I generally like Veeky Forums recommendations, but Jesus Christ, how disapointed I was with this book...

> If you think Stoner's life was wasted in any way, you're not a good reader

>“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

?

>Stoner's enemies (his wife, Lomax, Walker) came across as comic book villains
That's missing the point. They aren't comic book villains, they only appear that way to Stoner and we see the world through his thoughts. If you do what the book asks you to do you would empathises with all of them and understand them.

It shows that his life was futile in the sense that all life is futile, not that it was a wasted life. If anything that reads like a modern retelling of Ecclesiastes.

This post just proves how easily concepts go over your head. You're literally latching onto one or words in the entire paragraph and completely missing the bigger picture.

This passage is just Stoner musing on an existential question. There is no judgement about the worth of his life or whether it was wasted at all in the entire passage.

>insipid

A new favorite word on Veeky Forums, unless that's you who keeps using it. If you know of any English undergrads who write John Williams please direct me to them. I'd love to find more novels like Stoner but haven't been able to.

>excess of bland descriptions

confirmed for having never read the book

The prose is supposed to be easy going and bland in order to transmit the feeling of monotony and regular life of the mc.
The characters are almost always seen trough the eyes of stone a.k.a. John Williams so it makes sense that they are bidimensional. Tell me about your worst enemy. Im sure he is bidimensional by your standards as well.
The dialogues are as the plot, simple and bland and mundane but there are times of beauty in them that contrast a lot with the monotony of the rest of the book making them extremely powerful, like the egg scene at the begining or his romance with the young undergrad.

This book is just a brillian short novel about a mans life.
Before you know it you have read the entire life of someone else from start to end in only a few hours and you forget about your life to the point where it feels like when Stoner dies you died as well.
It is just beautiful.

>ignores the final pages of a book

this. it's a fantastic book.

i rec'd this to a friend, who rec'd it to his mom, who then had her whole book club read it lol. so that was cool

nobody who likes stoner and has actually read it would post something like this.

and after typing that, i realized you got me. im posting this anyway

how did the women in the book club like it? i always felt that if i recd it to a woman, they might be taken back with how the main woman of the novel is generally perceived to be a bitch.

from what my friend told me, they all enjoyed it a lot. i know that his mom loved it.

i don't think that women would see the depiction of stoner's wife as a cold person somehow a reflection of women in general. the student he had the affair with wasn't like that

but then again stoner did cheat on his wife. i thought maybe a wife reading this novel might feel a little off by that.

eh. i think they understood the situation, his wife's nature, and the temptation that would be involved. men and women both cheat. it just happened that in this situation it was a man cheating on a woman

stoner was in the wrong regardless, but actions never exist in a vacuum

much love brother HH

lol what if the twist at the end was that stoner was black . that'd be fucking NUTS

if that was the point, to show all the characters from Stoner's perspective, then why would it give third person descriptions of what his wife was doing at the house when Stoner was not present?

it being told in third person omniscient narration doesn't imply that the stylistic choices made in the narration aren't there to mirror Stoner's outlook on life. it would be strange if the book were filled with flowery prose

want you to know that I genuinely laughed out loud at this

kekd a little sir

. . . B-but the ending was so powerful.

not reading this thread but op I agree and I'm with you

this poster reporting in for duty baws... i'm in clined to say this is one of the best books i've read in my life. who gives a fuck about the characters bro. what makes this book so good is that it pushes literary technique beyond that which can be examined by typical philosophical work. there is literature for writing good's sake (sarah dessen novels, perks of being a wall flower, the illiad) and then there is literature that examines the human condition . you choose.

...

...

I read it today and liked it but it was very sad.

I agree with the consensus on empathy; one interesting thing I noted was at the beginning of the book, the narrator states that Stoner is scantly remembered by students or colleagues, yet throughout the book there are passages referring to the legends surrounding Stoner's affair, classroom attitudes, etc.

Now i need something ebullient to read as a pick-me-up. Any suggestions?

Also fuck Lomax

it's obviously being shilled by entry-level fags
not sure why you fell for the meme

>he prose is supposed to be easy going and bland in order to transmit the feeling of monotony and regular life of the mc.

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence of the heart."

I don't understand how people call prose like this as bland. He seems to find some middle ground between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He gets the taut muscularity of Hemingway without his curtness, and he achieves Fitzgerald's tenderness without his over sentimentality. If you read his earlier novel Butcher's crossing one can see the influence of Faulkner on his prose in that work. His prose is a lot of things, but bad and bland are not among them.

You shouldn't be allowed to read.

Stop pretending.

this excerpt clinches it, i will never read stoner

it's just realist drivel. realism is a cancer on art. the working class wants to feel special, too, so they hijack art and create narratives where it's all about them and they're personal, mundane struggles. no one cares and it will fall out of vogue and with it shit like this too will vanish.

What? I can't tell if you're trolling or not.

You can't be this fucking retarded and full of yourself, can you?

>I don't think the author has ever talked to a woman, by the way
Why is this argument in every negative review of a book?

I am convinced Stoner is actually a novel about someone incompetence because he smoked too much ganja. The book was published in 65, who can say Williams didn't know the term 'stoner' by 'someone who habitually uses drugs'?

Was Stoner someone who smoked so much ganja he developed a feeling things just happen to him, so he never took a brave decision in his life, like leaving Edith in their first years of marriage or leaving the University because of the Lomax incident? Did he start smoking weed with his student cutie?

Did Lomax smoke weed with Walker? Did Edith smoke pot all the time and developed a basic white pothead bitch syndrome? Did her father commit suicide not because of the financial ruin, but because he was left without a provider? Did Dave Masters go to war just because he could get his hands on some European pot?

Nevertheless, Williams certainly wrote an interesting book that explores that subject.

Are you a teenager who just started experimenting with drugs?

This is the main interpretation of the book

there is something about this guy's writing that makes his books incredibly tedious and difficult to get through. I got about half way through butcher's crossing before I had to put it down. It's like he takes every sentence and makes it three times longer than necessary, and then removes any content that would be perceived as entertaining. he's a snoozefest.

finished it a couple weeks ago. I almost wanted to stop when I read the part when Edith takes over the daughter's life, takes the desk from Stoner's study, etc. made me sad in a way that no book has for a long time. I even feel weird talking about it now

great fucking book, a genuine 10/10

maybe it's just because I'm getting better as a reader, but I found Stoner to be extremely readable and tore through it in a week and a half. Are his other books as good?

Might need to come back to this book then, user.

Live life, fail a lot, the usual, and read it again.

>tore through it in a week and a half
user, it's the kind of book you read in one evening...

I have school and work. Not all of us can live the NEET lifestyle

I have no clue how people could say that this book has boring or bland prose. I mean, I see their point, but It's not an action-packed, witty adventure. It's some dude living his life. To have a disjointed, erratic, colorful, thrilling narrative would completely miss the entire point of the book. If you don't like it, read something else, nobody is forcing you to like something.

I always think that I'll get over this passage, but I never do.

>To W.S.

that part fucking killed me