/lit/ - Literature

nobody rates those writers highly besides teenagers though, they can't be overrated.

>>1955370
And anyone working in admin from my experience.

>>1955370
I rate Tolkien highly. I am not a teenager.

Nietzsche

Tolkein>>>Martin>>>Rowling

>>1955377
I'd have rated him higher if he didn't decide to cruise on his one good work for the rest of his career, opting for sheer amount of content over good writing.

I only liked the Hobbit and Children of Húrin

I always thought LotR was just a glorified tale of a cross-country trek.

William Burroughs

His writing reads as if he got all the works of the Marquis de Sade, cut it up into thousands of separate sentences and put them together in a random order,

Asimov
Kafka
Turgenev
Lessing
Garcia Marquez

>>1955395
>Asimov
>overrated
No no no no. He was an absolute visionary.

This thread is now about writers which are good because I don't like cynical snobs

William T. Vollmann
John Steinbeck
Saul Bellow
Raymond Chandler

>>1955384
I really did struggle to make it past the first 100 pages in Fellowship. A "super fantastic" party that came across bland as bland. Tolkien failed to deliver after all the anticipation building up around the preparation. What else happens? Frodo procrastinates for 20 years and a couple of visits from gandalf.

overrated = my opinion counts more than everyone else's

Philip K. Dick
Asimov
All of the Beatnicks.

They're all good, but they're all overrated as fuck.

>>1955414
overrated = a poor writer that's popular.

Poor writing isn't an opinion. If you have poor writing skills you have poor writing skills. There are poor writers that I love and good writers that I hate.

Agree with Tolkien. He wasn't an author, he was a linguistics professor who had to write a massive book to accommodate his made up languages. Impenetrable prose and long, dragging passages of history, song and foreign language.

define 'overrated'

>>1955415
Sort of agree with Asimov, but the Foundation Trilogy is really good.

On Philip K Dick, the man has written everything and he has done it well. Not everything is fantastic, but the man can write.

Tolkien is overrated in terms of writing, but his importance cannot be overlooked.

Lenin, he was a mother fucking faux revolutionary.

Also, Marx.

All Classics.

I think it's hard to rate writers who wrote in a language other than English, unless you actually speak that language and have read the material in that language.

All books.

>>1955415

Super-troll. Asimov was an amazing writer, almost all of his novels and short stories are good, quite a few great. His only weakness was his characters, although some were decent.

>>1957804
Super-troll? I'm not that guy but you know what? Fuck you. A person holding an opinion which differs from your own is not automatically a troll. Human beings have different sensibilities, tastes, different life experiences which might cause them to react to a thing in a way other than you did.

Asimov sucks.

>>1955366
Typical /lit/fag... Always hating on fantasy. That and science fiction are my fave genres. Everything else pales in comparison.

>>1957867
Confirmed for shit taste.

>>1957877
Nope. I like what I like. Fuck you for think you are better than me. Eat my shit.

>>1955422
Overrated doesn't mean poor at all. Just not as good as their reputation.

German here. Gunther Grass.

Maybe i'm too stupid, despite being an university student, but i never got why his books are supposed to be so great?

Has anyone said F Scott Fitzgerald yet? Because it needs to be said.

>>1957583
THIS, when reading LotR, I skipped through the songs and poetry, they added little to the story.

Though for for the record, I still think it's a great story.

Anyone who considers Tolkien overrated has never read the Silmarillion or anything else in his mythos outside of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

He put astounding amounts of work into the fine details of a mythology that surpasses most real-world religions, creating many parts of a few legit artificial languages along the way, and laid much of the foundation for the majority of more modern fantasy works.

As for overrated, Stephenie Meyer, obviously. Followed somewhat by Rowling. The twilight series is a bastardization of creative literary standards more suited for a fan-fiction blog, and the Potter series, while entertaining as hell for much of the journey, could never stand on its own without relying on the fact that it's aimed at children and young teens. I also thought that the series lost a ton of steam at the most important part: The end. The finale was a floundering mess that seemed to me to demonstrate that Rowling is unable to deliver an epic, satisfying conclusion.

Tolstoy

>>1958122
No, the Silmarillion only serves to flesh out the Middle-Earth mythos, it is inferior to both the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit.

>>1958133

>>1958122

Tolkien was a bad writer. Your appreciation of him will depend on if that bothers you or not.

Also, spawning hundreds of even worse imitators should not be a positive note.

As an East Asian major, I fucking hated Abe Kobo. God damn he was so boring.

In general, I guess I'm not a big fan of Ray Bradbury. I mean, maybe Farenheit 451 does get better but I can't get through the beginning of it.

>>1958144
I don't think that we have to mention any names.

>>1958146

Abe Kobo is boring?

Mind elaborating on that?

I've read two books of his, and I thought they were very interesting.

>>1957604
Were you expecting Marx to write a riveting tale?

>>1958151
I meant he's overrated.

I will always say that it is probably just me. I never want to fault the material or the author.

It's just when I had to read him for class, I couldn't get into the story because it felt too slow for me. His concepts are interesting but the story itself bored the hell out of me. I read Box Man and The Ruined Map.

Hmmm, to be honest in terms of overrated authors Tolkien wouldn't have been up there for me
However Poe would have been (great poet, not so great author), as well as Dante and Tolstoy

>>1958146
I'm about halfway through the woman in the dunes now, and I have to say his writing is incredibly Kafka-esque, which is something I adore. What are his other novels like?

>>1958161
I read the Divine Comedy recently, very disappointing, though I may have just read a bad translation.

>>1958169
You cannot appreciate that book in all its facets unless you're able to comprehend the Italian language and are able to read the original.

>>1958169
Whhhhhhyyyyyyyyyy.

Why does anyone read poetry in translation. Why? Why? Why?

>>1958152
Actually, many parts of Capital Vol 1 are really fun to read, e.g. all those footnotes where he polemicises against bourgeois theoreticians, or gripping like the chapters on primitive accumulation and his examples on the horrendous situation of the English working class.
Vol 2 & 3 are certainly more tedious to read, but that's probably because he didn't get to finish them before his death.

Jack Kerouac.
Cormac McCarthy.

Clearly OP you should have just said you don't like the fantasy genre.

That would have made the same point and would not have made you sound like a retard.

Robert Jordan. The Wheel of Time sucks after The Shadow Rising (Book 4) and doesn't get good again until Knife of Dreams (Book 11). The Path of Daggers (Book 8) might just be the most boring-ass book I've ever read. I don't know how the two newest books are, I haven't read them yet.

>>1958122
> The end. The finale was a floundering mess that seemed to me to demonstrate that Rowling is unable to deliver an epic, satisfying conclusion.

Oh, god, the final duel between Harry and Voldemort. This had so much awesome potential, and it was all squandered. "Underwhelmed" doesn't even begin to describe how I felt about it.
And the epilogue was lame.

>>1958169
Which translation did you read?

What? All of them.