S&L Literature Thread

L

Layna

New member
if you post here, you probably read.

favorite authors:
Dostoevsky, Hubert Selby Jr., Joseph Conrad



also wtf is up with vonnegut and palaniuk?

i read slaughterhouse five in like a day and i thought okay, cool, a nice sci fi story, nothing else. is this supposed to be satirical or insightful commentary on the human condition? (the back of the books say so) you know when you eat really dry popcorn and need a big glass of water? thats the feeling i get when i read vonnegut.

as for palaniuk, i really can't get into him. his books are overly stylized post modern catch-phrase crafting contests wrapped in a story thats so extreme thats supposed to be some half baked metaphor for personal revolution or some bullpoop

i can see why people want to seem smart by reading him but god...


oh and i know its crap but stephen king is a guilty pleasure of mine. haven't read anything of his in a few years though.
 
i completely agree with you about palaniuk. a friend of mine got me to read him a while ago. though fight club was decent, i think that was mainly because the film was playing out in my head at the same time. i tried reading another one of his, forgot what it was called but it dealt with sex addicts, and it was just trash. he writes like a much much much much lesser thompson, ie. tries to be like him but comes off as crude, simple and uninteresting.

dostoekvsy is one of my favs too, and so is stephen king. im not a huge fan of king's novel work (i do like a few) but i think his best work is in his short stories. i've got all the collections, and despite there being a whole bunch of duRAB, the quality to be found in those (particularly the stories in Night Shift) is really high.

i haven't read any vonnegut
 
i read sirens of titan by vonnegut and it was a great big picture absurd view of humans and there were some beautiful moments and overall just a great and zany story. havent read palahniuk but just the fact that dumb people i know read him and his fans in general make me think it's twilight for the male IQ 100 people.

haven't been reading a lot of fiction. proust lately
 
I admire Russian literature. Im currently reading Dostoevskys The Brother Karamazov, in fact. Ive only read a little Dostoevsky, a little Turgenev, and a little Tolstoy, but Ill contribute what I can to this thread.
 
im a huge fan of russian writers too, but i haven't gotten any further than dosteovsky, tolstoy, solzhenitsyn and zamyatin
 
Chuck Palahniuk is the worst, let's not discuss him at all. Vonnegut is great though.

I have copy of Crime and Punishment that I think about reading from time to time, but I really want to read Notes From the Underground.

We is great, has Zamyatin done anything else I should know about?
 
I've only read We, but it's his most well known work. I haven't really heard anything about any of his other writing.

Both Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground are fantastic. Notes is quite short so you'd probably be better off reading that first, also because it'd be an easier introduction to his sometimes tedious style.

What Vonnegut book would you recommend I read first? I really don't know anything about him, the first time I heard his name was a little while ago in the general forum.
 
Slaughter House Five is universally heiled as his masterpiece, i was like 12 when i read it tho so I don't really remember much about it

You should definitely read Cat's Cradle, it's maybe 200 pages at the most and it's ingenious. Probably the only social satire i've ever read that actually made my jaw drop at how bad it made the human race look.
 
EDIT: ok i got it.


Does anyone having access to the Mutillid article? My faculty doesnt have a subscription. With time one of my collegues will get it but maybe someone here has it already.
thanks

cheers
Eckart
 
im reading Don Dellilo's "White Noise" right now, an amazing story. In every way. Denis Johnson is a great man as well. "Jesus' Son" will do wonders for anyone who reaRAB it. And even though its a book you will have to read in school, "The Things they Carried" kicks *** as well.
 
Laugh at me all you want, but I'm a total fantasy nerd.

My favorite authors are J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Ed Greenwood, and David Eddings.

WHAT!?
 
i like the idea of fantasy but i find most series' completely derivative of each other. the only writers i'd say i'm a fan of would be tolkien and robert jordan, and perhaps feist to a lesser extent. terry pratchett i love of course but i dont normally put him in with general fantasy

and wtf fantasy isn't even literature it's just arse
 
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