like that one day.

>the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope

Extraordinary.

[Anonymous No.17271169]

>>17269685
>>17270200
I personally liked both Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina. One classic that I didn't enjoy was Great Expectations. There were some memorable parts that stuck with me, but I think I just don't enjoy Dickens' writing style.

[Anonymous No.17271199]

>>17271096
>Dickens
I think that he's great at sentimentality as well as humor.
Man, that scene when Pip is looking out at Joe & Biddy the night he finds out about his "great expectations" breaks my heart
Also the rhythm of his comedic scenes when read out loud are genius.

[Anonymous No.17271208]

>>17268820
Franz Kafka - The Trial

I dislike this book. Although im fan of Kafka.

[Anonymous No.17271209]

>>17268820
Pretty much all of russian lit is shit. I find it extremely repetitive, tired, boring and uninspired. Its like slavs are castrated intellectually to the point of it being impossible for them to be truly creative.

[Anonymous No.17271222]

>>17269920
Did you just read the title and not even bother to look at the wiki page.

[Anonymous No.17271260]

>>17268820
Tess of D'ubervilles

[Anonymous No.17271266]

This is Murakami's most-discussed book by far, but I think it reads like a ham-fisted parody of his style.

>>17269637
>nothing exceptional about the prose either
Bitch are you serious
Read more Conrad; you're missing out.

[Anonymous No.17271276]

>>17269920
retard

[Anonymous No.17271280]

>>17270285
People reading Moby Dick expecting it to be some grand whale hunting adventure and finding that it's literally quite the opposite is both the historical reaction the novel got since it's inception, and in some ways, the point of the book. I suggest re-adjusting your expectations and reading it again. If you're having trouble understanding it, no offense, I believe you might be younger, replace every mention of Moby Dick with "God" and go from there.

[Anonymous No.17271290]

>>17269734
There's only one translation and it's good.
(even Marquez said it was better than the original, I know that could be a sales pitch, but it is good, assuming English here evidently.).

[Anonymous No.17271345]

>>17271290
I haven't read it, but I'll let you know that Borges didn't like it either. He said it starts well but then the quality drops. He said it on that Buckley interview, I think (it's on YouTube, great interview).

[Anonymous No.17271364]

>>17269030
>overly descriptive
you basically have to fill-in 80% of the gaps. If you've never seen a picture of colonial africa, and nobody told you the basic premise of the book, you'd be totally fucking lost.

>>17269637
>nothing exceptional about the prose
>muh prose
>the writer wasn't chummy enough
>the writer didn't go into eloquent rhetorical flourishes belaboring the description of a chair as a sturdy wooden steed befallen to a lifetime of servitude to Mr Doogiebottom's rump.
fag

[Anonymous No.17271379]

>>17269860
Not the anon but fuck looking up a special character to type a name. I just use Garcia Marquez

[Anonymous No.17271436]

>>17271345
So, I don't really like it, I read it in English, twice (recently and years ago, hence the re-read), the first 3 chapters are phenomenal, both style, writing, etc., then it falls into it's pattern. The book is good, I get why it's a classic, but I don't personally like it though, hence opinions.

[Anonymous No.17271557]

>>17268820
This shit, biggest disapointment of my life. Read it when I was 15, maybe if I do it again it might change my mind.

[Anonymous No.17271806]

>>17271557
Somebody explain the ending to me?
I'm not ashamed of getting filtered by surrealism.

[Anonymous No.17271815]

>>17268885
Kinda of sad "Heart of Darkness" became the one work of Conrad's everyone reads. "Nostromo" explores a lot of the same themes, but better.

[Anonymous No.17271816]

Nadja
I can see its influence on surrealism, though.

[Anonymous No.17271825]

>>17269748
Anon I suggest you push through. Everything in Love is meant to get you to the end.

Trust me.

[Anonymous No.17271841]

>>17270247
I am a transsexual.

[Anonymous No.17271870]

Animal Farm, if mostly for the fact that I think the allegory is too on the nose

Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's tendency to employ flowery language and do jumps in time without even signaling to the reader is often a detriment to narrative coherency

Anything John Steinbeck wrote. A fucking hack if there ever was one

[dudelit No.17271879]

>>17268820
can't stand Great Gatsby

[Anonymous No.17271918]

>>17271806

To me, I found the ending to be quite funny - the last few sentence have this feeling or all the claustrophobia opening up, imo, as if killing Gregor were the slaying of a monster, which considering what we know about who Gregor was before the transformation, is the least deserved possible death delivered with the least deserved possible sentiment - and yet, because he is now physically repulsive and no longer economically useful, being rid of him, regardless of who he once was or what humanity he has left inside of him, is an enormous relief - he simply goes out with the trash. It's darkly humorous, one of the funnier endings to a piece of serious literature that I'm aware of, and it all drives home the main thrust of the work.

If you imagine that Gregor were simply sick with tuberculosis, it's perhaps easier to see why the family's reaction is funny - it makes a mockery of every good deed and sacrifice he ever made for his family. Imagine your family's reaction to your death being relief, after you worked so hard to provide for them! The family's reaction is almost inhuman, you might say, which is itself funny.

Every aspect of the ending seems to highlight an absurd contradiction. There's a lot more to it than I can write briefly, but my sense when reading it is usually that it's structured or delivered almost like a punch line - everything forces a reassessment of something communicated to the reader previously, in a genuinely surprising way. Of course, if any of this could be expressed easily, there would be no need for literature, but I think there's a very good reason Metamorphosis is considered one of the best works of literature produced in the 20th century.

[Anonymous No.17271934]

>>17271379
That's alright. What matters is using both last names and not just the maternal one.

[Anonymous No.17271953]

>>17268820
>>17270241
>>17271557
Fucking pathetic individuals

[Anonymous No.17272585]

>>17271054
:(

[Anonymous No.17272612]

>>17269748
100ys I still one of my favorites. Beautiful book

[Anonymous No.17272697]

>>17271879
The Great Gatsby is responsible for least half of all people who stop reading novels after high school. It’s only considered classic literature because it came out when the only other entertainment was pushing a hoop with a stick and riding those retarded bicycles with giant front wheels.

[Anonymous No.17272711]

>>17268885
>bitch this book is booty.
this explains more about your than your entire SOP essay for your uni

good god you're an embarrassment to this board

[Anonymous No.17272723]

>>17270241
I agree Anon, I got filtered hard by the repetitive nature of his adventures

[Anonymous No.17272759]

>>17268820
More of a cult classic I guess but you all owe me the time it took to read this shit

[Anonymous No.17272789]

>>17271870
>Anything John Steinbeck wrote. A fucking hack if there ever was one

[Anonymous No.17272820]

>>17271069
And you are a fucking retard for not realizing that Sylvia Plath can't write prose to save her life. All she wrote that was decent was Ariel.

[Anonymous No.17273015]

>>17268885
stop writing like a retard

[Anonymous No.17273032]

>>17271096
>new ideas were allowed to flourish, but only so far as the prisoner who extends his arms through the bars of his cells green window; not far at all.
We're reaching levels of pseud I never thought possible. No wonder you dislike realists, it's obvious that subtlety of any type is too much for you to handle. Christ.

[Anonymous No.17273137]

>>17268820
Fuck Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In the beginning it still good, but you would assume a maturing man to get less and not more melodramatic. Seriously what a fucking gay twink is this Stephen Dedalus dude, as a kid he was endearing, but having him soul-cum every 20 seconds in the later stage of the novel just feels so on the nose and trite. Like the first half up to his guilt about fucking hookers is still a readable decent book, because the characters emotions actually feel somewhat warranted, but after he resolves that issue it becomes pure melodramatic turd.

[Anonymous No.17273224]

>>17268820
Lord of the Rings. May appeal to children or young adults. Not much else.

[pip No.17273269]

>>17273224
u are some fewl sara

[Anonymous No.17273775]

>>17270488
I am in Bosnia so no,well
You have to count Neum so.....?
Yeahhhhh?

[Anonymous No.17273779]

>>17271280
Yes,all of this is correct
Thank you

[Anonymous No.17273822]

most contemporary shit
david foster wallace
murakami
paul auster
great gatsby
stendhal
italo calvino
hemingway
jack kerouac
henry miller

[Anonymous No.17273827]

>>17271280
exactly, the experimentation going on here is post-modern, but done right

[Anonymous No.17273831]

>>17273822
>Contemporary
>Stendhal

[Anonymous No.17273842]

>>17273831
obviously contemporary was one point on the list..

[Anonymous No.17273847]

>>17273842
and it's not that i think old shit was better, just that most of it wafiltered.

[Anonymous No.17273893]

>>17271266
>classic

[Anonymous No.17273914]

>>17268820
same, we had to read it in school
>>17269920
the book doesn't say that word once, at least in the first tome, and also wouldn't call it a classic
>>17271208
irs especially not rewarding
>>17271266
agree
>>17271280
sounds based
>>17273224
I've never been able to enjoy medieval fantasy
>>17273831
based

[Anonymous No.17274125]

>>17268820
i dont know what classic really means, does call of cthulhu count? genuinely hate that one.

[Anonymous No.17274155]

As I Lay Drying

[Anonymous No.17274162]

To Krill a Mocking Bird

[Anonymous No.17274173]

Ron the Road
>sequel to thomas the tank engine

[Anonymous No.17274189]

>>17271169
So you're saying you had Great Expectations, but it failed to deliver.


I'll see myself out.

[Anonymous No.17274301]

>>17271054
leo is such a chore
>anna karenina
it was much easier read imo

[Anonymous No.17274314]

>>17268820
>scarlet letter
read this shit in HS and it was such a fucking snoozefest. unbelievable terrible. even the teacher hated it but couldnt do anything about it. just makes kids hate reading. what a fucking slog, everyone used sparknotes and even reading those hurt my brain. pick some novels that are actually good and maybe kids wouldnt be so fucking retarded today. just think like wasnt War and Peace written around the same time as this? and compare the two. scarlet letter just needs to be banished forever.

[Anonymous No.17274354]

>>17268885
>I'd rather watch Apocalypse Now
>bitch this book is booty

HAHAHAHAH I had hopes for this board, but now.

[Anonymous No.17274565]

>>17273822
>Calvino on the same hate-list as the likes of DFW and Kerouac
How is this possible?
>>17274314
This opinion is very metal. Make of that what you will.

[Anonymous No.17274649]

It's not that I think it's bad, but I believe The Fall and The Plague are much more engaging and better written.

>>17271557
Also read it during my teenage existentialist phase and got filtered hard.
Then ten years later I read In the Penal Colony and holy shit, I was flabbergasted at how brutal and confusing this short story is, it was so awesome.
During the lockdown I finally read The Trial and found the combination of permeating social autism and surrealism really fun.
I think what got me around liking Kafka is that I have a boring corporate job now, his themes feel much more real to me now. That, and understanding that he is hard to translate in the two languages I can read (English and French).

[Anonymous No.17275741]

>>17274354
Guise, guise, anon isn’t adhering to 4chan slang and lingo, he must be a retard! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous No.17275808]

>>17275741
Talk like an ape, think like an ape. That's how you get filterd by a book read by teenagers who actually attened school n shieeeet.

[Anonymous No.17275882]

>>17271280
This has kind of blown me away. I need to go back and finish Moby Dick now

[Anonymous No.17275895]

>>17268885
Cope, Apocalypse Now is shit.

[Blarty Hongo !WegkZP4tiw No.17275905]

[Anonymous No.17275915]

ITT filtered general

[Anonymous No.17276254]

Tropic of cancer
Brothers Karamzov (single chapters stand out but most of it is filler)
Things Fall Apart
A scanner darkly
Atomized
Hunger
Zauberberg (unfathomably boring)
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Schopenhauers Aphorisms
Confessions of a mask
The Confusions of Young Törless
Brave new world
White Noise
Flauberts novellas

[Anonymous No.17276312]

>>17275808
The amount of cope. So now I’m filtered by a book because I don’t like it? Holy shit, have sex.

[Anonymous No.17276410]

>>17276312
Talk like a woman, think like a woman.

[Anonymous No.17276430]

>>17276410
REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.17277104]

ubik

[Anonymous No.17277181]

I dislike most Spanish classics from the 18th and 19th century. The 18th century was the worst period literature-wise for the country and 19th century novels like La Regenta or Doña Perfecta were at most just above mediocre desu. La regenta specifically could have been half as long.
Other than that I too dislike Heart of Darkness, I can appreciate Conrad's prose but I didn't feel the book was particularly insightful or an spectacular exploration of its themes so I don't really get why it's universally acclaimed. Maybe I just need to reread it.

[Anonymous No.17277200]

>>17268820
same OP

>>17276254
>Flauberts novellas
nibba you crazy for this alone

[Anonymous No.17277202]

>>17270285
I found it pretty comfy, because I knew going in there was barely any plot. I now know a shitload about whales and being on a 19th century fishing vessel, and have read hundreds of pages of interesting commentary on damn near every philosophical question using whales and boats and sailors to make the author's points. Its a slow burn, I'm glad it took me 4 months or so to finish because its definitely not an exciting book, its one to read 10-20 pages of at a time and chew over in your mind before moving on

[Anonymous No.17277248]

>>17273822
>DFW
I like his prose but infinite jest really came across as exactly the opposite of how it was apparently intended to me. Just stereotypically 90s 'everything fuckin sucks and life is depressing bro' shit.