Mediocre literature that popular culture decided as masterpieces

Mediocre literature that popular culture decided as masterpieces

Obviously ASoIaF too, but that's low hanging as fuck.

Aren't these kids books?

No. Only CS Lewis. Which people parade around as the best shit ever.

Sherlock Holmes was the airport novel of the late Victorian period.

>Dickens
>Brontë
>Christie
>Sartre
>Austen
>Dumas

Bronte isn't mediocre, assuming you mean Emily.

Also, we can't forget Orwell in this list.

Pretty much every celebrated book published after the year 1900 fits into this category with a few exceptions.

It's a kid's book, what did you expect? Lewis' actual academic work on medieval literature is actually pretty good though.

>It's a kid's book, what did you expect?
This isn't a "books you expected to be masterpieces but were not" thread. It's a "books that are overrated by the plebs" thread, which this is.

Orwell's prominence owes more to the current sociopolitical zeitgeist than anything. His writing wasn't particularly captivating, but his predictions were on point.

Great Gatsby. To Kill A Mockingbird.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is still considered a masterpiece, and his predictions were not on point (but people like to twist it until they are). Not to mention that most of his predictions weren't predictions so much as devices.

I still think he's okay, though.

fucking "Michael and the Sex Goblin" is such a meme.

the guy who wrote it has other stories on wattpad as well and he's a fuckin' idiot.

>Implying Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London aren't legit 9/10 and 8/10 respectively.

Most British lit post-Milton is dry and boring

Orwell is preserved for greatness by his non-ficton.

All of Russian literatures

I resent that being as I think it's a masterpiece. You're just mad you can't write as well as him. I just found out about that last night, and I can't wait till he posts more stories. They're refreshing.

>Great Gatsby
Came here to post that.

...

How to be a pleb: the post.

Don Quixote.

Dickens. He sucks.

>Dumas
I will fight u irl u little shit

Time to drink some bleach, my dear man.

Orwell's predictions are so off-point you might as well compare him to those old magazines where they had people flying gyrocopters to work.
He's not nearly as interesting for me as a guy who was born in the dying embers of a collapsing communist regime. I get the appeal though.

>ITT: I don't like = its garbage.

David Foster Wallace

Virginia Woolf

I agree about 1984 desu.

implied and substantive

Ha

Ha

To Kill a Mockingbird is shit

>It is simply impossible for anyone who is sane to consider Woolf 'mediocre' if you've read a single page of her work. She's either sublime, inaccessible, or completely repelling, varying on the personality of the reader. Kill yourself

Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye

Oliver Twist, The Giver, Pale Blue Dot

Those are some hot opinions

Nah ur a Dumas

Harry Potter, Diary of a young girl (has a good ending though), Narnia, hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

My nigga Dumas is very clearly pulp. I'm not saying he's bad, but he's as good as Heinlein or Aasimov.

Mark Twain tbqh, I suppose most american posters will become outraged or some shit but he's a non-entity as far as the rest of the world is concerned (every language has that kind of thing, tho)

>Mark Twain

This. A thousand times this.

H.G. Wells

moby dick
Whales are boring

Hot and correct.

H.G. Wells isn't considered a masterpiece writer.

Am I the only person on Veeky Forums who unironically enjoys iconic American literature such as Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.?

sure he is. he is considered a science fiction pioneer with works such as the time machine and war of the worlds considered to be masterpieces.

inb4 someone points out my Lord of the Flies error

it's in the same category of "things Veeky Forums hates" though

You are boring.

No they're all fine. The great gatsby is much better than the other ones you listed though.

>he is considered a science fiction pioneer
Correct.
>with works such as the time machine and war of the worlds considered to be masterpieces.
Incorrect.
Yes, except Great Gatsby. People cum buckets over it.

>People cum buckets over it.

This statement only holds true if one first accepts the premise that normalfags are "people."

Every single thing Sagan wrote is hugely overrated. He is also the originator of the "SCIENCE IS AWESOME FUCK YEAH" attitude, and for that he should be despised.

>Pretty much every celebrated book published after the year 1900 fits into this category with a few exceptions

This. If you ask yourself which books of this time will still be relevant in 200-300 years - there won't be much.
Maybe the late Rilke and the early Montale, when it comes to poets, maybe Joyce, when it comes to novelists (and some others like Orwell, Ayn Rand or Houellebecq out of historical interest), and pretty much only Wittgenstein, when it comes to philosophers.

The Outsiders

>maybe Joyce

Joyce will definitely be remembered. Him or Faulkner, MAYBE both.

m8 once Western Civilization collapses it will all be irrelevant. They'll pick out like Dante, Shakespeare, and Aquinas or something, and the rest will be consigned to meme status.

This is true, Mexicans and Muslims are not going to give a shit about European literature anymore than we care about Muslim literature.

>Shakespeare
Only if english stays a dominant language after said collapse which is highly doubtful.

It'll be like Latin was in Europe I imagine, it's already almost like that globally

The first collapse of Western Civilization gave us Augustine, what will this one give us?

Anyone who hates Twain is a pretentious twat

Mexico has participated favorably in Western culture, dumbass. More than most Americans post-Tommy P.

>what will this one give us?

Nothing, this particular collapse is accompanied by the literal replacement of European peoples by migrating non-European tribes. It's completely different from an internal collapse. There is no recovery from this kind of demographic disaster.

Fuck off back to /pol/.

neo-Veeky Forums, everyone

Explain what is wrong with what I said.

>by the literal replacement of European peoples by migrating non-European tribes
That literally happened in Rome m8. And in Baghdad, it's not a new thing, it tends to happen at the end of civilizations when people stop having children and start importing foreigners.

Something new will eventually spring up, in Russia or South America or whatever and claim to be the continuation of Western civilization just like the West Europeans claimed to be the continuation of Roman/Greek civilization.

Unless technology has made the normal patterns obsolete which I don't know how the fuck you could predict that.

Aside of you being a racist piece of shit?

there has never been a time on Veeky Forums where someone wouldn't have been posting stuff like that

Every basic assumption in your post is factually incorrect.

>>/reddit/

Can you please explain 1) what is wrong with being a racist, and 2) how being a racist make one's arguments incorrect?

>not dickens
GTFO.

>mfw if the Church plays its cards right it could wind up with a whole new generation of converts

Francis probably wouldn't approve, but he's 79 and aging. The next Pope will have some interesting decisions to make.

>That literally happened in Rome m8

Yes true, but I think it's obvious that the deciding factor in this case is the enormous difference in degree caused by globalization and technology. The migrations and the actions taken by Western governments over the last 100 years are, at this point, too destructive to ever recover from. No part of Europe is safe.

>Something new will eventually spring up, in Russia or South America or whatever

Russia and Eastern Europe are treading the same path as Western Europe, just a few years behind. In Russia only Muslims have kids and Russia's Far East is already being defacto colonized by China. South America is an ocean away and its inhabitants are 99% mongrels, any kind of civilizational growth that happened there would not be European.

I fucking hate Lord of the Rings

terrible book

>Ayn Rand

Good meme kid

>“A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.” - Czesław Miłosz

people on this board always shit on 1984 but I've never been captivated by a book quite like I was by that book when I was nineteen or so and first read it.

idk, something about the prose, which people bitch about, is just gritty, it really gelled with me. I read it cover to cover in an afternoon. I guess people here don't like it for that reason, it's accessible. Veeky Forums tends to favor purposefully obscurantist novels that they can feel smart for having read. There is a certain sense of accomplishment derived from working through a puzzling work like Ulysses or Zarathustra but that shouldn't denigrate the value of comparatively straightforward works.

His essays are indispensable. Orwell is the most underrated writer on Veeky Forums by far

>inb4 Holy European Empire is established in former Kazakhstan

Exactly this.

>a puzzling work like Zarathustra
your brain must not work properly

Go back to your university issued hug box, faggot.

hes a red, so no.

>mainstream and loved by popular culture
>decide to read what fans and the author consider the best work
>it's low brow shit
>mysteries are sub par at best
>in one of his mysteries, a horse killed the victim

Site wide trigger warning in effect, racially intensive remarks detected on lima, india, tango, be advised

Suspect is described as a fucking white male, approach with caution

Austen, Emily Bronte, Dickens and Dumas are fucking brilliant.

lol.

Mexicans are patrician, you (most likely American) pleb.

Dickens at his worst was pretty damn bad.

>Holy European Empire
You mean the EEU (European Emirates' Union).

People only shit on 1984 because it's younger brother Brave New World doesn't get the credit it deserves

pic related

>drug cartels executing high schoolers is patrician

...

Great gatsby is pretty good tho

The Count of Monte Cristo is quite bad

dickens is hit-and-miss. but when he hit he fucking hit. his characters are timeless. he was the epicentre of anglo-realism. his only flaw is that you can tell he got paid by the page.

is mexican not western civilisation in terms of culture? they speak spanish. latin america is intimately connected with european lit.

is there even such a thing as wesern civilisation now? not just civilisation?

No

Yes

>Sartre
plz. Nausea is a masterpiece. He's got nothing on Camus though.