Books that just weren’t for you. Don’t be ashamed. The premise of this one sounded great, and I enjoyed some of the backpacking and hostel stay stories but it’s so dry and full of architecture descriptions and references to other high brow European shit that its a slog for me. I’m like 90 pages from the end but I most likely won’t be reading the rest of the series. Not a fault of the book at all, not afraid to say that I’m probably not worldly or intelligent enough to fully appreciate this book as a non-college educated blue collar/middle class genuine mutt American. What are your’s?
The first 5 or 6 chapters of Anna Karenina
Finished the top two this week, finally. Kept getting hella filtered. Bottom two are classic case of >oh I’ve listened to the audiobook, oh I’ve seen the movie, oh I basically know the plotand then next thing I know I have put it down and never re-opened & finished. They’re not hard reads; I just have bad discipline
>>25385984My friends recommended Blood Meridian to me with a lot of high praise, pre-Wendigoon and movie hype. About three years worth of occasionally mentioning it in conversation about books they enjoyed until I caved in and tried it. Nothing in it really hooked me but I forced myself to keep going thinking maybe something would happen because of how much they enjoyed it. I gave up somewhere just after the halfway point because I really just wasn't interested in anything in it. I don't even have any complaints or criticism, just got bored of it.
>>25386048That’s why I personally keep avoiding it. I feel like I keep getting baited by everyone rating these top ten, top 50, top 100 lists of “classics” and “must reads.” And when I finally get into one, it’s a boring time waster and I have to cope my hoping interesting plot will suddenly flare up when it never does
>>25386054plot is always going to be the dullest aspect of literary fiction so if that's what youre hoping to be grabbed by you will always be disappointed by the classics
To the lighthouse I’ve tried like 6 times can’t keep track or whos talking to who who’s thinking of what who’s thinking of talking or talking about thinking or if they ever actually plan on not talking and getting the fuck up and actually going to the lighthouse or if it’s just a metaphor
Just today I was filtered by this translation of Kudrun. Something about the rhyme and the caesura'ed lines short-circuited my brain. I couldn't even make it to page 10. Here's the first stanza for a demonstration:>In olden days in Ireland // a king to greatness came>Who bore the name of Sigeband; // Ger was his father’s name.>Queen U-te was his mother; // she of a king was daughter;>High was her worth and goodness, // and well her love beseemed the lord who sought her.>>25385984I (a fellow burger) loved A Time of Gifts, but everything you said about it is accurate.>>25386048I read it because I'd seen it compared to Moby Dick. There was some nice language here and there, but it on the whole was a disappointment.
>>25386048>ADHD BRAIN GO BRRRRRRR
>>25386048>>25386054I liked it and re-read it probably once a year, but I’m from middle of nowhere west Texas,enjoy westerns and kind of a yeehaw in general.
>>25386081>Moby DickI do want to try and give it a shot one day but my experience with BM gives me pause since I've also heard the comparisons.>>25386093I'm the kind of guy that will happily read dry non-fiction infinitely less moving than how McCarthy describes a single random piece of desert in BM for hours in complete silence. A lack of stimulation is not the problem here.
>>25386171ahhh so it's autism. let me guess, poetry does nothing for you either.
i got almost half way through the count of monte cristo, i enjoyed what i had read,but i realized at that point that i had exactly zero interest in reading hundreds more pages of pulp revenge story, mainly because i had a lot of other great stuff on my backlog at the time
>>25386171>but my experience with BM gives me pause since I've also heard the comparisons.>missing out on moby dick because of this
>>25385984I was filtered by Lord of the Rings. I'm sure it's a great book, but I just don't care enough about fantasy to dedicated 1000 pages of reading. I also didn't like the Hobbit all that much.
Picrel. I don't get the hype. Loved the chapter about the German colonists, loved the chapter about the siege of Malta, but the "wowie I'm so zany and random" thing got old after the first 100 pages. I slogged to the end but have no desire to repeat the experience with GR (or any other Ruggles novel)
Oh, also, Naked Lunch. I understand that it's "incoherent on purpose" but that doesn't grant it any further literary merit.
>>25386207Same. Love the hobbit, re-read it every couple years, but I’m not even slightly interested in diving any deeper or being invested in Tolkien’s middle earth made an attempt at whatever the first in the trilogy is called and was fatigued halfway through.
Being and Time but I tell myself I'll finish it one day
For me, it’s If on a Winter Night a Traveler. He went a little overboard and heavy-handed with all the “style” here and it comes off as smug and sniffing his own farts. Really enjoy the rest of his stuff especially Marcovaldo.
>>25385984Three Body ProblemGene Wolfe shitBrando Sando shitLeft Hand of DarknessThe InterdependencyCity of Last ChancesParable of the SowerReplayPandora's StarChronicles of the Black CompanyBlindsightRed Rising
>>25386295If you're getting filtered that much, it might say more about you than the books. Also, why were you reading Parable of the Sower in the first place?
>>25386296People recommend this shit to me and I read it. 90% of what I read and enjoy is history and biography but I try out shit like that sometimes and it's almost always bad. I used to love science fiction as a kid. At least I read quickly so it's not that big of a deal.
>>25386174Well to be honest I don't read poetry at all. It's one of my media blindspots. But if your actual argument is about me having some sort of heart of stone that's not moved by beauty, emotional moments, symbolism or subjective experiences (or whatever you think the opposite of autism is) then you'd be wrong because I get plenty of that from other media, and theres plenty of passages in Blood Meridian that hit these notes very well and have stuck with me.If anything it's the story wrapped around these moments that ruins it for me. I don't care about any of these characters or what happens to them or what they do to others. They feel like cardboard cutouts at times. They don't compel me to keep the pages turning.>DUDE BUT THE JUDGEOh no! A bigger, weirder, smarter and more vaguely supernatural character than the rest of the cast that uses these traits to...do more fucked up shit but with an insane philosophical justification for it!
I got 3 pages in
G K Chesterton I got through The Man Who Knew Too Much fine without hating itThen I read The Man Who Was Thursday and by the end I was hating it but managed to finish because it is pretty shortThen I gave him one more chance with Manalive but dropped it in the first chapter and never read Chesterton again.
>>25385984I wouldn't say it "filtered" me in the sense that I struggled to understand it or the deeper meaning and context, but I thought picrel was a nasty, pointless book about horrible people, with dubious literary value. Didn't enjoy reading it at any point. Big E did some good writing, but not in The Sun Also Rises.
>>25385984For me, it's War & Peace. I'm all for dense, difficult books, Gravity's Rainbow is my favourite prose work, but something about having to remember dozens of characters, their relations and nicknames, all from a foreign country, just fucks me up. And it doesn't help that I find the prose style dull. I had the same problem with Dreams of the Red Chamber, though at least I enjoyed the writing in this one.
>>25386443Old man and the sea is one of the greatest books but other than that Hemingway is entirely overrated
