hey Veeky Forums I have only entry level knowledge of literature (pic related is probably the best book I've read) and I was wondering if some more well read anons could post examples of truly great writing, the best in your opinion. It can be just a short excerpt if you want, just something that displays masterful skill in prose and stuff like that.
I want to see what the best writing in history looks like.
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It's Ulysses, but you might not be able to appreciate it yet. You might want to start with James Joyce - The Dead (Dubliners)
You act like it's on a scale or something. Read for five more years and you'll realize how stupid the question is.
Are you saying that Dostoevsky is not better than JK Rowling? Or that David Foster Wallace is not better than John Green? Are you seriously falling for the "art is subjective" meme user
>Dostoyevsky
>DFW
wew
Art isn't for fighting other teenagers with your power level. As hard as it is to understand, yeah, a lot of it's subjective. I think JK Rowling has paperthin characters, really basic morality, etc. But she's readable as hell, has competent prose, and has a really healthy sense of what a good page-turner is, especially for kids. I don't read Harry Potter, but if you act like a book can only be completely better or worse than another book, you're beyond retarded.
>best writing in history
Too broad. Too many examples. The first twenty or so pages of The Great Gatsby are impressive as hell
Can you just post a short example of really great prose
>In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
>“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
>He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men....
Opening page of Gatsby
The prose of the first twenty or so pages of The Great Gatsby is so bad I put the book down and never picked it back up. Every time he used an adverb after a verb or used some terrible, flowery replacement for "he said" or "he asked."
>"say, have you ever been told the difference between a lawman and a sewer rat, my dear?" he exclaimed inquisitively
*Every time he used an adverb after a verb or used some terrible, flowery replacement for "he said" or "he asked," another inch of my body broke out in a rash
Lost half of my sentence there, sorry
OP, there are about 2 dozen correct answers, which is actually a much smaller number than it appears at first glance, and this is one of them:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
The intro to Suttree is fucking beautiful, and the rest of the book gets just as good
>Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth high shouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors none shall walk save you...
If you're going to pick a "first X pages" meme, you should go with the first 50 pages of Underworld.
>He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful
>...
>Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day--men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
This. Shame there's about 150 good pages out of the remaining 750.
who are some prose stylists you do like?
late Joyce, McCarthy and Gaddis are some favorites
Tolkien has turned into a meme where the only thing people talk about is world-building and his hatred for allegory be he is a legitimately beautiful writer. This is Gandalf talking to (I think) Aragorn after the battle of Pelennor Fields.
>Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
>and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
I read Confessions of an English Opium eater a couple months ago and I thought the prose was beautifully written.
I've seen this sentiment a lot. I can understand it, but I'm a bit more than halfway through and I disagree. I think the prose in the chapter with Nick and the swinger approaches (and maybe eclipses) that of the prelude. And the chapters with Matty and Eric remind me a lot of the conversations between Jack and Murray in White Noise, which were some of my favorite scenes in that book.
Beyond just the prose (and I feel a need to justify the book since just about a week ago there was a thread with a few anons complaining about Underworld) I'm enjoying the "late reveal" way that DeLillo's doing character arcs. The way that important characters are introduced at older ages, and then explored later on in more youthful stages of their lives.
Agree with thread. Your question is stupid and you proved your stupidity here
Don't even bother... These are quite hopeless cases
read William Gaddis, Frank Stanford
>Agree with thread
It's always the redditors who think they can speak for everyone else and define a thread before it's barely even begun.
And OP's rhetorical question advances a good point, even if he bungled it. Some writers are just better than others.
Not sure if I understand you.
Are you saying the person to whom I'm replying is hopeless?
Do you like Underworld?
Since no one's going to bite:
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Joyce's evocation of essentially a child's crush in Araby
Yes and yes
The structure's great, and the prose is almost so beautiful you take it for granted. My only problems were the really inflated length and how everyone talks like a pseudo-intellectual outside of the flashbacks. I get he was trying to show how the home run affected people through time and how people interpret these connections by showing all of these little tangents, but that doesn't make it any less of a chore to get through.