Post the worst book you've read, just because you had to know what the fuss was about.
pic related
the crying of lot 49
Paulo Coelho " The Alchemist"
>>7678045
By no means the worst book I've ever read. I'd never want to spend another minute on it though.
The Name of the Rose by italian Dan Brown.
This and WWZ
God I hate normies
>>7678060
God I hope this flares up some Umberto fags.
The shining i guess
>>7678062
I warned you about genreshit bro
>>7678045
is it bad like "harry potter" bad, or is it bad like "meaningless masturbatory self-indulgent trite wank" i really need to know how cool I am for liking it
>>7678089
it's basically dude weed lmao, le conspiracy so randumb xd
>>7678089
definitely the latter, though given it's so short it's not especially self-indulgent.
Illuminatus!
I'm even into discordianism too so it was a huge letdown.
>>7678099
One mention of marijuana in the entirety of Lot 49, and not in context to any main character. You're a simple minded baboon.
Pynchon is nothing like untouchable, his writing full of faults, but you touch on none of them, instead just shoot back some meme comments without engaging the story in any depth.
>>7678108
Thanks for this. It's been haunting in the bookshelf of my local library for quite a while and I wasn't sure whether it's any good.
>>7678048
Same
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
>>7678146
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.
>>7678150
>Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by Stephen King
>reading Stephen King ever
Fuck off, Pleb. Go back to your genre fiction.
>>7678189
please be bait
or is this post-irony
>>7678194
>please be bait
I'm not the one reading Stephen fucking King, buddy.
>>>>/r/books
>>7678197
okay you can stop baiting now
or else i can't believe someone could be THIS new
>>7678113
Not that guy, but Illuminatus is great if you've exhausted Pynchon's catalogue and want something similar. Also takes influence from Catch-22 and Vonnegut's shit, but of course on /lit/ we aren't allowed to like the latter
>>7678201
Lighten up, friend.
>>7678197
>pleb cannot understand posts of alleged English professors
How can I expect you to even understand King?
>>7678060
Italian here. It was really mediocre.
>Eco keeps filling his prose with incredibly archaic words (I don't know if they were lost in the english translation but in italian it's ridiculous). I'm talking 19th century italian words that NO ONE uses anymore. Never seen them in another book.
>His characters are incoherent as fuck (the young monk falls in love with a girl, knows she's innocent but does nothing when they execute her and then doesn't think about her even once for the rest of the novel).
>The plot is retarded. Blind monk wants to keep people from reading a book. There is only ONE copy of it. Instead of burning it, he enacts incredibly convoluted plots to kill everyone that gets too close to the book. For FORTY years. Only when he's found out, does he finally burn the book. Well, maybe doing it 40 years earlier would have been easier?
Shit novel. Shit, arrogant author. Both worthless.
>>7678210
Regardless of your reason for reading King, it's still reading king. It's like ironic shiteposting. It's still shiteposting.
>>7678218
the worst bit was the tl;dr on whether jesus laughed. actually it was most of the book.
there was also references to new world vegetation e.g. pumpkins which would not have been present in the old world at the time the book was set.
>>7678062
WWZ isn't that bad, I'd call it harmless.
