Underated
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You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
Sublime books that never get mentioned here. I'll start:
Middlemarch. Expansive, thought-provoking, moving, and terrifying in the depth of its suggestion that two people never really know each other.
>>8176173
The frogfaggots will ruin this thread, but I wholeheartedly agree. Masterpiece
Bleak House.
Like the rest of Dickens' oeuvre, severely overlooked by you fucks. Don't worry that it's long. It's in its length that there's pay-off.
The Confidence Man.
Intention, scope, achievement, anything, this book holds measure for measure with Ulysses for greatest work in the English language.
Eliots depth with her writing is pretty impressive, I remember when I was 10 pages in I was expecting another typical english story but then all of a sudden, medical references everywhere, greekisms, 600 pages of psychological breakdowns and analysis.
It was one of the thickest books I read concerning fiction. Gr8 stuff.
>>8176173
Picked this up on a whim at a used bookstore but haven't read it yet. I didn't really "get"austen and the bronte sisters, so do you think Eliot would be accessible to me?
>>8176495
Eliot is better than any of them. Whether you get her or not is impossible to predict, though.
>>8176182
What do you think of people saying Dickens overwrote many of his books?
The Life of Johnson, it's fucking fantastic. I can see why people would hesitate to pick up a 1400-page biography from the 18th century though.
Jane Austen is severely underrated and unmentioned on /lit/. She is hilarious.
>>8176182
Dickens too.
>>8176173
Fucking Rosemond pissed me off everytime she came into the story
William Kennedy's Albany Trilogy never gets mentioned here. Iron weed got him the Pulitzer and the Jack Nicholson/Meryl Streep movie, but my favorite was Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. But I prefer gamblers to murderous hoboes.
Lively prose too.
>>8176182
Good stuff, read this a couple of months ago.
It's an eye opening look at the Victorian legal system at the time
Just look at the title: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor
>>8176631
Oops.
>>8176554
Fair enough. Thanks very much!
>>8176173
If you finish Middlemarch, it will make you a better person. Dorothea is the purest good capable of a person.
>>8176943
Will Ladislaw was a good hearted person as well
>>8176173
>Middlemarch. Expansive, thought-provoking, moving, and terrifying in the depth of its suggestion that two people never really know each other.
Is this the /lit/ equivalent of
>intelligent, nihilistic and with a wicked sense of humor.
I recommend the following:
The Man Without Qualities
Petersburg
The Transylvania Trilogy
>>8176982
Yeah, but he was too caught up in himself to be as saintly. Mr. Garth is the only one that comes close for me (his failing being that lack of forgiveness to Bulstrode).
>>8176557
I'm not who responded to, and I don't have any clear answers about it desu, but I do think that if anyone believes in the "paid by the word" meme their opinion is automatically rejected.
There are plenty of great authors and books /lit/ doesn't care about.
Henry James is amazing at writing (relatively) accessible spooky ghost stories, and complex psychological dramas, but I barely hear anything about him here.
>>8177007
I agree, good to see someone else on lit who's read it
>>8176182
>Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
Favorite quote from that novel
>>8177035
yeah I was gong to post Portrait of a Lady, his relative lack of reverence goes beyond /lit/ though, maybe because people just get assigned Daisy Miller because Portrait is too long/people are lazy
In the First Circle - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
>>8176182
>Like the rest of Dickens' oeuvre, severely overlooked by you fucks.
If you're looking to expand your horizons, you need to look beyond the infestation of memes on this board and search for yourself. It seems you already have that going, kudos to you.
>>8176173
I saw a few copies of it in a second hand bookstore earlier, but lately I've had my philosophy blinkers on and I was looking for stuff by Nietzsche/etc.
I also saw a shitload of Milton's Paradise Lost. It was strange. Almost like they were trying to tell me something.
Nietzsche had some choice words for Eliot in Twilight of the Idols...
>>8178212
Nietzsche flogged a lot of dead horses.
Luckily, the flogging of a live one shut him up.
#Turin
I'mma toss out a few that I've not read, but intend to read in the hopes that you'll either confirm or deny:
American Tragedy
Vanity Fair
Basically anything by Philp Roth?
>>8176613
Never even heard of it. I'll check it out. Somehow reminds me of Outcasts of Poker Flat (dug that story), but I'm sure that's wrong.
Also, William Saroyan never gets mentioned here or anywhere else. I'm not sure he's sublime, but the dude abides.
Legumes are underated. Eat your legumes, kids.
>>8176557
He probably did, but that never seems to scare anyone away here. Ulysses is nothing if not (deliberately) overwrit; Gravity's Rainbow seems pretty tight until the end, which gets pretty baggy (also maybe deliberate); Inifinite Jest needn't even be mentioned.
Great Expectations is proof that Dickens can contract if he wants to, and relative to say Little Dorrit, Bleak House is pretty tight for a doorstop.
>>8177023
Also this.
>>8178742
Can't speak for American Tragedy but Roth and Thackeray are both good. Vanity Fair is one of the most misanthropic novels I've read, though.
>>8178842
American Pastoral or Portnoy's Complaint? Or something else entirely? Roth's bibliography is longer than my... (then again, so is Joyce's)
>>8178870
I'd start with American Pastoral.
>>8176195
I loved Moby Dick, but the only other Melville work I ever hear mentioned is Bartleby. What is this and why is it so overlooked?
>>8176577
Jane Austen is 19th century Twilight.
Complete trash.
>>8176612
Dorothea was worse, she married a guy twice her age she barely knew and then she was surprised he wasn't what she expected. No shit, dummy.
>>8176195
His 2nd best work. And that's saying a ton. Moby-Dick and this are in another world. Okay by me if /lit/ don't get it. Read H. Bruce Franklin's intro too.
>>8179219
A single day on a riverboat on the Mississippi, moves from con to con. I've never tried to write about it (the thing is like a perfect sphere intricately woven from spider webs - totally at a loss for how to start unraveling).
The story moves from one con to another and a string of ever changing confidence men, like the ebbing of the river, but the central conceit is that all of these confidence men and even their marks are really the same, and that in fact, all of the characters are really Melville, who, as a writer (especially of fiction) is himself a confidence man - sort of like that scene in Ulysses where Stephen's boss quotes "Shakespeare" saying "put money in thy purse" and Stephen replies that it was actually Iago who said that, leading one to wonder where Shakespeare actually is in all this. Melville likewise has a genius section where characters discuss the despicable Polonius whose oft-quoted "good advice" to his son actually belies a deep distrust in his fellow man.
The book works on a moral level about the need to trust in man (despite watching despicable and obvious cons throughout the novel, one ends up feeling a deep necessity to trust even the con-artist lest your lack of faith in man destroy your soul); or as a meta-fiction about the role and meaning of the author; a work about the state of America; and finally as just a pleasant trip down the river rife with unbelievable prose.
He also has wicked take downs of Thoreau and Emerson and a bunch of others, which feel motivated by a genuine, thoughtful mistrust of their ideas rather than a chip-on-the-shoulder about Melville's own literary failings, all of which is all the more impressive considering that Melville knew he was writing for an audience of precisely zero.
>>8179427
Agreed. Moby Dick was my favorite novel for a long, long time, but the Confidence Man surpasses it.
>>8179436
>The book works on a moral level about the need to trust in man
Your analysis is good, I'm just surprised in the confidence of this statement.
Also, I've always thought that the religious angle was very important to this work, as it especially comes out towards the end of the story.
>>8179452
Indeed, probably overstated and Melville certainly never makes any definite assertions one way or the other. But every time I finish the book I find myself willing to give money to beggars in the street and allow myself to fall for cons.
I think that mostly arises from the religious element. Melville seems to be saying something very profound about Jesus's opinions concerning material wealth (the sick man giving all his money for snake-oil while the wealthy woman who spends quantitatively more gets qualitatively and qualitatively less attention from the novel and the Confidence Man)
In Herman Melville is a thinker with the religious depths of Tolstoy, the ironies, subtleties and ambiguities of Joyce and the profundities of Hawthorne. Rivaled only by Shakespeare.
>>8179484
>In Herman Melville is a thinker with the religious depths of Tolstoy, the ironies, subtleties and ambiguities of Joyce and the profundities of Hawthorne. Rivaled only by Shakespeare.
Heh, it sounds like a line out of Bloom!
>>8176566
agreed
i would also add that a lot of Tolstoys less popular short stories/novels (aka not Death of Ivan) are amazing and not talked about much
I see Conrad and Gogol mentioned on here occasionally, so neither Dead Souls nor Nigger of Narcissus really count as "never mentioned," but I'd say both qualify as sublime and underappreciated here.
>>8176943
>Dorothea
>not Mary Garth
>>8179792
I think if you mention gogols other works and short stories which are technically his bread and butter no one on here reads them for the most part. A shame
>>8179949
It takes a real effort to seriously get into an author's work. You won't get there by reading /lit/'s perennial recommendations. That's why I've dedicated this summer to reading Hawthorne's complete body of work.
I have to ask is Robert Louis Stevenson any good?
I always just assumed he was just some high tier pulp writer of his time but so many great authors that I respect seem to admire him.
>>8180149
Treasure Island is good at what it's doing. Haven't read anything else by him.
>>8179497
Kek.
