Is most of fiction literature not that great?

>>8605256
>is either the bible or yeats
You're just a pseud, it'll pass when you read more

>plot premise
Fucking really

>>8605266
What's wrong with saying plot premise? A Picture of Dorian Gray literally revolves around an annoying little self-entitled literal faggot whose only even half interesting event in the novel is stabbing his friend.

>>8605277
Wow it's almost like you didn't get that it's a book about vapidity and a satire of the upper class!

Next you'll be telling me that Oblomov was slow or that Dead Souls seemed ridiculous!

It's almost like you have zero reading comprehension because you're bound to a novel's narrative as opposed to its style and actual substance as a result of years of diluted shit filtered through the lens of sci-fi!

>>8605302
>It's almost like you have zero reading comprehension because you're bound to a novel's narrative as opposed to its style and actual substance as a result of years of diluted shit filtered through the lens of sci-fi!

Indeed. If the OP is over 18, he/she should probably just give up.

----

Also, who the fuck only read's Swann's Way and skips the other 6/7ths of the book?

>>8605302
>>8605827
Oh look, the pseuds showed up early. The first of you faggots starts off with baseless strawman and the second one asks the most retarded question Ive ever seen

File: Forrest.jpg (2MB, 2300x1454px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2300x1454px

With almost everything I have ever read there was a point where if I had stopped thinking/talking/writing about the book, I would not have been satisfied with the work as a whole. Some books are innately satisfying (for overt elements like plot, prose, etc.) while others only become fruitful after a period of meaningful engagement. I think this can exist in many forms and occur at any point in the reading process but it is universally easier if you enjoy the book. So I'll ask you a few questions:

Did you enjoy reading these books?
What did your level of engagement look like?
ie: did you talk about them with others? write about them? was your reading sporadic? consistent? distracted?
Also what were your thoughts on the books? It's hard to discuss something like this when you haven't given a very substantial opinion on any of the books.

Another thing is that all the books you listed are surrounded by a cultural sphere of opinions that makes it impossible to go into them without expectations. This is evinced in your post by what you said about Dorian Gray.

I highly recommend you read Nabokov, specifically work from his later English writing. My favorite is Ada.

>>8606202
Don't you have a shitty sci-fi novel to read?

>>8606264
If he wasn't able to appreciate Wilde or Proust, what makes you think he can appreciate Nabokov?

OP, get your shit together and start reading with a critical eye. Your complaints are superficial and show that you didn't engage the book except on a very passing way. Perhaps you speedread them, hoping to be fulminated by them, but of course it doesn't work that way all the time, much less when you are used to reading mostly sci-fi (nothing bad with that, unless it's shitty sci-fi, but you can't possibly hope to understand a work like Dorian Gray if you read it through the lens of a sci-fi novel. It just doesn't work lile that).

Finally, what makes you think that your failing to appreciate and engage the novels in any meaningful way is the novels' fault and not your own?

>>8606285
I think that searching for explanations to what are at first perceived as flaws requires most people to have confidence in the author to ensure they will receive a return on their investment. One of the easiest ways to gain this confidence is to see the authors skill in crafting the overt elements of the book. Nabokov's case the reader instantly can see his talent as writer through his beautiful language. This gives the reader enough trust in the book to be willing to cut deeper into it's substance where they will be amply rewarded by the complexity and elegance of his literary and conceptual structures.

This is more less how I got into reading in the first place. Uncle CornKov is the best intro to literature (imo). I've consistently used him to get my friends into reading, it is always exciting to see their faces when they first realize things like how HH is deceiving you with the beauty of his prose. Also to address OP's post more specifically, the plot is thick af. Everybody is shocked in Lolita when Charlotte Haze gets hit by a car

File: thesuave.jpg (363KB, 700x466px) Image search: [Google]

363KB, 700x466px

>>8605256

Honestly, you probably just aren't yet old enough to appreciate them. If you're male the brain doesn't fully develop until around 26 years old, and when I was in my teens I mostly read sci-fi, ignorant to the works of real beauty. Had I read literature at this time I'm doubtful I would have appreciated it.

If you're already in your twenties and you still don't get it, maybe you have pleb taste. That's okay. You like what you like. I'm pretty pleb when it comes to music and my taste will probably never be refined, but I listen to what I dig and that's that. Some things you either "get" or you don't.

>>8605827
Not him but do you have to read Lost Time at once? I want to read one volume like half a year.

Op has vanished, you all spooked him with your dank conjecture

Scifi is one of the few genres that takes plot seriously. Plot is the most important part of fiction, but literaturefags don't like to admit this because plot is difficult. If you don't think about the plot very carefully you'll leave plot holes and look like an idiot. They prefer to focus on prose because it doesn't need much intelligence, only reading a shitload. Fill your brain with shit and spit it out like a Markov chain and you'll fool all the academics and /lit/ pseuds.

>>8606783
1. The Markov chain analogy doesn't make sense so that tells me you wrote it just to look smart
2. Plot is not "difficult", and many works of /lit/ have some of the most complex and subversive plots probably ever written (meme as they are, GR, Finnegans Wake, and Pale Fire come to mind)
3. It doesn't require "more intelligence", story just uses a different set of intelligence. Some books focus on it, others don't; saying a book lacks merit because it focuses on prose mainly is really fucking stupid, reductive, and non-adaptable thinking

>>8606790
>Markov chain analogy
It's only a slightly exaggeration. Of course you must pay some attention to the rules of grammar.

>Finnegans Wake
Once you have already tricked enough important people into giving you social status you can get bonus /lit/-cred by applying the same "creative" process to individual words.

>>8606790
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has a better plot than any meme-literature.

>>8606795
But you 1. still haven't acknowledged that the Markov Chain analogy doesn't make sense still and 2. that I was in fact referring to Finnegans Wake for its plot and not its prose

>>8606800
>merit beautiful as W.B. Yeats intered that's wrong way. You like half a novel to read it through to be fulminately satisfying (for overtheless more renown fiction. Of course you have zero read, I still haven't given half a year.

But litfags studied hard and read a lot of books! Sometime they are members of an officially approved oppressed group! It's not meaningless gibberish, you just don't understand it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

>>8606783
Embryo detected

>>8606831
>>>/mu/
>>>/hell/

>>8606844
embryo confirmed