/lit/ - Literature

Have only read #2 and #4 of your books, but I remember liking Catch-22's ending. Don't remember how Mostly Harmless ended.

>>1351726
Mostly Harmless ends with everyone following Random to Earth and dying.

My problem with Catch-22's ending is mostly related to it being funny and absurd for 30+ chapters and then turning grimdark and depressing at the end.

>>1351734
like Blackadder goesr fourth?

>>1351740

Blackadder goes forth is essentially Catch-22 except set in WW1

>>1351742
Please don't compare Blackadder to that shit.

>>1351734
see, I sorta liked that. it's like the bottom drops out and you realize how horrible the things you've been laughing at for 300 pages really are.

plus it ends on a note of hope! YOSSARIAN LIVES

>>1351734
LEARN TO USE SPOILER TAGS

ANOTHER GODDAMN BOOK RUINED

People who bitch about The Man in the High Castle's ending obviously didn't fucking understand the ending because it was perfect.

>>1351758
if a spoiler could really ruin a book it probably wasn't that good of a book to begin with

>>1351761
or he doesn't know how to look beyond the surface

at all

>>1351760
mfw Man in the High Castle ended

>>1351761
it doesn't ruin the book, it ruins the event it's spoiling.

imagine, all that character development for an event that takes place near the climax, an event that has weight only because of all the characters and all the buildup. You read the spoiler first and go read the whole book, and it's not possible to view everybody without seeing what it is that eventually happens. It ruins the character development for you. It's like, I know where they end up and what happens, all the sympathy I feel towards them is futile now.

>>1351782

All he said was "it gets grimdark". You're closer to spoiling it than he is.

I Liked The Man in the High Castle's ending.

>>1351760

The Man in the High Castle SUCKED. Dick couldn't write good prose to save his life. And his dialogue is even worse than his prose.

The ending wasn't too deep: it was just shitty, like the rest of the novel. He should have stuck to short stories.

Coming up with a "mindfuck" plot works fine for 20 pages. Dragging it out to 200+ without good prose/characters/anything else...not so much.

>>1351799

I enjoyed the aesthetic theory, historicity, and the inversion of institutional racism.

Man in the High Castle and Catch 22 both had awesome endings, fuck off.

>>1351814
"why did the i ching write this book?"
"because it's how the world should have been"
"oh ok"

"almost everyone I know is dead, I just watched dogs and children get beaten, aarfy got away with raping and murdering a completely innocent woman, and I just sold my soul to two douchebags who're going to use me to further their goals and ambitions"
"guess what orr is alive"
"omg awesome screw you guys I'm gonna go find myself a loli and flee to sweden"

awesome

>>1351799
My sentiment exactly. I read this book twice, and still my opinion remianed unchanged. Distrubingly, the blurb on the back of the book claimed it his most celebrated work,

Mostly Harmless was so upsetting.
Adams later said that he'd been in a really terrible mood writing most of it, a bad year or two, and he regretted ending it the way he did.

He was working on a third Dirk Gently book (The Salmon of Doubt) before he died, and thought that a lot of the elements of it would be better suited for a sixth Hitchhiker book.

>>1353011
It's probably just because it won a Nebula or a Hugo (or both?) I couldn't even get into it and I'm a Dick fan.

Anyone read Catch 22's sequel? I want to know if it's any good or not.

>>1353054
It's shit. I'm surprised writing a sequel even occurred to him. The thought of a sequel to Catch-22 is a catch-22 in itself.