ITT: Garbage books people talk about incessantly

ITT: Garbage books people talk about incessantly.

I wouldn't call them garbage, just overrated.

i just bought slaughterhouse five man ;_;

The Illiad
The Odyssey
Plato's dialogues
The Aeneid
Canterbury Tales
The complete works of Shakespeare
Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy
Pride and Prejudice
The Red and the Black
Crime and Punishment
Great Expectations
To the Lighthouse
Ulysses
Gravity's Rainbow
Infinite Jest

nice meme

>tristram shandy
>talked about incessantly

I unironically agree.

I was about to say you triggered me, but then I realised your real point: the only work of literature TRULY meaningful to Western culture is the Bible.

I agree completely.

My diary desu

Wish my faggot friend didn't leak it

OK listen up faggot

I've read all of those books, yes as a teenager, and yes they're relatively simple books and a lot of teenagers think they're smart for having read them

Yes you could call them "high-school tier"

But lumping them together like this unfairly detracts from their merits.

If Veeky Forums could actually have a good discussion about the subtext in any of these books, Veeky Forums would become a better board. Are these books Ulysses or Shakespeare? No. But their apparent simplicity is PERFECT for creating a shitload of subtext.

Guess what, I've read Nabokov, I've read Joyce, I've read Melville, Pynchon, Proust, whatever flowery author you name, and I still think those works in the OP have more interesting subtext than the major works of the authors I've just mentioned.

It's the same reason that Veeky Forums doesn't talk about Hemingway: he's not pretentious and affected enough for their tastes. He's "high-school tier" ... but what the motherfucker puts into his stories implicitly, how endlessly analyzable and relatable they are, is overshadowed by, say, Joyce's Ulysses for this board. Whereas one good short story by Hemingway is probably more interesting to talk about than and analyze than all of Joyce's Ulysses is.

There are scholars who have ingenious explanations and arguments about who the lady Martha is that Bloom sends letters to (the logic goes that, if Bloom calls himself "Henry Flower", can't Martha be using a penname too? and Joyce, clever guy that he is, wouldn't he include clues to this? she's Blazes Boylan's typist/secretary Ms. Dunne BTW, the one who gives us the date of the novel in Wandering Rocks, thinking meanwhile of a trite romance novel paralleling Bloom's The Sweets of Sin, with the added synchronistic reference to the name Marion (Molly Bloom)

>Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of The Woman in White far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her typewriter.
>Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
>The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them: six.
>Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:
>—16 June 1904.

But guess what? I literally don't care. I could not care less because although Ulysses is beautiful, it's so artificial that there's not enough human interest or plot in it for me to care who exactly Martha is that Bloom is having an epistolary affair with, or what Joyce meant with some exact lines.

It's so obtuse it defies this detailed interpretation for it, it throws it in your face and laughs at you.

But the books in the OP are both simple and complex enough (complex in subtext, simple in appearance) to make the prospect of analyzing them to crack their mysteries enticing, a challenge both formidable and possible...

For instance, finding out that Holden rapes his sister Phoebe was way greater of an epiphany and felt far better than anything in Ulysses.

...

this thread is fucking shit

Good job creating a strawman using Ulysses as an example.

Just because I criticised some high school tier books doesn't mean I'm some fag who sits in an armchair sipping cognac and ready Joyce.

The books in my picture are perfectly fine as books, however there is a misconception that they are 'profound' and therefore they are used constantly by psuedo-intellectuals, these are the same people who eventually graduate to reading Finnegans Wake and telling everyone about everything they've read.

However I still consider them garbage books, they may be enjoyable and have subtext, but they are far closer to Harry Potter than they are to Quo Vadis.

Also most of the authors you've read I would not rate particularly highly either (Pynchon, Proust, Melville) and in fact I think you need to broaden the range of authors you read as I can see why you seem to think in terms of this dichotomy of ridiculously obfuscated writing vs simplistic writing full of 'subtext'.

If you read a greater variety of authors you'll, probably, agree with my assessment more. At least I only assume you've read a small range because all the authors you named are relatively closely related.

>Implying the New Testament isn't the most significant and influential work of literature in Western society.

By literally calling the Bible a literary work of garbage (have you actually read the gospels? they are so aesthetic) you are saying you only enjoy Beowulf. Or you are a fedora neckbeard.


Kys.

Yeah of course I've read more than those faggots, I was just mentioning them to make a point --- namely, enjoying the books you posted and thinking they're worthy of discussion doesn't mean you're an idiot incapable of reading "fancy" and "difficult" literature

I was dropping meme names yeah but only to make a point, the point I just said

I'll admit that Catch-22 is probably the worst of them and Harry Potter tier, I'll say that much, but the other books are genuinely interesting and good books even if not apparently very difficult or deep

I also find it interesting how you rebuke me for creating a strawman and lumping together similar books when you yourself have done the same thing by lumping together some genuinely interesting books and dismissing them based on the category of "high-school tier" "I don't like the people who talk about them" etc.

talk about logical fallacies

Allow me to rephrase myself, I appreciate that they are interesting books. They are certainly better than anything I am capable of writing.

I'll admit garbage is hyperbole, but what I'm addressing here is that these books have a reputation for being sophisticated and are quoted by people who have read them just to tell people they've read them. I knew an absolute moronic douche who had a t shirt quoting Caulfield, in that sense these are 'garbage books people talk about incessantly'.

They're far better than Stephen King, but it's the disproportionate reputation these books have that makes me label them as garbage.

The same problem applies to Joyce (though maybe to a lesser extent) and Pynchon, just one rung higher in the pretentiousness ladder: they're primarily read by Literature majors who are trying to win a pissing contest over who has read the more 'challenging' book.

All of this contrasts just genuinely solid books both in the degree of complexity but also in the aesthetic beauty of their clear writing:

Count of Monte Cristo
Dead Souls
The Decameron
A Heart of Darkness
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Master of Ballantrae

These are books of varying 'seriousness' however they are all extremely well written and not meme'd nearly as much as the ones in my post.

Don't want to make a thread so I'll just ask now. Do I have to read Hamlet to get Tristram Shandy?

>I'll admit garbage is hyperbole, but what I'm addressing here is that these books have a reputation for being sophisticated and are quoted by people who have read them just to tell people they've read them. I knew an absolute moronic douche who had a t shirt quoting Caulfield, in that sense these are 'garbage books people talk about incessantly'.
Dude, that's just you. You're bitter about hipsters and posers. Guess what, they've always existed. A minority are real intellectuals, a lot more are pseudo-intellectuals, and a hell of a lot more just don't care about intellectualism at all or are anti-intellectual, and yes pseudo-intellectuals are probably the most annoying out of all of them but if you haven't got over the bitter and petty need to make fun of them...

well, I'm sorry to tell you, user ...

you're on the same level as them

Also Jekyll and Hyde is probably more trite, superficial, and juvenile than anything you posted in the OP despite having that flowery Victorian prose

>A minority are real intellectuals
(as in, of all of humanity)

of mice and men and the catcher in the rye are great books.

The Catcher in the Rye: Truly awful, I don't understand how anyone could think of this as literature.

Catch-22: Not the great book that many claim it to be, but decent depending on your tastes.

Of Mice and Men: A pretty good book with quite a bit of literary merit, I don't know what you are talking about.

Slaughterhouse-Five: Don't know, haven't read yet.

Not every book is good because it has flowery prose, in fact I'm not a fan of flowery Victorian prose so saying something is bad DESPITE the flowery prose makes no sense.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a book is good because it's an excellent allegory for the effects of cocaine (it was written on a cocaine binge) which makes it enjoyable. I included it in the list precisely because it is an example of a juvenile and superficial book that is good.

Also I am specifically calling out people that consistently name drop the same books over and over to seem clever, how can you possibly deduce that I am on the same level as them when I never named a book I'd read to sound clever.

The only person who tried to validate their opinion by naming authors they've read was you.

Newsflash: reading books isn't hard and it isn't impressive and it certainly doesn't make you smart.

And before you point to the list of books I mentioned earlier as me namedropping, I literally just picked those off the top of my head as an alternative to the pretentious authors you named. There's a big difference between randomly naming books you like versus circlejerking the same five authors to everyone you meet because you think it makes you sound sophisticated.

I think what I hated most about Of Mice and Men was it was nauseatingly pro-proletariat. I understand the merits of literature from the point of view of working class individuals at a time when they were very marginalised, but Of Mice and Men goes too far imo.

> For instance, finding out that Holden rapes his sister Phoebe
For fuck sake I just read all of that shit for one of these faggots?

Those are really just entry-level lit that everybody has read.

This is the post that rekt Veeky Forums forever

A lot more true than OP's pic

catcher in the rye is shit indeed

I read most of it as a teenager trying to find a part to jack off to, but there was nothing good. I was disappointed.

Tch, you didn't get to the part where Holden rapes Phoebe.

>ugh these books are so overrated
>posts widley known books people meme about as being reddit tier
>doesn't realize only contrarians actually dislike them

Another one of these threads, sage