ITT: Writers or books you think overrated

ITT: Writers or books you think overrated.

The Book of Disquiet. It has the ability to be the right book for the very wrong person. I've seen a lot of people fawning over it like babby's first pessimism.

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Phony.

Cien años de soledad. On english you may miss it; but in spanish the prose reads like a boy trying to imitate the classics. It's purple as fuck

Homer

Anything pop culture. Whedon especially.

I don't think you're giving Pessoa enough credit here, he writes with more nuance than most of Veeky Forums is willing to admit.

These are all overrated mainly in the context of this board, as opposed to the wider world but: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Pynchon, Gogol, Deleuze, Flaubert, Hugo, Ezra Pound, and Marcus Aurelius.

Name one (one) more overrated author as this guy. You can't because he is the most overrated author to have ever lived. Don't ever read his books they are overrated, and the guy has a major ego problem as well.

There was this liberal kid from USC that kept using the word phony while we're out with him, I asked him if he read the book and then I gut every thing he fights for because he stated he's supportive of the ideas the book proposes. Such a fucking internal happiness I had that night.

Sherlock holmes

Fuck you Gogol is great

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my diary desu

Nabakov.

He was an absolute charlatan, and he had the nerve to demean Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Joyce, etc. Plus his writing is pretentious shit. Nobody gives a fuck if you like bugs, Vladimir.

Joyce is just bad as Ernest Cline with embarassing and unnecessary references.

faggot

ah, yes. Ulysses reads just like Ready Player One

>When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past forty years, I'd worked my way down the entire western canon. Plato. Aristotle. Cicero. Livy. Herodotus. Augustine. Aquinas. Dante. Did I mention the Sumerians? I read every novel in order to be on Shakespeare's plateau, though I'm fully self-aware insofar as Shakespeare's genius being a shade of mystery.

And I didn't stop there.

I also watched read ever single book throughout every archaic library I could find. If it might have made me the greatest writer since Shakespeare, something like Yeats's Collected Poems, Goethe's ouvre, Plutarch, re-reading Aristotle for the fiftieth time because of my Jesuit education, then I re-read it until I knew every line by heart.

I devoured each of what is genuinely referred to as a canonical book: Gilgamesh (in the original Sumerian), The New Testament, Hesiod, the Greek tragedians, and Aristophanes (in The Frogs he preferred to pretend that Euripides wasn't a good a playwright as Aeschylus or Sophocles. I tended to agree [by the way: kekekek!])

I also absorbed the complete collections of every great author before my time. Ovid, Homer, Virgil, Martial, Seneca, Marlowe, Petrarch, Kyd, Hobbes. And, of course, Kevin Smith.

I spent three months studying every book of the Old Testament and memorizing all the times a female character might have shit her pants.

"Genesis 25:1 - Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah."

You could say I covered all the bases.

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they're popular stories, but are they really bad?

The Book of Disquiet is almost his worst work.

Kind of agree but that first sentence is pure gold (and yeah, I speak spanish).

Yeah it's not an amazing book. It has some amazing passages here and there, though.

>Gilgamesh in the original Sumerian
What a monster. That hardly even sounds worth it, but it's definitely as patrician as it gets.

Borges.

Pessoa is simply ugly. I can't stand him.

Jakob von Gunten

Every Russian writer.
Every Greek and Italian (including Roman) writer, especially their philosophy.

second post best post

gave me a light kek

yes
yes

Pretty much all of them. You have to be so lucky to get an agent or a publisher or both. Talent only gets you so far. You gotta have luck. No one in publishing knows what's going to sell or what's not going to sell. That's why there's so much shit cluttering the bookstore shelves. 99.9999999999999999999999% is shit. A waste of your time. And mine. Everyone's. But some lucky bitch or asshole is out there laughing like a loon because she/he got lucky. Convinced some agent to gamble.

My favorite:

We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses--
a well staring at the sky.

I can agree with this. It's accessible crime fiction and nothing more really. It's light fun but other than Sherlock and Watson being distinctive characters I don't think it offers much and I'm surprised they weren't actually forgotten over time.

This should end with "get on my level, motherfucker" for that perfect bit of bants.

the castle was so fucking tedious and shit
only kafka book i've read
does the guy just not do prose, it was literally people talking for 300 pages and nothing they said was particularly interesting, most of it was just about some stupid relationship

The Castle is a hysterical and transcendent glimpse behind the curtain of cosmic mystery. I truly pity those who can't connect with Kafka.

>people talking for 300 pages
Yeah that's Kafka.

>hysterical and transcendent glimpse behind the curtain of cosmic mystery
this is what i wanted from the book
what i got was 20 page chapters about people talking about dresses or about a relationship which we are given 0 reasons to care about. maybe i should try the trial instead

Wittgenstein is overrated.

Should have stayed forgotten

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What the fuck guys start with kafka's short stories, metamorphosis, the letter to his father... I'd hate kafka If I would have started with his novels

>Joyce
He called Ulysses one of the 4 best works of prose of the 20th century.

ill trust you user and start a clean slate with his work

>Graham Green
>Brighton Rock

Far too implicit and I can't keep up with the characters mood swings.

I thought it was good, but considering how hyped it's been it was pretty disappointing. Really don't see what all the fuss was about.