Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 870. page
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I already know what the literary world thinks of Stephen King, and I mostly agree with Harold Bloom. But that's not the point, really, as I am trying to learn to write horror that people would like.
I thought it'd be best to start studying Stephen King's works to find out what he does that makes him sell by the gazillions. I read through wikipedia synopsis of his books and picked one that interested me - The Girl Who Liked Tom Gordon.
Pic related is the first two pages of the same. I read the first two chapters and it is all like one big useless infodump. I am not even sure if I want to continue.. is this because I am not American /lit/? I just wanted to reach into the book and slap the shit out of the author and tell him to get to the point. Yet, I hear all the time he is the greatest storyteller, if not the greatest writer.
From the representative sample of pic related, can you tell me what you like or dislike about it? Why is it that from finding the synopsis interesting I went all the way to nope after the first forty pages or so in a damn 150 page novel. I just wanted to learn how to scare readers effectively, keeping them gasping for breath. That's all.
>>7784600
It's a big booku with characters being lengthily introduced and fleshed out and interacting, isn't it? Not a creepy short story which are usually better anyway unless all that fleshing out makes things more horrific.
>>7784617
Where does your pic come from?
>>7784635
tumblr
Now that the dust has settled, what is /lit/'s consensus on Bolaño?
>implying the dust ever settles
newfriend pls go
>>7784478
He's perfect
>>7784481
>implying you are not made of dust and will continually rise and settle, that life is not a billowing series of circle, and that this thread isn't a beautifully desperate take on marking a fixed point on the continuum
Hi /lit/, so a while back my friend recommended that I read some Murakami and following this my mother bought me Norwegian Wood for Christmas.
So far I'm about 200 pages in and in all fairness I'm not being blown away. I trust my friend's literary knowledge and taste as she's an intelligent and well read person but I'm not convinced here.
What does /lit/ think of Murakami in general and would you recommend any more of his stuff? Cheers.
I wanted to make a thread like this too.
I see him getting shit on a lot on /lit/ but I'm nearly finished with WUBC and have really enjoyed it so far.
Is his other work just not as good?
I read Wind Up Bird in 2012 and didn't care for it.
>>7784429
Yeah, I'd been thinking about posting this for a while but i'm a bit of a lurking newfag so ya know.
I'll give it a go as I've heard pretty decent things and I don't want to just discard literature that is celebrated and important just because I disliked one text.
I'm just not convinced by it, the imagery seems incredibly secondary school level and Catcher/Gatsby wannabe if I'm honest. So far I'm sat here anticipating a colossal change in quality which I'm starting to think isn't present.
Does this book get any fucking better /lit/?
Just started The Part About Fate and honestly it reads like a first draft.
>>7784340
just curious, OP. before you get btfo by /lit/. what exactly were you expecting? you clearly had something in mind and it did not meet your expectations.
bitch please; ya must be smokin' rocks! real shit for my people and it just don't stop
>>7784377
Honestly I was expecting something epic in scope and style. I've so far gotten a bunch of intellectuals on Pynchon-esque quest for a German who, for reasons never properly explained, is in Mexico (maybe), and the bored ramblings of a neurotic professor who talks to the homophobic ghost of his father for... some fucking reason.
Does it start to tie together into something more than "Hey look how /lit/ I am!" or should I stop now?
Why this sudden attendance /r9k/ robots into /lit/?
What should we do to stop it?
>>7784225
Currently reading this, it's hilarious.
>>7784238
Fo shizzle. I think that when it comes to russian 19th centure literature, once you pass the "muh deep themes muh nihilism" phase you start diging on other authors like Chekhov, Gogol, or pic related, who turn out to be hella funny.
On behalf of the /r9k/ manbabies who can not, I apologize for their autistic behavior and hope this will blow over.
Convince me /lit/, why is this considered good? I read this a long time ago and I was very disappointed, but I assumed that was because I had very little knowledge on philosophy and on the Enlightenment.
I'm now giving it a second try, hoping I'm able to understand it this time, but so far I just don't get it. Letting aside the absurdly bad prose, the plot is confusing and unbearably boring. Apparently the main point of the book is to be an attack on Leibniz's idea of our being "the best of all possible worlds", however, no matter how wrong Leibniz may be, Voltaire basically argues, implicitly, through Candide, that a lot of evil things happen on Earth, therefore this can't the best of all possible worlds; which is an extremely weak argument and does not refute Leibniz's ideas in any way. I have to say that some parts are funny and Voltaire's sense of humor is interesting, even though I feel most of it flew over my head, but I am assuming that there is more to this book than simply irony and snarkiness that is somewhat entertaining but ultimately doesn't lead anywhere.
I'm not a native speaker, so please excuse me if some parts are poorly written or if I didn't argue my point well enough. I'm just trying to understand why this little book gets so much praise.
>>7784142
didn't like it either. read lazarillo de tormes. infinitely more rewarding
>I am assuming that there is more to this book than simply irony and snarkiness that is somewhat entertaining but ultimately doesn't lead anywhere
There isn't. It's not a philosophical treatise. If the humor flew over your head that's probably why you didn't enjoy it
I thought it was really funny. Read an annotated version
What are you currently reading, /lit/?
What are your current thoughts?
>Pic related
Dead Souls. It's good.
it's great can't wait to continue
The Idiot. It's good.
What programs do you guys use as a free alternative to Word for writing? My 365 days are up and I have been locked out of mine. Thanks in advance guys
We pirate Word.
>>7784028
Well usually I pirate most things, but I just couldn't seem to get Word to work pirated at all
>>7784031
Grab an older version like 2010.
Once a small tomato
be tomato grow up and big tomato
tomato bully at school :(
tomato show bully be strong
happy tomato
sorry i no good english
Jolly nice!
then tomato meet cocumber
Cocumber say "tomat, you are fruit of gay"
then tomato say "no, I cant decide if fruit or vegetable"
Cocumber say "vegetable? You aren't the dead"
Tomato say "until I saw your mom"
Then cocumber became pickel
>>7784169
oh snap
post funny books and books about writing comedy
Poking a dead frog and Here's the kicker by Mike Sacks.
semen demon?
Catch-22 will always be the funniest book
Who /Niezsche/ here? Gentle reminder that this guy BTFO'd Christcuckery, inspired the religion of Thelema, was the main inspiration of Evola and also the root of all postmodern philosophy, including feminist theory.
He inspired both Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Fascists like Benito Mussolini, reactionaries like Evola and progressives like Foucalt. He was a protean figure without comparison in history.
Post your favorite passage then.
>no eternal return demon gf
>>7783855
Didn't he get cucked?
How can I better understand poetry?
I'd like to read some works like 'Paradise Lost', but I feel that I'd just be wasting my time as I won't understand them, and in turn, appreciate them.
The closest thing to resembling poetry that I've read, and isn't the King James Bible or Quran, is Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'.
>>7783816
Read the following:
Ted Hughes; Dylan Thomas; Seamus Heaney; John Berryman.
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton
Farm Implements & Rutabagas in a Landscape by John Ashbery
Emperor of Ice-Cream & Snowman by Wallace Stevens
Ezra Pound & T.S. Eliot
Hart Crane
This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
>>7783827
Thanks anon. Are these all fairly simple/easy to understand poems?
At what level would you say 'Paradise Lost' is at? How long would it take me to reach that level?
You can just read PL desu. It's Heroic verse, aka it does not ryhme, it just sounds good.
The punctuation is good enough if you can't understand a part read it out loud and you will understand.
It's also a great read. Go read it now.
>Infinite Jest in on loan
>All Pynchon is on loan too
How Patrish is your library /lit/
DFW and Pynchon is pleb lit, son.
Nobody reads at my library as far as I know, so its alright cause Im buddy with the librarians and ask them to buy me stuff and they usually do if its academic enough
>>7783713
>patrish
youre not patrician kid. not only are you a trendy fag but like the other guy said dfw and pynchon are not patrician.
come back when you have some taste and finish your freshman year.
Anyone have a job where they can read or listen to audiobooks at work?
yep. i'm a cashier and i get most of my reading done during downtime.
>>7783688
what kind of store has that few customers?
do you work the night shift?
does management care that you read or do they even know?
>>7783737
it's a local grocery store, pretty small place. i work afternoons through night. usually have a pretty steady flow of customers until about 4pm, afterwards they arrive sparingly, giving me a few hours of reading time. my bosses are great people and don't like to see their employees doing any more work than is necessary, so they have no problem with what i do. they understand that night shifts have a lot of downtime and don't care how i pass it as long as i'm not ignoring customers.
grumble grumble JEWS! grumble JEWISHNESS! grumble grumble Sigmund Freud. Grumble The Kabbalah! Shakespeare should have been an honorary Jew!
i love the rowling copypasta
I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>>7783818
The most fascinating thing about the whole story: Yale University bookstore is selling Harry Potter!?
Isn't it a children's book?
I agree with him, though, that it is silly to say children should just read any book, doesn't matter _what_ they read, as long as they just do.
