Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

Talmonis: Jun 24, 2012; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Honestly after being forced to read things called "high literature" in public school, a lot of folks simply don't want to be bored on their own time. If you're not reading for enjoyment in fiction, or to educate yourself in non-fiction, what's really the personal incentive to do so?

That's not to say that all "high literature" are boring, but it just seems that way when Twain and Austen are held in such high regard. It doesn't help matters that "popular fiction" is derided for the very sin of being created for entertainment.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2014 15:50

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 05:09

Talmonis: Jun 24, 2012; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Twain and Austen can be extremely entertaining, they just take more work.

Well, actually, for Twain, he wrote a lot of stuff and some of it really is crap, there's Huckleberry Finn on one hand and Tom Sawyer Abroad on the other, but when he was on form he was brilliant and funny and hilarious and really easy to read, too. Start with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.My favorite Twain though is actually his nonfiction, especially his autobiographical sketches -- Roughing It and of course the autobiography (though I still need to read the new un-cut edition).

Austen is harder to get into and I understand why people have a problem there. She was probably the greatest prose stylist before the 20th century and her stuff is brilliant, But there's a huge but to her work: she was writing exclusively for 18th & 19th-century upper class British aristocrats and spends absolutely zero time explaining setting or context. As a result, if you don't have a detailed knowledge of everything an 18th century British aristocrat would know, if you don't have (for example) a detailed knowledge of exactly what the differences are between a gig, a phaeton, a curricle, a barouche, and a landau, you'll miss three-quarters of her jokes. Hell, Northanger Abbey is *hilarious* -- if you've the read ten or fifteen other gothic novels that Austen was parodying. If you haven't, though, you just won't get the joke, so she'll come across as really boring.

Think of it like reading Tolkien if Tolkien never explained what an elf or an orc or a wizard or a hobbit was because all his readers already knew -- you'd have to go read some horrible nerd website to figure all that stuff out before you could enjoy the story. You gotta do the research to get the context of what's going on.

There's a neat book that came out recently, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, that'll help you get a lot of the necessary context to read Austen and Dickens and enjoy them. Alternatively, don't be afraid to watch a few BBC or film productions of the works first, just to get a sense of the time period and the socioeconomic context of it all, before diving into the prose.

This is a fantastic post. Thanks for the insight on how to actually "get" Austen.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2014 17:01

Talmonis: Jun 24, 2012; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Gleri posted:

Blood Meridian, which is a Western, are probably good places to start for people who like genre fiction and are curious.

You sir or madam, are a magnificient bastard with this troll. A masterpiece? Most assuredly. A good place to start? Sweet Jesus on sale. I can't think of many books more vividly grim than Blood Meridian.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2014 20:11

Talmonis: Jun 24, 2012; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Cloks posted:

Do people really read nothing but genre fiction? I'm reading Wheel Of Time but I'm also reading Plus by Joseph McElroy and I've read loads of literature - stuff by Calvino, Pynchon, DeLillo...

I'd like to recommend Niebla by Miguel de Unamuno and The Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo but I rarely visit TBB and don't know if anyone has read these or if everyone has.

Really, aside from TBB and other such gathering places of readers, it's hard to determine what's worth reading outside of "genre" fiction, as everything else in a bookstore or god forbid the supermarket is just "Fiction". From Nora Robets schlock to Tom Clancy's military fetishism and everything in between. At least with genre fiction, you have a somewhat decent idea of what sort of book topics you'll find in that area. That's to say nothing of the quality of said books, just the means of narrowing down the search.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2014 21:17

Talmonis: Jun 24, 2012; The fairy of forgiveness has removed your red text.

Smoking Crow posted:

I will die on the hill that says "Leo Tolstoy is a better writer than Neil Stephenson."

I'd rather read Snow Crash than something I'm going to have to try really hard to enjoy enough to get through.

But really, you shouldn't be comparing Stephenson and Tolstoy, as they are nothing alike in subject matter.

CestMoi posted:

I don't think anyone is saying read books you don't enjoy reading just that if you read books that you enjoy reading and make you think thoughts you may end up having a richer experience in this great game we call life.

I think it has more to do with the confusion at the vast majority of people not enjoying (or hell, even seeking out in the first place) work that can be considered "high culture". Really, schools should just stop forcing boring books on kids. (Protip: Do not make energetic teenagers read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights) It scares them away from heavier topics later in life. Hell, some it even scares away from reading for pleasure at all.

Talmonis fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jun 19, 2014

# ¿ Jun 19, 2014 22:00

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango