I must confess I don’t understand the “long sentences” complaint, although I hear it all the time. I pretty much hate everything that Hemingway wrote, and I think it’s because I dislike the overabundance of short, staccato (and dull) sentences.
Of the other writers mentioned, I like Hawthorne, love Pynchon, and hated Catcher in the Rye.
Can we just get an “amen” for the notion that the vast majority of the works we’re forced to read in school are absolute crap that seem designed to make kids learn to hate reading.
I’ve read for pleasure all my life but it’s in spite of, not because of, the stuff I read in English class.
I’m with Barney111. Hemingway is crap. I can’t stand the man. I read a short story by him and kept having to go back to try to figure out which character said what. War and Peace tops that list. Most of the book is a blur of pointless details that do nothing.
I had to read The Great Gatsby in college for a teacher who absolutely LOVED the damn thing and thought F. Scott Fitzgerald was a genius.
He kept going on and on about all the wonderful allegories and symbolism in the book. All I can remember is him rambling something about the stupid lights on the docks.
God, what a stupid book.
To Each His Own no not a book but a theory none the less.
Ditto Moby Dick. Great story. Horribly boring read.
Ulysses Supposedly a lesson in writing and storytelling. Keep battin’ it around and maybe regular guys like me will actually come to believe it in a few more hundred years. BORRING!!! Honestly, Dickens is wildly entertaining compared to this eccentric miasma of literary corpulence.
And the killer, Catch 22. The fable was so much more not worth the story. Should have been titled The Cat Chases It’s 22 Tales. Decent short story premise extended into a bad novel and the basis for a mediocre film adaptation.
forgive my ignorance, are we talking about on the road by keroauc? If so i loved it and most of his other books as well…although i must admit i couldn’t finish his book in dialect about the black boy from nc…as far as cat in the rye, it was ok…i started the sun… but couldn’t finish…
i believe people throw these great authors out just to seem intelligent…i’d settle for king, palaniuk, welsh and kerouac anyday…
“king”? Stephen King? Much as I enjoy many of his earlier works (and have all four of the Dark Tower series), it’s not great literature on any level, and King himself has said so. I’m now hoping it’s some other “king” you’re referring to.
I’m not convinced that hating a book because you were forced to read it in school is a convincing indictment of the book. I’ve gone back years later and reread some of the books I’d been forced to read in high school, and enjoyed them much more without the pressure and with a few more years’ perspective.
But I still dislike the novels of Thomas Hardy. Sorry.
Absolutely hated The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath.
I liked Of Mice and Men, though… I couldn’t believe it was written by the same guy as Grapes.
Ivanhoe.
Charles Dickens-He was the Danielle Steele of his day-cliched plots, characters with all the depth of cardboard cut outs. He is proof that any crap will be branded classic if it only survives longe enough.
Frankenstein- Utter crap. Huge plotholes. Subplots that are as convoluted, boring, and unnecessary as they are long. Things that are obvious to everyone except the characters (The creature just wants love!!! That woman was framed ! Don’t talk to the guy with the chainsaw and hockey mask!). How in Cecil’s name does Frankenstein spend all that time building the monster but only realize that it’s hideous(yellow mummy like skin that is stretched so tight it seems certain to split any instant, watery eyes, scars aplenty etc) when it wakes up? How is it that the creature is inteligent enough to teach itself to speak and read French, Latin, and German but never thinks of wearing clothes that hide its appearance?
BTW- The Frankenstein Diaries by HM Venables is a far better book. Wiithout going into spoilers-The creature is handsome when first brought to life. But, it is barely alive. Surgeries that stabilize and strengthen it give the creature its horrible appearance. After reading the book over and over, I’m still not sure whether the creature starts out evil and murderous or if it only becomes that way after long misstreatment.
OTOH-I love Moby Dick. There are definitely problems with this book. Some passages are written in script form rather than prose. Ishmael narrates the book. However, there are scenes he never witnnessed or was informed of. Still, I love it. Non Spoiler Example
All kinds of things happen to prevent Ahab and crew from hunting Moby. A storm turns their compasses. Truly huge numbers of sharks surround the boats. Are these the signs of compassionate god, attempting to save the Pequoud? Or, are these the work of a god terrified of Ahab and desperately trying to save himself? To me, the final chase reads a lot like the monster of a horror film trying to scare the heroes away before they destroy it.
—Of course, I’m not dissing anyone who hates this book; there is no reason to expect uniformity of views on aesthetic experience.—
While true, I’ve always wondered… if other people can like, even deeply love a book, and find great meaning and complexity in it and I hate it, that pretty much means that I am missing out on a potential source of enjoyment. So I certainly can’t see any reason to be PROUD of not liking something: it seems more like a personal failing.
That said, Wuthering Heights bites. It bites not because it’s a terrible story, but because it’s a love story in which I just can’t, for the life of me, figure out what the two lovers see in each other. They passionately long for each other… but why? What’s so great about either of them?
The love of Catherine and Heathcliff is based on the pure, transcendent knowledge that they’re not supporting characters, and so neither one will croak if the other gets up to use the john or something.
That’s the best theory I can come up with.
Oh, the evil that is the Brontes. And Jane Austen.
Tbhey make me shudder.
Now on the other hand, I am an unabashed Joycean. And read Ulysses cold the first time around. I even got my scared-to-death- of- flying butt on a plane and went to do nothing but study Joyce for two weeks straight.
There’s something undeniably silly and sexy about it for me. It’s also a thing of great beauty.
Take, for example the episode of the Sirens.
Two bar maids, Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, chatter behind the counter. One red-headed, one blonde- bronze by gold. The music comes in the form of the chapter itself, as the first paragraphs contain bits of the coming writing (and orchestra tuning up by playing snatches and finally performing the piece.)
(On good days, I even get two pages or so of Finnegans Wake read.)
AL
I just could not get through 100 Years of Solitude, though God knows I tried. Seemed to me that way too many characters had the same name to keep 'em all straight. I kept nodding off and losing the plot among the lovely, poetic, endless prose.
actually i was talking about stephen king…because it seems to me all the so-called great literature is hated…i’m sorry king doesn’t see his work as great, maybe he doesn’t want to pull his own chain…i’m an avid reader and if i prefer king over something written by homer, big fucking deal…maybe in a few hundred years kings work will be considered as a classic, until then i’ll remain one of the first to think so…and for the record i don’t think all of his work is great…furthermore who gives a shit what i think…
You make a good point Apos.
I tried and tried to read “The Divine Comedy”, but could never get into it. After fifteen years I was finally ready. It’s a good thing I waited. I learned a lot in that fifteen years, and I know I understood and appreciated the book more than I would have when I was younger.
Sorry folks, can’t think of a hated classic.
Just popped in to expound on Apos’s point.
Oh, and, a thousand pardons, I think “Moby Dick” is a truly great novel.
In music, Wagner, Tchaikovsy, Schubert, Brahms, Teleman, classical flutes, The Chieftains (perfect to the point of being like shiny plastic), James Galway, nearly everything written between 1650 and 1890, string quartets, opera, organ music, most of Mozart, most of Bach. I grew up near musicians and to hear another minute of that dreck is like listening to Britney Spears 20 hours a day for 6 weeks. Boring, overblown, self-referential. Blech. And the people who listen to it think they are so high-brow. They’re just conformist poseurs.
Gah…preview is my friend.
I assure you, my spelling isn’t always that bad.
More skin-crawlers:
Woman Warrior- Maxine Hong Kingston. Jeez, that sure isn’t the Fa Mulan story Disney told. Cripes! But a feminist classic, as fictionalized pseudo-biography as it is.
I hate just about all of Hemingway. And it beats me why anybody likes Chaucer, but I’m told they’re out there.
AL
I think you misunderestimate my objections. I think that most of the books I was forced to read in school were in fact terrible books. I realize they were hot shit when they were written, and due respect for that reason, but the state of the art has blown right past them.
To give you an analogy: “Pong” “Defender” and “Centipede” were top of the line video games at one time, but you don’t see kids forced to play them and learn to “appreciate” them. No one compares Zelda or Mechwarrior 4 unfavorably to them. Well, no one that I know of.
The long sentences, dull plots and outmoded social conventions that are part of most “classics” are like the crappy jagged graphics on early video games – evidence of their relative crudity and uselessness compared to the state of the art.
While I am not proud that I dislike these books, neither am I ashamed of disliking them – I feel I have ample reason to, over and above the nonconsensual manner in which I was forced to read them.
I love Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite musicians, PJ Harvey, did an album based on the short stories for that book. (Is This Desire? for anyone who cares)
I can’t stand Tolkien, and if I try to wade more than 50 pages into a Ray Bradbury book it makes me nauseous. I absolutely loathed Something Wicked This Way Comes. Each and every sentence he writes seems to be dripping with with the convinction that he’s a far great author than he actually is.
This may not count, but I remember having to read James and the Giant Peach in sixth grade, and finding it so annoying that I just gave up the points for the assignment. Ick ick ick.