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[NRDL]

Just finished Iain Banks' Use of Weapons. I'd kinda spoiled the twist for myself by looking through TvTropes, but I'd forgotten just enough to still get surprised, and the sheer IMPACT of everything near the end was...glorious.

[Yoink]

I'm currently reading The Great Gatsby, and it is surprisingly enjoyable.
Didn't really expect to like it, but the prose is simply fantastic, and there is a nice kind of dry humour throughout that stops just short of blatant sarcasm.  Definitely worthy of its classic status!

[Emma]

I read The Great Gatsby fairly recently and really liked it. It deserves its status as a classic I reckon. I just finished A Clockwork Orange today, I don't think I really understood it haha.

[nenjin]

I dunno, I've had to read the GG about 4 times for school over a course of 20 years.....and write essays about it.

It's a story about disaffected wealthy people and their fabulous, shitty lives and how they're shitty to each other and kind of shitty people. I've always thought it's telling that it's considered an American classic. I can't say I've ever enjoyed reading it though, and I'm the kind of person that finds reading college history textbooks enjoyable. Reading the GG always felt like a chore, and almost none of the characters were likeable. Even the protagonist is kind of "meh." As I was reading, I always found myself thinking "Everyone in this novel need a good, hard slap."

[Urist McScoopbeard]

From a popular standpoint, GG is a story about nothing people whose pettiness leads them to mildly horrible things and whose lives are then ruined by pure chance.

From a literary standpoint, I enjoy GG as basically my favorite example of using environmental description to reveal the emotional states of the characters. But ya, other than that... eh.

[kingawsume]

Speaking of oft-assigned books, I finally finished my prescribed dosage of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book might be halfway interesting, if I wasn't assigned it every year since 6th grade...

[deathpunch578]

I'm reading an interesting autobiography, it's called "Independent Contractors and You"

It's a book written by an actual hit-man, unfortunately you can't find much information on it. It's interesting, the way he justifies killing people for a living is that he is correcting mistakes made by the justice system (he thinks that he is killing awful people, an example he gives is killing a rapist that got off scot-free because of a technicality).

[nenjin]

Speaking of oft-assigned books, I finally finished my prescribed dosage of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book might be halfway interesting, if I wasn't assigned it every year since 6th grade...

I debated mentioning it in my post as well. That and GG I feel are the two American Classics I've been forced to read at least 4 times a piece. At least I like TKAMB better as a story, even if it is also pretty dry at times.

[Frumple]

...amusingly enough, not only did I not encounter mockingbird as assigned reading, I've never read any of it besides the occasional snippet. Seen a movie or two, though :V

Never really felt the inclination even back when I was reading too friggin' many books of the classic sort, either, though. If I wanted to get a gander at the issues it dealt with I could go outside or have a talk with my grandparents about their younger years, ha.

Gatsby can go right to hell, though. An eye gouging mix of boring and miserable, one of the ones near the end of what it took to get me to swear off "classics" indefinitely. The technical capabilities of the writing was fine but I'd 'bout rather jam a rail spike in my eye than deal with the rest of it, these days.

Reached a point where all the literary expertise in the world ain't worth crawling through the shite that is ruddy universally their characters, plots, and/or settings to experience. Once you've well and truly got the damn point behind any individual bit of the stuff they're trying to convey leaning on that junk it's near enough self-flagellation to make little difference... and if I'm going to inflict literary masochism on myself I'm damn sure going to at least read something that has good sex in it instead *grumbles into the distance*

E: ... though to actually contribute, I'm still chewing through Wu Dong... something. The Golden Thumbing of Dong. Bout reached the end of what's translated. It's martial arts fantasy of the cyclical deus ex machina sort, predictable enough it could be bullet pointed, but on the less terrible side of them... imagery and whatnot is decent and gets better, and while the MC is as much cheerfully inclined towards mass murder as any protagonist of these sorts of work are, he's at least fairly amicable otherwise and regularly interacting with characters written to do something other than finger his murder buttons.

Also the harem elements are pretty subdued, for all the "romance" subplot is farcical (tl;dr version, mentioned in the wtf thread, punch ghost made MC and love interest screw for its amusement, Dong spends next few hundred chapters getting thumbed along the way of hooking up with her and murdering the cousin that injured his father), which is nice after the summons thing I last mentioned. It's hilariously predictable anything female that's around him/gets much screen time has some kind of macguffin jammed in them, but hey, better is better.

Writing's still pretty much objectively trash, though, and it not being the original language probably doesn't help. Still probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless you're hard up enough for mountains getting thrown at people to slog through hundreds of chapters of mediocrity, or just want to see what a pretty generic example of the style looks like (as well as how absurd "generic" gets in the context of these things). One of these days I'll get around to reading one I'd actually recommend, heh.

[JoshuaFH]

Right now I'm reading Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", a novel originally written in Czech in the early 1920's, about a guy named Svejk and his misadventures during WW1. Outrageously funny, in the same vein as Catch-22's humor.

[Yoink]

Oh man! I bought that just a few weeks ago, along with a short novel by Gabriel García Márquez!
It was just $6, in the already-cheap bookstore that usually sells everything for $10. This reminds me, I need to swing by my friends' place and grab those books - I left them there since they live closer to the airport and I was flying the next morning.
The little taste I read of The Good Soldier Svejk left me with high expectations. Keen to read both books.

Didn't read much of everyone's opinions on Gatsby, since I am still reading it. I'm very much enjoying it though, and I am almost at the end - though I remember enjoying Mockingbird years ago, too, so perhaps there's just something profoundly wrong with me.

Gatsby's great, though. The prose is delicious and much of it is quite relatable.
I dislike this idea that a novel needs to be "about" something, something exciting with the clear skeletal structure of a story. A lot of my favourite books are the meandering kind, that take their sweet time getting to the point - if they have any point at all. Gatsby's honestly a lot less aimless than a lot of those, it has a pretty clear plot.

I'm jealous of y'all getting assigned such good books in school - maybe I would have enjoyed high school a bit more if we'd spent more time reading classics and less time being forced to slog through utter garbage written by Australian authors to supposedly help we young folks through the various trials involved in ascending to lofty adulthood - read: tales of surfing bogans and the feel-good adventures of shite football teams.

Luckily I soon mastered the art of being absent for our in-class reading sessions and simply chopping and screwing reviews mined from the internet by some poor sap who claimed to have actually read the book.
Though who knows - perhaps none of those reviews were actually by people who'd read those shitty books; everyone had just taken the same approach of repurposing other reviews - perhaps one could find a clear lineage dating all the way back to a "patient zero" of the book's first review to be published when it was released.

Sorry for rambling. I'm half-asleep, unhappy, hopped up on energy drink and waiting for a bus. ...Wait, the bus just arrived as I was typing that, but still.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

In short, "Literary Fiction" is a sham made up by academics in an attempt to deify the mundane.

[Emma]

I'm jealous of y'all getting assigned such good books in school - maybe I would have enjoyed high school a bit more if we'd spent more time reading classics and less time being forced to slog through utter garbage written by Australian authors to supposedly help we young folks through the various trials involved in ascending to lofty adulthood - read: tales of surfing bogans and the feel-good adventures of shite football teams.

-

[Starver]

I'm trying to remember what equivalent to GG/Mockingbird we had this side of The Pond.

At age 11+-ish, the book was The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe (quintessentially upper-middle-class characters in a classroom of mid-to-low-working-class/black-collar kids, which only added to the Fantasy setting, atop the historical overtones of wartime and pre-Baby Boomer values). At 15/16ish there was Of Mice And Men (drawing upon our cousins' roll of literature, not sure if Grapes Of Wrath/Cannery Row were open options for the teacher). In the midst of that there were several Shakespearean plays beat mercilessly into us (R&J, JC, AMND) in a way that inspired us mostly negatively (I was already an unwitting and atypical fan of the Bard, as it happened, but that was a low-point in my interest and only afterwards bounced back up).

Ah yeah, now I remember getting Animal Farm, as well. Bad memories of the teaching of it, though I appreciate it for what it is (and didn't then benefit any longer from any clever-herbert trying to show off by 'revealing' that it's a political allegory, 'cos now I definitely knew it).

And there may have been War Of The Worlds. But that may have been a peer-group thing, not school.

[nenjin]

In short, "Literary Fiction" is a sham made up by academics in an attempt to deify the mundane.

^

So much of what I had to read in school was the dramatization of average, every day stuff. Like I said, I prefer history to that kind of fiction.