/lit/ - Literature

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1302319]

>Find a 1 star review of a book you like on Goodreads.com
>post it
>gamestop

The Tractatus is a mesmerizing pile of poo. I spent a semester trying to understand whatever it was that Wittgenstein seemed to have stumbled upon... it turns out that this is just nothing more than an engineer writing bad poetry. Crap. Absolute crap..

"Whereof that which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence." What the devil is this? It's a coward's way out. Translation: "I can't roll with the big dogs so I'm going to take my ball and go home."

[Anonymous No.1302324]

if I wanted to read the selfrighteous bitching of idiots I would just go on lit and ctrl-f "deep&edgy"

[Anonymous No.1302334]

>I went from 3 stars, down to 2, and then almost immediately down to one for no particular reason except to say that I am half way through the book and the only premise is whether a college will announce its budget. This isn't really gripping enough for me to continue. I skipped to p. 319 and found that only a day had passed since p. 161. In other words, more drivel curmudgeon remarks by the main character as we follow his every move. He's not completely unlikeable but I feel I meet people like this all the time at the local convenience store and felt that I wanted to escape to my own sorted life instead of the other way around

[Anonymous No.1302347]

>>1302319
i know, right? like how wittgenstein "solves" russell's paradox.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1302354]

>>1302319

from the same guy lol:

Exceeding the gold standard he set in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein outreaches every expectation in Philosophical Investigations to produce what amounts to the second worst poem ever written. The first was the original manuscript of the same , which, I am told, contained two additional aphorisms.

If we were so fortunate that Wittgenstein was, in fact not real but a figment of Douglas Adams' imagination, he would have been the hero of the Vogon art scene.

This book is crap. It is NOT philosophy. It's what happens when a German engineer reads fifteen pages of Theatetus and suddenly thinks himself a philosopher.

FUCKING ENGINEERS

[Anonymous No.1302381]

laughterhouse-Five is a book that i didnt enjoy reading. It was very hard to relate with and complicated to read. Although i didnt enjoy it i think the author Kurt Vonnegut does a fantastic job with description and imergy throughout the book. One of the motifs the book has is time. I think time is a perfect motif to describe this book because Vonnegut writes about things that happen in the past, present, and future. This anti-war book focuses on the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim's adventurous odyssey through his time as a soldier. Billy realives how precious time is after loosing serveral people that were close to him. Pilgram used thought about war when he needed a place to feel comfortable and safe, he overcomes his pain with the stories from war. Being in World War II affected Billy's life and it is noticable in his lifestyle. I think this book is more for people who enjoy science and animation, but i may be wrong. In the book Billy travels to another planet with traidamadorians. In this section of the novel it shows me that Vonnegut could make fiction very believable. Although I wouldnt read it again, i will recommend this to others

>serveral
>traidamadorians
>imergy
>I think time is a perfect motif to describe this book

RAGEEEEE

[Anonymous No.1302386]

oh my god

>I've only read the first fifteen minutes (yes, minutes) of it and I'm feeling like I'm not feeling it, and when I asked others if I should continue in hopes of feeling it they kind of unanonymously agreed that, nah, not really a gonna feel it kinda book.

[Anonymous No.1302390]

>>1302381
>laughterhouse-Five
Please let there be a parody...

[Anonymous No.1302417]

>>1302354

But science is a philosophy.

[Anonymous No.1302429]

>>1302417
Well, technically scientism and empiricism are philosophies. Science is an activity.
Engineering, on the other hand, is a craft, the application of information produced by scientists. That's not a criticism. Without engineers, physics and chemistry would be mostly useless in much the same way that without doctors, biology would be purely academic.

[Anonymous No.1302441]

>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams. 1979. Random House. 142 pages.

>Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably one of the most ridiculous and lamest books I have read in ages. It was so random to the point where random events (such as crashing into a sperm whale in outer space) just weren't funny anymore.

>A young man named Arthur Dent leaves Earth with his friend and galaxy-born traveler Ford Prefect before Earth undergoes a type of apocalypse. In a nutshell, both men get picked up by a spaceship and encounter other random, weird events.

>At first, before Earth "ended", I thought the book was comical and would be lots of fun; but once Arthur and Ford were catapulted into outer space, the storyline just skewed into something horrible and nerdy. The humor was terrible and dorky. It was just awful. The only reason I stuck with the book because it was only 142 pages long. In fact, the only interesting parts were Adams' explanations on why dolphins and mice were superior to the human race.

>Maybe some hard-core nerds out there will like this book. I hope I never waste time on anything so horrible ever again.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1302447]

Mrs Crane rates The Prince 1/5

Recommends it for: 30 y.o. gamers who like to dress up as warlocks.

I expected something much different from reading The Prince. Machiavelli was secretary to the second chancery of the Republic of Florence. 15 years later he was banished from his political career when power was returned to the Medici. In his desperate and sad attempt to stay politically connected, which seemed to be the only thing of importance in his life, he wrote this discourse and dedicated it to The Prince (Lorenzo de'Medici).
As another reviewer put it most of his writings and advice seems to be common sense. I read it just for the sake of reading it, and truly tried to enjoy and understand as much as possible, but unless you have a liking to Renaissance political history I don't think it would be much of an interesting subject for today's modern reader. I started reading it in the first place because my most favorite quote comes from this book...or so I thought because I didn't find it, and I read every word!
"If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared."

Each time I turned a page I had to take deep oxygen-rich breaths. It was painful and unnecessary to read. It's a book a sad and lonely man wrote to keep busy and feel somewhat validated and politically worthy. I wonder what Lorenzo's reaction and response was to this dedication.
I guess his philosophy can be applied to any aspect of modern day management. If you seek to stretch it out and take it that far.

Reading this book I was able to perfect the art of speed reading while thinking about totally unrelated personal problems at the same time.


Another quote by Machiavelli
"for fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten."
...Nice, Niccolo. nice.

He need not be worried about my vengeance, because the injury was indeed severe.

[None !WvWWh.l.CE No.1302456]

Definitely not my favorite author. The hostoria is a self braided spiral in the most unlikely in a legal borocracia both the person and the reader anxious constamente, that if you add it to the character is a little character who constantly choose an action to fully implement contrary.

I do not know, something I failed to understand this story but after reading the metamorphosis of the same author, will be several years before reading some of it again.

Do not recommend it unless all you have to read and are in a desert island and ended up reading the Teleguía ... for the twentieth time.

[Anonymous No.1302464]

>Look up 1-star Dune reviews
>All women

Why don't girls like Dune?

[Anonymous No.1302466]

A typical Japanese story line. Fucked up, makes no sense, and when they try to explain it, they make it so philosophical that it’s hard to understand anything at all. The characters were very likeable, and the worlds of the main character (who is nameless, now that I recall) are very enjoyable. Although at times I felt that the book was blatantly ripping off the idea of “daemons” from His Dark Materials, the over all message of the shadows was powerful.

>blatantly ripping off book written 10 years later

[Anonymous No.1302467]

Neuromancer by William Gibson

>True Confessions

>1. I am a nerd.

><boring shit about the reviewer's personality and lifestyle> -- difficult for me to relate to characters who frequent bars, regularly use drugs, sleep around, and pepper their dialogue with lots of confusing futuristic slang and cursing. I’m aware that this is my limitation, although I can’t help thinking that some of it is the author’s as well. After all, I didn’t feel this alienated when I read about Humbert Humbert.

>2. I had to look up the definition of “cyberpunk” on Wikipedia.

>And then, that explained my difficulty getting this book. I can read academic articles. I can read in a foreign language (Hebrew). But much of this book was impenetrable to me. Witness the following randomly chosen paragraph (I simply copied this from the first page I opened up to):

>“Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input.”

>Do you get this? It didn’t make any more sense to me in context than it does out of context, because the entire context was more or less written this way. I suppose that’s expected for this genre, but I’m just not a fan of this type of writing.

>3. I never finished the book, because writing this review was more fun (see #1 above).

>And that was when I knew, around p. 55, that it was time to stop reading.

And this is the best liked 1 star review for Neuromancer...

>Do you get this?
Yes, makes perfect sense even out of context. Try harder. faggot

[Anonymous No.1302469]

Hyperion:
>Sure there were seven people making a pilgrimage and it's like Canterbury tales but I got 16 pages in and I just didn't care. I hated the Consult.
>16 pages

[Anonymous No.1302506]

>More like A Hundred Years of Torture. I read this partly in a misguided attempt to expand my literary horizons and partly because my uncle was a big fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Then again, he also used to re-read Ulysses for fun, which just goes to show that you should never take book advice from someone whose IQ is more than 30 points higher than your own.

I have patience for a lot of excesses, like verbiage and chocolate, but not for 5000 pages featuring three generations of people with the same names. I finally tore out the family tree at the beginning of the book and used it as a bookmark! To be fair, the book isn’t actually 5000 pages, but also to be fair, the endlessly interwoven stories of bizarre exploits and fantastical phenomena make it seem like it is. The whole time I read it I thought, “This must be what it’s like to be stoned.” Well, actually most of the time I was just trying to keep the characters straight. The rest of the time I was wondering if I was the victim of odorless paint fumes. However, I think I was simply the victim of Marquez’s brand of magical realism, which I can take in short stories but find a bit much to swallow in a long novel. Again, to be fair, this novel is lauded and loved by many, and I can sort of see why. A shimmering panoramic of a village’s history would appeal to those who enjoy a human tragicomedy laced heavily with fantasy. It’s just way too heavily laced for me.


this made me so fucking mad

[Anonymous No.1302525]

I'm glad no looked for this one yet, fyi the review looks like DFW and he has to be from /lit/ so one of you are about to see what you wrote.

>Beowulf

"Recommends it for: assholes, dickless pieces of shit, dumbfucks, douchebags
If I wrote a list of things I don't give a shit about, I'm pretty sure "some big fucking monster whose name sounds like a word for the area between my balls and my ass that attacks alcoholics and is eventually slain by some asshole, told entirely in some ancient form of English that I don't understand" would be near the top (for the record, run-on sentences would not. Judge not).

This was one of the first books I was ever assigned to read in high school, and I'm pretty sure ...more If I wrote a list of things I don't give a shit about, I'm pretty sure "some big fucking monster whose name sounds like a word for the area between my balls and my ass that attacks alcoholics and is eventually slain by some asshole, told entirely in some ancient form of English that I don't understand" would be near the top (for the record, run-on sentences would not. Judge not).

This was one of the first books I was ever assigned to read in high school, and I'm pretty sure it was the catalyst to my never caring about school again.

God do I hate this fucking book."

[Anonymous No.1302529]

>>1302525

That's a fucking sweet review right there.

[Anonymous No.1302530]

>>1302441
I don't see anything wrong with this. Hitchhiker's Guide WAS a lolrandum pile of garbage

[Anonymous No.1302536]

1/3
>Save time... watch the movies. This book can appeal only to a linguist. The underlying story is great, but it is buried under an avalance of horribly annoying songs and poems that do nothing to advance the story. They just take up space. I diligently read every last one, hoping that they held some deep meaning in relation to the story, but if there is one, it is so obscure that it serves no purpose. Also, the book is all about walking. Yes, I know they are on an epic quest, and there has to be soul-searching, etc., but the amount of detail regarding the walking is a snoozer! 45 pages of walking and 3 pages for a huge battle. AUGH! I know that this is a masterpiece, and I agree that the plot line is a beautiful tale of good and evil and power and corruption. However, reading this series was a drudgery. The only really good part that you miss in the movies is when the hobits return to the Shire in the last three chapters of The Return of the King. If you want a Tolkien fix, I'd reccommend The Hobbit.

[Anonymous No.1302539]

>>1302536
2/3
This is a response to the post from goodreads

>The detail is important so that one can paint the full picture of the world that Tolkien was trying to create. If you have problems reading this book, then the reason just might be that it is just to demanding for your reading level. I recommend you read something easier first, before trying to read Lord of the Rings yet again. To give a book which has been praized for half a century 1 out of 5 stars is absolutely ridicoulus in my opinion. I think it was Belgium and Germany that claimed that LotR is in their opinion the greatest book of all time. Maybe you didn't like it, thats OK, but to give it one lousy star, I can not understand :/...

[Anonymous No.1302541]

>>1302539
3/3
And this little bitch just had to through in their two cents
>Jarl, your comments are unwarranted, I think. A person can be well-read and not enjoy Lord of the Rings (for various reasons, in fact). No need to attack strangers because they did not enjoy your favorite book. I am finding it difficult to push through myself for the reasons outlined above (and NOT because my reading level is subpar, mind you), but I'm trying to push through because I recognize and appreciate its literary merit.

Fucking savages...

[Anonymous No.1302548]

>>1302506
>One Hundred Years Of Tedium

At least that reviewer repeatedly made it clear the book wasn't for him, instead of insisting that it was terrible.

[Anonymous No.1302655]

>>1302536
>hoping that they held some deep meaning in relation to the story
Wow, has that faggot never read a book in his life? I've seen similar reviews like this.. where people baww because of a mention of what the character ate
Every single line of text has to be related to the plot. No need to build up the character, make the world look real, make the characters real.. add little tidbits.. no maps or poems or songs.. what kind of fucking book would there be?

[Anonymous No.1302662]

>>1302536
I used to own this Ace paperback edition. Did you know it's technically a pirate edition of tolkien because they didn't have his permission to publish in the U.S.? Something about a technicality over establishing copyright by publishing format or something I don't remember the details.

[Anonymous No.1302679]

Half the "bad" reviews posted in here are spot on.

[SPACE MUHREEN No.1302699]

Where do I even begin? For starters, I should let the reader know that I'm not basing my score on the politics of the book (as laughable as I think they are) but on the plot of the book, or rather the complete lack of a plot in the book. While things do happen, some of them pretty big, Mr. Heinlein has seen fit that we should not be party to any of those things. Instead, he saves the most loving descriptions for daily life at boot camp. Seventy, yes seventy, pages of a two hundred-odd page book are dedicated to boot camp. Within those pages we learn the importance of food, and being able to sleep in any condition. Thrill to the excitment of marching into the middle of nowhere! You will weep and wail along with the officers when you hear them lament the fact that they are compelled, nay forced, to flog their men when they misbehave. Honestly, you could watch the beginning of Full Metal Jacket and skip reading that whole part and save yourself some time, and be more entertained in the meantime.

[SPACE MUHREEN No.1302702]

>>1302699
Next you're treated to an extended flashback where a teacher (who is quite obviously channelling the author) lectures his students (representing the reader) about the major reason for the downfall of society in the past (today!). What one overarching reason is responsible for the collapse of society? Massive energy crisis? Economic collapse? Political anarchy? WRONG!!! It's because people listened to psychiatrists and didn't spank their children enough! The secret to an orderly society is corporal punishment, and lots of it! It does make me wonder about the particular proclivities of the author, but that's neither here nor there.

[SPACE MUHREEN No.1302704]

>>1302702
So now that our main character, Johnny Rico, is a full-fledged soldier we can finally get to some action after half the book is already finished, right? No. No, no, no, a thousand times no. You will not see action in this book that is advertised to be about killing gigantic outer space bugs. Instead, you will be treated to the doldrums of a soldier that isn't busy killing things. Guard duty! Sleeping! Maintaining weapons and space armor! Dinner and its various protocols! Even his time off gets more detail than all the fighting Rico participates in combined! The typical description for a battle will go like this: "We dropped on this planet to smash things up. Boy, what a mess that was. This guy died. These ones got hurt."

[SPACE MUHREEN No.1302705]

>>1302704
Then Rico goes to officer training school where we get more detail about learning things! And another lecture from another teacher to his students about why soldiers should be the only ones to handle government affairs! Then we get told how battallions are broken down into platoons and squads and such forth! Finally we get to the end which turns into one of the biggest anticlimaxes I've ever had the misfortune of reading. You'll get what feels like five hours of blabbing about setting up patrol and coordinates streamed endlessly at you, some thrilling detail on hypnotically suggested sleep, and then a blessed five seconds of actual confrontation with something! Then it's over before you even know it started. The end.

[SPACE MUHREEN No.1302711]

>>1302705
I realize that the life of a soldier is probably pretty accurately portrayed in the book, days upon days of boring drudgery with a few moments of life-and-death craziness, but that doesn't necessarily make for a particularly interesting book. At least not the way it's depicted here.

Don't be fooled by the first ten pages of the book, which actually contain more action than the other hundred and ninety. What you're getting when you get this book is only one step away from a military training manual, only with some references to outer space and aliens tossed in along with a couple crazy rightwing ravings as the chocolatey syrup to go on top of the whole crappy sundae. Don't fall for the hype, pass on this book.

And yes, the movie is better. It's stupid and fun. The book is just stupid.

[Anonymous No.1303512]

>>1302662
I remember hearing that. Wasn't it also because they took liberties with the text, and spelled things different? ie: elfs instead of elves, dwarfs instead of dwarves.

[Anonymous No.1303532]

I don't get this book at all it is basically about a boy who lies, eventually attends his own funeral and he gets away with it, to me it is a waste of time to read

[Anonymous No.1303539]

I did not get this book. First of all, there was too much gay rape. Second, not enough cocaine. Also, I do not like cartoons. This book could be renamed Superman Had Daddy Issues and nobody would know the difference, except the people who read it, who wouldn't care anyway, 'cause they'd all be too shocked about the gay rape. Ban this useless book from Good Reads.

[Anonymous No.1303541]

There are people who absolutely love this book. However, I'm not one of them. Reading the nutritional information on your morning cheerios for the 10,000th time is more interesting. That aside, my biggest problem with the book is that I couldn't have cared less about what happened to any of the characters. I can forgive a lot of a book has compelling characters but, for me, it just didn't deliver. I am most certainly not afraid of Virginia Wolf.

[Anonymous No.1303545]

"What I can't abide is that the author implies a tacit approval or at least admiration for his fantasy creation and seems to expect I will enjoy it, too. "

I swear I must be miss reading this. The way it sounds to me though is that he hates that the author likes the world which he has created, and expects the reader to like it as well. Am I missing something here?

[Anonymous No.1303547]

god i seriously can't spend too much time on this website. it's like how if you spend enough time reading smug two-star yelp reviews written by people wearing scarves in their profile pictures you start planning out your career as a serial killer

[Anonymous No.1303563]

>Rick rated it 1 of 5 stars
>Recommends it for: Emo Kids
>By today's standards, a bog-standard blog.

>The only reason that this was preserved in the first place is that the author happened to be a Roman emperor. (That, and that ancient Rome didn't have LiveJournal.)

>The only reason that Meditations is still being published today is that once a book gets labeled "classic," hardly anyone who reads it has the grapes to admit that it just wasn't that good. Well...the emperor has no clothes.

LiveJournal invented journals.

[Friendly Fat Chick !GjeWV9COa. No.1303576]

>>1303563
ALL MY HATE

[Ralph Wiggum !!RbKRCS+NEzU No.1303603]

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind.

[Anonymous No.1303607]

>I read this book thinking that it would be somewhat like the Blade Runner movie. Once I finished the book, I thought to myself, what a disappointment. This book was nothing like the movie. Philip K. Dick, added so many scenes and characters to the book. He tried to make the story more dramatic, but it did not work. I did not like this book at all. DO NOT READ IT.

Another...

>What Philip K. Dick never realized was how to actually write a book. Some people suffer from the inability to see the forest through the trees. Well Dick cannot see the trees through the forest. Big ideas and theories are great for the individual but if that same individual wants to convey these ideas to others they enter into a new arena all together. This point happens to contain Philip K. Dick's flaw as a writer, he cannot tell a story without tripping over himself. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" starts out strong and then quickly fades and drags in the middle and then somewhat picks itself back up in the end. Nothing can make up for the dull, inane and silly middle section of the book however.

[Anonymous No.1303642]

>Dennis Lehane is a crappy writer. I love the movies made from his books, but his writing sucks.

[Anonymous No.1304068]

"What. the. fuck.
No, really. This is genius?
Inverting the family romance so that the father is posing a threat to the son's relationship with his lover -- okay, I'm in. The contempt and nausea that permeates every sexual relationship any character has -- all right, maybe that seemed like a new idea in 19th century Russia, and Dostoevsky sure does communicate his message that sex is nasty and humiliating. Got it. Two of the characters had moments in which I was able to suspend the disbelief that permeated my encounter with the other 976 pages in the book, even. But really. No one talks in these kind of monologues. This is not a story; it's a treatise supported by an ill-structured, repetitive, only vaguely coherent "narrative," translated to sound like a chinese resturant menu: we serve delicious food for you that you love eating subsequent to when it is served to you.

The ideas that slipped in, however misformed, in isolated passages, have slipped into my consciousness like parasites, so that this unfortunate encounter is now part of my thinking life. Is this cultural relevance? Can't really say I want the ten hours I spent on this bitch back, I guess."

How dare they treat the Karamazovs this way.

[Anonymous No.1304146]

>What makes this novel so unbearably terrible is how promising it is in the first half. When I first heard about Auster's new book, I thought the premise sounded refreshingly more ambitious than his previous few books, so I decided to give it a look, as I admire his early work but have found his later work irrelevant.

And, for the first eighty pages, it's just that- exciting, mysterious, political, and intense, not so much a return to form for Auster but a long overdue branching out into new territory, considering something besides the over-intellectualized, uber-sentimental domestic lives of the wealthy, white, and well-educated.

And then, halfway through- BOOM! Auster pulls the rug out from under us, aborting the compelling, Children of Men-like story and replacing it with...the over-intellectualized, uber-sentimental domestic lives of the wealthy, white, and well-educated.

I can only surmise that Auster got scared by his dangerous proximity to actually saying something. What is the most maddening is that Auster demonstrates in the first half of this novel that, yes, he is capable of writing provocative, exciting, and challenging fiction...but that he just chooses not to. Whether from cowardice, laziness, complacency or a mixture of all three is unclear, but it is disheartening to see someone built up as one of America's greatest writers committing an act of such cruelty to both his readers and his characters. I am officially done with Auster.