Why does /lit/ love this novel so much?

It makes you feel.

>>9976206
So it's a tearjerker?

Why don't you read it real quick and get back to us about it?

>>9976197
I enjoy the complexity of its plot

>>9976214
I will. I've got a PDF available. I just wanted to know what made /lit/ like it so much.

>>9976232
It's just one of the funniest books I've ever read. There's a part where a character named Tavis is comforting this young girl who has like new school anxiety and the things he says had me howling with laughter. There's a lot of parts like that, that are just unbelievably funny.

>>9976208
No, not that kind of feeling. The kind of feeling you get when you have a moment of clarity while switching tabs between /lit/ and trap porn at 3 AM and wish beyond all wishes you could wake up the tomorrow afternoon and be young enough to change everything.

>>9976197
/lit/ hates it now, and rightfully so as it's a terrible novel

Slogging through it ~ 175 pages in. Since there really isn't a plot up to now, some interwoven vignettes. It's illuminatingly silly is how I'd describe it. If the novel were written today, a character would give an essay on shitposting probably while coming off of opiates and thus constipation while on the shitter next to a gal in the next stall who is ODing. He'd mistake the gurgling ODing noises for understanding of the metaphysics of shitposting.

>>9976247
Damn...

>>9976208
>So it's a tearjerker?
Not really. It reads sort of how depression feels. Not sad - it's just a real downer behind an outward facade of funny nonsense. It just feels very 'real' and sort of has a personality of its own, I guess is how I would put it.

>>9976273
I posted this in another thread, but I'm slogging through right now, too (~230pg right now) - you're in for a treat for the next 20 pages or so - the "Selected Transcripts From Ennet House" and the "Description of Enfield Marine Hospital Complex" scenes. Some of the funniest material I've read in a long time.

>>9976324
That's one of the redditiest parts of the book iirc. DFW gives us zingers like "girls can be just as messy as guys" and "black people can be racist too" as if he's dispensing radically new ideas

>>9976247
Cringe

>>9976332
No, not that bit, the part where they're talking to the counselor and one of the residents stabs another with a fork for finger-drumming on the table. You're referring to the "newly acquired facts from a halfway house" bit, which I can agree was pretty cringe.

>>9976247
wew

>>9976232
its going to be a wild ride reading the footnotes in a pdf. I suggest you, if you are going to read in the computer, to have 2 pdfs open, 1 at the main text, 1 ate the end notes

>>9976208
Its more of a circlejerker

>>9976247
IOW, the kind of feeling you get when you're at the end of your rope.

File: dfwat.jpg (17KB, 480x360px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 480x360px

>>9976942
or belt rather

I'm about 600 pages in and Gately's driving the Aventura around. Is the rest of the book worth reading? It's been good so far but not enough to justify the length. Will I miss the best parts by stopping now?

>>9976802
I honestly can't understand how I ever managed to read physical books with paper pages. Both laptop and phone for PDFs has made it so that the rare time I try to go back it feels like torture, picking apart pages and having that shitty paper rubbing sensation go through your fingers, and also not being able to scroll up and down to wherever you feel like, instead being stuck to a tiny page's worth of text at any given time. I'm pretty sure if I woke up one day back in 1993 I would just make use of the one convenience still available back then which is shotguns for reliable suicide.

>>9978685
The ending and things coming together is what it's all about - you'll realise that everything that's happened all adds up

>>9978711
Disregard, things never come together, DFW even admits he didn't include a real ending because he wanted you to imagine it instead. Meaning it's garbage.

Wardine be cry.

>>9976197
I really want to read this but I always convince myself not to since I could just read 2-4 smaller, and probably better, books instead.

>>9976340
lmao you don't need to spoiler IJ, since there's hardly even any plot for you to spoil

>>9978746
Leave /lit/ if you refuse to read our massive pretentious tomes

>>9978724
Bollocks, there's a clear path through the narrative

>>9978761
>Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame.
-DFW admitting you have to imagine the ending because it's not contained inside the book

>>9978773
But the ending is pretty easy to imagine.

>>9978773
No you're just a brainlet. Sorry you didn't understand the ending.

>>9978737
W A R D I N E

>>9977630
too soon

>parallel lines
>converging
the man to genius too suffer the inanities of this world

>>9980375
"Line" was a bad choice of words since they have connotations of not changing, but otherwise what he said made sense. He's talking about series of events that start out parallel but then stop being parallel and converge.

>>9976197
It has a lot of themes I can relate to. Lots of beautiful section of prose. Characters that I enjoy. Written in a very interesting way.

>>9978685

You're moments away from some of the most exciting moments in contemporary lit.

>>9978737
We try not to talk about that

I just finished reading through endnote 110 and I want to kill myself.

>>9981635

Is that one of the ones about math?

>It gets better

>>9981901
It's the 15-or-so page phone call between Hal and Orin

>>9981914

Oh that's a long one. Did it hold the documents Orin sent to his Mom to avoid talking to her? The one with the footnotes within the footnotes?

>>9981926
That's the one. The whole thing easily could be reduced to a paragraph, but, "Fuck you," says DFW.

>>9983225

Well, yeah. That's how you could describe a lot of it. It's kind of masochistic at some point, reading a book like that. I think it makes the good parts better, but, you know, there are those parts. The fact that I knew what you were talking about might hint at some kind of merit. Or not.

DFW- Ricky gervais
Joyce- Stephen Merchant
Pynchon- Karl Pilkington

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