I like to think that I can handle an author who may not be “accessible”… but everything I’ve ever read that Herman Melville wrote convinces me that he must have been being paid by the word.
I fought my way through Moby Dick, and realized that what we have here is a very good story that is almost drowned by the man’s sheer insistence on burying it in excess verbage…
I read War and Peace when I was 18, just because it’s such a “classic”. Hated nearly every page of it.
AnnaLivia: I agree. I was forced to read The Woman Warrior (“The Woman Wanker”, we called it) in my last year of high school. Utter dreck.
“Defender” is still a top-of-the-line video game!
Bach? You don’t like Bach? No, I mean… you dislike Bach? Is this even possible?
I have a bad habit of letting threads lie unread until they get quite large. Had I read this one earlier, I would’ve put my Catcher interpretation in this one, rather than starting a new thread about it.
I, too, couldn’t stand Huckleberry Finn. Dammit, Twain, you spell “going” “G-O-I-N-G”, not “G-A-W-A-Y-N-E-” or “G-O-I-N” or whatever local dialect you’re trying to spell out. And to do this to everybody - WTF???
Catcher in the Rye
I’ll join in on Catcher in the Rye, a book seen through the eyes of a whiney kid who somehow thinks he’s in a position to look down on everyone around him. Snore.
Ditto The Scum……err…The Sun Also Rises. It’s Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, sixty years earlier, without the sex, and just as aimless and meaningless.
There’s something to be said for plot in a novel, and one young person, or a bunch of people, drifting around aimlessly with no goal in mind, isn’t a plot.
The Great Gatsby has a plot, but whatever people like about it, I’m certainly missing. Another thing it’s up to an author to do is to get you to care about the characters. If Stephen R. Donaldson can get me to care about Thomas Covenant, who is one of the most unlikeable protagonists I’ve come across in a novel, then surely “great authors” like Hemingway and Fitzgerald can give us reasons to care about their characters.
Don’t go saying bad stuff about Catch-22 or One Hundred Years of Solitude. The former begins with the mild absurdities of military life, and is genuinely funny in the early going; it gradually draws you into the tragic absurdities, and the humor becomes mordant. By the time McWatt says “Oh well, what the hell” for the last time, you’re in a completely different sort of landsape than you were at the beginning, but Heller has gotten you there honestly.
As for Solitude, sheesh, that sucker had me completely pulled in by the second sentence, if not by the end of the memorable first sentence. (Last time I looked, that first sentence was somebody’s sigline here, but I don’t remember whose.)
I didn’t dislike Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, but I felt she lost an argument with herself: if there’s couples who really must be together by the end of the novel, then ‘sense’ is hardly everything.
And it wasn’t sufficiently enthralling writing to convince me to give her another chance. Especially with all that stuff about money at the beginning, which was never let go of throughout: the attitude is very much that, in order to be a “real” person, you mustn’t have to work for a living, and the novel’s all about ensuring a sufficient income to avoid that dire fate. I realize we’re reaching across time and economic class here, but I still found it to be a damned irritating theme.
I just saw As Good As It Gets last night! And you’re right, Scarlett is the perfect inspiration for that line. (Speaking of unlikeable protagonists. In long retrospect, how either Rhett, who actually has a few insights about the human condition, or Ashley, who’s introspective to near the point of immobilization, can go for decades without seeing that there’s absolutely nothing under Scarlett’s flashy surface to like or dislike, is beyond me. My assumption is that Margaret Mitchell wasn’t exactly deep, herself.)
GWTW is really a very famous (though reasonably well-written) trashy novel, and that’s all.
Terrifel, thank you for mentioning Wuthering Heights. I have tried to make myself finish it and like it, to the point of taking it with me on a cross-country flight. It’s not going to happen. I found myself disliking both lead characters and wishing they would just behave sensibly. I liked Jane Eyre and ond of these days I might finish The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but as far as I’m concerned, the Bronte sisters are a mixed bag.
I have to agree with jr8 who wrote
. That to me is wear the author crosses the line from art to pretension. Then again, I’m proud to be the good friend of an unabashed hack with about 70 published books to his credit.
CJ
That’s your problem, right there: reading a Ray Bradbury story longer than 50 pages.
I had the same reaction to Something Wicked, but I think the problem is not so much that Ray Bradbury is a poor writer; he is in fact one of my favorite authors. However, his brilliance lies in the ability to present small, startling ideas and images in a compelling, poetic fashion. You really ought to check out his short story collections like The October Country or S is for Space. Bradbury’s short stories are, quite simply, dynamite. His writing style does tend to become rather overwhelming in large doses, though, like an overly sugary pastry. You can only cram so much glittery pixie dust into a story before it starts to lose its credibility.
No offense intended, Ray. We love you, keep writing them.
It’s probably unfair, but my problem with Ray Bradbury was that he was about the only “SF” writer the academic types who decided on textbooks thought was worth including. Hell, when I was growing up, you coudlget the idea that SF consisted entirely of the short story “By the Waters of Babylon” and Ray Bradbury.
His short stories are good, but there are a lot of MUCH better SF writers than Bradbury, and have been since the 50s.
There are, indeed, plenty of science-fiction writers better than Ray Bradbury. However, Bradbury doesn’t write science fiction. He’s a fantasy writer.
Granted, he uses a lot of sci-fi elements in his stories, so if that’s your definition of sci-fi writing then, yes, he fares poorly by comparison. Even in the 50’s, though, everyone knew that the actual Mars was nothing like Bradbury’s description of Mars. Bradbury knew it too. He was using it as a latter-day Desolate Wasteland metaphor, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” That’s probably why Literature texts favored him. That, and the fact that Bradbury’s best stuff is in the form of short stories. He’s very anthology-friendly.
I agree. But Bradbury was what you got in textbooks when it came to SF at one time. I understand things have improved since then.
Ballet. What could possibly be more tedious than ballet?
The Nutcracker, that’s what – boring even by ballet’s usual undiscerning standards. Oh, it’s a great little hobby for young girls and boys, but to pump a million bucks into some “ballet company” that puts patrons to sleep in their tuxedos and furs clutching the $200 tickets in their pocket while dreaming of the wine bar at intermission when they will pretend to enjoy the whole dreary affair and chat to other ennui-stricken acquaintances about “oh this version is even better than last year’s by the blah blah blah company”, when couples are all whispering to each other “can we leave now and not be noticed?” Not to mention the anorexia and deformed ligaments that renders dancers neurotic and unable to move without a walker after age 38. Meanwhile parents are worried about their kids taking E and dancing till dawn while happily sending little Judy off to ballet school where she thinks she’s going to become a ballet star, which is an oxymoron and a cruel lie. And then put this stuff on TV just to slow down my channel-flipping? Gimme a break.
FRANKENSTEIN is indeed garbage. Of the three major 19th century horror novels–FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, and DR.JEKYLL AND MR HYDE–it’s the worst written. Its massive influence on popular culture is mainly due to the brilliance of its central idea and, of course, the movies. But the idea was lifted from a late-night opium-addled conversation with Byron and the movies are only loosely based on the book which is a good thing since it’s nearly unreadable. Unlike Stoker or Stevenson, Shelley didn’t have much talent as a writer. First-time readers are always amused to find that she has him talking like a philosophy professor rather than mumbling “Love dead, hate living…”
My votes for crap books that should be dropped from the canon go to LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe and LORD OF THE FLIES by William Goldman.
That’s interesting. I checked into this thread so I too could profess my great hatred of Whitman’s works; his poems ooze pompousness to an extreme degree even for a poet of his era. <ducks> However, the one poem you hate is the only thing I’ve ever read by him that I was indifferent to rather than appalled by. I guess by default it makes it my “favorite” of his poems.
Read Babylon once, around '91. Lemeesee-
“I am John, son of John and my heart is big as I go to the place of the gods!”
And I thought ‘This is strong magic.’
I prayed to the great god Ashing.
Re Bradbury-
He’s far from my favorite sf or fantasy writer. However, I find his descriptions of things interesting and worth exposing kids to.
Poetic, distinctive, using all the senses, if only I could remember a good example for this post.
Re-Ballet
I hate it for the same reasons I hate opera. All this art and artifice and I never see, hear or feel (with the exception of one aria from Paliaci [Speliing? My gut tells me Pagliaci]) any emotion being conveyed. Faust selling his soul to Mephistopheles or the Nutcracker killing the Rat Queen should be impassioned moments. Instead, vocal pyrotechnics and grande secondes that only serve as showcases for the writer and performers.
Shakespeare-
That is why I love Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter, Latinate words contrasted against Teutonic words, layers of meaning (including quite a few dirty jokes- Hamlet “I meant my head in thy lap. Thought you I meant count…ry matters?” Henry the Fifth “My horse is my mistress.”) but all filled with the proper emotion. Macbeth’s many ‘I know I’m screwed but I’m going out like a man’ speeches are fine examples. Hmm, so my wife is dead, the weird sisters have fed me half truths and made me their puppet, I’be done horrible things, all the bloodshed has gained me nothing and I’m about to die.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day til the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lit fools the way to dusty death Out! Out, brief candle! Life is but a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. Tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury- signifying nothing."Twain can basically go fuck his cold, dead self for ever having read Huckleberry Finn (the only book I’ve physcically destroyed upon finishing it).
Same goes for the book with the only protagonist I hate more than Huck - Catcher in the Rye.
I was indifferent to Gatsby, and really do not see why such a big fuss is made about it.
However, I did enjoy Pride and Prejudice and the Shakespeare I read in high school a great deal, so I guess the system isn’t completely flawed.
… no, wait, I just remembered having to read The Scarlet Letter and Their Eyes Were Watching God. The system is, in fact, completely flawed
Frankenstein
At last, a hated “classic”.
Hackneyed, cliche filled, stupid novel.
I began to skim about halfway through.
Found nothing, absolutely nothing, to like about Herr Frankenstein. At every dramatic turn of the plot he’d become unaccountably agitated, or faint, or some such crap.
I liked the monster much better.
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that gave me half as much desire to give the protagonist a good punch in the mouth.
Of course I know the monster could also be viewed as the protagonist, but you know what I mean.
I sure was glad to see that someone else also disliked “Beloved”.
I also hated all Ayn Rand’s books and now they’re listed as classics in our local library.
Although they are too new to be considered classics the Philip Pullman “Dark Materials” trilogy - “The Golden Compass” and its sequels - well, they won lots of awards but I thought they were horrid, horrible, an awful joke. Yuck. Just unreadable. Sorry, I get upset thinking about the good reviews those books got.
Could I just add Perelandra by CS Lewis. Pages and pages of boring, boring and more boring.
I agree wholeheartedly with those who mentioned The Great Gatsby. I find the plot and characters to be utterly vile. It makes me feel profoundly depressed every time I read it. Why should it be considered an accomplishment to write such a book? It’s like Fitzgerald took everything awful about life and wrote a book about how they always triumph over the few good things in life. The bastards keep making me study it in my English classes (11th grade, 12th grade, and now in college).
But at least it’s readable (in fact, it’s one of the best-written books I’ve ever read). Beloved was the only book I was ever assigned to read that I just wasn’t able to finish. I broke down about halfway through and bought the Cliff Notes.