Thread: Summer Reading Challenge

Hearts in Atlantis [Stephen King]
Freakonomics [Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner]
Dreamcatcher [Stephen King]
Prey [Michael Chrichton]
Raise the Titanic! [Clive Cussler]
The Dark Tower [Stephen King]
The Amber Room [Steve Berry]
Death of an Expert Witness [PD James]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [J.K. Rowlings -- i finished it saturday]

One more to go...

Add to my list of finished novels The Castle by Franz Kafka.

Nah. In 100 years contemporary authors will be analyzed and picked apart in the same ways we do to Dickens.

Real literature is art. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are entertainment. I have nothing against well-written entertainment like Graham Greene's "The Third Man" or the novels of Raymond Chandler. I enjoy them myself.

But real literature contains philosophical ideas and makes you think about the important issues of life. It can inspire the reader and give some depth to his experience. That's more valuable than entertainment, which you can get from a video game.

Again, I give you:

Quote:
To loosely quote Aristotle, as storytelling goes bad, so goes the neighborhood. The contemporary literary establishment routinely confuses literary fiction with literature. What we’re sold as literature these days is usually (again, with a few exceptions) little more than an attempt to mask an inability to tell a story with disdain for those who can, to replace substance with a frequently pompous style of—equally frequently—questionable beauty, and to pretend that it’s not boring unless one is a “philistine” who sees only a blank canvas where only a blank canvas is hanging.*

Literature is and always has been a form of storytelling, not of art. If a novelist doesn’t have a story that he absolutely must tell, and tell coherently, there’s no reason to read his self-aggrandizing drivel. If a novelist doesn’t have a story to tell, then all he is doing is posturing. And posturing is best kept to chat rooms.

The whole “literary” fad, with its fashionably unpopular authors, intellectual-wannabe critics, and logrolling literary award committees, has gone beyond just thinking outside the box. This fad has climbed out of the box and walked all the way around the bend from the reader who still remembers that reading a novel is supposed to be a pleasure, not a chore. It’s time to get back in the box and figure out that literature is no more and no less than a well-written work of fiction that tells a compelling story about characters who come alive in the reader’s mind, and leaves behind a slightly expanded perception of the world. Kind of like what Tom Wolfe does. Which is why he is popular.