/lit/ - Literature

>>11981199
just read IJ and 2666. IJ was miles better. 2666 is just long.

None of them are that difficult

>>11981199
if there was a generic "genre pretentious"

i feel like all 6 would belong there. i just found no joy inside them, it's like sitting down with a very boring neet and then listening to them talk for 6 hours about what they think is the meaning of life. i could just ask someone who actually is a happy and fun person, and they would probably take like 15 seconds to say something like:
>"i don't know, what do you think anon?"

>>11981245
>i would prefer to talk with somebody who won’t even attempt to engage in discussion than somebody who would

get out, nigger

>>11981199
I've read all except Women and Men

Difficulty (easiest>hardest)
2666>IJ>GR>Ulysses>The Recognitions

Quality (from worst to best)
2666>IJ>The Recognitions>GR>Ulysses

>>11981255
Nigga do you know what the > sign means

>>11981265
Shit

Oh well, you get the point

>>11981245
>it's like sitting down with a very boring neet and then listening to them talk for 6 hours about what they think is the meaning of life.
>I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
(from the recognitions.)
???

>>11981245
I guarantee you haven't read any of those books, except maybe IJ before dropping it at Wardine be cry.

>>11981199
I read the top three, since this is /lit/ I'm gonna give the basic-bitch answer.

a) Ulysses > Gravity's Rainbow > Infinite Jest
b) Ulysses > Gravity's Rainbow > Infinite Jest

I feel like Ulysses is difficult in an entirely different way than GR and IJ are. The 'difficulty' in both GR and IJ lies in a clusterfuck characters/plotlines/puzzles and themes hidden in the aforementioned clusterfuck. This is done to more extreme lengths in GR, to the point where both the reader and the main character have to ask themselves: how the fuck is any of this still making sense?
The good part is that it makes just enough sense to start chasing ghosts around, which is what both the main character and the reader get to do.

Of those three Ulysses is the only one that gets (almost) unreadable on a sentence-to-sentence basis in parts, which is what makes it a whole other beast.

>>11981199
Why would I ever read a novel written in the last 50 years? Do you think that little of me OP?

>>11981245
>he found no joy in GR
Closeted faggot

>>11981406
I've read all but Recognitions and Women and Men and would pretty much echo this statement. I don't think 2666 deserves to be on this list -- not because it isn't great, it is -- but because it's a translation and both its "difficulty" and "quality" are pretty much unknowable to the English reader in a tangible way.

My Spanish isn't bad, but it isn't good enough. I read Latin at an advanced level, ancient Greek fine with a dictionary, and French fine with a dictionary. I only mention this to point out that I think about translating a great deal, and conflating a translation with an original text does great disservice to both. I read N Wimmer's 2666 and Savage Detectives, and both really were wonderful novels that I want to read in the original. Just, pretending like we could judge the aesthetic power / quality / difficulty of an original based on a translation is pretty disingenuous.

(pic related: am trying to read the Quixote in Spanish right now)

>>11981326
>You poor bastard.
did you just assume my gender?

>>11981255
Dude, when was the last time you were in a maths class?
Your opinion is practically worthless. You can't probably use basic math symbols and you expect me to believe you understood Gravity's Rainbow.
Get the fuck out.

>>11981199
only worth meme trilogy

>>11981742
based & high IQ (over 90)

Am I the only one who finds Gravity’s Rainbow more difficult than Ulysses?

>>11982101
There's gonna be some variation between readers on who finds what difficult. The first 200 pages of GR kicked my fucking ass, and I was reading it straight after TCOL49 and V so it's not like I wasn't prepared.
Meanwhile I didn't get as frustrated at Ulysses, but the parts I didn't get I chalked up to not being well-read enough, so I didn't obsess over sentences and paragraphs until I got them like I did GR.

>>11982101
IJ is harder than both due to Wallace writing like a prozac tard with literally no direction.

>>11981265
>>11981569
Nothing wrong with what he wrote. He properly defined the ">" sign as "easier than" and respectively "worse than". If we were talking about real numbers or any other ordered set, then there might have been conflicts.
If you've never even studied abstract algebra and set theory don't criticize people about math.

I doubt there are many people here who've actually read all six.

Is 2666 actually as difficult as people make out? I managed to read IJ and Ulysses already but I struggled with the latter, honestly.

>>11981199
can we swap out IJ for literally anything

What about the alternative meme trilogy: Finnegan's Wake, Pale King, V?

I had an image but I lost it.

>>11981199
Who the fuck ever decided Recognitions, Women and Men, and 2666 was the alt-trilogy anyways?
They're not nearly as discussed or memed as Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, or Lolita.

>>11982193
I have actually studied a fair bit of set theory and abstract algebra and your defence is rather weak. You just don't define + to mean subtraction and plead not guilty.

>>11982239

Didn't think 2666 was hard, but it was boring so I dropped it by page 200 or so. Savage Detectives was way better.

I am sorry if I sound like a pleb but is 2666 worth reading? Isn't it unfinished?

>>11982193
Not one of the people you responded to, but I think you probably understood what they were getting at. The post maybe wasn't mathematically incorrect but it was syntactically poor. Why label a set 'difficulty' or 'quality' and then the list them in precisely the opposite order?

>>11982239
Ulysses is the only one of the original 3 I haven't read. I'm pretty intimidated by it, to be desu. I was blown away by GR; went out to buy my own copy, and plan to reread it and annotate. The first reading, I sort of just went with it. Then, I figure, since I enjoyed that one so much. I might as well read IJ. Took me about a month: I was absorbed in it, but upon completion; it sort of rubbed me the wrong way and left a sour taste. I just couldn't stand DFW as a person, even though his talent was undeniable. He still comes off with a superiority complex. Ol' Farty Letters still intimidates me, though.

>>11982349
The set is the one which contains the 6 books that OP posted. OP has asked us to construct two orderings of the set: one according to difficulty, the other to quality. There is obviously no canonical ordering, so we each have to propose our own version. I don't see why we wouldn't have the freedom to also create our own notations as long as we explain them (in fact it's better this way, so as to avoid confusion).

>>11982437
It's not about "canon", it's simply about creating an intuitive way to do it. Labelling a poor system doesn't necessarily avoid confusion. Which of these seems like a better ordering to you:

Size:
Ant > Elephant > World
(Where the list is smallest to largest )

Size
World > Elephant > Ant
(Where the list is largest to smallest)

Even if both are explained, the explanation for the second example just confirmed what you already intuitively understood because of the use of "greater than" (>) symbol, whereas the former example was less intuitive.

We have the freedom to choose our own notations but I don't want to read a new notation every single time I interact with a different person. Our lives are easier if there are intersubjective agreed upon standards. The first example is harder to understand and is therefore syntactically poorer. That's literally all I said.

>>11982489
>what you already intuitively understood
Well, there's the problem. In your example the ordering by size is perfectly clear. There can't be any difference between two orderings except if you use other signs, which of course would be pointless.
But in our case the ordering by quality is very much disputed. And it's not intuitive whether an easier book is "greater than" a harder book or the other way around. You probably do have a point with the worst to best case, but I'm still of the opinion that if the guy properly defined the symbols used then the most he can be accused of is bad writing.

What will be the Punished Meme Trilogy? I vouch for Life: A User's Manual, The Corrections (inb4 Franzen, he's just as shit as DFW) and idk maybe Illuminatus! or The Public Burning.

>>11982239
Niqqa I don't know if I'm underestimating or you're overestimating the typical /lit/ poster but the only one I didn't read was Women & Men because I don't much care for it (and I'm not even particularly well read)

>>11982652
I think you're potentially overestimating how well read many posters on this board actually are. I sometimes get the impression that many people here claim to have read much more than they actually have. For example, someone will post about a book but clearly know very little about it for supposedly having read it. Also, there's a sheer time aspect to it as well because I think a lot of posters here are relatively young (let's say early twenties) and a lot of these sorts of books are not something that you can read particularly quickly: it takes a considerable amount of time to become well-read, and I doubt that many posters have really had the time to become so yet.

>>11982703
I will admit I didn't read all of them with the same care (IJ for example, I only finished because I didn't have access to other stuff at the time, I was away on a trip and read 4 other books before I was out and had to finish IJ, or GR which I read with great care but a lot of shit went over my head because I read it in english and during a hot as fuck summer in which I probably should have smoked less weed) but still, save for maybe Gaddis and McElroy, nothing in that list is particularly obscure (and Ulysses excepted, not even that difficult. Reading arthurian shit for example is leagues harder than anything on the pic).

Since I see it mentioned under the same "massive deconstructionist epic" umbrella as IJ and those, is The Tunnel a very difficult read? The excerpts I've seen are very interesting, but I read about a quarter of Ulysses and found it incomprehensible.

>>11982647
>Perec
BASED

>>11982807
The first couple sections are intentionally obtuse, but once you get the feel of it it's nowhere near incomprehensible, just unorthodox. The narrator is mentally unstable and difficult to follow sometimes, but that's intentional.

>>11982715
You're right that none of these six books is obscure, but my point was rather that there are many, many literary classics which are not obscure, so the likelihood of a high number of people having read all of them is perhaps not as likely as you may think.

>>11982647
hogg, the story of the eye, illuminatus!

>>11982647
The Man Without Qualities, The Book of Disquiet, and Underworld

memes aside, 2666 should be replaced with The Tunnel

>>11982239
lol at pic

i would not call 2666 an 'easy read' based on length and subject matter and frankly how boring it got at times, but it's not in any way confusing or self consciously challenging as GR, IJ, and Ulysses are at times - it's just a long novel

Is 2666 really "boring"? I was kind of interested in reading it

>>11981245
I bet all the music you enjoy has to be in 4/4 time

>>11981326
Before you wrote this was from The Recognitions at the end, you could have told me this is the speech Robin Williams makes to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting and I would have believed you.

>>11983091
It's already in the The trilogy

>>11983378
Not in the one OP posted

>>11983307
it's good, i liked it. but the whole of part 4, the longest part of the book is almost entirely describing the santa teresa murders one after another which becomes a slog to get through, and there are large digressive interludes in the narrative that don't seem to say anything or go anywhere that make it hard to want to read at times. i put down 2666 more times than any of the original meme trilogy books, but i still loved the experience and i think it is a great book overall, at times as much because of the boredom as in spite of.

>start a new job a few months ago
>have a conversation with a coworker the other day
>asks what I'm reading
>I say Ulysses
>ask what he's reading
>he says Infinite Jest
>mfw