Hello everyone, the holidays are uppon us and I'm trying to decide what to buy and would love some advice. I like poetry and philosophy but wanted to get a novel that I just can't miss. So far I've got Catch-22, Lord of the flies and of Mice and men in the cart.
Also, recently I've started reading Infinite Jest and maybe I didn't go in deeply enough yet but I can't get why there's so much hatred towards this book
The Master and Margarita. Discard Lord and Mice as you can just read them online and their content is too short to be worth any price
>a novel that I just can't miss
Treasure Island is great. I hardly ever see it talked about here though.
>I can't get why there's so much hatred towards this book
Hating the book is a meme. It's not really a difficult read, it's just long. Mind you the story doesn't really start to piece together until about 400 pages in. Enjoy the ride.
I don't get why ppl like it, the book seems presumptuous so maybe ppl take that as an attack
>not really a difficult read
am i the only one who was always looking up words? the extended vocabulary was the most 'difficult' part of this book, the rest was spelled out pretty well
IJ is hated for many reasons, only some of which has to do with the actual content of the book:
-Too many people had once read it on Veeky Forums (when the meme trilogy was first forged) and thus it was overdiscussed (however that was time past, and I'd properly assume many new Veeky Forumsizens since haven't touched it
-People go through an intense love hate relationship with the book (a cultic obsession that then leads to a contrarian dislike and aloofness about the book, and then a fond nostalgia about it after a few years)
-It perfectly strikes its target audience of overeducated college age white men, strikes well enough that its a token item in any of their bookshelves and they are identifiable by it
-it is biggest "maximalist" or "postmodern brick" text with perhaps the simplest language (you can meet ordinary people who have read infinite jest cover to cover, but never gravity's rainbow or the tunnel) and has big pull with the upper echelon normies
-there's somewhat of a performative contradiction in the text that many people bring up, Wallace was attempting to overcome the verbal gymnastics and self referential nihilism he saw eroding empathy and sincerity in the real of fiction, but he does so himself from inside the funhouse of weirdly recursive metafiction
-It is arguably also the simplest text in the meme trilogy and thus the easiest for shitposters to glean information about from wikipedia and try to start arguments over
if you like IJ I urge you to also pick up The Pale King
Catch 22, Lord of the Flies, and Of Mice and Men are all pretty good books sure but if you're consulting some kind of "best of" lists you have to be aware that those books are (or were) required reading in some high schools and are thus vastly overrated by people who've never read any books since
you should read:
-The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- 2666 by Robert Bolano
- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
- The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- 4321 by Paul Auster
-Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
-The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
none of these are foreboding impenetrable masterworks, some of them are fairly heady but they're nice introductions to each of their authors works (many of the authors having more difficult work you can read afterwards)
while reading foreign language classics like you must keep very importantly in mind that there exist multiple translations of important works and that some translations are vastly better than others. Particularly with respect to Russian authors, you should avoid the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations you see waved about everywhere, and consult Veeky Forums or other sources for the best translation
Don't let his vocabulary come across as pretentious, he has a great love of large and scientific words (his mother was a grammarian, he roomed with medical students in college, and he fondly loved pharmaceutical dictionaries). He actually invents several words
*in the realm of fiction
Presumptuous in what way?
don't bother, if you see negative replies don't engage them, there's been five DFW threads in the last week that have been shitposted to death
>Giles Goat-Boy
this guy is thinking about getting Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men so you suggested he get Barth?
After a second glance at this post, I realize now that is must be bait
You got me good, user
he's making his way through IJ, reading lord of the flies would be getting back in the kiddie pool
>infinite jest
>book ends
>book ends
Doesn't feel like it
it doesn't end senpai
its deliberately designed so that the ending seems aclimactic and you must read it again and again to glean the small hints of the arch plot's finale. its intended to make you read it over and over, just like the samizdat
checked
Also, it clearly ends. Look at your image.
maybe I forgot to mention, but English is not my mother tongue so I didn't grow up on an environment where these books were required at school. I know English, Spanish, Portuguese and something of French and Greek.
But yeah, I was looking for a list of good books after reading Camus and Sartre. So thanks user, I'll make good use of this list you gave me and forget about the others.
-The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- 2666 by Robert Bolano
- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
- The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- 4321 by Paul Auster
-Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
-The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
if english is a second language to you, it sometimes really helps to read hard books in translation, then later read the original in english
you'll probably have to do that later when you get to Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and William Gass
not the first time I see this book mentioned, but as said, I'm also not much into translations. I guess I just learn languages so I can read stuff without translation, especially poetry
I did that with Camus and Rimbaud and I was surprised how I could get most of it even though my French isn't that good
Most of the hate come from people who have never read the book OP. It is truly a masterpiece.
Infinite Jest is a good novel, it just suffers from the contrarianism and bias that plagues anything popular. Its flaws have been amplified beyond proportion, and its merits exaggerated to the point where some consider it revelation.
It's basically an update to Ulysses and Crime and Punishment, captures the zeitgeist of our times, captures Wallace's psyche, doesn't say all that much new, but presents some of it differently.
If you want a fairly fast read that's captivating try Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. It's not his best novel, but it strikes the balance between accessibility and fascination quite well.
If you want something a bit different, you could try The Fall of the King, a book by Johannes V. Jensen, with a translation to English that he helped to author. I would consider it an unmissable novel, and it usually is missed by those who are unaware of Scandinavian literature.
Some good recommendations there.
The big problem with IJ is that everyone forgets that it's funny. The book is laugh out loud entertaining, hysterically funny. His lexicon is enormous, but it's used to capture nuances of tone and control pace, the payout for both is usually comedic irony.
Besides some of the tennis and AA passages (which I'm near certain he intends to convey as tedious) I found the book a great pleasure to read due to how entertaining it was. Even the details, like some of snide outward facing endnotes, which are basically just him being a bit of a dick. The book's full of banter.
Oh, and to add, it's quite nice to imagine all of this films he describes, and have your image of them evolve as the descriptions become more complete. Plenty of funny optics that he talks about too. I always wanted to try to make some of the films.
Im going to buy moby dick, portrait of the artist as a young man and frankenstein. Wordsworth seems to have the cheapest versions, should i just buy those?
dear god no
wordsworth is literally one of the worst english language publishers
for Moby Dick you will definitely need the norton critical edition or an edition with lots of endnotes/critical essays/glossaries
many people with english as their first language struggle with moby dick
portrait of the artist as a young man is a pretty good novel, but its largely overshadowed by Dubliners (Joyce's early story collection) and Ulysses (harder to read than moby dick)
Frankenstein is ok but a dated and rather romantic (not in the lovey-dovey sense, the literary movement)
I'd suggest Dracula instead of Frankenstein, Dracula is actually a weird collage of letters, reports, and newspaper clippings. Its practically metafiction and way ahead of its time
Thanks.
>The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Shit, I was at the thrift store yesterday and they had a copy of this in decent shape. I think I'll go back and pick it up.