There are people on Veeky Forums right now who unironically believe that these three books are the greatest books of...

How is it even possible that you people haven't met a person in real life who knows about Pynchon or DFW?

My situation is different, I live in a shitty third world, third rate, third class slum, so of course no one here knows about the writers of the meme trilogy, but in the States/UK or any advance country...? How?

>mfw I call him Thomas Pinchy to people who've never heard of him and they go on actually believing that's the way it is

they don't leave the house

y du we call him pinecone

Ive never met anyone who knew who Pynchon or DFW were, I know several people who would know the name James Joyce but wouldnt be able to connect it with anything else

I'm reading Ulysses now because I'm curious how an author reimagines a piece of literature and makes it his own.

Where do you live?

please tell me this is a true story.

I've met someone who was familiar with Veeky Forums and he thought infinite jest was great.

post 'em, Veeky Forums

Patrician here:
Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow are equal in their importance to the world, they're highly innovative, reach the sublime, and transcend all the memedom into pure unadultered Canon.

IJ is good, it's not the best thing ever, probably important for some early 20 year olds on here for getting through stuff, that's fine. It won't be the most memorable piece from his generation of authors, great ideas, some near perfect chapters, but too try hard at points especially Marathe's and Steeply's governmental debates. That being said, it's good and entertaining, not transcendent. The Pale King had potential if he would've finished the 2-3k pages he was planning on writing for it.

People from ages 18-35 mostly know Ulysses is, especially in urban areas. Most people in academics are very aware of it but very few, maybe 5-10% of English students at a given college/uni read it.

GR is much less known than Ulysses. Usually only adults that binge the Time 100 list or English students have heard about it but very few, I'm talking count within all 10 fingers at a given uni/college have read it.

IJ is becoming incredibly popular as a rite of passage for most college aged people, in the past year alone his name has blown up on campuses (residual effects from the End of the Tour). People will usually read an essay or a few short stories and proceed to talk about them ad nauseum for a year in any conversation about books until they decide they have ample time to overcome the hurdle they think is IJ.

That being said, GR/Ulysses some of the most important and influential work in the modern novel category at least, are they the best ever? I don't think anyone argues that because that's just pedantic, they're a lot of people's favorite books and thats okay. IJ is also a lot a favorite to a lot of people for obvious reasons, but again no one says its the greatest seriously, at least.

>having the worst edition

>laminated

...

they all look so new

did you even read?

what's wrong with it faggot. nice book club edition. what are you my mom

New Skepta's album is trash.

Looks like a hardcover, you mong.

>"the meme trilogy, babe"

are you retarded?

you should seek out a therapist

christ

There is no way this happened.

And how the fuck would she not know about Tao Lin then?

of course not

do you seriously think tao lin is as well known as pynchon, wallace, or joyce? do you get 100% of your literary news from Veeky Forums?

>projecting

I mean DFW was talented but the other two were in a completely different tier
>Ulysses
>Gravity's Rainbow
>Infinite Jester

Tell me which of these doesn't belong.

Ulysses is pretty interesting from technical POV, not a must read for most people but definitely valuable for a writer.

Haven't bothered with Gravitys Rainbow nor do know anybody who did.

Infinite Jest is meme tier though. DFW can be witty but not witty enough to write a whole book.

It has a great impact but it's pretty shitty from technical, story, plot or characters POV, and everything else. Quite a big fanbase though.

I like Joyce, I really do. But he, Pynchon and Wallace are nowhere near half as amazing as some of the memeboys make them out to be on this website.

How did I not see this fucking thread here?

I could've just posted this here

Ulysses doesn't
utterly unreadable behemoth

People don't recognise that America is a third world, third rate, third class slum

youtube.com/watch?v=2c9TyeKnGGk

SAVAGE

An old lady who saw me reading V. outside literally asked "Is that pronounced pinecone?"

Why would anyone not read these books? Aren't they considered classics at this point? Criticizing people for reading them is like criticizing people for reading catch 22 or Proust. Get over yourself

ulysses is a classic
gr is fairly important
ij is meme tier. won't be read in a couple decades

Definitive Meme Trilogy ranking:
> Ulysses > Gravity's Rainbow > Infinite Jest

No, this isn't up for debate. Ulysses is a truly transcendent and monumentally important piece of literature.

Gravity's Rainbow aspired to be the same and at times even comes close but it will never have the cultural impact that Ulysses did.

Infinite Jest is a good book but doesn't belong in the same conversation as the first two. A better, more comparable meme trilogy would be: Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions.

I propose we follow Pound's advice and MAKE IT NEW. Well, only slightly new since we will only be replacing one book.

Do you really think IJ is only popular and highly regarded on Veeky Forums?

Heh, that's it.

>The Recognitions
replace that with Women and Men

GR is a wonderful book. Perhaps the best Pomo in the past fifty years.

Ulysses I'll agree with. Bears repeated readings. Multiple layers of subtext, references, and not a misplaced word. A book I'll turn to again and again till I die. Perhaps only bested by Hamlet or Homer himself.

IJ I haven't read.

no he's very popular among a certain demographic - primarily US, 18 - 30, white, male, middle/upper middle class from suburbia and college educated/ing. IJ is currently popular because it describes and focuses on a very particular experience that fits the demographic I outlined, but it lacks the same kind of universality that something like Ulysses does.

Joyce managed to connect a very narrow experience of early 20th century Dublin and tap into something that is communicated globally across culture and backgrounds, but IJ falls short of that.

IJ is not bad, but it's not canonical masterpiece tier like Ulysses - not even close.

GR is somewhere in between.

No. I was picking books of similar quality and importance that also happened to be memes. Not books that are purely memes with no actual readers on this board.

Ulysses- 1961 Random House Hardcover (pic related)
Gravity's Rainbow-Penguin Deluxe Edition
IJ- 20th Anniversary editon

kek

There are people on Veeky Forums who literally look at things from this perspective.

Is there a way to get all three printed in the same volume set?

Reading the 1946 version at the moment. In a cafe near a piazza in veneto.

owned

You echo my sentiments

Nice, you gon see all the epic ancient Roman ruins?

...

Thought about revisiting the Duino near Trieste tomorrow...with a copy of Rilke in hand. Aquilea isn't too far and worth the trip.

Didn't make it past proteus huh? That always weeds the plebs out.

>Aquilea
Nice, I wanna go there and steal a 2000 year old piece of stone.

You should visit Ostia Antica, but that's like on the other side.

It's worth it despite not much still existing or buried. Great mosaics but not rivaling those found in Ravenna

>Byzantine Empire
not even once

they are three solid choices though

Saw the book in some Paul Rudd movie

Hagia Sofia was sad in its curent state.

While i disagree, it's not a bad perspective. I haven't read any of these books, so of course i can't call the greatest, worst, or anything in between. But having these books on that list is an agreeable actitude.
Ulysses is a highly important work within modern english literature, while the other two are within postmodern english literature.
And that's what i can admire. People who aren't looking into a distant and inexistent past, like most movements have done.People who want literature talking about right now, not some deified greek writer. And yeah, you may say, Ulysses is clearly taking cues from homer, but that's not the same at the looking back of romantics. I was never in arcadia, i was born on an hospital, full of machines and people my family didn't know.
I'm not saying that romantic poetry is bad or that you shouldn't read homer. Neither i'm saying this three book list is perfect, i mean, does anyone unironically belive good literature has only be written in english?
But i can understand the sentiment of someone who stands by those books and think it can be pretty noble, in it's own way.

>I haven't read any of these books

why the fuck are you posting then

gas yourself

Thanks for the paste.

>ruined Hagia Sophia
>destroyed Parthenon and turned it into a mosque
>stripped pyramids off the outer casing stones
>obliterated the Eastern Roman Empire and the Balkans
>recently destroyed ancient cities such as Nimrud and Palmyra

Why do they do this?

Going out on a limb here, it may be a plastic sleeve

>I haven't read any of these books
Then why do you think your opinion matters?

Is Infinite Jest worth reading?

kek I think I'm the only one who actually read my copies.

If being a first world country means being cucked by muslims, I'd rather be third.

Nigga, the rocks in my garden are more than 2000 years old. You can have them for free, don't even need to be a degenerate thief.

Yeah, but these are rocks that have been altered/shaped by humans from over 2000 years ago.

Did you ever read your IJ in public?

Why does everyone's copy look like shit? Like, where do you read? I only read at home and none of my books end up looking like that.

>greatest
Most great

>unironically
Devoid of irony

>(all) time
Unbounded by limits of time

As somebody who is just getting into classic literature (read Plato's The Republic, and Dante's Inferno Trilogy, and currently reading Infinite Jest), Infinite Jest is by far my favourite book of all time so far. I also purchased Gravity's Rainbow. What should I read after those 2? I was thinking of buying something by DeLillo, maybe White Noise.

(Someone talk to me about Infinite Jest. Please. I'm 400 pages in and I absolutely love it and how it extensively refers to the footnotes. Does it get better? I'd die.)

>I care more about the pages than the ideas conveyed within them

What? The Bible has influenced the entire modern world thanks to Europe and N. America. Not to mention the sins and the rule of three (heaven-purgatory-hell, father-son-holy spirit) are fairly difficult to argue against even to this day. The Bible honestly is the greatest book ever written from a critical standpoint.
Second would probably be the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Third is whatever tickles your fancy. Probably some ancient Eastern text as far as a realistic placement goes.

>Dante's Inferno Trilogy

oh god

sorry, the divine comedy, semantics

I felt that same way about infinite jest until I started reading Gaddis after I finished infinite jest, and I realized just how much prose matters as much as the ideas behind the novel, and while IJ was very insightful to my life, the delivery of his ideas was poor in that his prose was boring and tedious, and his ideas are very culturally specific, and not nearly as universal as other great works.

Any book by Gaddis (or others) you could reccommend?

I'm about 150 pages into the recognitions and I highly recommend it. Pynchon's novels usually greatly explore a moment-by-moment sense of logical cause and effect, whereas each step is logically connected to the next, but the initial premise has little to do with the final result, which for me, is incredibly frustrating and why I haven't even touched gravity's rainbow because I can only imagine how much of a mess it is.

The recognitions is far more linear, just verbose at times, and the insights and moral instructivity that I really liked infinite jest for are overwhelmingly common in the recognitions, and the recognitions was just so fun for me to read.

What's ur favorite passage in IJ so far, I think I remember mine being around page 400 :)

Will get the Recognitions, thanks a bunch , stranger. :)
My favourite so far, which I guess is kinda embarassingly elementary, but resonated with me so much so that i had to highlight it (never have done this)
"[...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
if you can remember, what was yours?

His "Boston AA is like no other..." chapter is my favorite, just because it was also thematically relevant to me

This is the greatest book ever Veeky Forumsers!!

>Gaddis
Well memed my friend!

I'm just about there in IJ now. Did you guys must have started in the summer too?

Those horrifying AA stories, damn.

lool your retarded gaddis is the shit

Joseph McElroy is.

yeah he's dope as well

I don't know anyone that knows Wallace or Pynchon. Tao Lin has had interviews and book reviews in the papers.