Books that are a torture to read

All fantasy post-Tolkien.

19th century novels.

exam.

Camus is the John Green of philosophy.
One must imagine him as having been in a constant state of self-satisfied mental masturbation.

>Young Adult

>Anything that has a cover that screams "INSPIRED BY GAME OF THRONES"

An unrelated individual example is 120 Days of Sodom. That thing is unbearable; not because of the "LEL OMG SO SHOCKING" content, but because it's boring, repetitive and drawn-out.

Fell for the fucking meme. Wanna read degenerate bullshit and have a little bit more fun? Read edgy pasta online. Or find a friend with very little imagination and ask him to tell you a shocking story.

magical reality

>Camus is the John Green of philosophy

Retard opinion 2bh

It's hard to describe, but this new sort of NPR mom-lit that's written in smarmy kike uptalk fills me with uncontrollable rage

It's like YA but written for middlebrow thirty-somethings who watch a lot of sitcoms and love to Tweet

I know it when I see it

Romances, mostly. A girl suddenly falls in love with someone; unironical sex scens.

Marquis de Sade was just an edgelord of unimaginable proportions, his books have jack shit redeemable about them

allegorical poetry, or poetry rich in pompous and unimaginative adjectives like azure

almost anything that requires from me to focus
how the fuck do I sort myself?

>NPR mom-lit
Never has a turn of phrase so powerfully beamed a concept directly into my mind's eye
Fuck

Agreed

I'll get hate for this but Nietzsche. It reads like a bitter NEET's nonsense that didn't have the internet as an outlet to shitpost on.

Middlemarch redeems everything

kek
change your value system u stupid neet

Does the black girl on the left really have any concept of what's happening or is she just along for the ride?

she looks like she might be one of the vaguely smart ones

Aren't all books postmodern because literature is dependent upon the reader's perception of that literature and we can only think in a fundamentally postmodern way because the way we analyze art is shaped by our culture?

Nice bait. Do you even read? Have you read victorian lit?

You've missed the point with Sade entirely. The degenerate bullshit you read online is drawn from the collective cultural concept of what those acts entail and represent, which were founded principally in Sade's work. The proprietors and clients in the back end of Paris would know of these goings on but the scope of human sexual experience was not exactly being studied by the masses.

It's not about his prose. His prose is trash. It is repetitive, because he wrote it with a skeleton structure in a jail cell and his writing wasn't great to begin with. It's about the gift of compendium. Sadism as a semantic concept and psychological factor is defined by his work, followed my Von Sacher-Masoch's. Their combined work was the most comprehensive collection of power exchange ideas ever presented, and the forms in which a person can engage another.

Additionally, your concept of degenerate has no bearing in the real world, because you don't know what that fucking word means or are deliberately butchering its use. "Anyone who likes something I don't like is an abomination."

Now go fuck your hand.

It's like saying: "Why read the Bible when I can read religious blogs?"

You're reading quarternary literature.

Fucking ecce homo i swear to god nietzsche does nothing but praising himself wow so deep

no its formed by intuition first which is then refined in reality overtime and verifys our intuition, there are LOADS of dishonest people in this world, who will deny universal objectivity till the day they die

T H I S
H
I
S

Its supposed to be ironic, you pimp.

Everything from the Renaissance to Modernism, including the Enlightenment and Victorian Era.

Romantic prose, Elizabethan prose

i dont like when authors use language in way to obscure meaning

>shazamed!

>like postmodern philosophy
>hate postmodern lit
what's wrong with me?

you

Isekai LNs

>"We must imagine Sisyphus as being happy"

WHY!?! BECAUSE YOU FUCKING SAY SO!?

GODDAMN IT.

I'm sure other people honestly enjoyed Omensetter's Luck, but I wasn't one of them. And I found the return-on-effort very poor on 'The Beetle Leg,' but maybe I read the wrong John Hawkes.

I read this POS from cover to cover. It probably is the only book I've read all the way through that actually felt like a complete waste of time and effort.

I think what you've tapped into here is the shaky nature categorization in a post-modern context. Sure, you can frame and discuss a lot of texts in a lot of different ways, but others need not agree with your approach, and that's all it is: discourse that coalesces into, among other things, a generally understood concept. Literary theory or categories need not be absolute to be a useful way of thinking about texts or communicating to others criticism. With that in mind, if you can justify your reading of a text, call it whatever you want (ofc, to a certain extent) and I may agree with you. Outside of that--left to yourself--you're welcome to think whatever you like.

I know this is probably not going to be a popular opinion, but Ernest Hemingway can go fuck himself. I can deal with a lot of words but fuck.

I also detest Tennessee Williams. His "symbolism" is so obvious it's insulting.

>The proprietors and clients in the back end of Paris would know of these goings on but the scope of human sexual experience was not exactly being studied by the masses.

So all the parts with the giant trapdoors into vats of boiling oil and automated torture machines were documentative?

As a book 120 Days of Sodom is bloody dreadful. It only serves as a flimsy, repetitive frame for his (thinly disguised as his characters') philosophy. If that was his intent he could have just written an essay instead of filling hundreds of pages with flat, inconsequential characters and some of the dullest prose this side of an Ikea instruction manual.

Sadism was named after him, yeah, and maybe he did contribute in pushing sexual sadism into the mainstream, but that doesn't make 120 Days any less of a slog.
>complete waste of time and effort.

What? You can't tell me that you didn't find the repetitive structure enthralling, or that you couldn't latch on to any of the wonderfully realized characters in the book. Remember Zephyr? He was my favorite. Such a scamp. What about The Bishop? Remember his thing about liking man-ass more than anything? Oh wait... they all have an unquenchable thirst for man-ass...

Well, remember the one that said that evil made his dick hard? Yeah! I remember- oh wait no. It was all of them. Their whole shtick was "Rebel and defiance makes my motherfucking cock hard"

Also, can't forget Sade's impact on modern culture. Without his influence we wouldn't have movies like Saw, Hostel or torture-pasta on Veeky Forums.

God where would we be without that Cupcakes fan fiction?

Last bit:

Someone else could have codified 'sadism' without having written such a dreadful novel. There have been mass rapes before, rapes for pleasure, torture for pleasure; Sade didn't invent any of it.

Or maybe he could just have written something other than a criminally long sleeping aid.

After the first book O'Brian starts toning down the nautism (nautical autism) a bit.

young adult fiction is cancer

I cannot get myself through the Greeks. I wanted to start with them so that I can understand the western cannon but goddamn the Iliad is a chore. It is just "Spy vs. Spy" bullshit where we have a few chapters where the gods favor the Greeks and they beat the shit out of the Trojans. Then its a few chapters of the gods favoring Troy with them kicking Greek ass. Then back and forth and back and forth. Sometimes its interspersed with a chapter about the gods bitching at each other. Then we have entire chapters dedicated to stating all the names of everyone who joined the war, their home region, their number of ships, their primary export, their blood type, their favorite color and their credit score. Additionally I am halfway through the book and Achilles hasn't done a single goddamned thing cause he is still fucking sulking.

The sad thing is that every so often I get to a part where I can see why the book is so good in certain segments of prose and their conversations about loyalty and honor (particularly about why the Trojans feel they have to fight this war which was caused by Paris' bullshit). Yet these good parts are just stuck in sea of text which drags on.

(You).

Romantic lit can be fun.

Just try to sit through it, it really is a beautiful work of literature once you finish and look back on it.
The Odyssey will probably suit your tastes a bit more, as it isn't completely chronological and reads more like a travel book, as you might have guessed.

Peterson seems more confused than her t b h famiglia

Marx is probably the most painful thing to read. He had some excellent ideas, but it is extremely dry. I'm thinking that is because most of his essays are analytical instead of ideological, but I also think he lacks analogy and examples, so he relies primarily on bland syllogism to explain ideas, which works, but makes be want to bash my head on my desk.

read more poetry
OR
stop reading poetry
because you've missed something

Anything with vampires that isn't Dracula
Anything with a literally perfect main character (just finished reading Dean Koontz's Winter Moon and this was a real problem for me)
YA fiction for the most part

Fuck The Coral Island in particular

>Oh no a problem!
>It's okay, we solved it because we're British
Right down to the end where the cannibal natives are about to eat them but convert to Christianity and a British boat turns up to rescue them.

"Thrillers". They do the opposite of thrill. Mainly it's because a lot of the "story" relies on buildup. And of course the prose isn't good enough to accompany it along the way

for me, it's Ayn Rand

ten times i read neechey and it still doesnt make sense, why be proud of meanylessnes

Pretty much any of Veeky Forums's recommended literature. You faggots are living in the past.

What are your favorite books?