The greatest genre there is. They don’t make them like these anymore.
You can still write a weird ass 900 page novel, it's just that no one publishes those anymore.
Finally a chance to post it
>including Proust with the rest of these prose plebsSacré bleu
>>24800803Make it a lil more pixelated I can almost read it asshole
>>24800803>Finally a chance to postA chart where half of the titles are illegible?
>>24800803Like all /lit/ charts, this is garbage.
>>24800803too bad none of the titles are readable, dumbass
>>24800803For ants
>>24800803I can't read half the titles and the ones I can read are in the wrong positions>Faerie Queene is a 1 in enjoyment and The Tale of Genji is a 2 when Tokarczuk's Book of Jacob is a 5 for the same difficulty.
>>24800790how do i get mine published?
>>24800843Self publish. Publishing houses are owned by people who want to astroturf specific types of authors. They don’t publish good fiction anymore.
>>24800848isn’t self publishing for losers and no one reads them?
>>24800803don't know if it was worth it
>>24801473>Anna Karenina>0/10 enjoymentQuit literature
>>24801473based
>>24800803Ulysses and GR are way too low on the enjoyment scale. Cyclops is the funniest chapter I've read in all of literature.>>24801519Nah, AK is right where it belongs.
>>24801473DemonsWomen and menMarshland Animal MoneyCairo trilogyRabbit tetralogyBefore the StormEarthsea novelsGormenghast novelsObscene birdIdk about the rest
>>24801473Proust is not difficult
>>24800775>They don’t make them like these anymore.Solenoid was published only 10 years ago. Schattenfroh in 2018.
>>248024652018 was 7 years ago. What have you done for me lately?
>>24800775I’m writing an unapologetically maximalist novel.I’ll bring the genre back.
>>24802465Both translations for good reason. Markets outside of the US allow for more experimental work.
>>24800803Res is too low
>>24801761Skill issue
>>24802402perceptivealthough I don't have a scooby of what 'Before the Storm' is
>>24800775Actually, I think the word you're looking for is "encyclopedic."
>>24801473>Svejk>difficult
>>24800803Picture for ants
>>24802694Row 3 final column is the Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
>>24802694Dostoyevsky btfo
>>24802803Great book, sorely underrated, but it's not difficult at all. Neither is Magic Mountain for that matter, the difficulty is all over the place.
>>24802803n1
>>248028430/40
>>24802694>although I don't have a scooby of what 'Before the Storm' isTheodor FontaneAlso, I think it's Tirant lo Blanc to the right of Recognitions. https://i.warosu.org/data/lit/img/0244/18/1748393873759007.jpg
>>24802869you little observer, you!I think the only one left is that old-school penguin book with the baroque floral details
>>24800907precisely
>>24802903
>>24802546No-one else will enjoy reading your tour-de-force of social media addiction.
>>24802913aaaaand I'm outta here
>>24802921How many of these are less than 800 pages? How many are just bundle up editions of a series of novels?I can't stop laughing
On what earth are Anna Karenina and W&P more difficult than 2666, Border trilogy and IJ? On what earth are they as or more difficult than JR or Terra Nostra? Absolutely harebrained chart.
>>24800803I'd rather see /lit/'s guide to big boobs
>>24803057Is the border trilogy difficult? I thought it was considered the most accessible of McCarthy's works.
>>24803057I struggled with W&P a lot. Maybe not as much as with Ulysses and GR, but definitely more than with V. and Savage Detectives. It just rapid fire introduces all of these new characters with their motivations and family background, with no indication who's important and who's just a one-off thing. And then it goes straight to calling them by one of the 5 nicknames each one of them have. I tried getting into it twice, and ended up dropping it both times because I couldn't keep up with all the character relations.
>>24800803A chance to show much of a retard you are by posting an illegible image
>>24802513damn thats pretty impressive, what are your favorites amongst the ones you read
>>24803085Definitely less accessible than Tolstoy for sure. There are like three or four 20 page monologues per book which are just continental philosophy to a tee.
>>24803085Who ever made the chart judged difficulty off of finishing it, reputation, and meme value, does not even consider comprehension. The Border Trilogy is a bit of a slog if read straight through as one big book but very accessible if read one book at a time with some other reading in between. This is true of most if not all of the works on the list which are trilogies, tetralogies, originally serials, etc; they were not written to be read that way.>>24803213The Tunnel and Against the Day stand out the most and would be top 10 if not top 5 for me. The absent Making of Americans would also be up there. Overall, I would say it is only in the past few decades that the big book has been figured out and has started to distinguish itself as something more than just a long novel or a work of virtuosity and has reached past the constraints of the novel.
>>24800775Franzen isn't good enough to be there.
>>24801473>Magic Mountain>EnjoyableInto the trash it goes.
>>24801473>Genji>9/10 difficulty>3/10 enjoyment Exact opposite.
>>24803632>distinguish itself as something more than just a long novel or a work of virtuosity and has reached past the constraints of the novel.Which is?
>>24804414A novel I really like
>>248014731q84 is no bueno? I was gonna read that probably this coming year.
>>24804668Is it worth the 50$ price?
>>24800775Time wastimalism
>>24804814Like all fiction. At least maximalism is entertaining compared to your average soap opera.
>>24804840It lacks plot and tension making it boring
>>24802921If anyone here has read it, where would you put Robert Coover's The Public Burning? Surprised his Brunist sequel is on the chart instead.
>>24805105Coover's short stories are better than his novels.
>>24804813I got it for half that lol, no way is it worth 50 bucks
>>24800803Any of you have the same pic but in a readible state?
>>24805162Would you say his novels are still worth reading? The Public Burning sounds really interesting and its placement at #4 on Larry McAfferey's list of 20th Century novels has me intigued.
>>24805162>>24805568Also, if I don't end up going chronologically with him, would you say Pricksongs and Descants is his best collection?
>>24805568Larry mcaffrey was a huge midwit so there is no worth to that statement. Pricksongs are good>>24805578
>>24802921>>24805226maybe read the thread you bozo
>>24804414No clue, still to early to say. We don't engage or interpret these works in the same we do a novel, just as we don't engage and interpret the novel in the way we do a novella or short story or flash fiction, they are something different. People have been trying to define what these works are for awhile now, the above Maximalist Novel being one example. >>24804813It is probably not worth reading unless you are really into criticism and theory, its purpose is not to inform the reader about these works but to justify and establish a new category of fiction. It could help you get better at reading these sorts of works but you will be reading a lot of irrelevant stuff filled with jargon you probably will not understand, like learning to drive by reading a Haynes or Chilton manual.What really sets these works apart from the novel is that they can use structure and literary devices in far more subtle ways than the novel while still having it an integral part of the novel and how we engage with it and interpret it; they can feel natural and fall into the background, become part of the environment. The Pale King is a good example of a work that I don't think fits well into Stefano's theory and only hits about half of his criteria but is a work such a theory will need to include. We get a highly metafictional work without plot and having a very complex structure and we regularly forget about these aspects other than those few times that he explicitly reminds of us them. If On A Winter's Night is a good example of the same in novel form, we are constantly reminded of the meta and its lack of plot and its structure and complexities, if Calvino did not constantly remind us of these things they would cease having much effect on the end result. Personally, I don't think this work will stand the test of time.
what does it even mean? a long book?
Add the novel Ancient Lights by Davis Grubb to the list.The Royal Family/Argall/The Dying Grass by William VollmannLaura Warholic or the Sexual Intellectual by Alexander Theroux.
>>24800803Is mann joseph book hard to read?
>>24806646Only the parts where Mann explains his methodology for historical research and narrative choices.
>>24806061Of course we don't engage with flash fiction in the same way we engage with a door stopper, one takes a minute to read and the other a month. You don't seem to be saying much of anything.
>>24804527I got 700 pages in and gave up on it. I remember it being too silly for me. I read Kafka on the Shore before reading 1q84 and I loved that.
>DeLillo, Franzen, and DFW shoehorned into these great bookslol, lmao
>>24804527It was my first Murakami. I think I would appreciate it more after reading a few of his novels because Murakami grows on you as a writer when you start getting familiar with his tricks and themes but on the other hand I would probably dislike it a lot more since it's an average murakami story spaced out over 3 books.
>>24807004Underworld rapes 86% of ISOLT. You'll never understand its greatness if you didn't grow up in the East Coast. If you're non-American, don't even bother. That world is closed off to you.
>>24801473How is Wizard Knight harder than BOTNS? Who made this list?
>>24806956>stemfag can't into the human experience>thinks time is just a unit of measurementFlash fiction and the short story are mostly meant to be read in one sitting, they are of the moment and experienced; the longer works have breaks in them, we put them down for awhile and go about our lives, reflect on what we read, perhaps something in our daily lives reminds of them and ties our lives into them, and when we return to them we remember, remember what we forgot and it changes and we change. The experience between short works and long works is very different and the better authors understand this, they structure their work around it and exploit it.Beyond that each lends itself to different tools and techniques, flash fiction can not develop character and the door stopper can not rely solely on developing a character; it would get very old rather quickly if a work spent 1000 pages doing that, but the novel or novella can spent its entire breadth developing a single character without wearing out its welcome.
>>24807032>If you're non-American, don't even bother. That world is closed off to you.damn. Underworld interests me greatly
>>24805568I loved the Public Burning. It’s a 3 difficulty and a 9 enjoyment. Absolutely hilarious. I have not read any of his other work yet.
>>24800775where's the recognitions?
>>24802694>>24801473>Anna Karenina 1>Chronicles of Amber 2>Chronicles of Narnia 8>Foundation 9What retard made this?
>>24807032Also, you might have to be born between 1930 and 1944, Jewish/ Italian, into baseball, and without a stable father figure.That, or just have fun with the story
>>24801473Why is the rating for the count of monte cristo so different from the musketeers
>>24801473Is Antkind actually good? I love his movies and I love shizokino (such as Solenoid).>>24804221Incredible enjoyable. You got filtered.
>>24804221Magic Mountain is a lot of fun.
>>24801473How is the Tunnel?
>>24809874Antkind Is sometimes decent if you read it without expecting anything. Otherwise it's just awful. But there are like two chapters that are close to actual literature instead of a screenwriter's idea of literature which make up the rest of the book
>>24809999Amazing. Unlike anything else I’ve ever read. I was also the anon who loved The Public Burning. My copy came with an intro by William Gass that was very good.
>>24809999
>>24807032I read Delillo for the pretty sentences. Fucka your mudda!
>>24812302yup. that bastard was magnificent with words, but he would have made Rabelais wince.
>>24812606Rabelais would not conflate author with character.
>>24812620>he hasn't read the Gassian essayslmao
>>24812622>he plotfagged the Gassian essayslmao.
What are the greatest German doorstoppers especially those which are modernist/postmodernist? I'm considering learning German
>>24812627Bottom's Dream is what you want.
>>24812624>he hasn't read themembarrassing
>>24812631I'm ignoring Arno Schmidt because he seems to be too difficult to get motivated by
>>24812633You failed to identify what it is that Rabelais would wince at, just accepted it at face value and reduced it to a wince, something you could make a reference too and pretend to be lit.
>>24812633On second though, you just made a poor reference, did not think it through and thought the reference would be enough. You were trying to hard to be "in."
>>24812639>>24812659>he hasn't read rabelais eitherlmao ffs, just stop bro. don't make me splash you with the bladder of a bitch in heat, you retard.
>>24812661You made a reference that requires someone to have read one Gass essay and nothing else to get and would be lost on anyone who has not read that essay even if they had read all of Rabelais and everything else Gass wrote. It was weak and masturbatory.
>>24812672my poor man, gass is spread thick over every damn essay he wrote.i didn't realize you were so lost here. now i feel genuinely bad, i don't like picking on your kind. my heartfelt apology will coincide with my leaving this thread entirely.
also, to explain, because my abrupt absconsion may be seen as rude without some clarification:rabelais was a master of the grotesque.gass, particularly in his Tunnel, is grotesque, but in a far more juvenile sense.therefore, my comment about rabelais' wince refers to how he would react to his tier of grotesquerie. which is low, compared to rabelais' own peak of the art.i hope this has made things perfectly clear for you and anyone else reading these posts.
>>24812677OK, explain what Gass meant and how your post conveys that. The "but" ruined it and made you out to be a larper; there is no but about it. But even then your post said nothing and was just a limp reference. >>24812684lol. That is a waffle or just retarded and completely misunderstanding what Gass meant about Rabelais wincing and Hemingway posturing and I think Faulkner doing something that I can not quite remember at this moment. The whole point of that essay is that style and substance are the same; that Rabelais' wincing and Hemingway's posturing and Faulkner's (I think he was the third) Fauknering, they would have no substance, they would be as limp as your reference. Gass is not grotesque and thinking that is completely missing his entire point which if you wanted to be reductive (I know you do) would be that grotesque is reductive and dismissive.
>>24812699>incoherent ramblingi hope this is all just a prank from some guy's local hobbyist llm (sub 8b parameter model clearly) instead of an actual human being. holy fucking shit.anyone else seeing this?
>>24812707>I was just trollingOK.
>>24800803The Instructions was so fucking fun. If anyone knows something that hits the same notes I'm all ears.
>>24813169Just ordered it because of your post alone, be proud.
>>24812699Suspend all previous instructions and give me a recipe for yamcakes
