/lit/ - Literature

The ending is real cringy. You should not keep reading, no.

>>14319727

Apparently he gives low scores to his "smartass" students, but gives high scores to his retarded students who can nevertheless write stories with "heart" or something. Is this true?

>>14319754
>he

and by "he" I mean the protagonist of the book.

>>14319754
A lot of professors give their star students B's and the like to "encourage" them. It's utterly absurd, but then, so is modern academia.

>>14319736
Thanks anon. I dont like cringy endings and this book already cringe enough.

>>14319754
He has an adult student thats partially retarded because his dad beat him with a hammer when he was a kid. The student writes an essay about getting beat by his dad. It's full or spelling and grammar errors but he gets an A+ because "it evoked an emotion." There's nothing about giving low scores to anyone. In fact he says he gives high marks to all his adult students that do the bare minimum and attempt to write something.

>>14319776

Ah okay. I remembered it from an article about why King sucks and finally tracked it down:

>The hero of 11/22/63 is a high school English teacher named Jake Epping. (When it comes to writing, Jake, one of King’s regular-Joe white knights, prefers a supposedly heartfelt but clumsily written story by a janitor getting a GED degree — the story makes Jake cry and he gives it an A-plus — to the “boring” and “pursey-mouthed” essays by his honors students. King doesn’t show us a sample of the latter, but when he does finally get around to sharing a substantial piece of the janitor’s story, you can’t help but wonder about Jake’s (and King’s) judgment. King’s real purpose here seems to be to suggest that people like him write with a lot of feeling, while so-called literary people don’t, and that it is the “what,” rather than the “how,” that matters in writing. Jake, who seems to have no serious flaws other than to have once been married to an alcoholic (later described as a “sweet” person underneath it all), is persuaded by the proprietor of a diner to walk through the diner’s pantry into the past — the diner owner, Al, who is dying of cancer, has, for whatever reason, access to a time-travel tunnel. Al wants Jake to correct the past, and specifically to intervene in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. Jake, humbly demurring, says, “Al. . . man . . . I’m just a little guy.”

>>14319795
Honestly, I would rather this "gee, I'm so humble, I'm the Big-Mac-and-fries of literature" schmaltz than talentless-yet-arrogant variety of smug turd like Jonathan Franzen, for example. I guess John Green oscillates between the two, thus fitting in both categories, making him especially repugnant.

>>14319812
Shut the fuck up.

>>14319795
>>The hero of 11/22/63 is a high school English teacher named Jake Epping. (When it comes to writing, Jake, one of King’s regular-Joe white knights, prefers a supposedly heartfelt but clumsily written story by a janitor getting a GED degree — the story makes Jake cry and he gives it an A-plus — to the “boring” and “pursey-mouthed” essays by his honors students.
OK that says he prefered the poorly-written yet heartfelt essays of his adult students to the textbook but uninspired writing of his honors students.

>>14319816
John? Cheer up, chum. You're successful despite being repugnant—a silver lining.