Fiat Lux: Oh, we have to answer that way exactly?
I assumed everyone gives a respectful nod to any book written as sci-fi. I want to give a respectful nod to an author in the sci fi genre, but his stuck up attitude…
“You can’t edit my books, 'cause you’re not able to write as good as I am.”
Fiat Lux: Oh, we have to answer that way exactly?
I assumed everyone gives a respectful nod to any book written as sci-fi. I want to give a respectful nod to an author in the sci fi genre, but his stuck up attitude…
“You can’t edit my books, 'cause you’re not able to write as good as I am.”
Fiat Lux: Oh, we have to answer that way exactly?
I assumed everyone gives a respectful nod to any book written as sci-fi. I want to give a respectful nod to an author in the sci fi genre, but his stuck up attitude…
“You can’t edit my books, 'cause you’re not able to write as well as I can.”
Fiat Lux: Oh, we have to answer that way exactly?
I assumed everyone gives a respectful nod to any book written as sci-fi. I want to give a respectful nod to an author in the sci fi genre, but his stuck up attitude…
“You can’t edit my books, 'cause you’re not able to write as well as I can.”
My wife used to teach TotS in her lit class. At one point she wrote a sentence from the book on the board, and asked the students to tell her what it meant. None of them could understand what James was trying to say, and neither could she.
I have to agree with Wells’ opinion of James: his prose is reminiscent of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea.
Personally, I’d like to like Haruki Murakami, but for all that he’s supposed to be wacky and innovative and so forth, he just doesn’t resonate with me.
I like some of Chesterton’s work, but I find that he suffers from C. S. Lewis syndrome. He seems to think that everyone who disagrees with him is an idiot, and if he can’t prove that, then it’s ok to just settle the issue by brute force. (In fact, much as I enjoy Lewis, I’m a little frightened whenever his Christian characters deal with opposition through a combination of stubbornness and violence.)
While I loved Moby Dick, I must say that Melville’s style often strikes me as being a little… fruity. I don’t mean homosexual, necessarily. More like sticking your head in a bag of banannas that are just a tad too ripe, and taking a deep whiff.
Is it just me, or is Melville a little reminiscent of the SNL skit in which two 18th-century dandies are running an antiques shop?
“O ho ho! You won’t be taking my Billy Budd!”
“Oh, but I will be taking your Billy Budd!”
“Oh, dearie me! Oh, you shall not! Not my Billy Budd!”
Stephen Fry’s novels. I love Stephen Fry: I love his autobiography, his journalism, I love him in Jeeves and Wooster, whenever I see him on TV he comes across as intelligent and kind and immensely likeable. Which is why it pained me so much to find that I hated his fiction: The Liar, The Hippopotamus, Making History, The Star’s Tennis Balls… didn’t like a single one. But I have such respect for him that I’m willing to assume it’s just that they’re too clever for me!
(Strange, it’s just occurred to me that I had a similar disappointment with Clive James. After reading and enjoying his autobiographies, volumes of TV criticism and literary essays, I was stunned to read his novel “Brrm, Brrrm” and discover I hated it. )
For the past couple of years, I’ve been hearing all about how Chuck Palahnuik is a total genius who’s doing all this incredibly creative and innovative stuff. I started reading Invisible Monsters, and I’m hating every page of it. Some of the concepts he throws in every once in a while are pretty amazing, but I can’t stomach anything else about this book. Am I reading an anomaly, or is all his stuff like this?
I’ve tried to read Tolkien before, but I’ve never lasted more than 80 pages or so. Bleah.
Also, I’ve been told I should like Jane Austen, but I don’t.
I would have liked it more if a third the book wasn’t about whales.
I mean, the stuff about the whaling industry/town/ship was facinating, and I rather enjoyed the bits about ahab and his obsession.
But really, I am not THAT interested in every minor little detail about whales. This is not an Alien Life form you are talking about that is relativly unknown, and thus, more deserving of hundreds of pages of explanation(though it was written in the 19th century, so maybe it was considered alien at the time) THIS IS A FRICKEN WHALE!
Or maybe it’s just that whales aren’t something I really find interesting.
Thank you. I kept wondering why people I know go nuts over his books (my roomie especially, he is dying to buy the latest one and will in the coming week as he gets paid). I personally don’t see the allure of him.
Not that you asked for my reasons (I blame the caffeine for making me pushy), but here you go.
Henry James, who should be stopped even if he IS dead. He may be a good writer, but that don’t make him a good read.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, because the Scarlet Letter etc. is such a big So What? and it’s time he was put away.
Anne Rice, she just bugs me and I get tired of people having kittens over her work and then looking at me like I have a second head growing out of my neck when I say I don’t like her writing.
That Harry Potter chick; I was all set to have fun and then found that so many other SF/Fantasy writers put her to shame inventiveness-wise (and they should have gotten movie deals and fame and fortune first).
John Grisham The Client was a waste of time and I’m still ashamed I read three more of his books before I could make myself stop reading him.
Stephen King because it’s pretty much just the same idea/book over and over these days. I suspect he can do better, so I’ve sent him to the corner to think about what he’s done, naughty boy.
Raoul Dahl because his stuff is so very creepy.
Hmmm, half of what I’ve just written is only remotely on-topic and the rest doesn’t make sense. If you’ll forgive me, I promise not to post again until the caffeine is out of my system.
About a year or so ago Harpers and the New York Times were gushing over a new translation of Issac Babel’s short stories, most of which were about his experiences in the Russian-Polish War of 1921. The book was good, but unfortunately for Babel, I’d recently read the Civil War Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Bierce had excelled Babel with the same theme, but his book was more obscure.
The same thing happened when Tom Wolfe came out the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” fanfared as giving us the panapoly of 1980’s New York City much as Thackery had done for Regency England in “Vanity Fair.” Not being a New Yorker, I would have been gullible to this claim exept that, again by coincidence, I had recently read “Table Money” by Jimmy Breslin, which narrowed the focus to the city’s sand hogs. This convinced me that Wolfe’s familiarity with New Yorkers is limited to the ones who have doormen on their Christmas gift lists. Some panapoly.
Maybe its not any author I don’t like, just the blatherskite book reviewers.
Jane Austin bores the living hell out of me. I like Victorian fiction - I enjoy Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes, and so on. So, going by genre, I should like Austin. But her characters are too self-absorbed to be likeable, and her prose seems to get all drawn out, so that if there ever was a plot, I’ve forgotten what it was by the time I get to the end of a paragraph.
I really wanted to like Tolkien, but I got about 40 pages into The Hobbit and decided it wasn’t very promising if the only thing I liked was how Gollum talked.