/lit/ - Literature

>>21525406
bro it's a book for children what'd you expect?

>>21525406
Who the fuck told you Bradbury was well regarded outside of pop culture?

Plodding boredom. The last gasp of irony in literature, I don't even feel as if DFW had any passion by the end of this one, it was as if he'd begin to realise he'd carried a joke on for too long and was running out of steam.

>>21525420
I understand it's not exactly a hard read but given how many top 10/top 20 lists you find it in, I at least thought it would be similar to 1984.
1984 seems to be the one piece of dystopian fiction that's been written with care. Fahrenheit and pic related almost feel as if they ride it's coat-tails. They say nothing new and don't repeat anything better.

>>21525422
I assumed there'd be at least some merit to his writing and I haven't read him before 451, but it's just like reading a toddler describing their dream.

This one is weirdly enjoyable to read but there's almost no content. Dostoyevsky seems to just love shame and guilt. Antithesis of what it means to be human.

>>21525437
He wrote it at the rate of about 1000 words an hour. He tried to write it as quickly as possible. Just read something else by someone better you like from a sample online.

>>21525432
beginning of brave new world is pure kino. there's not much of a story to the whole novel but the fictional future world it presents is compelling if not particularly realistic

>>21525406
There are lots of books like this that have a strong or "promising" premise or milieu in which the story is set but the story itself is not very good.

Philip Dick's works are almost always like this. They are useful to give screenwriters something to work with...

>>21525406
I like his fiction but not his poetry. His poems are only good when read as a child.

>>21525406
I don't think F. 451 was supposed to be read by people above the age of 18.
t. read it at age 14 and understood everything

>>21525506
The thing about BNW is that the story doesn't matter on purpose. There is nothing Bernard or Savage can do to change anything in their world, and one may argue that, as opposed to Orwell, Huxley left his opinion on totalitarianism much more ambiguous in his book.

>>21525432
BNW definitively differs from 1984, and is imo and improvement in some ways. It's more of a commentary on hedonism than authoritarianism, which I think is more interesting and definitely more relevant to most people's lives today.

Are the people of BNW happy with their constant pleasure and lack of struggle? Is that an appealing world to you? What specifically is missing that makes it undesirable?

1984 is a bit more clear cut... cautionary tale of too much governmental power. Protect your rights, be wary of propaganda and surveillance, etc.

>>21525432
>>21525831
F451 deviates a bit from the others in that it argues censorship will come from the public. It's your neighbors who want the books burned, not the government.

Burn all dystopian lit

>>21525441
I agree... most of it is just drenched in guilt in a way I didn't find relatable.

Imo most of the value lay towards the end with the discussion of 'stepping over', particularly that if you hesitate or aren't comfortable stepping over, then you aren't meant to do it.

>>21525406
This >>21525420. His short stories are good when you're 12 and under.

The Trial. It is just plain and boring, like the plot never advances

>>21525432
>1984 seems to be the one piece of dystopian fiction that's been written with care.
lol anon

>>21525437
prose can be a major part of a work, but it doesn't have to be good and reading more makes it easier to appreciate "weaker" prose FYI

Too long and boring

>>21525422
Fahrenheit 451 is frequently assigned as school reading.

>>21525432
>They say nothing new and don't repeat anything better.
Brave New World has so little in common with 1984 beyond their both being "dystopian" that I have to wonder if you even read either of them.

>>21529543
Isn't there a little kid orgy in it? Or more that they run a train on a girl their own age?

>>21529627
Not worth the boock tho

>>21525406
>>21529627
In order of worst to best:
451 - author says books are important, then more old man yells at the sky, then nukes go off for unrelated reason.
1984 - the NSA is real man, you've got to believe me. Epilogue, a dictionary.
Brave New World - take the dumbest eugenics program you can imagine...no, dumber. Also there's an ugly annoying gnome.
Animal Farm - funny animals make fun of communism before sad animals die like usual. Kept it short. Overall good job.

>>21525406
Bad books,
Dhammapa - horrible, ad copy from a small town newspaper is better written and more convincing.
Alice in wonderland - have you ever played a surrealist game or read someone else's dream, now you can do it for pages and pages.
Wuthering Heights - ok an actual you know book, not as bad as the others, still absolutely mogged by her sisters.

>>21525432
i thought the opposite. Maybe it's because I'm reading it from a 21st century perspective, but 1984 seems completely useless.
>economic inequality bad
>brainwashing bad
>totalitarianism bad
it offers nothing new or interesting, nothing a 12 year old couldn't include in a dystopia.

BNW's message is much more ambiguous and original imo. not to mention that 1984 turned out to be completely off the mark and bnw quite accurate. I think one thing both books and picrel failed to predict is our own personalities being marketed toward us rather than a rise comformism. In all three books there is little space for individuality whereas todays society is much more individualistic than it used to be.
not a book but picrel is probably the most accurate dystopia out there imo

>>21530619
>not a book but picrel is probably the most accurate dystopia out there imo
I'll be hooked up to my auto masturbation machine as I watch ultra 4D touhou hentai music videos with thousands of people around the world, thank you very much. No regrets as long as the machine stops after I die.

>>21525432
What a retard
1984 is just Orwell crying and masturbating on his acquired cynicism, BNW has at least interesting twists to the formula and a much more believable and complex message

>>21530820
What do you care if the machine stops after you die?

>>21531168
1984 is just a romance novel with a goofy totalitarian government. Orwell wants a girl who goes secretly against the government to fuck him.

>>21525406
I liked the description of the little girl the first time she showed up, her general arc, how much Gui hated his wife, how annoying his wife was with the television, I liked his dilemma, and I liked the foreward about how it was written in 2 days after an annoying cop stopped him. Fucking hated the hobo arc though.

Nice language, fun enough, but flawed and weak on meaning. I'd rate it a 7.5/10.

anyone who says the world today resembles brave new world is wrong. no, governments are not just handing out pleasure like candy. if anything we seem to be progressing to greater scarcity.

>>21531303
Exactly.

>>21525406
fahrenheit sucks

>>21525441
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place."Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

>>21525406
The vast majority of fiction. Maybe I am just autistic, but I don't see the point in reading fiction.

>>21531696
But the scarcity doesn't refer to our purchasing power of entertainment.
We live in a world where you can buy endless entertainment with a $200 laptop and a $50 internet plan, but renting an apartment and driving to work siphons 1/3 of your salary

Fahrenheit 451is for people who go on reading bouts every 2 or 3 years and like to pretend they're inherently better than those who don't read at all just because they read a couple of popular books every once in a while

Fahrenheit 451 is a good book. Who cares if it's assigned reading, it details what would happen were free, complex thought to become banned.

Bradburys other short stories deserve a read as well, like the Martian and the one with the wall with a view to the African desert

>>21525406
This and pretty much everything else by Nabokov. I get that they're well-written, even beautifully so at times, but I just don't get the appeal of him and I would really like to understand what it is.

>>21525876
I have made some bad mistakes, its no exaggeration

>>21532441
Nobody can seethe like Nabakov, my sides are in fucking space. Love this pasta.

>>21525406
Agreed, Bradbury loses all interest at one point and just wants to get over with it. in pic related it's even worse like that and London literally ends book mid-sentence

This doesn’t resonate with me because the entire concept is based on outdated ideas of future technology, so I can only read it for its prose.

>>21525423
David Foster Wallace is smart but suffers from bad ideology as far as I can tell. I only liked his article about being on David Lynch's set for Lost Highway. I thought Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing were teenage girl level.

I've had no interest in reading books like gravity's rainbow, ulysses or infinite jest which have all gotten put in the same category. Correct me if I'm wrong but they all seem like gaslighting that fairly smart people want to deliberately impose on themselves as a mind organization exercise. "Can i sift out this nonsense which is meant to scramble my mind?" I have no interest in that; I would rather read novels that present a lucid and coherent way of thinking, because my work requires lucid clear thinking. Maybe if I had a mundane job and needed to deliberately scramble my mind (like alcohol) in order to cope... And I'm not even saying this is what the author's intended by writing them but this is how they seem to function to a lot of people.

>>21525406
Fahrenheit 451 is meant to put a false image of what censorship looks like. They want to put this hyperbolic violent image of flames in your head so that actual censorship doesn't seem that outrageous by comparison. Actual "book burning" is done at the publisher level: choosing bad covers, bad translations, filling the books with opinionated annotations. That's the crime.

ITT pseuds seethe over a book they never read.

>For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons like not my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

>>21534271
What a strange pantie design