/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14904833]

Post the most overrated book you can think of

[Anonymous No.14904837]

>>14904833
The Magus

[Anonymous No.14904893]

>>14904833
In descending order of talent, anything by Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, or Joan Didion.

[Anonymous No.14904894]

>>14904833
Every book ever written by a nigger.

[Anonymous No.14904898]

>>14904893
>not liking Virginia Woolf
pleb-filtered

[Anonymous No.14904901]

>>14904894
Even Hamlet?

[Anonymous No.14904910]

>>14904901
nice meme

[Anonymous No.14904912]

the ego and its own

[Anonymous No.14904960]

>>14904833
i haven't read enough books
and i mostly read ligh novels
and certainly none of them are overrated or rated highly for that matter.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !WLnhB9xZds No.14904966]

Burr by Gore Vidal

[Anonymous No.14905162]

Catcher In The Rye

[Anonymous No.14905166]

>>14904966
Wow you have absolute shit taste

[Anonymous No.14905208]

>>14904894
This book really is fucking garbage, but Toni Morrison has a surprisingly based view on the western canon

[Anonymous No.14905275]

>>14904898
Virginia Woolf is a writer driven by resentment and insignificant, two-bit anglo elitism. You can always tell which writers Woolf owes the most to because she vehemently bad-mouths them at every turn. She couldn't stand that an Irish plebeian did everything she wanted to do in literature 10 years before she developed the awareness to even try. Woolf's attempt to capture the transcendent details, the momentariness of life, and the subjectivity of being human, were all done first in A Portrait of the Artist and killed off in Ulysses. Everything To the Lighthouse tried to do was done in Dubliners and with a more deft hand. All of her stream of consciousness schlock is utter garbage compared to Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Not only this, but Virginia Woolf had no talent for realism. It must have been a sorry day when poor old Virginia realized that she was destined to play second fiddle to Joyce and had no other choice but to write the only thing she could. She could not make the transition to realism. Woolf knew that even if she tried, her writing would never ascend to that Chekhovian beauty and intricacy captured in the work of her former friend Katherine Mansfield. Of course, like Joyce, it didn't take long for Virginia to turn sour on Mansfield. What a laugh that Woolf has been shouldered as some sort of champion of women's lit, when she tore down other talented female writers in an attempt to claw her way to the top. If it were not for the fact that her husband ran a printing house, this woman would be languishing in out of print, 7/10 novels read by mentally challenged fucking retards who believe that reading a British woman whose father and brothers went to Cambridge is somehow progressive and fair-minded.

Virginia Woolf was a woman driven by envy and poisoned with bitterness. What a colossally derivative fucking harpy cunt.

[Anonymous No.14906387]

>>14905275
tldr: she was an ugly bitch and cant into literature

[Anonymous No.14906416]

>>14905275

[Anonymous No.14906422]

>>14905275
based

[Anonymous No.14906428]

>>14905275
Your capacity for analysis does not seem to extend beyond the comparative level and even there you lack any sense of sublety and differentiation. Its a wild guess, but you sound like a literature student who's proud of being integrated into the circle of academic judgements and parades them around on /lit/ as if you were their champion.

>Everything To the Lighthouse tried to do was done in Dubliners and with a more deft hand

This makes me feel as if you havent read neither of them aside from excerpts.

Trascend your little ego, if you truly want to understand literature, my child.

[Anonymous No.14906439]

>>14905275
Absolutely devastating.

[Anonymous No.14906453]

>>14906428
lmao what a faggöt

[Anonymous No.14906457]

>>14905162
did you post this for approval? no one will disagree. think of something a little more boundary-pushing next time. thanks for the effort.

[Anonymous No.14906480]

>>14906453
based

[Anonymous No.14906512]

The Old Testament

[Anonymous No.14906553]

Scarlet Letter a good close second.

[Anonymous No.14906570]

>>14904833

[Anonymous No.14906626]

>>14904833
Anything by Pynchon

[Anonymous No.14906638]

>>14906570
I agree. Don't know what the hype is. Felt like it was written by a teenager fulfilling his cyberpunk fantasy

[Anonymous No.14906649]

>>14905275
She was cute, though

[Anonymous No.14906902]

Nathan the Wise

[Anonymous No.14906958]

>>14906428
Cringe

[Anonymous No.14907069]

>>14904833

[Anonymous No.14907202]

>>14904833
I know that the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is incredibly popular among dim-wits. My nu-age hippy grade 10 teacher made us read it and it was absolute 'The Secret' tier brainlet feel good schlock.

[Anonymous No.14907228]

>>14906570
PKD does pulp sci-fi better. Neuromancer is a book I'd recommend to a teenager who's bored with reading, or someone who wants a book to casually read over a weekend.

>>14906638
To be fair Neuromancer was basically the first teenage cyberpunk fantasy. The genre does owe a lot to Billy Gibs.

[Anonymous No.14907244]

>>14906570
The prose style in this book sets my teeth on edge.

[Anonymous No.14907261]

>>14906570
Do people read this expecting more than a trashy pulp? At best it's literary junk-food.

[Anonymous No.14907283]

What's that sound? Is >>14906428 sucking cocks again?

[Anonymous No.14907287]

>>14905275
I just like her books desu

[Anonymous No.14907302]

say anything positive about this except that it uses obscure words (which isnt an upside btw)

[Anonymous No.14907342]

>>14904833
Pic related and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

[Anonymous No.14907358]

>>14905275

[Anonymous No.14907395]

>>14906570
>>14906638

Irrefutable

[Anonymous No.14907518]

>>14905275
Gigabased

[Anonymous No.14907724]

>>14904833
Anything by Bolaño

[Anonymous No.14907929]

>>14906570
It's overrated but not as overrated as Snow Crash.

[Anonymous No.14907944]

>>14905275
cringe
>>14906428
based

[Anonymous No.14907966]

>>14904833

[Anonymous No.14907967]

>>14904833
War and Peace. So long, so many characters, to so little end...

[Anonymous No.14907976]

>>14905275
>derivative
All of literature is derivative.

[Anonymous No.14908030]

>>14905275
Saying her books are trash twelve times doesn't mean anything more than saying her books are trash once, pseud. Joyce did do it better though, but they're still different writers

[Anonymous No.14908086]

>>14906428
His comparison is fitting. To the Lighthouse shows characters at different ages in brief, capturing in small, pivotal moments what is an essential part of their humanity. “The Dead” alone bears a heavy resemblance to To the Lighthouse, but of course it’s really the other way round.

[Anonymous No.14908096]

>>14905275
Dangerously based and top-tier roastie bait

[Anonymous No.14908173]

>>14907967
Can you give me a quick rundown on War and Peace? I forced myself through The Cossacks and was bored out of my fucking skull. Is War and Peace like that too? Don't want to waste my time

[Anonymous No.14908234]

>>14904912
This
>muh collectives are spooks
Individuals came up with them because they benefitted them retard

[Anonymous No.14908292]

>>14905275
extremely based. women are only capable of writing about the same base hysteria with which they experience their myopic lives anyway.
and George Eliot was a more technically capable author than Woolf.

[Anonymous No.14908300]

>>14907069
bad opinion. augustus should be more highly rated though

[Anonymous No.14908486]

House of Leaves

[Anonymous No.14908510]

>>14904960
Why are you here?

[Anonymous No.14908940]

Slaughterhouse Five

>>14904833
>>14904894
t. insecure racists. Passing is great. So is Beloved.

>>14905275
This is the most retarded thing I've read on /lit/ in a while. All I got from this post is that you think she's inferior to Joyce and you hate women. Virtually every scholar would disagree with you. You sound like an undergrad who is butthurt his "SJW" professor made him read a book by a girl.

Literature isn't a competition. If you're looking to make arbitrary comparisons based on half baked subjective hot takes go tune into "the game" you braindead faggot.

And what's up with all the hate for Woolf in this thread? /lit/ used to adore her even just a couple years ago. one of the few women writers who 100% deserves her place in the canon. nu-/lit/ sucks. bunch of underage /pol/ faggots.

[Anonymous No.14908957]

>>14907929
it's bizarre how one of the two most famous cyberpunk books is a parody

[Anonymous No.14909029]

>>14906570
Go fuck yourself to death

[Anonymous No.14909032]

>>14908940
nigger cope. all your writers suck.

[Anonymous No.14909111]

>>14907069
yes this sucked

[Anonymous No.14909119]

>>14909111
filtered

[Anonymous No.14909144]

>>14908940
>racist
Yes.
>insecure
lmao
Beloved is hot garbage. Imagine being a black writer and the only ghost story you can think to write is one where a fat ghost feeds off her mother and destroys their family. Really, Morrison could've looked outside the black community for inspiration.

[Anonymous No.14909176]

>>14904894
Even Invisible Man?
I hate pic related with a fury it probably doesn't deserve. It just blows my mind it gets into the top 10 on greatest books evar lists with such consistency. I might not agree with the rest of the picks but they always at least have a lot of depth and to see this proto-YA shite listed among them is baffling.
To a lesser extent I hate many other "Great American Novels" not named Moby-Dick

[Anonymous No.14909198]

>>14906570
Absolutely the worst book I've ever read

[Anonymous No.14909202]

>>14909144
I'll never understand this criticism. Namely, that black authors should refrain from writing about black people, and doing so somehow makes them niche and inferior to white writers who, by and large, write about white people yet are seen by white readers as writing from some sort of generalized outside of race.
>Imagine being a black writer
Try performing your own though experiment in earnest. What do you think you'd write about?

[Anonymous No.14909213]

>>14909144
>Morrison could've looked outside the black community for inspiration.
And your favorite writer could've looked inside the black community for inspiration.

[Anonymous No.14909218]

>>14904833
The Road, easily

"wehhhhhh everything is depressing" isn't automatically deep, the way it's written makes me want to gauge my own eyes out, and I have no idea how English teachers think it's a classic. It's not. It's a shit book and anyone who likes it has bad taste

[Anonymous No.14909243]

>>14907302
The language is flowery, yes, but I personally liked seeing inside the mind of the monster. Humbert is an interesting antagonist, one who you feel both revulsion and pity towards- his daydream sequence early on in the book where he imagines himself on an island playing with eternally young nymphets is creepy, but also incredibly sad. The man's a creepy rapist, no doubt, but he's also wistful and yearning and mentally unstable.
I found the book was a good DIY exposure therapy, too. But I know the book isn't for everyone, which is why I'm hesitant to recommend it

[Anonymous No.14909278]

>>14909202
You've misunderstood me. I'm not saying black authors should refrain from writing about black people. I'm saying that black authors who write about black people will write inferior, shitty books (because art imitates life).
>what do you think I'd write about
fatherlessness, laziness, addiction to drugs
>>14909213
>having a favorite writer
the state of this nigger

[Anonymous No.14909322]

god /lit/ is so fucking boring

[Anonymous No.14909348]

>>14907069
Fuck you

[Anonymous No.14909363]

>>14906570
Thought of this immediately when I saw the thread

[Anonymous No.14909373]

>>14908940
>she's inferior to Joyce and you hate women.
Yes.
>Virtually every scholar would disagree with you.
Who gives a fuck?
>Literature isn't a competition.
Everything is a competition. Never will everyone be equally good at something.
>women writers who 100% deserves her place in the canon.
No such woman exists.
>nu-/lit/ sucks.
Seethe. Cope. Dilate.

[Anonymous No.14909387]

>>14909176
you have to be a retard to not see the depth in TCitR or to genuinely hate it. i don't know what kind of nonsense buzzfeed listicles you read, but no one is saying it is the best thing ever written, though consensus is that it bretty good.

[Anonymous No.14909389]

>>14909373
>No such woman exists.
Dickinson, Woolf and Eliot deserve their place in the canon.
>inb4 muh derivative
All literature is derivative. Chaucer's Canterbury is pretty much a riff on Boccaccio's Decameron yet both are part of the canon. There's no reason to exclude Woolf just because she uses stream of consciousness like Joyce.

[Anonymous No.14909434]

>>14904833
Fahrenheit 451

[Anonymous No.14909768]

>>14904833
Have to read this for a class soon, is it still okay even if overrated?

[Anonymous No.14909779]

Ulysses. Its a bunch of gibberish and no good plot

[Anonymous No.14909792]

>>14909389
>Dickinson, Woolf and Eliot deserve their place in the canon
no they don't they just write about the same crap as all female writers, vacuous people.

[Anonymous No.14909812]

>>14909779
This is bait

[Anonymous No.14909850]

>>14905275
>In a 1928 letter to a mutual friend of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf wrote:
>"I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God."

God, what a cunt.

[Anonymous No.14909851]

>>14904894
It's exceptionally good for a YA novel, which is what it is.

[Anonymous No.14909858]

>>14909850
No, she is a (b)a(sed)theist.

[Anonymous No.14909864]

>>14909858
I'm not even religious but she's 200% reddit in that quote.

[Anonymous No.14909874]

>>14909792
>Dickinson
>vacuous
What a pleb. Commit suicide.

[Anonymous No.14909884]

>>14909373
Hating women is part of the School of Resentment as being a feminist. If you can't see the literary merits in her work then you're beyond hopeless.

[Anonymous No.14909908]

>>14904894
This.

Every nig book is basically
>This is what it means to be black in America.

[Anonymous No.14909942]

>>14905275
Both Joyce and Woolf were geniuses.

Ulysses > To the Lighthouse > The Waves > Mrs. Dalloway > Portrait of the Artist > Orlando > Dubliners

[Anonymous No.14910002]

Savage Detectives, as well as anything by Bolano. The dude can't seem to write anything besides dime-a-dozen dick lit.

[Anonymous No.14910038]

>>14908940
>All I got from this post is that you think she's inferior to Joyce
She envied the talent of others (especially women) and desired above all to see them fail and fade into obscurity. She did not possess enough confidence in her own work to let it stand on its own. You can read her diaries or google any number of feuds and rivalries she brought on with her cattiness. All that she desired to achieve was done first and done better by others. Virginia Woolf was a malicious and spiteful woman. Scholarly opinion generally supports this conclusion.

>You sound like an undergrad who is butthurt his "SJW" professor made him read a book by a girl.
Far from it. I read 3 of her books of my own accord and two in a graduate course on Modernism. I've also read many excerpts from her diaries and more than a few of her essays. Virginia Woolf--though a favorite of the "SJW" crowd (the kind who inevitably pretend to have read books they are utterly ignorant of), was a racist, a classist, and an anti-semite, and these sentiments show up constantly in her work. She was a small minded woman deeply entrenched in her own vanity.

>Virtually every scholar would disagree with you.
Literary scholars are rarely in the business of judging what works are better or worse. Aesthetic judgement (i.e. which writers are better than others) really does not play much of a role in the literary scholar's activity. They are much more concerned with how a writer fit into their time period, how they influenced the writers that came after them, who they were influenced by, and how their work can be interpreted by the various schools of criticism. No literary scholar finishes up writing an article or essay and rates a book out of 10 or says "Virginia Woolf is far better than so and so." That would be utterly preposterous. Nonetheless, I am correct in my judgement.

All literature is derivative but Woolf's is decidedly so. She elaborated on nothing, made no steps forward, makes no unique or inventive contribution. She has no empathy, no philosophy other than resentment and anger (most likely because of being molested as a child), no love of humanity, and no real taste.

How ridiculous it is that she heavily criticized Ulysses and then went on to make countless attempts at its replication. She didn't have the class to acknowledge her contemporary whose work hers possessed an obvious affinity with.

>you hate women.
Wrong. I already gave praise to Katherine Mansfield. There are many women whose work I admire greatly. Woolf is not one of them. Austen, Eliot, O'Connor, Emily Brontë, Margeurite Yourcenar, Wharton, Shirley Jackson, and Iris Murdoch are a few, and that's just novelists.

[Anonymous No.14910093]

>>14905275
Based

>>14906428
>Criticizes someone's capacity for analysis
>Proceeds to weirdly project insecurities and offer nothing but weak adhoms
And then you go on to samefag in >>14907944
Holy fuck you're cringe. Go out and buy some rope.

[Anonymous No.14910114]

>>14905275
You absolutely decimated her, anon

[Anonymous No.14910127]

Why are people posting things that aren't required reading or something like harry potter?

[Anonymous No.14910413]

>>14910038
Based anon came back for the kill

[Anonymous No.14910486]

>>14904833

[Anonymous No.14910494]

>>14910413
Like a fuckin boss.

>>14910038
'The bitch is dead.'

[Anonymous No.14910505]

>>14910038
>Nonetheless, I am correct in my judgement.
based

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.14910519]

>>14904912
Haha. Cry more, non reader.

>>14908234
>muh collectives are spooks
Hahaha. Also haven’t read

[Anonymous No.14910552]

>>14909373
Take pity on this man. He is a retard.

[Anonymous No.14910560]

>>14904837
What are you talking about, The Magus is way underrated.

[Anonymous No.14910931]

>>14904833

[Anonymous No.14911263]

>>14909434
This

[Anonymous No.14911302]

>>14906570
yeah, extremely overrated.

[Anonymous No.14911486]

>>14909850
>>14909858
What about "the atheist Tansley"?

>>14909864
It's tongue-in-cheek, mongoloid.

[Anonymous No.14911494]

>>14910038
>Austen, Eliot, O'Connor, Emily Brontë, Margeurite Yourcenar, Wharton, Shirley Jackson, and Iris Murdoch are a few, and that's just novelists.
What about Willa Cather?

[Anonymous No.14911811]

Probably The Book of Disquiet

[Anonymous No.14912081]

>>14908510
Just to suffer

[Anonymous No.14912202]

>>14905275
Uh, hello? Based department?

[Anonymous No.14912234]

>>14905275
Magnanimity or pettiness isn't a reason to dismiss the works of an artist generally but in her case, it justifies it along with her second-rate catalogue.

[Anonymous No.14912346]

>>14906570
Ye basically

[Anonymous No.14912880]

>>14905162
This

[Anonymous No.14913013]

Mein Kampf
what a fucking waste of time

[Anonymous No.14913059]

>>14904912
> he hasn't read the new translation

It's called The Unique and Its Propery

[Anonymous No.14913325]

>>14906570
Kys niggers. Its good

[Anonymous No.14913399]

>>14904833
Anything by Toni Morrison

[Anonymous No.14914066]

>>14913059
I just noticed her hairties are little spooks.

[Anonymous No.14914079]

>>14904833
https://discord.gg/VbZw6HE

[Anonymous No.14914103]

>>14907342
>Wuthering Heights
....................

[Anonymous No.14914212]

M-O-O-N that spells trash. I hate The Stand and I don't understand the praise it gets. I know it's too overrated but it offends me that it is well regarded. However, I did read the unabridged version so that probably it worse.

[Anonymous No.14914234]

>>14914212
Meant to write "I know it's not too overrated".

[Anonymous No.14914331]

>>14910486
Lol most of the other books in this thread have some sort of merit but this one is just boring as fuck.

[Anonymous No.14914573]

>>14908300
Based.

Put Butcher’s Crossing for best western too.

[Anonymous No.14914596]

>>14910038
Truly ultra mega based. Threads over. This nigga killed Woolf.

[Anonymous No.14914630]

>>14909243
>I personally liked seeing inside the mind of the monster.
Try some Peter Sotos.