/lit/ - Literature

>>15027309
maybe you just like different shit my dude

>>15027309
Read the american post-modernist of the late 1900s

You definitely do have to weed through a lot of garbage that the lit establishment promotes before you find something worthwhile. My best suggestion is to make friends with people who have similar tastes to yours who also read a lot of contemporary fiction, and then take recommendations from them. Though good luck finding such people.

>>15027469

This

Are you familiar with Sir Walter Scott?

Maybe vaguely, right? Or maybe you haven't heard of him at all. But in his heyday he was the most popular writer in the English-speaking world. He wrote from around 1795 until his death in 1832. He wrote poems, short stories, novels, and plays, and he was a smash-hit bestseller.

Now, though? Who reads him? Other than Ivanhoe, none of his novels are even slightly well-known. Nobody reads his poetry, nobody reads his short stories, nobody reads his plays. What do we read instead? We read Wuthering Heights. We read Middlemarch. We read Jane Austen. We read the poetry of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron. All of these were unpopular in their heyday, or if they WERE popular, they weren't as popular as Scott's works. Even Dickens at his height wasn't as popular as Sir Walter Scott in his prime. Yet we remember Dickens, and we don't remember Scott.

The point of this is that the popular taste doesn't always determine the great art of a time period. The determination of what's great art doesn't always depend on what's popular with the masses, or what's a bestseller. What's popular is what lasts. This is precisely why you like these old books. I bet you don't include Sir Walter Scott's works in your favorites. That's because you don't JUST like old books. There are a lot of shitty old books. You like books that are old and have gained a reputation over the decades and centuries. That isn't to say that popular opinion doesn't determine great literature, or shape the Western Canon. But it's not immediate, contemporary popular opinion so much as it is popular opinion over time. What's great is what lasts, what is remembered and preserved while other things are left to rot and decline.

>>15027557
>What do we read instead? We read Wuthering Heights. We read Middlemarch. We read Jane Austen
Lol I wonder why that is.

>>15027557
>Byron
>unpopular
Byron was so popular he changed the face of russian literature

>>15027309
A classic can only be a classic in retrospect. Plus there are so many authors now that it gets harder to be notable

>>15027469
Not op, but I can't even do this on other topics, let alone literature. Whether it comes to tv, books, video games, or even dating profiles, I seem to be an outlier. A little off topic, but E harmony actually declined my account after filling out their matching profile because they couldn't pair me with anyone in their database... at least that's what the message that popped up said... You would think with the user base size of such sites there would be overlap with... someone.... I don't think my tastes are that obscure? I like sci-fi, high fantasy, JRPGs, and creating stuff (diy & professionally). Even on this image board I find myself often in disagreement with posters, and this is one of the places where other outliers tend to, or at least used to gather.