quote:That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Can you clarify?
Sure. What was the author's purpose in quoting Heidegger? Did it further the plot? Convey information about the character? Evoke a sense of the scene? Communicate an idea or emotion?
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Blood Meridian is my favorite book, so there might be a bunch of things we don't see eye to eye on.
quote:I'm really not sure I agree with your definition of these "jump" books because it's come across as way to essentially say repeatedly people who find a book pretentious simply weren't intelligent enough to get it. And I really don't think that should play much of a role.
Or, we could conclude that the claim of pretentiousness often says more about the reader than the book itself.
We could just drop it is a critical term altogether. Why is it so important to be able to call a book pretentious? Because it gives us an excuse as to why we aren't interested in it. Why not just say it isn't your cup of tea?
If you really want to say "different strokes for different folks," then just say it. I don't get any enjoyment out of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett in the slightest, I think reading them is like watching grass grow - but that doesn't make me dumb and it doesn't make them pretentious.
It's important to point out that while I've spoken of good readers and bad readers, I've never once spoken of intelligence (except in a rhetorical statement to Vadon). It's all of you who keep doing that. What I'm saying has nothing to do with being smart or dumb.
Reading is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. Two people of entirely equal intelligence can have unequal reading skills, just like they can have entirely unequal mathematical skills.
Quality requires skill to appreciate. We don't think a 10 year old is dumb when they can't appreciate Shakespeare, especially from the written page. Reading Shakespeare requires a certain level of skill, and the things in Shakespeare that create that requirement are a large part of what makes him great.
Anyone who wants to insist that everything in writing must serve the plot is free to rewrite Hamlet. See if your version is remembered in ten years. (You could always add in some creepy sexual politics like a certain someone in order to generate buzz)
quote:That basically constitutes literary discrimination by saying, "If you aren't smart enough to get this book I think is great, then you don't read 'great' literature."
Literary discrimination, I love it. But again, you're the one talking about being smart.
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quote:That being said, House of Leaves is both pretentious and awesome. Heidegger quoted in German? Faux Derrida speak? So awesome and so ridiculous.
To what purpose?
Can you clarify?
Sure. What was the author's purpose in quoting Heidegger? Did it further the plot? Convey information about the character? Evoke a sense of the scene? Communicate an idea or emotion?
The last two. It was a passage about the uncanny, or better yet the un-homelike. It was pretentious because I don't think the author had ever actually read Being and Time. Or at least he dragged a passage from it out of all context and dropped it in just to enhance the faux-academic writing. Plus, it quoted him in the original German (I think, I don't have a copy with me). I mean, come on. And the Derrida faux speak was played for laughs.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Cormac McCarthy is bad.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
posted
So I've been thinking for several days about what makes a good or great book. Here's what I've come to.
A good book has to stimulate the reader. That can mean a lot of different things. A good book might stimulate emotion, curiosity, imagination, understanding, laughter, anger, fear, arousal or compassion, but if it doesn't stimulate something -- it's not a good book. To be a great book, I think it has to stimulate the reader in ways that have a lasting effect on the way the reader understands people, the world and their relationship to it.
Naturally, people are going to vary a great deal in what they find stimulating and in what kinds of stimulation they prefer. I think the underlying question is whether this is simply a matter of individual preference or if some types of stimulation are fundamentally greater than others. There is an unstated assumption among the literati, which is I think reflected in Foust's commentary, that to be great, a story must stimulate a certain flavor of deep abstract intellectual thoughts. I have yet to find any justification for that assumption that doesn't boil down to elitism.
I think that if some forms of stimulation are of intrinsically greater worth than others, it is because they have a more lasting and profound effect on the way we think and act. By that standard, much of the highly acclaimed literature I've read doesn't rank any better than your average murder mystery.
[ May 01, 2012, 02:56 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: There is an unstated assumption among the literati, which is I think reflected in Foust's commentary, that to be great, a story must stimulate a certain flavor of deep abstract intellectual thoughts. I have yet to find any justification for that assumption that doesn't boil down to elitism.
I think that's been more or less the point I've been trying to make regarding the state of what is "pretentious."
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quote:To be a great book, I think it has to stimulate the reader in ways that have a lasting effect on the way the reader understands people, the world and their relationship to it.
Something I've been wondering about lately: how many books can realistically alter someone's worldview meaningfully? (Or, how often can you experience a book totally blowing your mind)
It seems like there are books that tend to impact people if they read them at certain ages, when their identities are in flux. I'm not sure if they have to be read at those ages, or if those ages just correlate with people discovering particular works.
My current hypothesis is that you can only have your worldview dramatically shifted so many times before it solidifies, and you probably can't radically shift it that often (so even as an impressionable college student, you're unlikely to, say, get blown away by Ayn Rand and the immediately get blown away by some opposing story).
How many books have you read that blew you away at the time? Would they blow you away if you read them now?
Books I recall really impacting me:
1) "The Giver" 2) "Ender's Game" 3) "Xenocide" (moreso than Ender's Game for me) 4) "Worthing Saga" (hey, got to experience the "The Giver Mind Blown Experience" twice!)
5) "Eisenhorn", by Dan Abnett and "Traitor" by Matthew Stover books. (Two bizarrely good "made to crank out cash for a franchise" stories. Neither told me the moral of the story, and I felt obligated to figure it out myself, which was an interesting experience.)
6) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (sort of the "anti-Worthing-Saga". Also gave me the "born again X" experience. This worldview I had always sort of had suddenly got validated and magnified, complete with followup obnoxious evangelizing)
I don't expect to read many more books that change me radically, but I feel like I'm missing "The Moby Dick experience," wherein I'm able to appreciate a really complex work not just for its surface layer(s), but for the way it interacts with complex life experiences that I just haven't had yet.
I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
[ May 01, 2012, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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posted
I would add one more thing. I think that to be truly great, a story has to be true. I don't mean that it can't be fiction or that all the details must be factually correct and realistic. I mean that the story must reflect the essential or genuine nature of life in some meaningful way.
Too many authors excel in telling "half truths" too well. V.S. Naipaul, for example, does an incredible job of telling half the truth about Trinidad but his tales are so misanthropic and bitter that they end up being mere caricatures. In the story "The ones who walk away from Omelas", Le Guin writes
quote:The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Intellectuals are quick to recognize the shallow dishonesty of happy stories but fail to recognize that stories that show only suffering and evil are equally dishonest and shallow.
[ May 01, 2012, 04:36 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Originally posted by Foust: Or, we could conclude that the claim of pretentiousness often says more about the reader than the book itself.
We could just drop it is a critical term altogether. Why is it so important to be able to call a book pretentious? Because it gives us an excuse as to why we aren't interested in it. Why not just say it isn't your cup of tea?
If you really want to say "different strokes for different folks," then just say it. I don't get any enjoyment out of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett in the slightest, I think reading them is like watching grass grow - but that doesn't make me dumb and it doesn't make them pretentious.
It's important to point out that while I've spoken of good readers and bad readers, I've never once spoken of intelligence (except in a rhetorical statement to Vadon). It's all of you who keep doing that. What I'm saying has nothing to do with being smart or dumb.
Reading is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. Two people of entirely equal intelligence can have unequal reading skills, just like they can have entirely unequal mathematical skills.
Quality requires skill to appreciate. We don't think a 10 year old is dumb when they can't appreciate Shakespeare, especially from the written page. Reading Shakespeare requires a certain level of skill, and the things in Shakespeare that create that requirement are a large part of what makes him great.
Anyone who wants to insist that everything in writing must serve the plot is free to rewrite Hamlet. See if your version is remembered in ten years. (You could always add in some creepy sexual politics like a certain someone in order to generate buzz)
I think we might actually be pretty close to a consensus here. You've asked why having the term "pretentious" is so important when we could simply say that a certain work isn't our cup of tea. But that leaves the question of "why isn't it your cup of tea?" You've said it's an excuse for saying we're not interested in a piece, but if we simply say we're not interested in it (It not being my cup of tea) people will want to know the excuse or reason why we're not interested.
For example, I'm a nerd who doesn't particularly like Star Wars. Saying the series isn't my cup of tea doesn't usually appease my nerd cohorts. They demand a justification with charts and graphs and everything.
If I describe a book as pretentious and cite it as my reason for not liking it, that doesn't obligate you to also believe the work is pretentious. It is simply my subjective reason for the book not being my cup of tea. You can think I'm wrong, and I have no problem with that because I do believe that "different strokes for different folks" applies. If the reason you think I'm wrong is because you think I'm a bad reader or that I didn't get it, then there are many cases where I would object to your reason. If you simply say that you don't find the work pretentious and therefore think I'm wrong in my reasons for not liking a book, I have no beef.
Also, I'd argue that Disney's The Lion King has survived past ten years as a rewrite of Hamlet's basic plot. Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
What if you don't consider happiness stupid, but you also portray non-banal evil and non-boring pain?
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: What if you don't consider happiness stupid, but you also portray non-banal evil and non-boring pain?
Examples?
Honestly, I enjoyed stories of horrors far more when I was younger and more naive. The more I have experienced and witnessed real life evil and suffering, the less entertaining I find it.
[ May 01, 2012, 04:35 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
Why do people who are 25 assume that their life is over? Maybe it is for some people, if so what a horrid waste. You only stop having mind blowing experiences at 25 if you stop using your mind. Perhaps as you age change become more of an evolutionary process than a revolutionary process but true revolutionary changes are rare at any age.
Since you asked, here are some examples of books that have had a profound impact on me since I was 25.
In my late 20's, I was profoundly impacted by Gandhi's autobiography and a related collection of books on non-violence. The book "Paddle to the Amazon" inspired me to buy a canoe, a sport which I have now enjoyed for over two decades.
In my thirties I started reading a lot more science fiction, fantasy and magical realism. For me, OSC's books don't qualify as "great literature" but they do have great moments. One of the most memorable for me is the scene in Speaker for the dead where Ender meets human. That's had some significant influence on the way approach science. It's made me more wary of rejecting data that doesn't fit my model. In general, I think reading fantasy, science fiction and magical realism have had a profound impact on my understanding of the importance of imagination to being human. It's made me contemplate the question of why fantasy is the most enduring form of human story telling. I no longer dismiss it as "light reading".
In my thirties I was also strongly influenced by books by Wallace Stegner. They've have given me valuable insight into my adult friendships.
Some of the authors that have had a significant impact on me in 40s include Thich Nhat Hahn and Mary Midgley. Most recently, I read the Glass Bead Game which has had an impact on the way I think about and approach intellectualism and literature. Sunday evening I watched the BBC version of "MacBeth". Even though I've read and seen MacBeth numerous times, that performance caused me to connect some things I've never connected before.
Personal development only ends in your twenties if you choose to let it.
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posted
It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently. I did mean the question earnestly, not "clearly I will never experience this again, prove me wrong if you dare."
Orson Scott card books had a major impact on me as a teenager, but when I go and read similar books now, they're merely "good" (sort of the way you describe them).
My Dad's spent the past several years being continously blown away by Moby Dick, which I finally last year and thought was "merely good", but which I could imagine having more meaning for me if I had more experience to integrate it into. So I know there was definitely *something* more to come, but it seemed to be a different kind of experience than what I've had so far.
I felt like there were qualitative differences in the ways I heard people of different ages describe reading experiences.
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posted
Speaking for myself, there's very little I've read since I was 20 or so that's had any kind of real impact.
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posted
There may be a biological explanation for that to an extent. I think some of that may have to do with the slowed progress of the brain's biological progression shortly after young adulthood. When our brains are still expanding to fully develop the capacity for problem solving or decision making, I think one's worldview (which can be shaded by decision making) could be reasonably said to be malleable.
Once that stops, one could infer it'd be more difficult to make drastic changes in that department.
Grey matter and white matter and blah blah blah. It's finals week, so I don't want to go into anymore psychological detail than necessary outside of my actual finals.
Edit:
After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
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quote:After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
quote:It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently.
Everything is really intense as a teenager. Teenagers lack perspective so everything seems of critical life changing importance. But as you get older, your perspective on what was actually of life altering importance changes. This is not to say that nothing that happens in your teen years is formative and life altering -- it's just that we rarely recognize what is truly of life altering importance at the time.
Perhaps I am not really the best person to speak to this question since I never had an experience as a teenager with a work of fiction that "blew my mind". The stuff that blew my mind as a kid was all science, philosophy and religion.
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quote:After posting, I also thought that could potentially play into the idea I often hear expressed that you really only listen to the music you enjoyed as a late teenager for the rest of your life.
There could be a biological basis for this cartoon. In all seriousness.
Edit:
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Perhaps I am not really the best person to speak to this question since I never had an experience as a teenager with a work of fiction that "blew my mind". The stuff that blew my mind as a kid was all science, philosophy and religion.
My experience was similar to this to a limited extent. For me, though there were works of fiction which greatly impacted me, the book which had the most effect on me was a work of non-fiction as opposed to a work of fiction. I can genuinely look at my life and say, "This was me before The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this was me afterwards." Reading texts from other religions than my own had a similar effect. I think I learned more from reading The Book of Mormon than I did many textbooks, and I'm not Mormon.
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posted
Hm. This has actually prompted me to consider which book I think had the single most transformative effect on me. And as much as it pains me to admit it, I'd say it has to be Taran Wanderer and its sequel, The High King. The transformation of Taran into exactly the person I always wanted to be was oddly moving for an eight-year-old, and stuck with me forever.
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posted
I never finished reading that series. I read the first two in elementary school, but the library got rid of the copies of the rest of the series by the time I would've gotten around to them. And I just never sought them out again.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: I'm 25. For people who are... say, 35+, what have you read AFTER your early twenties that really impacted you, and did it do so in ways that were similar or distinct from 20s- experiences? Can you describe it?
After my early 20s I definitely started reading slower. But there were still books that had a huge impact on me. The Book of The New Sun might be the most important one. It was a "harder" book, maybe the first really hard one that felt like it was completely worth the work. I think that's one good thing about more complicated works, for me, is that at this stage of my life they can make a big impression on me where more YA-ish books feel like popcorn.
Another example, which was less of a hard book, was Girl in Landscape, which I just read recently. There was a really aching drama at the heart of it, which felt truer to life than a lot of other dramatic novels because it was so nuanced and there were no easy answers about who was to blame for some of the bad things that happened in the story.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: It wasn't so much that I expected to stop developing, as I expected subsequent developments to feel less intense, or high intensity ones to happen less frequently. I did mean the question earnestly, not "clearly I will never experience this again, prove me wrong if you dare."
I'm 35.
The problem is that the more books you have read, the more *great* books you have read. So you have experienced more greatness, and on some level you compare every new book to that standard of greatness.
Also, once you find a great author, you easily read all of his novels, at least the ones that have been received well. And great authors that speak to you on a more personal level don't come around that often.
Unfortunately, I think I'm starting to get tired of scifi, which is my favorite genre. I've explored nearly all interesting authors out there, over the last 25 years. But there are still some I haven't tried out - I just ordered 4 novels from Jack McDevitt at Amazon. I've never read him, but he might appeal to my tastes. But I'm starting to fear that I've already read all the great authors who appeal to me.
When you are young, everything is *new*, and therefore more exciting and impressive. When people get older, they usually don't actively seek for new things, so they don't experience anything exciting. The solution to this is to always seek out new things - You just have to get out of your comfort zone.
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posted
I don't know, I the Fountainhead still affected me greatly in my late twenties. Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
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quote:Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
Ditto.
In my 30s, interestingly, Bujold's Vorkosigan saga has had quite an impact about how I think about certain things.
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posted
I think much of the argument in this thread presupposes a work of fiction must meet some criteria for being "great" to have an impact on a person, and that's certainly not true.
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quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: I think much of the argument in this thread presupposes a work of fiction must meet some criteria for being "great" to have an impact on a person, and that's certainly not true.
Twilight changed my life!
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posted
And conversely I would certainly not use that as a basis to lay accusations of "greatness" against a book which I think most of us can agree is much closer to criminal.
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quote:Originally posted by Aros: I don't know, I the Fountainhead still affected me greatly in my late twenties. Ben Franklin's Autobiography was rather powerful in my mid thirties.
quote:Originally posted by SteveRogers: And conversely I would certainly not use that as a basis to lay accusations of "greatness" against a book which I think most of us can agree is much closer to criminal.
As much as I dislike the Twilight books, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that Twilight is closer to being a great book than to being criminal.
It is, at the very least, a book. And it has non-zero merit.
But the writing and publishing of it broke no laws that do or should exist. It is not criminal in the slightest.
It deserves more credit than it gets for being a legit vampire story. I find it unbelievable that people criticize the kinkiness of it: Edward's a 100 year old man hitting on a teenager, etc. It's a vampire story, vampire stories are supposed to sexually inappropriate.
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posted
Foust: It's more that Twilight is sort of billed as a wholesome Mormon-safe vampire story with no premarital sex and a loving relationship.
And then it still has stuff like a 100 year old man breaking into a teenager's room to watch her sleep, and then getting into a horrifically codependent relationship with her.
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quote:Foust: It's more that Twilight is sort of billed as a wholesome Mormon-safe vampire story with no premarital sex and a loving relationship.
And then it still has stuff like a 100 year old man breaking into a teenager's room to watch her sleep, and then getting into a horrifically codependent relationship with her.
That disconnect between the marketing of the book and the actual book itself exists, and it is hilarious.
But yeah, the book does present itself as a wholesome love story. The fact that it is actually a skin-crawlingly creepy story makes the book more interesting, not less.
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