'Great' books you could do without

[nick]

i don't see what the big deal about neuromancer is either. i got about 70 pages into it wondering when something was going to capture my interest before i stopped.

[Blair]

[Scumfucker]

That fucking book my dyke teacher during my sophomore year in high school that was about that black chick getting raped all the time for not doing the dishes.

Sounds suspiciously like Maya Angelou. Is it "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"?

[evildeadone]

As I Lay Dying and A Ssperate Peace.... seriously crap.

1984 and Brave New World arent that bad but kinda overrated too.

[MANTIS]

1984 is one of the best and most important books I've ever read.

[MANTIS]

I think about raping black chicks in the morning too. Let's be pals!

[riley-o]

i don't see what the big deal about neuromancer is either. i got about 70 pages into it wondering when something was going to capture my interest before i stopped.

Wow 70 whole pages ?

[DanBehavingBadly]

1984 is one of the best and most important books I've ever read.

I agree. Now more than ever.

[Honky Kong 64]

i don't see what the big deal about neuromancer is either. i got about 70 pages into it wondering when something was going to capture my interest before i stopped.

Wow 70 whole pages ?

He didn't even get to the part with the dragons.

[CHUFFED beyond necropsy]

i don't think these are considered particularly "great", other than by people who listen to power metal.

[NewVoid]

i don't think these are considered particularly "great", other than by people who listen to power metal.

You broke Skyclad's heart.

[CHUFFED beyond necropsy]

i don't think these are considered particularly "great", other than by people who listen to power metal.

You broke Skyclad's heart.

Yeah, i think i've talked shit about Drangonlance to him before, too. Oh well.

[Fields of Shit]

Anything by Faulkner.

[Cascade Whore]

Also, I was subjected to a Don DeLillo novel once, and... ugh.

Which book did you read? I've read Underworkd and Falling Man. I have now The Angel Esmeralda, Libra and Cosmopolis from the library. I can't find the thread where people were saying White Noise is so far up it's own ass and written by academics for academics but isn't it supposed to be a spoof on academia? I enjoyed Underworld, think I rated it an 8 or 9 but I can understand someone hating it.

[riley-o]

I was way into DeLillo when this thread first rolled around and I was actually teeth-gritting mad at Mike for talking shit.

I remember loving Mao II the best but White Noise, Libra and Underworld were all right up there too.

Now I don't remember a single God damned thing about any of them. Not a word.

What went into that place in my brain ? Anything ? Or is it just shuttered off area now ? Lights out, broken windows, covered in chicken-scratch graffiti ?

Would it all come flooding back if I started reading one of them ? I re-read the Dune series over the summer and there were passages that I felt I almost I could've recited before reading, but then plotlines and book endings that were like brand new, changed versions.

I used to absolutely love that entire series, but this go-round I realized, man does that series just get progressively worse and worse as it goes (barring the 4th, which I think is the 2nd best).

[Cascade Whore]

Hey Riley. How do you feel about Pynchon and David Foster Wallace these days? I've read Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Signifying Rappers and Consider The Lobster so far. I found Infinite Jest a tough slog but well worth it and rewarding. So far I've only tackled Gravitys Rainbow for Pynchon. While Wallace is challenging I feel like the complexity is just on a different level with Pynchon and have been intimidated to dive into anything else by him. Gravitys Rainbow felt like an endless maze constructed by aliens with no reference point. Every paragraph was so dense it felt like I read five pages. It truly felt like the works of someone with an incredibly powerful and mature mind and you are just trying to keep up. I'm sure some of the philosophy students would laugh at calling Pynchon complex.

[riley-o]

I read Infinite Jest in my early 20s (maybe even my late teens) but, again, not a word of it remains. I liked it at the time and honestly I may well have had better taste in art and literature at that point in my life than I do currently, so..

I LOVED most of Pynchon's work that I read but struggled with disinterest through others. I couldn't get through Mason & Dixon at all. I enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow and the more coherent parts stick with me still (I clearly remember a passage about, I believe Pirate Prentice, eating disgusting English candies, and of course the bombs), but I think a big part of my appreciation for that book was based in the swelling of pride in my breast for actually reading the whole thing. I received much more pure reading enjoyment from The Crying of Lot 49 and I legitimately, thoroughly LOVED Against the Day, which, despite it being Pynchon's longest, also felt like his most readable. I think I was pretty neutral on Vineland (again, I couldn't begin to pull even the most basic plot synopsis for this one from the foggy depths of my worthless CTE-addled brain; not a setting, era, character, nothing) and haven't yet read either of his two newest, despite my long-running and heartfelt intentions.

[Cascade Whore]

I think what stuck with me most from infinite jest are the last 200 pages or so.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

so much unbelievable pain with Don Gately and the ghost

I also read the foot notes all at once because I'm an asshole.

[spacehamster]

I read The Names for a college class once and almost wrote a paper about it and Auster's Leviathan (which I love to pieces, and which probably changed my taste in literature more than anything ever in my life.) From what I remember, it's basically one long, drawn-out exercise in semiotics masturbation. Gee whiz, look how postmodern I am with the blah blah about how language is just self-referential. It was mostly just incredibly boring, and even though I was way too young and stupid to be jaded about post-modernist word masturbation, I just thought it was all profoundly transparent and uninteresting.

And really, I actually still like this sort of thing, it was just DeLillo that bored me to pieces. My master's thesis was a rambling treatise on the respective identity crises of Bret Easton Ellis' protagonists based mostly on Foucault, Baudrillard and Freud. Written for a professor who's a Freudian/Lacanian feminist. So I feel like I should be all over DeLillo, but I'm not. Maybe I need to read it again, it's been a while.

[FVBTVS]

no adorno, huh

figures

[spacehamster]

no adorno, huh

figures

I don't think a single one of my literature professors ever even mentioned Adorno, so I guess he's not chic around here. I minored in media science, though, and did a presentation on The Authoritarian Personality once. It was mostly about his methodology, though, and I'm just glad I did it because now I get to be a smartass everytime leftovers of his F Scale show up in internet questionnaires. You might be a closet Nazi if you believe in astrology.

[Cascade Whore]

I read Infinite Jest in my early 20s (maybe even my late teens) but, again, not a word of it remains. I liked it at the time and honestly I may well have had better taste in art and literature at that point in my life than I do currently, so..

I LOVED most of Pynchon's work that I read but struggled with disinterest through others. I couldn't get through Mason & Dixon at all. I enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow and the more coherent parts stick with me still (I clearly remember a passage about, I believe Pirate Prentice, eating disgusting English candies, and of course the bombs), but I think a big part of my appreciation for that book was based in the swelling of pride in my breast for actually reading the whole thing. I received much more pure reading enjoyment from The Crying of Lot 49 and I legitimately, thoroughly LOVED Against the Day, which, despite it being Pynchon's longest, also felt like his most readable. I think I was pretty neutral on Vineland (again, I couldn't begin to pull even the most basic plot synopsis for this one from the foggy depths of my worthless CTE-addled brain; not a setting, era, character, nothing) and haven't yet read either of his two newest, despite my long-running and heartfelt intentions.

I think I might have gathered up enough balls to tackle AGAINST THE DAY in the near future but the over 1000 pages and your description as "the autistic Gravity's Rainbow" scares the living shit out of me.

Plus other peoples descriptions I've heard such as:

"there will be hundreds of pages of plot and then something really really important will be mentioned in a two sentence paragraph that you have to be careful not to miss"

[riley-o]

That was Zap's description, not mine.

[Chad]

anything by ''George Sand'' or Chinua Achebe

9th grade stuff...

bullshit...

[joefromthegarage]

I can't do Tolkien.

Man, why not?