Honestly, I’m not sure I remember there being any female characters in Foundation (the first book, that is, as opposed to any of the sequels or the series as a whole). But while all of the characters were men, it was only relevant that they were men in the sense that they were the sort of person who’d hold political office, or run a trading company, or the like. At the time it was written, the default assumption was that all such people would be men, and so for that audience, it would have significantly changed the book for half of them to be women. But in a modern adaptation, for an audience who expects both genders in those sorts of roles, you could seamlessly change character genders.
Which is what Apple TV did.
And RLS doesn’t screw around in this book. Unlike a lot of other classics, Stevenson moves the plot along at a pretty brisk pace and doesn’t take us on many tangents. Since it was written for children, I can only assume the tight pacing was for their benefit.
Say what?! Have you not seen the Jim Cavaziel/Guy Pearce version?
Another J. Eyre fan here. I came in to say this one… I also will defend Watership Down as a capital C Classic. Battle Cry (Uris) and The Good Earth are also favorites and I would put A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in that category also.
That’s the one I specifically had in mind when I said it hadn’t been done justice. That movie was great popcorn and soda–but the novel is so much more than that. If the novel was Moby Dick, that movie was Elmer Fudd singing “Kill de White Whale.”
I understand and kind of agree, but it’s worth remembering that many (though not all) of the classics were originally something that lots of people read for fun.
If standing on the shoulders of giants were to be used about Russian literature then the giant would be Nokolai Gogol. Born Ukrainian, he turned into a lover of Tsarist Russia and the Orthodox church. His views on Jews were problematic anti-semitic, to say the least, not unusual in the early 19th century. For all his faults as a human, as seen from our perspective, he really was an amazing writer.
Forget everything you know about classic Russian literature: 3" thick books, with a two page cast of characters that you constantly have to check back on to remember who is who. Gogol is surprisingly easy to read, very funny for fans of the absurd. Almost in the same vein as Monty Python or Doulas Adams. The Nose is about a man who wakes up one day to find that his nose has taken its leave, to wander around and make a life of its own.
If you can find a collection of his St. Petersburg short stories (which should include The Coat), it’s certainly worth your time.
Watership Down is definitely a beautifully written book and gripping adventure story. Its reputation is somewhat tarnished nowadays by its distortion of its purported “naturalism” about rabbit behavior in the service of a typically sexist perspective, although its fantasy elements are brilliantly imagined. As Ursula K. Le Guin remarked in her essay collection Cheek by Jowl,
I am more willing than I was at one point to give Adams a partial pass on his male-supremacist fake-rabbit pseudozoology, because I think any late 20th-century fiction writer trying to present an imaginative fantasy of rabbits being brave, strong, determined, or with similar conventionally “masculine” virtues would have a hell of a tough row to hoe.
“Rabbit” has long been shorthand for a timid, weak, cowardly man, especially one under the thumb of a domineering woman. I bet that on some, possibly subconscious, level, Adams simply took it for granted that it would be impossible to make actual male rabbits seem to his readers like heroic or even sympathetic characters if he portrayed them in a matriarchal, or even significantly gender-egalitarian, social structure.
Still a gorgeous book, though, and I think “classic” is a valid description. I would admittedly like to see this fictional Lapine universe through a less patriarchal lens, but Adams’ own sequel Tales from Watership Down didn’t really manage to achieve it, and I don’t think any other author could believably capture his vision of that world.
That is really fascinating! I’d be lying if I said it didn’t change my view of the book, but I thank you for it.
No problem! This episode of Kimstu Ruins Everything has been brought to you by the endless task of compromise with grim reality. 
Is “Dracula” considered a classic? Because I’ve recently read it, and it was good.
(Counterpoint: Is “Brave New World” considered a classic? Because I’ve recently read that one, too, and it sucked to high heaven.)
War and Peace has one flaw. Every now and then, Tolstoy will interrupt the narrative, and spend a couple of chapters pontificating on history, or politics, or economics, or religion, or the Meaning of Life. Then he will resume the narrative of Pierre and Andrei and Natasha, which is a fun soap opera.
The “philosophy” chapters are a good cure for insomnia. But if you can force yourself through those, the “narrative” chapters are marvelous.
Dante’s Inferno is good, provided you get an edition with lots of footnotes, to explain who are all these popes and politicians he keeps ranting about. I like John Ciardi’s translation. I would recommend reading the entire Divine Comedy, but most people only want Inferno.
I read Moby Dick in high school, and found it utterly boring. A few years later, I bought a copy on a whim, and read it cover-to-cover. If you are reading it at your own pace, without a school deadline breathing down the back of your neck, it is a fun book.
Ha! Watership Down was the last bedtime read-aloud I did with my older daughter (she turned 13, and had outgrown the lovely tradition). I was so excited to read the book with her, and had forgotten how extreme the sexism was. (“Oh, I hadn’t forgotten,” my wife said, which is a pretty good example of how privilege works). We had a lot of conversations about it, and about how the book could be beautiful and also really problematic, similar to the conversations we had about Lord of the Rings.
I excused Adams somewhat because he was extrapolating from real-world rabbit dynamics. Le Guin once again schools me, and I’ll have to let my daughter know that Adams doesn’t even have that excuse.
Lolita, for me, belongs on that list, but six is a short list, so who knows. Infinite Jest, definitely, and it’s on there. Moby Dick – I dunno. I did it – just can’t drudge through Melville’s excruciatingly detailed prose.
This is one that did influence my thinking. It’s hard to see joining an army voluntarily after reading that. (Do war movies have the same effect?)
I’d put The Good Earth in a somewhat similar category of influencing thought.
Extremely different, but I wonder if Trollope’s Barsetshire novels pushed my thinking in a bit of a conservative direction (although Trollope was left of center by standards of his day and time).
Some books I very much liked, but didn’t change me. Ivanhoe ranks high there.
I need to read Vanity Fair.
Asimov published the first Foundation story in 1942, when he was 22. It was the same year he met his wife. He claimed that prior to that he had very, very little experience with women: not just romantically, but in any context, and I think that continued even after he married. Its painfully obvious in his writing that he knew nothingabout women but didn’t feel comfortable just writing them as people. Instead, he didn’t write them at all.
I was shocked by how boring and poorly written Dracula was.
That wasn’t “the default assumption”: that was Asimov’s assumption. He was writing about a time far in the future, and if you think that no American in the 1940s could conceive of a world in which women held office, I’m afraid you’ve studied a different history from what I’ve studied.
But in any case, it goes beyond that. He didn’t just assume that men would hold all positions of formal authority in the future: he also assumed that these were the only folks who would influence society. In 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt had been first lady for almost a decade; no American could claim that women wouldn’t have a role in the halls of power. Asimov could easily have posited a patriarchal future and still included powerful women. He didn’t, and his book doesn’t hold up well.
There’s no real reason to defend it.
I did not enjoy War and Peace at all. It did not live up to its reputation in the least.