YEAH WRITE!

So now that this blog has a good little following, I want to ask you all a question! What are your top 3 favorite novels, and which 3 are not your least favorite, but the novels that you think are the most overrated, and why?

Submit your answers at http://yeahwriters.tumblr.com/submit and I will post them!

My answer to this question, if you care, are under the “Read More” cut.

Top 3:

East of Eden - John Steinbeck You don’t know Steinbeck if you haven’t read his masterpiece. His other works don’t hold a candle.

Hamlet - What’s his name again? Yeah technically a play, okay, but I had to do a 15 page paper on it last spring and the more I studied and read about the play, the more you realize that it truly is one the most genius pieces of work of all time. Every single word is so perfectly place and the depth of symbolism and meaning is absolutely endless and just perfect perfect perfect.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak I guess there’s a running theme here because this book is narrated by Death. It tells the story of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany, and sheds a lot of light on how naive the German people were to what was really going on during WWII (and therefore how the Third Reich got away with all that they did). Very creatively written, but not in an obnoxiously avant-garde way.

Top Overrated:

Twilight - Stephenie “Mormon Stay At Home Mom Who Had Never Seen An R Rated Movie and Doesn’t Believe In Writing Sex or Violence Into Her Books” Meyer Probably the biggest disparity between quality of writing (low) and book sales (high) of any book in history. Stephenie Meyer is NOT an author and those books sound like the drivel I used to have to read in high school creative writing classes. I truly believe that Little, Brown & Co. should be ashamed of publishing that book (and even more ashamed of how heavy their pockets are from it). Anyone in the literary world—hell, anyone with half a brain or over the age of 14—will tell you likewise. I got less than halfway through the second one before I threw it out of my tenth story window (and only through the first one because it was the only book in Germany I could find in English).

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen Like Twilight, I thought Water for Elephants’ popularity stemmed not from its literary quality, but from it’s indulgent subject matter. And, like Twilight, the characterization was mediocre at best. Too bad, because a novel about travelling circus life could have been very cool. Credit to Gruen for all the research she did, though.

Light in August - William Faulkner I probably just say this because I just had to read it for a class, but Faulkner’s style just seems so… emo. Like, “oh look at all these rambling free form words I used”. It’s sorta like abstract painting to me. There were things I liked about it too, though, and I still want to read some of his other things. An extra credit for the final for that class is for me to write about someone I know in that style, ha. Maybe I’ll post it here.

(Source: lauraisawhore, via hermuse)