[hydrogonian]

(08-14-2013 03:48 AM)the chef Wrote:  

anything written by bukowski. totally underwhelming and lame.

I've only read "Women", and while it wasn't conducive to reading through it a short period of time (due to said repetitiveness) or conveying a story per se, I thought it was good in conveying the nature of women and relationships. However, I concede that this aspect doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't suck as a novel.

[hydrogonian]

The best quality fiction authors that I've ever read are likely Dostoevsky and Tolkien.

[hydrogonian]

Oh, and you guys are all a bunch of phonies.

[Truth Teller]

Lord of the Flies. Boring, rambling plot. It's only 150 or so pages, but it takes forever to get through.

[Pride male]

So who decided that Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolfe, are the epitome of fiction writing? What did they see that others dont?

[TooFineAPoint]

Catcher, like all Salinger writing, is readable to the max. It's taut, like Hemingway, but more colorful. His way with dialogue is perfect. It's like reading an excellent screenplay. It hums. Salinger has a craft that is at a high level, but he performs it in a very unpretentious way.

Not sure why the guys here are so turned off by the Holden character. He calls people out on petty bullshit, sees value in preserving innocence, doesn't bow to useless authority, and manages to game a sexy rich chick.

Yes, he also lies, is petty, can be a whiny bitch, and generally doesn't know where he is going. Cos he's a kid, with absentee parents, and a brother who recently died. It's a realistic character with flaws, not a superman.

[Germanicus]

My take on some of the books mentioned since the thread bump:

Catcher in the Rye: Whiny, narcissistic, and petulant. Definitely not a classic. I can see why baby boomers loved this in their youth. If Western civilization survives to the 22nd century and beyond this book will be forgotten. If Western civilization collapses all extant copies will be the first things burned for warmth and not a single copy will survive. Absolutely no loss except to future historians who might like to understand the neuroses of middle-class white Americans from 1960-2060

On the Road: They first 50 or 75 pages or so is actually not bad. Then it gets dragged down by its repetitive non-plot and Kerouac's writing gets noticeably worse as if even he was bored writing it and he was cutting corners in desperation to get it over and done with.

The Koran: I tried to read it before deploying on one of my tours to Afghanistan as I would be working and living with the Afghan National Army and I wanted insight to their mindset and to make an effort to understand them on a religious/cultural level. After about 50 pages and some skimming thereafter I quit. I have no fucking clue how anyone gets anything out of Islam in a spiritual sense. I've read the Old Testament, the New Testament, several of the Hindu/Vedic texts, Sumerian and Babylonian texts, Buddhist and Zen Buddhist texts, lots of the Roman, Greek, Norse, and Celtic pagan texts and those I could understand why people would and could believe in any of those and how it would give them solace and a sense of community while partaking in philosophical speculation about human existence. The Koran only seemed like bragging about how badass Allah was, how smart Mohammed was for spreading the word and how unbelievers were gonna get theirs. Hey, if you're Muslim and it makes you a better man for it, cool. But I don't get it.

William Faulkner: Any of his books. My God, I'd rather sit through a romantic comedy marathon with a girl only to see her friend zone me than read Faulkner's boring novels. Absalom Absalom being especially awful. Dense and overwritten with pages upon pages of waffling about inconsequential bullshit. It also apparently gets taught as a The White Man Is Evil text so that right there can fuck off and die.

Heart of Darkness: I liked it. I think a lot of people come to it with expectations from Apocalypse Now. It's slow-paced and it's written by Joseph Conrad-- English was his third language and he was writing for an upper-middle class Victorian audience at the start of the 20th century. But for all that good overall.

[hydrogonian]

(04-01-2016 01:20 PM)Pride male Wrote:  

So who decided that Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolfe, are the epitome of fiction writing? What did they see that others dont?

A lot of it is social commentary or variously socially subversive. It's a common theme for what is promoted as essential/classic fiction in the 20th century and beyond.

[storm]

(04-01-2016 09:19 AM)hydrogonian Wrote:  

(08-14-2013 03:48 AM)the chef Wrote:  

anything written by bukowski. totally underwhelming and lame.

I've only read "Women", and while it wasn't conducive to reading through it a short period of time (due to said repetitiveness) or conveying a story per se, I thought it was good in conveying the nature of women and relationships. However, I concede that this aspect doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't suck as a novel.

Bukowski was fucking great. Read Post Office and Factotum.

Surprised to see him mentioned in "Famous books". I found out about him from read some guy's comment on delicioustaco's blog: they apparently have similar writing styles. I knew he was well known but famous?

[thoughtgypsy]

Almost all the books I was forced to read in middle and high school. They're almost all dripping with smug leftist preening. Can't stand being forced to indoctrinate myself with ideas that are contemptible to me.

Disliked
Catcher in the Rye
To kill a mockingbird
great gatsby
The crucible
Beowulf
the scarlet letter
2 other "males are evil" ones I forget
WAR in human civilization (Only the first chapter is necessary)
System of Objects or anything by Baudrillard (utterly contemptible)
The Bear and the Dragon

Books that were ok
The things they carried
Lord of the flies
The Odyssey
Flowers for Algernon
The Rum Diary

Entertaining books
Platform
Elementary Particles
An African in Greenland
A Dead bat in Paraguay
Why Can't I use a smiley face?
The unbearable lightness of being
Red Storm Rising

Enlightening and entertaining books
1984
Animal Farm
Civil Disobedience
The Giver
The Gulag Archipelago
Man without a Country

Books I didn't enjoy, but were worth pushing through
Brave new world
Walden

Books I haven't finished
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Jungle
Heart of Darkness
Catch 22
Brave new world revisted
Ulysses
Emotional intelligence
Meditations
Antifragile
The cosmic landscape
Ethics (wordflow is too frustrating)
How to argue and win every time
Democracy in America

[Pride male]

^What was wrong with Beowulf? I watched the movie I thought it was awesome.

Some members shit on Eat Pray Love but I thought it was aiight. Just disappointed she didnt get laid.

[KevCapitalist]

Romantic era/influenced literature - I'm way too cynical for cliché reading. Reminds me of the Hallmark channel and all their movies. We get 'good feelimgs' from reading through predicting the plot before it happens and I just see it a cheap high.

Young adult lit - Written for teenage girls. Enough said.

Buisness/Self-help books - Truth be told the bad ones usually sort themselves out by title alone. Too much fluff/empty encouragement. And the fact the info is quickly dated as people create new tactics(marketing mostly.)

[Quintus Curtius]

I didn't like "Catch-22." Something about the rambling, disconnected style put me off.

I also tried to read Spengler's "Decline of the West" in a complete and unabridged edition and could barely get through 20 pages of it. Maybe it was because the translated German prose doesn't read well in English. But it was barely intelligible. Same goes for anything by Karl Marx.

[xxMarco]

(04-01-2016 04:03 PM)storm Wrote:  

(04-01-2016 09:19 AM)hydrogonian Wrote:  

(08-14-2013 03:48 AM)the chef Wrote:  

anything written by bukowski. totally underwhelming and lame.

I've only read "Women", and while it wasn't conducive to reading through it a short period of time (due to said repetitiveness) or conveying a story per se, I thought it was good in conveying the nature of women and relationships. However, I concede that this aspect doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't suck as a novel.

Bukowski was fucking great. Read Post Office and Factotum.

Surprised to see him mentioned in "Famous books". I found out about him from read some guy's comment on delicioustaco's blog: they apparently have similar writing styles. I knew he was well known but famous?

I read 3 books from bukowski, post office, ham on rye, and women. Didn't like none of them. Comes off as negative attitude and ramblings of a drunk.
I ended up reading them because this girl I was talking to recommended them. I ended up banging her but besides that I wasted my time reading those books.

One book I did like that was recommended in another section on the forum was Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Couldn't put that book down.

[h3ltrsk3ltr]

Count me in on the catcher in the rye sucking giant camel dicks

[FireStarter]

(04-01-2016 04:03 PM)storm Wrote:  

Bukowski was fucking great. Read Post Office and Factotum.

Surprised to see him mentioned in "Famous books". I found out about him from read some guy's comment on delicioustaco's blog: they apparently have similar writing styles. I knew he was well known but famous?

He's famous in the same way The Ramones are famous. People know of him, he's referenced in movies and TV shows ie. Californication. But most people wouldn't be able to tell you the title of any of his books.

Bukowski has a great writing style but the few books of his I've read just don't go anywhere. Post Office was one of the better ones, but at the end I still had the feeling that there was no point to the story. I wouldn't say that his books suck, but they are over-rated.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac, on the other hand absolutely sucked. Slow, boring and pointless.

Other books that I have no idea how they're regarded so highly include The power of Now, Moby Dick and anything written by Tim Winton

[Stirfry]

I second (or I guess third) the opinions on Pauolo Cohelo. An ex-gf recommended I read it and when I was done she asked "Well, do you believe it?" as in, she really believed in secret societies and mysticism and all that (he writes in the first person and tells the story as if it actually happened, and she bought it all, like so many crappy self-help books). I said that I didnt even like it as a work of fiction. It was the beginning of our breakup ;-).

[Hannibal]

The Awakening by some dipshit feminist writer Kate Chopin. I could tell a woman wrote this because there was no point, no plot, no personal growth or character development, and everyone else in the story was simply expected to cater to the protagonists' wishes or fill some gap in the story to explain away her shitty behavior.

So the manservant guy she had a crush on, well that was because he was really attractive in ways her husband was not (even though she's basically fucking the poolboy at this point).

The bohemian artist who lives in an attic and paints pictures? Well, she's a representation of how deep the main character must be to associate with free spirits like her.

The town rake who takes her out to the horse races? She likes an adventure and a risk (didn't know gambling with someone else's money was risky, but whatever).

Seriously, she's a stay at home mom with all these servants, a couple kids, and all her needs and wants catered to, yet she's still not haaaaappy so she decides to leave and slut it up with the town rake at the horse races. The entire time I was reading this story, I kept asking "Where the fuck is the husband in all this? Why aren't the kids saying anything about how their mother doesn't give a shit about them?"

Check this out.

Quote:

"Edna felt an indescribable oppression which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish."

I've read amateur smut better than this. Why did I have to read this shit in English class? It sucks dick.

At the end of this nonstory, she still doesn't know what she wants so she drowns herself in the lake, the only real action she took during the entire shitty novel. Everyone reading this in English class was supposed to come to this great enlightenment about how she's oppressed or whatever when she really could not be more privileged in any respect.

[Khan]

Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel. In 2014 George Clooney directed a movie based on the book. The book explores an interesting historical segment of the liberation of Europe during the closing stages of World War II, but it's very boring and poorly written. Already halfway through I had the feeling that every chapter was just a rehash of some previous chapter, it's so repetitive. If the book were shortened by half (and maybe even more), nothing would have been lost.

[911]

(04-01-2016 02:19 PM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  

Catcher, like all Salinger writing, is readable to the max. It's taut, like Hemingway, but more colorful. His way with dialogue is perfect. It's like reading an excellent screenplay. It hums. Salinger has a craft that is at a high level, but he performs it in a very unpretentious way.

Not sure why the guys here are so turned off by the Holden character. He calls people out on petty bullshit, sees value in preserving innocence, doesn't bow to useless authority, and manages to game a sexy rich chick.

Yes, he also lies, is petty, can be a whiny bitch, and generally doesn't know where he is going. Cos he's a kid, with absentee parents, and a brother who recently died. It's a realistic character with flaws, not a superman.

Interesting, if highly unconventional takes on The Catcher in the Rye from Joe Atwill:

http://postflaviana.org/freemason-rye/

He brings up thinly veiled overarching masonic themes, which do make sense at first glance, like the character called Al Pike as a homage to Albert Pike, and Carl Luce standing in for Lucifer:

"So what I did finally, I gave old Carl Luce a buzz. He graduated from the Whooton School after I left. He was about three years older than I was, and I didn’t like him too much, but he was one of these very intellectual guys– he had the highest I.Q. of any boy at Whooton–and I thought he might want to have dinner with me somewhere and have a slightly intellectual conversation. He was very enlightening sometimes...

...Old Luce. What a guy. He was supposed to be my Student Adviser when I was at Whooton. The only thing he ever did, though, was give these sex talks and all, late at night when there was a bunch of guys in his room. He knew quite a bit about sex, especially perverts and all."


In another essay, Joe Atwill and Jerry Russell bring out a more ominous element in Salinger's opus magnum, that of latent pedophilia:

http://postflaviana.org/a-pedophile-fantasy-in-the-rye/

I haven't read Catcher in the Rye since HS, but that seems like an interesting angle worth looking into on the next read.


I was pretty impressed with some of Atwill's other works, particularly his decoding of the "weaponized anthropology" and social engineering involved in the first major wave of pop culture, the 1960s "counterculture". This is where everything went pear-shaped with the planned degradation of Boomer culture.

[storm]

War and peace

Just awful.

[Fortis]

Catcher in the Rye

Huckleberry Finn

[Paracelsus]

(04-01-2016 03:20 PM)hydrogonian Wrote:  

(04-01-2016 01:20 PM)Pride male Wrote:  

So who decided that Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolfe, are the epitome of fiction writing? What did they see that others dont?

A lot of it is social commentary or variously socially subversive. It's a common theme for what is promoted as essential/classic fiction in the 20th century and beyond.

In particular, many of the "rambling" books mentioned in the thread so far - Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, On The Road, etc - are the products of modernism. They're deliberate attempts to spit on the idea that life or fiction has any sort of narrative, which is the essential theme of modernism. That's why they ramble on for hundreds of pages without the appearance of any particular protagonist or plot. This intellectual system is what gave us postmodernism and the joys of third-wave feminism, because moral relativity is essentially the most evil result of postmodernism in particular and modernism by extension.

Modernism did give us a useful child - science, in particular the principle that theories explaining the physical universe are derived from data, not the other way round - but pretty much every other thing we get from modernism has more or less destroyed the West.

[Pride male]

A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin.

[Mr. D]

"Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky. I got almost halfway, and I got confused by the names.
8 or 9 major characters, all with nicknames, 4 characters sharing a nickname. And the narrator started blending into the characters at some point.

Bit of a clusterfuck, that one...