The best and worst books you've ever read. I'll start:

>>7390880
>Best
Bible

>Worst
Quran

>>7390924
Rofl just rofl memed hard anal fellow /a/non

>>7390880
infinite jest (that means t o p k e k)

>>7390924
But the bible isn't one book anon

>>7390880
I don't read books I don't like.

>>7390880

>Best
Stoner

>Worst
Probably something I read as a kid and forgot about. The book I hated most in recent memory was probably Insomnia by Stephen King.

>Best
Moby-Dick

>Worst
Catcher in the Rye

>>7391019
What didn't you like about Catcher, pal?

>best
Moby dick

>worst
Wuthering heights
Only book assigned for school i never finished. Jesus fuck it was awful. The entire thing is just people intentionally being miserable and making everyone elses lives miserable and doing absolutely nothing else. I despised every single character and by the time i stopped two thirds of the way through i just wanted them all to fucking hang themselves to stop the endless bitching.

>>7391054
Holden is a whiny bitch, and it gets really annoying. And he's always depressed about everything and makes stupid decisions.

When I read this in high school, I thought it was really stupid, and the teenager that I was and the ones I knew were nothing like Holden.

I read it again this year and still hated the book.

>>7391054
don't bother, anyone who hates catcher is a wannabe patrician trying to puff their chest off by disavowing what they were told in school was a great work.

I usually don't read bad books. Reading takes so much time that I feel like it's actually an investment and like any investment you should do research into it before you take it. So I read reviews and shit before I pick up a book and as a result I like almost every book I read.

That being said, probably the worst book I ever read was one of the Han Solo trilogy books from the Star Wars paperbacks. I think it was called The Paradise Snare. I didn't even finish it. I quit after about 70%.

Worst
Crying of Lot 49

>Best
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

>Worst
Kingkiller Chronicles

>>7392152
Isn't Pynchon supposed to be the original memer? What didn't you like about it?

>>7392232
When you place Pinewow's books next to each other, it is the smallest, shortest. Plus it's an easie read.

>Worst
All The Pretty Horses

>Best
1984

>best
The Western Lands (Burroughs)

>worst
Dave Barry Does Japan

>>7390880
>Worst
A Tale of Two Cities

>>7394132
Congratulations, you've read one book.

Best
Moby Dick

Worst
Lord of the Rings

Is Moby Dick actually good or am I being memed? I remember it being boring.

>>7390989
He said worst. You could read 2 books and whichever one was slightly better the second would be the worst.

>>7390880
>Best
The Idiot. Fight me.
>Worst
Madame Bovary. Yeah yeah there are tons of novels that were revolutionary at the time and yet *aren't shit now*, don't bother with this one.

>>7392240
>the shortest and easiest book makes it the worst
great meme kid

>>7391167
absolute shit taste my man

>>7391628
the point of the book is that like every fucking teenager ever, Holden whines about everything and you get his stream of consciousness and in our minds we complain and dislike a lot more than we say. How is that difficult to comprehend?

>>7392152
i was really let down by it myself

>>7394268
I really hated Bovary when I first started reading it, but I think it got better. And if you read it as if she's the embodiment of Romanticism and that you're SUPPOSED to hate her, it's quite enjoyable

>>7394234
Stop using "meme" in such an inflating matter.

And yes, as someone who usually goes on and on about the shittiness of american literature I have to say it is one of the most beautiful works ever written.

>>7394296
*manner

>>7394268
I have recently read the first ~50 pages of The Idiot and quite liked it. Where should I go from here?

>>7394311
The rest of the pages.

>>7394315
Thanks.

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>>7394311
>>7394315

Best:
Infinite jest

Worst:
Ethan From

>best
Finnegan's Wake

>worst
Anna Karenina

>Best
The Iliad
>Worst
Pride and Joy

Best
Cunt of Monty crusto
Worst
Dune

>Best
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
>Worst
Lady Oracle

best naked lunch
worst nadja + infinite meme

>>7390880
best: catcher in the rye
worst: taipei

>>7390880
>Best
Petersburg
>Worst
A Separate Peace

Best
Ulysses
Worst
Hard Times

>>7392249
>All The Pretty Horses

Yeah i gave up after 25 pages. Terrible.

Also to add to my own worst:

From Earth To The Moon
Choke

>>7394556
>nadja
Get the fuck out

>>7394556
this is literally the worst opinion i've ever seen

>best
Death of Ivan Ilyich

>worst
Hugo cabrett

>>7391667
Why are you even here?

Best: Don Quixote
Worst: Lolita

>>7394998
they're both boring dull and completely self-absorbed hey that sounds like you

>>7391019
Two of my favorites

>>7395397
and naked lunch isn't self-absorbed? lel

>n-no you!

fucking burroughs fans

>best
the sound and the fury
franny & zooey
the sun also rises
naked lunch
crash
robinson crusoe

>worst
madame bovary
life of pi
prozac nation
animal farm
neuromancer (cool setting; fucking terrible writing)

I'm actually surprised how many people I've seen disliking Madame Bovary lately. I haven't seen anyone talk about this book and then I made a post in a topic a few weeks ago shitting on it and it feels like since then I've seen other people shitting on it.

>>7395531
forgot another giant piece of shit that I hate: ham on rye.

>>7395462
at least old billy boy didn't pussy out of life. and breton is just the french holden caufield a whiny bitch

Best - Lolita
(Almost done No Longer Human, might be the best thing I've ever read honestly.)
Worst -
>be edgy teen
>read all of twillight to tell people the books suck too
at least I always have an immediate answer

>>7395531
Life of pi is brilliant you sonna bitch

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>>7395531

>Life of Pi

That book is pretty good - I'd never really recommend it, or re-read it, but the parts at the start about Pi and all his religions are great, and the ambiguity at the end with what really happened is pretty good.

But, that book contains one of the biggest jump-the-shark moments I have ever read. In the middle of this story of survival... that fucking island that eats people except for their teeth. What in the actual fuck was that about. The entire book would be 1000% better without it, it has nothing to do with the main story, and it totally wrecks whatever shreds of 'suspension of disbelief' are still hanging on.

Read this short story by Yann Martel - 'We ate the Children Last' http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/17/originalwriting.fiction4

>Neuromancer
>Terrible writing

Man... just.... that book is fucking incredible. There are so, so many awesome passages that stay with you after reading it (see pic). On the first read through the plot seems a little choppy, but it's a masterpiece.

>>7395531
>>7395728
I like Martel's writing (generally) but his plots just go consistently off the fucking rails.

>>7394379
tbqh senpai I'd say. I didn't like it

Best
Apuleius - The Golden Ass

Worst
Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

Is broom really that bad?

I loved IJ and DFW's stories and was considering reading broom simply to get some more of his delicious language games, autism and humour, plus I fanboy DFW in general

>>7391649
so you're saying everyone who dislike CitR is a phony?

>>7396141
It's easily his worst. It's a blatant Lot 49 ripoff, though no one seems to understand that. He even said he never read any Pinecone when everyone reacted in horror. There are some interesting things in it, but they feel like accidents—even in Infinite Jest I get the feeling that his symbols are in there because they're cool, this is Cool, right? Which he did in fact say, irl, to a woman he stalked and lied about boning. Wallace, kill yourself.

Best: Gothes Sorrows of the young warther; It's the most romantic book ever written.

Worst: Franz Kafka, all of it. Obscurant "high brow" lit that is edgy for the sake of pretentiousness. Obviously pandering to petty burgeois psudo-intellectuals.

>>7391628
So you rate your books on how similar you are to the main character?

>>7390924
the Quran is allegedly much shorter

so people actually read it and become retarded suicides

>>7396153
But Kafka isn't particulary highbrow, or obscure in a difficult sense either, rather straight forward obscure for the sake of it. You sort of get what you want out of Kafka, he suits everyone

>>7390989
How do you know that you like/dislike a book before you've read it?

>>7396153
Have you read Kafka in german?

>>7396181
Kafka ist kein Autor der von seiner Prosa lebt/leben soll angeblich, mein Freund. Irrelevant, aber ja, habe ich.

>>7396187
Kafkas Sprache ist ziemlich Syntax-heavy. Eine Annomalität, die dir vielleicht nicht auffällt, weil du kein Muttersprachler bist (angeblich), kann bei ihm eine subtile Nuance beinhalten

>>7394294
Wuthering Heights sucked monkey dick and you know it, anon.

>>7390880
>Best
In Search of Lost Time

>Worst
Great Gatsby
Tropic of Cancer

>Best
Don Quixotic
>worst
Tuesdays with Morrison

I read it as a high school assignment and I will never forget how much I loathed it. I threw it the wall multiple times.

>>7394545
Youd ranked Sailor above Golden Pavilion?

best:
hyperion cantos
dice man

worst:
principia discordia
what is called thinking

>>7392249
>>7394978
Why didn't you guys like Pretty Horses? I honestly want to know why you think it's the worst?

Also, second anon, I agree with you on Choke. I loved Invisible Monsters, Fight Club and some other Palahniuk book I can't remeber the title of right now, but I couldn't finish Choke, it was so bad.

>Best
Blood Meridian, or Solaris
>Worst
Portnoy's Complaint, or Whatever by Houllebecq

>>7396226
Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart? I'm about a third of the way through and really enjoying it. Are the other two books as good?

>Best
Stoner
>Worst
Alchemist

>>7395531

Gotta agree with the shit writing on Neuromancer. Decent book.

>Worst
The ones that fall into this category I never finished

>>7396151
Which ones though?

I'd easily argue straight away but maybe we've got some absolutely different symbols on our minds.

>Best
Pedro Páramo or The Aleph

>Worst
Island Beneath the Sea, by Isabel Allende
The Broom of the System

>>7395531
I loved Madame Bovary but only when I read that Flaubert hated everyone, and wrote all of his characters as representing everything he despised about humanity. After that (especially from part II onwards) the book became a blast, and quite funny.

Best
The Brothers Karamazov, Stoner, Chekov short stories, The Overcoat, Book of the New Sun

Worst
Old man's war, White Noise, Crying of lot 49, Name of the Wind

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>>7390924
t r i g g e d

Best
the creator - Jorge Louis Borges
worst
the book which inspired the movie "eyes wide shut"

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>>7396414
Since I'm not going to make an inventory of Infinity Jest—from the top of my head: Eschaton, Blood Sister.

In Broom: Vlad the Impaler. Though he might be the best thing Wallace has ever thought of... Not sure if 24 year old Wallace knew much about psychology or what—maybe it's from having read Gödel, Escher, Bach, which he had around the time he was working on Broom, but no one ever talks about Vlad, even though he's on the goddam cover of the Penguin edition.

Anyway—what ARE the super serious and woah deep symbols of Infinite Jest that you'd argue straight away? The Samizdat?

>>7396141
Its wasted potential. It goes from The Bell Jar, to CoL49, to ideas that were half-assed until fleshed out on IJ.

Granted, I never finished it but the only stuff I remember are some vague scenes with the psychologist and the enormously fat man.

>>7395006
Ahh, you didn't like Hugo Cabret? I read it when I was much younger, but if I always had fond memories of the sketches if nothing else.

>>7398046
>didnt finish
Anon, I...

Also, what was half-assed but fleshed out in Jest?

>>7398095
I found myself getting more annoyed than anything when I reached the halfway point and that's the only time I really ever put a book down.

I just mean the whole structure of switching to a scene that's midway through a conversation where you have to pick up on who is who from just dialogue. I don't really know what to call it, but in Broom it seemed like he was trying way too hard to push a nonlinear structure but didn't know how else to do it aside from jumping into dialogue. Arguably, the frame stories in Broom were implemented better in most cases than IJ.

>>7398122
How pseudo-intellectual. You read both, well half of one, and you gave us 'arguably'.

There is the part starting on p567 where Pemulis fucks with the blindfolded kid, but it is clear what's happening, and it's definitely a development, in a way, but it makes sense here because one of them is blindfolded—the context is appropriate... It's not that it's done better.

Another (p774) is Rémy & Kate Gompert (the name of someone DFW played tennis w/as a kid & who later sued him for defamation)—this scene is much closer to the Lenore & FanPiss's in Broom. Not better or worse. Although Kate accepting Rémy's offer is a downer, DFW notoriously binge watched TV, which is entirely understandable, though I find vidya even more numbing...

But that's more a style thing, and Wallace didn't have enough balls to have the characters speak like normal people. How many times do you say your own name or someone else's during a conversation?

So St. Dave uses it 2x, far as I can see flipping through, once better, once equal. I honestly remember Lenore & Rick on the plane more fondly than Rémy & Kate.

How nonlinear is Jest anyway? It starts and ends in flashbacks, and there are a number along the way, but the book is clear on what happens when.

What is a frame story? The stories w/in the story?

>>7390880

>Best
A Tale of Two Cities

>Worst
A Tale of Two Cities

>>7398336
kek

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>>7398353
I wish the wordfilter switched out kek/fag, fag/kek

>>7398368
why?

>>7398394
Probably because it would mean lots of hilarious fights.

>>7398404
are you calling me a fag? because if you are then you're just projecting, because every time I jerk off it's to women, and even when I do jerk off to men it's only so I can gain an appreciation of how straight I am, likewise when I finger my ass

I don't really know about best and worst. The book I've read that would probably be regarded as the best is Moby Dick, and while I really enjoyed the story, I found the extensive chapters on whaling techniques very boring. Then again, I did read it in high school. I'll have to read it again someday, but that's the impression I have now. I also read The Screwtape Letters in high school and couldn't follow a single word of it. Maybe I was just stupid. Not bad books, just personal disappointments.

My favorite books I've read so far, if I had to pick five they'd be The Stranger, Invisible Man, Please Kill Me, The Road, and Raising Cain.

Best: Brave New World

Worst: Great Expectations

>>7396153
I'm triggered anon. How can a guy who allegedly only wrote for himself produce something pretentious? And, how is, by your logic, most of the certainly elitist "best" literature mentioned in this thread not made for "petty bourgeois pseudo-intellectuals"? You probably only read a few chapters of Kafka and immedeately doomed it. I wouldnt, after reading all of it in german, my native language, even consider the language used obscure in any way. Maybe Kafka is allegorical, but not pretentious or obscure. I think you really have to read a lot of Kafka to love it. You have to get immersed in it. Feel the famous "kafkaesque" feeling.

Yours sincerely,

A embarrassingly pissed anon, Kafka fanboy, triggered as fuck

>>7394334
Based anon I can enjoy almost any book but fuck Ethan From.

>best
Middlemarch, Candide, Grapes of Wrath, On the Road (scroll text)
>worst
In Cold Blood made me want to strangle Truman Capote. That book is the burning off of so much pure journalistic and literary talent into a self-aggrandizing haze, and he didn't even care to follow it up

best: anna karenina
worst: all of pynchon

Crime and punishment
Memoirs of a geisha

Best: Paradise Lost

Worst: Last of the Mohicans

movie is tight tho

>>7390880
Absolute mememan!

>>7394311
>>7394315

>Best
Les Miserables

>Worst
I dunno, some Minecraft kids book I read to my nephew one time. It was written like "Once time there was a minecrafter who was on a adventure and he saw a pig LOL" Not even kidding - the grammatical mistakes and the text-speak was really in there. Wish I remembered the name of it. Pretty sure we tossed it, hah.