Books that Veeky Forums recommended which sucked? ill start

Found the Pleb.

this isnt a troll thead. OP here. the book is bland, its just not my cup of tea is all. if it wasnt a meme, Veeky Forums would feel the same. but i forgot if its a meme, or DFW shit it out, then lit will eat it up. little fucking sheep you are

Jack Kerouac
Moby Dick

>the book is bland, its just not my cup of tea is all

Sounds like your tea is fucking bland, friendo

idk y but i am roaring at this meem

If his tea was bland, then the book would be flavoursome, in his eyes at least. No?

Not if he's used to it and thinks other things are bland because they're not what he likes

I sort of get what you mean but I personally enjoy Wilde's humour, he injects a bit of life into what would otherwise be a bland work.

American Psycho. used to be like 10 threads about it daily around here.

Sighing intensifies.

Pleb.

Started this the other day. This hitch-hiking cunt can't even make a journey to Chi-town without almost getting lost.

I also find his friends to be incredibly obnoxious and ridiculous-tier.

Should I continue?

not really those lists that have this listed in the top half of the must reads are full of shit.

I just finished it yesterday. It has moments of goodness, but otherwise its just a book obsessed with sucking Dean Moriarty (a placeholder for some kind of stupid Beat virtue)'s cock.

Read if you are young and impressionable and have a preconceived destiny of eternal travel. Otherwise it is just proto-hippy wank.

Idk I'm not young and dont have any illusions about travel having been homeless and done quite of bit of essentially migrant work, and I loved this book. Would even consider it one of my favorites. I think it is written beautifully and is life affirming is a painful honest way. The Beats have a terrible following these days because theyre loved by hipsters who want to project the image of authenticity while being snarky and ironic because they dont have any real developed content in their thoughts. The beats werent literary geniuses but if that's what you're looking for you're missing the point - and I'll defend that they were good writers regardless. They were following in the transcendentalist american tradition of finding spiritual significance in passionate exploration of the world. In all of On the Road there is not one moment of irony. Jack and Neal have excited conversations about the beauty of the places theyre coming across and their impressions of the people. It's unabashedly involved and invested and finds poetry in the tumult of life. They were not admirable people at all, and I hate this idealization of them as individuals. The point is that they were deeply flawed.

Read the original scroll, it is much better. Am I alone in thinking the beats were good? Veeky Forums seems to unanimously dislike them

It's aight

I have to agree. Oscar Wilde has some really good lines, but I started getting really bored about halfway through. Then it got to pages and pages of him doing an inventory of all his possessions or something and I just started skimming over everything quickly because I wanted to finish.

You will probably hate me for this, but I only knew of Dorian Gray because of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, so I was expecting something a little different.

Dorian gray is more of a guilty pleasure than pseudo 'literary' fiction. As far as I know, nobody holds it up as a great work of art but as entertainment it's great. Who doesn't like posh high class dialogue and homoerotic undertones?

When I said "moments of goodness" I was referring precisely to the beautifully written parts. Some parts totally surprised me at how well they were written, since I was under the impression Kerouac was not that intelligent. At moments you can even understand the sadness in their living.

But the book seems somewhat purposeless. We are led through scenes that merely flesh out Dean, Sal taking a backseat to the real Beat. While Dean is supposed to be some tragic character, in my opinion he is just sociopathic. The story is indeed life-affirming, but the painful way its delivered (i.e. almost hollow and escapist) detracts from this.

As for the bit about the Beats. I wasn't aware there was a universal hatred for the Beats, I just find myself disliking them. Perhaps its because of their romantic racism, or simply because I cannot empathise with their aimlessness. Individual authors can be good, however. While he isn't a Beat to me, William S. Burroughs is a pretty good author.

Okay I can definitely see where you're coming from. It is definitely aimless and to an extent pointless. The "point" is only really found by reading the rest of Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, which varies in quality so I would not recommend all that too someone with mixed feelings about On the Road. Basically, it follows Kerouac continuing to travel aimlessly but discovering Buddhism and maturing a good bit, becoming very disenchanted with the concept of the Beat generation and his own celebrity, and eventually going back to catholicism after spending time in the mountains trying to escape his life.

I think the pointlessness of On the Road comes from exactly this, since it was just autobiographical events arranged into novel format, the characters could only really develop in a satisfactory way along with their real life analogues.

But again not necessary to delve much further, On the Road is a great sample and it's good you enjoyed what you did from it. And I agree Burroughs is very good and very unlike his beat friends in his style and content.

What do you think of Ginsberg? I'm not exceptionally well read in poetry so I have mixed feelings and not a whole lot to base my understanding on. I liked Howl and Kabbalah quite a bit but a lot of his stuff seems almost lazy. With a wider concept his really loose wild free verse seems to work but in small pieces the lack of any structure makes me pretty confused and skeptical.

Saying it sucked is a bit harsh but yeah. I semi-agree. For me it's Stoner by John Williams. Boring as hell but the ending is so depressing I literally sobbed.

Catch-22
A Confederacy of Dunces, if you want anything more than cheap comedy

Sorrows of Young Werther
Notes from Underground

I don't know if it's fair for me to judge them because I read them in translation

I'm surprised no one has said Ulysses yet

That's because Ulysses is a great novel

Vladimir Putin.

kys

what isn't cheap comedy to you shitbird?

>Then it got to pages and pages of him doing an inventory of all his possessions or something
You mean the chapter where he talks about the numerous ways in which he tries to fulfill himself with material possessions, knowing full well his soul is getting more and more stained with sin? You mean that chapter?

I guess it's easy to understand why people might be bored by the Picture of Dorian Gray. Most people here don't give a shit about the concept of sin or the concept of sin being manifested by beauty or ugliness. (Though guess what, most of the horror classics are exclusively about sin). But don't skip through a book and then shit on it like you've read it. You read half of it and then stopped

Ditto. The book is excellent, and that chapter was obviously designed to be precisely the way it was.

i know this is a bit of a meme, but i hated infinite jest. i guess i'm just a retard

Something that has more value than just comedy.

No, it's like telling you you should have strong notions of structural engineering if you want to become an architect.

The Greeks will tell you what houses are made of and what they're good for. They will show you what happens when buildings collapse and destroy peoples' lives, plans and dreams. Then they will show you that buildings do that no matter how good of an architect you think you are.

Then they will show you that buildings and their builders are like the stacked layers of dead leaves that fatten the ground. They will show you how the best architects and the worst architects and the many mediocre architects will outdo each other, standing on the top floors of their towers even as the ground floor--and they know it--is crumbling. They'll make your see how no architect lives little enough to not see at least some of his best buildings turned to rubble.

You are too much of a dullard dunce for that book. It portays the dialects of New Orleans and the vibrancy of the city perfectly all while giving us a modern Quixotic Hero. There is a reason it won a Pulitzer Prize, and one of the 20th Century's greatest minds (Walker Percy) had endorsed it in the forward and led to its publishing.

Wow, the way you write is cringe as fuck. Cut the adverbs.

Go fuck yourself since nobody else would stoop so low.

I'm looking for an honest opinion is Picture of Dorian Gray actually any good?
I've already read 20 00 leagues and Jeckyll/Hyde and didn't care much for either of them

I read 20 000 leagues beneath the sea
Didn't take me long to realize it was outdated/for kids

Anything from Bakker

wouldnt say it was bad, but recognitions is viciously overrated by pseuds. definitely the new IJ.

If you didn't like Jekyll and Hyde I can almost guarantee that you won't like Dorian Gray

It depends on what you didn't like, of course, but if the themes of Jekyll and Hyde didn't intrigue you, Dorian Gray will probably do nothing for you because, even though it's better written, it uses much the same themes (and with much less action, to boot). It's mostly a book about avarice and sin, etc., and how sin can manifest itself in someone's appearance, etc.

Well, my main problem with Jeckyll and Hyde was that outside the twist that everyone already knows about, it didn't have much to deliver
Just the story of a guy trying to figure out what everyone reading it already knew
The theme was...fine. I liked seeing the 1800s, though i couldn't get much into it other than just as some vague image of how London was back then

You're the type of retard who calls things overrated

if fucking beautiful men isn't your cup of tea, please leave you pleb

Yeah, it does build up the mystery a bit. If you want Victorian London obviously the Sherlock Holmes story describes a lot of it

Give Dorian Gray a try, but the first few chapters are very much a preview of how the rest of the book is

*stories

>caring about how people write
>on Veeky Forums
this is why everyone on Veeky Forums is a pseud

>dorian greay
>recommended by Veeky Forums

haha, what the fuck, you never read this book before being in this place?
pathetic

Absolute gutter trash.

Stoner
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
Siddhartha
Infinite Jest

Oh, spotted the psued, lemme guess, you read at age 5 along with ij? Whoa! U go guy!

>it uses the correct dialect for the time and place
So what?

>Ignatius is a modern Don Quixote
Okay. Again, so what? He made a version of Don Quixote for another place and time? I disagree, since the beliefs Ignatius had were actually reminiscent of real beliefs from the past, unlike chivalry which rarely existed outside of fiction, not to mention Quixotes belief in magic as well.

Jack kerouac sure
Moby dick hell no brother. Melville covers such a wide variety of topics under the guise of a practical sailing encyclopedia. Talking representation vs reality, interpretation of fiction, religion, brotherly love, death, evil and the mask we ascribe to it, etc etc. I understand if it isn't your cup of tea, but holy shit it's an incredible novel.

quads confirm.

I'm not him but it was just a good book kill yourself; literally have no soul if you didn't find it funny/entertaining/etc

I could try to give some thematic reasoning but who cares

The Idiot by Dostoievsky

Eh it isnt that great

Never said that it wasn't funny, just that it has no value besides humor.

People spend a ridiculous amount of time justifying Hemingway's place in the western cannon.

Lopeta postaaminen.

>waaaa I've started to read last week, my meme filled opinions without any substance matter guys, g-guys? waaaaaaa

>The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

Should've read Sea of Fertility instead.

Not him but I'm on that.
Only book one, but the main character is a tsundere.
I'm done reading anything Japanese.

I actually couldn't read this book in High school, I just knew the basic premise.

It was too dense for me. I just remember the smell of flowers in the beginning and was like, fuck this gay shit.

Reread it recently. The plot is actually pretty nice.

His short stories are much better imo

Never liked Great Gatsby much. It isn't bad but its just a very unmemorable book for me. Well written maybe, but no ideas from it really stuck in my head.

For real, what the fuck was this shit? I don't care if it's by Nabokov it was shit. Bulgakov was a better writer.

>Moby Dick
Perhaps the biggest literary meme there is, but it's still really, really good.

Aside from everything mentioned by , there's even metafiction in there. How much symbolic weight can be ascribed to the whale?

Even out of context it's incredible, but when you consider how eerily similar Ahab's dictatorial tendencies are to some of the 20th century's most terrible leaders, Moby Dick was also quite prescient.

Even if none of that convinces you, some of the passages alone are stunning. It's filled with sentences or paragraphs which unexpectedly hit you right in the gut. Can't find it now, but one involving whale calves, circling in the depths really got me upon first reading.

Kill yourself. Wilde is bae.

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