/lit/ - Literature

chill dood who wrote some good books
crazy wife

>>22471289
Normal penis

>>22471289

Not a fan. did Great Gatsby as the usual compulsory high school reading, not a horrible book but naturally I resented it for the simple fact that it was compulsory. Haven't read anything else, although I may read the Crack-Up sometime since Cioran praised it, I think one or two of the Frog philosophers /lit/ routinely mentions may have brought it up at some point (possibly Deleuze but I might be wrong).

I live near Saint Paul, and used to go to college there. As irrelevant as Minneapolis is, Saint Paul is a sub-irrelevance attached to another irrelevance. The city claims Fitzgerald since it has nothing else going for it. Fitzgerald this, Fitzgerald that. I actually went in the library downtown for the first time recently. Lovely neoclassical building, but nothing worth caring about in its inventory. On an upper floor, sure enough, is an entire nook devoted to Fitzgerald.

Also, I don't mean to be that guy but a novel about white rich people problems really is nigh-incoherent for the contemporary audience. Here is a rare example of a situation where I wouldn't mind a white guy's book being removed from the curriculum.

>>22471304
drivel post
>not a horrible book but naturally I resented it for the simple fact that it was compulsory
literally the rest of your post was unwarranted and unflatulous

>>22471289
books about black musicians upfront please, it's jazz time

>>22471304
I was like you once. Have Fitzgerald a chance years later, he’s top tier for me now. Author’s like him get better when you get out of high school and have more life experience, you appreciate his representation of social dynamics more.
As for the “can’t relate to rich white people angle,” forget that shit. You read Fitzgerald for the commiserating about how shit women are and how much you love them anyway. And how that will inevitably ruin your life.

>>22471289
His prose is what I describe as elegant. I hardly describe a writer's prose as elegant, maybe 1% of writers. His writing is for me, one of the most densest to read because he chose each of his sentences to have underlying meaning and symbolism for social commentary.

>>22471289
i read the great gatsby at 15 and it affected me profoundly

>>22471304
Really superficial take. If you reread The Great Gatsby in your late twenties or early thirties, it's very different.

>>22471289
Unlimited privacy and self-consciousness of it

Pic related is more grim than The Crack Up. The poverty oozes out

>>22471289
Read Gatsby in highschool and was not a fan in the slightest. Came back to him in my mid thirties and was blown away. Tender Is the Night is one of my favorite novels and I truly wish that he could have completed The Last Tycoon. Fuck Bukowski, Fitzgerald nails alcoholism to the floor and cements its true tragedy in a mesmerizing way that is impossible to take your mind off of.
>rich white people problems
is a literal elementary school take of his works, though I do feel a certain jealousy for the readers who cannot recognize the much more mature themes like the hopeless slow spiral down and away from prime and vigor which are I personally see at the heart of the majority of his stories.

>>22471289
>what does cum think of C Cum Cumgerald?
Cum.

>>22471289
Lovely prose

I’m reading pic related. A few of the stories were cute and funny. One more cute than funny but there have been a couple darker tales as well. May Day and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. The latter really surprised me. It had a science fiction quality to it. It reminded me more of Poe or Wells at their darker imaginings. The stories I don’t quite as like as much he’s more like a less funny Waugh or Wodehouse.

>>22472742
>write reading pic related
>forget pic

>>22471289
wife cucked him
alcoholic
an heroed himself
kinda sad honestly

HST said Fitz has good word economy. I agree. decent chap. Bit on the dry side to read more than 2 of his works tho. read almost everything HST, that man is man of humor.

I appreciate Fitz a lot because I was a poor teacher's son who went to the private schools she taught out, so I shared that somewhat outsider view of "rich people" (which oftentimes isn't as true as you'd think, for example, one of my classmate's doctor parents recently got busted for selling opioid prescriptions). People always worry about how they portray themselves to others and Fitz works with that idea very often.

>>22471993
>>22471313
>>22471309

Terrible replies, you're oh for three, which is impressive. There's nothing at all superficial in reading a text, dismissing it as dull, and then (this is the important part) not caring to give it another chance, whatever its real merits. Because one has better things to read with one's time (predominantly, but not exclusively, non-fiction). Where fiction is concerned, one wins this sort of subjective argument by declaring that one doesn't care to know, one simply doesn't care to re-visit. After all, it's not as if it's a very important work.

>>22471289
King

>>22473798
Yeah, i bet you did many important things with your time in your high school years. Jerking off? Playing vidya? Yeah, a valuable usage of time

>>22474056

Final Fantasy Tactics, art history and precalc are far more interesting than a bloo bloo old sport let's have another drink *a few people get shot* borne back ceaselessly into the something something. Once we got to pick our own book to read and do an extended, self-directed report on it, I picked a real big boy book: Crime and Punishment. I even put pic related as the cover image without having seen the image directly associated with the novel in any other context (e.g. as the cover of an edition), the association was spontaneously mine. I used a word which I thought I'd made up, but which turned out to be a real word: "trichotomy". Teacher was very impressed, got an A IIRC. At seventeen I actually did something resembling real, non-stupid lit crit.

pic related.

>>22473798
>>22474610
>which is impressive
>"one" x4
>Final Fantasy Tactics
>precalc
>I picked a real big boy book: Crime and Punishment
>sloppy self-suck over completing and turning in high school homework
Even if this is a bit, it's one of the better ones I've seen on here in a while. If it's real, then /lit/ is so fucking back. This sort of totally clueless adolescent arrogance is so much more rich, layered and vital than the inferiority complexes of the retards who just post "durrr books r dumb n gay" anti-intellectual threads.

>>22474731

-The Final Fantasy Tactics mention is just agreeing and amplifying. It's a fun game. But I did grow out of video games in my early 20s.
-the point in mentioning precalc is not so much to indicate intelligence (indeed, studying precalc doesn't indicate intelligence), but rather to put down Fitzgerald. I genuinely found more enjoyment in the study of a subject which most people find dull than I did in reading that silly book. Now that I think about it, I can recall another tedious book from around that point, which I also don't care ever to read again, by a Nobel Prize winner: The Dwarf, by Par Lagerkvist. A bloo bloo I'm a dwarf life is hard. Great.
-Dostoevsky is actually good and /lit/ approved to boot. I found Fitzgerald to be dull and I don't care to give him another go apart from the Crack-Up, maybe, as I've said. I get to have well-founded and correct opinions.
-One can scarcely be faulted for having certain linguistic tics.
-the "big boy" is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, a slight self-deprecation (but at the same time it's a bit more challenging than most hs students would voluntarily choose to read). You don't seem to have registered any of this.
-My self suck is NOT sloppy, it's precise and gratifying. On a par with Awesome Cougars. Not just the "completion" of a homework assignment, but A-tier work, one that the teacher really liked. He did gush (suck?) a bit in his annotations, I was always rather proud of that one.

I remembered where I got Albright's Poor Room from. It's included in The American Art Book, which I enjoyed at the time. I reviewed the blurb along with the plate and to my relief, it does not mention Crime and Punishment, but it does indicate that the room is clearly trashed and that might be a dead body over there. This was enough to make a simple comparison. It would seem that my interlocutors have now gone oh for four, but maybe not based on post count.

>>22474616

Anon what could you have possibly meant by this?

pic rel

The Great Gatsby is the second most overrated book I have ever read, after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

>>22474610
>Final Fantasy Tactics
go back to /v/, this is /lit

>>22474783
AUTISM ALERT
BEEP BEEP BEEP

>>22474872

I don't use /v/. /lit/ has been my home board for roughly a decade. I did not care for The Great Gatsby, and you can't make me.

>>22474935
reading comprehension fail

>>22471289
One, I miss the /wg/ gun meme.
Two, he's a very underrated writer. He doesn't have insane style, but he has some incredibly good paragraphs. This is one of my favorites.
>They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her—she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain—and he lay awake in the clear darkness.

>>22471304
>did Great Gatsby as the usual compulsory high school reading, not a horrible book but naturally I resented it for the simple fact that it was compulsory
take yourself back on to reddit

>>22474985

Again, I don't use reddit. I've been using 4chan since 2004 and have been regularly posting on /lit/ for about half that time. I will never not reddit space btw, I was doing it years before it came to be known by that epithet (/tv/ started to really hate it circa 2015-16 or so). It looks better.

>>22471289
he is just a guy who has a shitload of space, and that's really what people needed

>>22471289
this mother fucker enjoyed what he saw