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Never really seen the appeal of capital L Literature - reading it is a whole lot of work and very little enjoyment - not something I look for when I'm lookin for something to read. Plus, a whole lotta literature is hella depressing, which makes me want to read it even less. Honestly, literature and genre books seem so incredibly separate in everything they intend to do that even the comparison of a big mac to a filet mignon seems off, - I'd say those two foods have considerably more in common than the average piece of literature and the average genre novel. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 05:19
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Effectronica posted:What have you read in terms of "high literature"? Almost nothing beyond the typical high school classics, I mean I've tried some, but not in a while, as I've never been able to actually stick with one for long enough to actually finish all or even most of it. The impression I have of things literature having a tendency to be depressing is just from the descriptions I've heard of literature from people who have actually read it and understood it better than me, though I may just have been bumping into people who really love reading about the futility of human existence or whatever. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 05:35
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tentative8e8op posted:What ones did you try? The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit, Animal Farm, 'simpler' stuff like that. If I try to open something like War and Peace I'm lost by page 2.
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Jun 18, 2014 05:45
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Sir John Feelgood posted:Yeah, it's good to read books that aren't rendered 100% worthless once you know what happens. Sometimes things in books/movies/games/tv/whatever are a mystery though, and a significant part of the fun can be to try and guess what is really happening - being spoiled can take a lot of the joy out of that. It's like if every time you read a mystery novel it told you who the killer was on the blurb on the back - There are plenty of ways to write a mystery novel that can work even with the 'who' known, but not the 'how' or 'why', but that doesn't mean that they all are, or should be, written in that way. Books are meant to make you feel something or think about something, and trying to surprise your readers and keep them guessing is one very valid way of writing. Even if the book still has merits on its own, being spoiled can steal a lot from your first read of that book. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 09:07
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A Rambling Vagrant posted:
I'm sorry, but I read through the entirety Shadow of the Torturer once and holy poo poo that was the most nonsensical, ridiculous book I have ever read in my entire life. It starts off making at least some sense and then just increasingly loses it's grasp on anything remotely comprehensible until by the end you have no idea what happened. He puts the words together in the proper order with proper grammar, but no matter how many times you reread them it still doesn't actually make any sense, like he might as well be speaking another language. Plus, If I recall correctly, he literally made up his own long, complicated-sounding words, as well as pulling out words that have been dead for hundreds of years, to throw around with little to no context to help make them understandable. The whole thing felt like an acid trip more than a story half the time. Subtext is nice and all but Gene Wolf forgot to have something actually readable for the subtext to hide under. Like, it literally personified nonsensical 'bad literature' for me, I just wasn't sure if it 'counted' so I didn't bring it up here. It's probably what scared me off literature more than high school  .
Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 23:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You remember incorrectly, everything in BotNS is English, however obscure. Is it really still English when even the OED doesn't know what the hell it is and it may have possibly been seen in a quote a couple hundred years ago one time on an obscure footnote, maybe? I don't really think it 'functions' very well - it quickly became so dreamy and noncoherent that half the time things were happening that made no sense and would never be explained, and then more nonsensical events followed the first, and you're understanding less and less until pretty much the whole thing falls apart. Then, if you take a step back and look at a summary of the plot from someone who bothered to dissect it, it doesn't even sound very interesting. Half of it seems to be random things happening without explanation or purpose, and while they surely have some explanation or purpose if you thoroughly analyze it or whatever it certainly doesn't make it a very enjoyable experience. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 03:45
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