/lit/ - Literature

Do you like John Green?

>Her eyes were black - like a negro's - but hummed with the craft of a higher predator.

Thoughts on this Author?

Have you pre-ordered John Green's new book, Turtles All The Way Down (available October 10) yet? I know I have!

What does /lit/ think about John Green?

What's he up to?

>>9058990
>The value of me cannot possibly be rated high so long as the hard diamond of the not-me bears so enormous
a price as was the case both with God and with the world. The not-me is still too stony and indomitable to be consumed and absorbed by me; rather, men only creep about with extraordinary bustle on this immovable entity, on this substance, like parasitic animals on a body from whose juices they draw nourishment, yet without consuming it. It is the bustle of vermin, the assiduity of Mongolians. Among the Chinese, we know, everything remains as it used to be, and nothing "essential" or "substantial" suffers a change; all the more actively do they work away at that which remains, which bears the name of the "old," "ancestors," etc.
What did he meme by this?

>A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources. That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development.

Is he really THAT bad?

JOHN GREEN LITERATURE GOD.

PAPERTOWNS is the greatest book of this century.

I'm not exaggerating :D

> Q: I've recently been reading a lot of fiction along the lines of Franzen, Egan, Foer, Wallace, etc. And I can't help but realize that your writing style is no less good than theirs, and that young adult fiction, while undoubtedly very important, perhaps does not deserve your full attention. I know you started writing the noir, but are there any plans to release a non-young adult book?

>A: Interesting question.

If I’m doing my job, my work stands up to DFW and Franzen and Egan no matter where it gets stocked in bookstores. But frankly, I’ll never be as purely gifted as those writers. There are, however, YA writers who are among the world’s best living novelists: M. T. Anderson and Markus Zusak, for instance.

I don’t really think novels for adults have inherently different themes from YA novels (like, Egan’s Good Squad is functionally a kind of coming-of-age story, albeit not one about teenagers. And David Foster Wallace is certainly very popular with teenagers).

I like publishing the way I publish partly because it reminds me that books are supposed to do something other than just prove to the reader that the author is intelligent. (I don’t think that criticism applies to DFW or Franzen or Egan, but too much literary fiction is merely clever.) I’m very prone to that kind of self-indulgence, and honestly it is only when I am writing for teenagers that I feel like I am doing work that is useful.

And that’s very important to me: Writing novels takes a long time, and it’s completely impossible for me to do it unless I feel like the thing I’m working on is going to be helpful to people.

Maybe to my discredit as a writer, I like to make stuff that is useful more than I like to make stuff that is beautiful.* In short, I write because I share DFW’s belief that books can actually make human life better. For me, at least for the conceivable future, that means writing YA novels.**

And I don’t feel like you’re taking the easy way out if you read my books. There’s plenty of room for both Franzen and me. Reading isn’t an easy way out. Watching NCIS is an easy way out.

* although of course books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful.

** I mean, of course I am not saying that adult fiction is not helpful: DFW’s work, for instance, is extremely helpful to me on a literally daily basis. I just mean that I personally feel most useful, as a writer, when writing books about teenagers. And readers, at least thus far, seem to agree.

>"It [the Holocaust] is something like a religion.... The Intellectual Adventure is that we are reversing this entire trend within the space of one generation -- that in a few years time no one will believe this particular legend anymore. They will say, as I do, that atrocities were committed. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, but there were no factories of death. All that is a blood libel against the German people."

What did he mean by this?

What does true sincerity look like?

>Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

Ok, before you guys jump on my throath the points of this thread is to see some arguments, the pic is just to gather some attention and is also related to this thread.

So, is there such a thing as "a book that doesn't deserve to be read"? Or reading anything is aways better than read nothing?

In my opinion, and probably this will be the case for the vast majority of this board, I think life is too short to waste time on bad books, but how do you face an arguments like:

>"how can you know the book/author is bad if you never read it?"
how do you respond withouth a fallacy? Like saying "I don't need to prove hemlock to know it is poisonous"

Daily reminder that if you browse /lit/ and you even have an opinion on this motherfucker you're a pleb yourself.

Being here and hating this guy is the equivalent of those grown ass men who go out of their way to criticize Justin Bieber or One Direction. It's the sign of someone whose tastes are just barely above those of a teenage girl, and he's upset because he feels like the position of the stuff he likes in mainstream culture is threatened by what those girls like.

how does it feeling knowing even he is much more successful, well-known, loved, and respected than you?

My stepdaughter asked us to buy her some of this guy's books, she's 12. Are they appropriate for 12 year olds? If she reads them will she be forever consigned to be a pleb?

John Green is the pinnacle of 21st century literary talent. Prove me wrong.
>Protip: you can't