/lit/ - Literature

>>22086699
I have it on my shelf and am saving it for the end of the year.

>>22086699
Im not a dorky jew york mfa soiboi that works in publishing.

>>22086699
>the greatest piece of 20th century literature
Care to explain why?

>>22086699
I feel like pomo bricks is something you grow out of

We all know you haven’t either, OP (faggot)

Because I read Hind's Kidnap and really didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped.

OP here. I posted the wrong picture, my bad.

Real OP here. >>22086824 is an impostor. Meant to post this, sorry for the confusion.

>>22086794
Then, what do you grow into?

>>22086880
A noose.

>>22086856
Been reading The Mirror, really not impressed.

>>22086699
>book only has 270 ratings on Goodreads

Why should I care about this book when nobody else does?

>>22087002
Why are you Americans unable to refrain from checking other people's opinions on meme garbage-tier sites?

>>22086722
What do those people read now? Also don’t think anyone working in publishing is Jewish anymore

>>22087015
I wasn't checking anyone's opinions. I was checking the amount of times the book was rated.

Moby Dick was rated 536,000 times. This random book was rated 270 times. Why should I care about this irrelevant book that barely anyone has read?

>>22087032
Anon, you do realise that there are great books outside of the generic top 100 lists.

>>22086794
Yep. YA for college freshmen

>>22086699
Because it is fucking garbage

"Don't you guys Just LOVE hearing the sound of experience itself? Lol"

>But that’s it. It is that music. Or was it the person playing you “heard”? Was that the feeling? Heard but not seen! A sound of Experience itself. Weigh it, store it; luckily in your “life” you can be dumb about it. Her privacy inseparable from the noise of the instrument: piano or violin; some days both. The musician’s secure devotion. Practice, yet not to make perfect. Scale-like up-and-down workouts on violin that were more like real music when the in-between notes got crazily played. Early experience of somebody else’s, yes, thought earned. Or could it have been some teenage, fairly early experience for you of pausing: pausing to Look Back! But why back, when what you were hearing was your mother’s concentration right now? But where was it going?
>This was you going too. Does that just mean “growing”? Or that you doubled her going? Who could you report such claptrap to? Is it monstrous that to this day you have not thought much about her going? Fact was, she went, dead or alive.

>>22087032
You are a retard if you think the number of times a book has been read says anything about its quality. Find a brain.

>>22087032
You’re also a fucking retard for thinking most people in the world use goodreads, you so social media addicted loser. Modt of the people who actually read Women and Men when it was released barely know how to use their phone.

>>22086794
They’re not necessarily intrinsically “bad” or non-worthwhile (postmodern doorstoppere), but, yes, people often overly glorify them to swing around their own equivalent of a mental-dick. Like a dick-measuring contest of how long, dense, difficult, tricky, allusive and experimental of a book they can either read or write, or both.

However, the antithesis of this (and just as shallow and silly when at its worst) is the utterly troglodyte view that NO ONE could EVER possibly enjoy any literature that challenges them, and everyone who claims to do so is just a “poser” and/or “effete upper-class literary critic.” Like the claim that no one could EVER actually genuinely enjoy authors like Milton or Shakespeare, Melville or Joyce, without just being a “pseud.” One thing to keep in mind is the genuine possibility that we’re seeing a reverse Flynn effect (dropping IQ scores), coming about from a number of factors, anything from formerly leaded paint and gasoline to the rise of Internet, social media and smartphone addiction. Even the civilization /pol/ loves to hate, Arabic Muslims, had a tradition among themselves of having a group who had entirely memorized the Koran by heart, being able to recite it all from beginning to end by sheer mnemonic capability, known as the “hafizes” (or huffaz in Arabic, plural of hafiz), lit. “memorizer(s).” Although rare, they still had a (highly respected) place for them in their culture, down to coining the phrase for them, and according them a position as uniquely qualified sages and religious preachers and guides for their community (imams). Could you imagine that same degree of culturally sanctioned respect being given today to such intellectually-overgrown “freaks”? At best, they’d be disregarded as “impractical scholars applying their vast intellect and mnemonic capabilities to something that doesn’t directly and immediately help serve humanity at all (for not being technologically oriented, such as towards engineering, medicine or physics)”. Outright anti-intellectualism is just as real a problem as pseudo-intellectualism nowadays.

>>22086880
Snide remarks about books you've never read. This is the ideal form.

>>22086880
Realist literature from the 19thc.

>>22088140
Sobering effort-post.

>>22086794
I was this way. My foray into literature was with the difficult postmodern doorstopper. I despise them now

>>22088140
There's this thing about the process of maturation in a person. As a child you are utterly lacking in self-awareness and embrace everything you like with sincerity and enthusiasm. During puberty and adolescence, when the opinions of others and peer pressure begins to become an actual factor, you begin to hide this sincerity for fear of mockery and ostracization (when I became a man I put away childish things etc.) and this attitude of disdain for sincere enthusiasm is often so instilled at this age that people never grow out of it.
In the course of maturation into actual adulthood you should be freeing yourself of the constraints of what your peers think about your hobbies or what you enjoy, but in this age of prolonged adolescence we don't achieve this full maturity and so we have adults who only enjoy things "ironically", who watch youtubers like The Nostalgia Critic shitting on movies because the only way they can enjoy these things is through a veil of insincerety, through detatchment.
In a culture like this it's not really that outlandish that people would simply refuse to acknowledge the possibility that someone else might sincerely enjoy something for real.
Just my two cents.

>>22088186
You are very right, anon.

>>22088140
based

I do not really care for gigantic maximalist tomes.

>>22088272
A very sensible position. I doubt that in the decades to come, these maximalist tomes will be recognised as the great books of our times. Or else, reading will have become mostly obsolete. I suppose the latter will be the case.

>>22088140
>Like the claim that no one could EVER actually genuinely enjoy authors like Milton or Shakespeare, Melville or Joyce, without just being a “pseud.”
One of these things is not like the others.

>>22088292
I can see 2666 remaining relatively popular. IJ and Pynchon will always remain relevant to a small, niche, dedicated fanbase. Underworld will be obscure. No one cares about Gaddis or Barth outside of the postmodern crowd. Vollman might have some staying power because he is pretty unique. Ulysses will always be the bar that literary works are measured against so I don’t see that fading. Coover, McElroy, Powers, etc are already forgotten. Overall I think the maximalist doorstopper will be seen as a fad and made fun of

>>22088321
Vollmann is a little different because he isn't just a fiction writer, stuff like Imperial and Carbon Ideologies expands his audienc quite considerably.
Obviously DFW was the same.

>>22088321
Is Gaddis worth it? I tried reading Pynchon and DFW but i didn't really *like* them. It wasn't the prose or structural complexity but something bugged me. I was thinking of picking up The Recognitions.

>>22088352
If you don't like this type of book then maybe you shouldn't read them.

>>22088352
I would never read The Recognitions again, personally. It had some great and memorable parts but I will always maintain that it should have been edited down by hundreds of pages. I remember a lot of it was a tedious slog. I read this almost a decade though so it isn’t fresh in my mind, but the impression remains. There are some hardcore Gaddis fans who will rave about it and insult me but they seem to be pretty scarce on /lit/ now; he used to have a much larger presence on /lit/ years ago. That type of book doesn’t interest me much anymore so maybe that clouds my perception. YMMV. It is a dedicated undertaking though and IMO it’s hard to get a feel for the book because the beginning is one of the best parts

>>22088321
Is 2666 popular? In what circles? I'm interested if normies are actually reading such a thing

>>22088359
Yeah i figured.. I'm too dumb for that kind of material.
>>22088366
Nice digits and post. Thanks for the reply
I suppose i better get though other not-gigantic texts first. I was thinking of exploring early 20th c continental literature first. Had some nice recommendations.

>>22088374
Bolano is pretty popular among normies as far as literary writers go. I had a girlfriend really into him and she didn’t even read that much. He’s a pretty accessible writer. I’ve been meaning to reread TSD and 2666 for a while now. Maybe sometime this year I’ll actually get around to it

>>22088375
If you’re fairly new to reading I would look in a different direction. TR has unattributed dialogue (Gaddis is great at making each character have a distinctive voice though, I give him credit for that), numerous references that those just getting their feet wet won’t get, and, like I said in my post above, I found it to be a tedious slog often. I’m not saying you are doing this, but there seems to be an achievement focused group of readers who are just getting started. I count myself as among them. I thought I’d get credit and it was an accomplishment if I read a difficult long book. I’ve eased up much more and now just want to get something from a book, no matter what the perception of that book is. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself but it is important to read what you like. It takes time and many books till you find your wheelhouse. Maybe you are a seasoned reader though and I wasted my time typing this, kek

>>22086794
there so few of them and they are very different. there was nothing to grow into in the first place, but you can continue to shuffle your tepid enthusiasms and personality through made-up genres and movements if you want.

>>22088321
I imagine that most of the pomo works that will be fondly remembered are shorter ones. Things like Kurt Vonnegut novels or Barthelme's stories will still probably be read as they capture what's appealing about this kind of literature without being so overwhelming. Like you said, I imagine Underworld won't really be remembered but White noise will.

>>22088479
I agree that this umbrella term doesn’t work well. Gaddis was inspired by Russian door stoppers, Barth by the 1001 Nights, which are long narratives. As far as difficulty goes I don’t know what retard is reading a book for some non-existent intellectual trophy. I like reading Pynchon because I enjoy his books. Something about DFW puts me off from reading Infinite Jest but I might try it. There’s an interview with him talking about how avant-grade lit was becoming too masturbatory and not fun to read, perhaps in direct reference to Women and Men.

>>22088502
Calvino too will endure.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giorgio Manganelli, Alberto Savinio, Tommaso Landolfi, Guido Morselli, Vincenzo Consolo (and their counterparts in France, which I'm not familiar with) all demonstrated that you can write god-tier fiction in every respect (modernist or postmodernist or else, it doesn't matter) even keeping the total page count under 300.

>everything he wrote out of print in his own lifetime
McElroysisters, not like this...

>>22088871
But Women and Men was just reprinted, it's how I got my copy