/lit/ - Literature

Jane Eyre

I have a hard time believing that anyone was stupid enough to believe it was a true story. Rochester fucking disguises himself as a gypsy and tells fortunes to everyone, and then later he is crushed by a falling support beam and instead of losing a limb or getting horribly burned he loses his fucking eyesight. Jane's childhood is so over-the-top and trying to milk the reader for sympathy with her orphan status and abusive foster parents I can only compare it to Harry fucking Potter. And I'm sick of people saying "Jane was so brave for running away from home. It was so progressive back in Victorian England." No. Jane wasn't brave, she was fucking stupid. She runs out into a god damn thunderstorm and nearly gets herself killed. The only reason she doesn't die is because people save her from her own stupidity. That is not a feminist role model, sophomore English class.

Terrible fucking book, Jane Eyre.

The only good thing about Jane Eyre is that it taught me India was once called Hindustan. When I saw "Hindustan" for the first time I thought it was a terribly phony sounding fictional country that Bronte made up, like Vishnustan or Durkastan.

It's mostly sound advice, and advice that everyone always seems to say, however...

>Never open a book with weather. (Unless it's for atmosphere, or unless you're a good writer who can write weather. What?)
>Avoid detailed descriptions of characters
>Don't go into great detail describing places and things

So don't describe people, places, or things? So the book should just be nonstop dialog and characters doing things in spacious vacuums?

>Protagonize is a creative writing community

NOPE

because the book is awful and Rand's philosophy is twice as awful.

the book is essentially a giant straw man argument, where Dagny argues with a bunch of incompetent idiots, so of course she wins every argument because everyone who disagrees with her is such a huge idiot they can't argue at all against her. It would be a different story if Rand only did this once, but she does it over and over and over, so by the time you're two hundred pages in you've listened to the same straw man argument no less than seven times in a row. This also means that the characters aren't actually characters. They're caricatures. Everyone in the book only exists to support Rand's philosophy, especially the characters who disagree and are painted as being mildly retarded. This also makes the characters incredibly dull, flat, predictable. If you're a character in Ayn Rand's story you're either God's gift to mankind or you're a brainless leech, and there is no middle ground, ever. An exaggerated black/white dichotomy serves a purpose for propaganda, but not for actual literature.

That's ignoring Rand's blatant wish fulfillment romance subplot which was really just a recycling of her blatant wish fulfillment romance subplot from the Fountainhead. That's also ignoring that Rand's prose is really bad, and that in the 1,000+ pages there are probably only a few paragraphs that seem to shine. And that's also ignoring that Rand's philosophy is horribly, horribly flawed.

Over and over and over she states that people who are poor or unsuccessful just need to work harder, and everyone who is rich earned their wealth through hard work and dedication. It would be nice if that were true, but it isn't. Hard work often goes unrewarded and successful people often have luck and circumstance to owe for their success. This is essentially called a "fundamental attribution error."

>yfw only crappy books have sequels

>reddit
>comments
>we have a right to our emotions

>>1166899
I've got nothing against Japanese novels, but light novels are just so fucking pathetic. take a look at this excerpt from Strawberry Panic, professionally translated by Seven Seas.

>Flutter flutter...
>All around them, cherry blossoms scattered to the ground. In the middle of a cherry-blossom-colored mist, a larger figure and a smaller figure stood close together atop a hill, surrounded by thick, old cherry trees. Standing atop the gently rolling hill of bright green, the two figures looked like they were floating in a thin, cherry-colored cloud.
>"The time has finally come to say goodbye, hasn't it?"
>"Oneesama, I...still..."
>Fwooo. A gentle breeze blew. It scattered the cherry blossoms again.
>Flutter flutter...

Light novels, man. What a fucking joke.

>Indeed, Harry Potter’s audience is also more evenly split between the sexes than Star Wars and Lord of the Rings,

more diverse audience = better film? Since when is the lowest common denominator of audiences good at gauging a film's quality?

>both of which appeal far more to emotionally stunted fanboys
because Harry Potter fans are so mature and grown up, right?

>who can’t seem to survive without some complex actions sequences and contrived back history to slaver over.
So what's with the contrived and thinly veiled Hitler allegorical back story to Voldemort and all the pandering quiddich scenes?

>For this reason alone you could probably rightly argue that Harry Potter is the best blockbuster film franchise of all time, easily outdoing its more puerile peers.
so because something is really popular, appeals to "mature" people, and doesn't have self-indulgent action scenes and contrived back stories (which HARRY POTTER DOES HAVE), it's the best franchise out there?

Nigga, you just went full retard.

these homework threads have lead me to believe that /lit/ is populated by community college drop outs.

>Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Twilight, Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, The Dark Is Rising...
>all these books are on about a fourth-grade reading level,

WHEN I CRITICIZE BOOKS FOR HAVING A CHILDISH READING LEVEL, /lit/ GETS UP IN ARMS AND CALLS ME A PRETENTIOUS LITERATURE NAZI HIPSTER

BUT WHEN THE NEW YORKER SAYS IT THEN I GUESS IT'S OKAY.