/lit/ - Literature

what is it about The Great Gatsby that gets the plebs sucking up this slop harder than their BF's melanin-enriched schlong?

Your thoughts on The Great Gatsby? Is the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio any good?

If you could assign five books that US high schoolers would be required to read, which five would you pick?

>The Great Gatsby
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>Heart of Darkness
>In Dubious Battle
>Slaughterhouse-Five

What is the Great American Novel?

What are some of your favorite novels <150 pages or so? I'm looking for a fairly quick read to break up the pace in between longer works.

>>20349237
We read it in 11th or 12th grade at my high school. I honestly don't remember much other than the part where she describes the guy fucking her. And that's because the teacher read it out loud. So my honest opinion is that it's very forgettable.
10th grade was probably the best year for books. The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451.
In 12th grade, we read The House of the Spirits, and that was probably my least favorite book out of all of high school.

>hear good things
>first page in
>it doesn't make sense
i don't get it bros, how is he a politician if he is not judging people? why do the men hate him at his college?
am i being filtered or is this book just trash?

Books published in 1927 will enter the public domain in 2022.

>>19258099

How can people read the Great Gatsby and think this shit even approaches Mary Shelley or Hemingway, let alone someone like Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, LET EVEN MORE ALONE someone like A. Burgess or Shakespeare?

>In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Here you can see the extant of this guy's literary capability. Take something BORING like "When I was younger", make it overly descriptive in a BORING way that has no bearing on anything and rely on a bland, big-word stuffy tone to carry the otherwise garbage writing. IDC who this boring MC is. There's no personality, he just sounds stuffy. There's flow I guess but that's it.

>Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
OK, so he is a boring, rich, stuffy old man who is thinking way too hard about a simplistic moral.

>He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.
And yet we're not told at all what he could've meant. Boring. Again. No interesting word choice. Completely direct, sterile writing. No interesting characterization. Nothing.

>I’m inclined to reserve all judgments
He's non-judgmental because he know poor people exist. W0w.

>a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
So this boilerplate old kind rich dude has hobbies. Wow.
I'm trying to look for good writing otherwise. Curious natures? He's curious, thinks deeply, and has hobbies? Victim of veteran bores is OK, but I'm not interested.

>The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
I lost focus until "secret griefs of wild, unknown men". But he doesn't go far enough and the rest of the book is written in this sterile, oblique manner. Sure, he uses some writing memes I guess, but its just clean enough to trick people into thinking its good and getting itself into public education. I never even read this in school and still hate it trying to read it as an adult. I am convinced the reason people call this such a great novel is solely because they have heard someone say that, and then look at the clean, big-worded language of the novel and how he does a bunch of memes they heard about in English lit and think "I HAVE TO enjoy this".

I guess he's not THAT bad throughout. Its readable. I look over the quotes from this novel and they leave me with something, and then I look back to Shakespeare or the willow tree scene from 1984 and think how the FUCK is this a masterpiece? Anyone with half a brain could make these seasonal analogies and evoke the same fucking...

Alright /lit/ards, what am I in for?

ITT: Books you can't fully understand or appreciate unless you are at least 25.

Starting out with an obvious one.