I find Jane Austin’s books much much easier to get through if I’ve seen the movie first. Characters and motivations are already laid out for you, so you can spend more time appreciating the language.
I stopped 3/5 the way through Catch-22. Couldn’t fucking stand it, it was like homework! :mad:
I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow three or four times. I’ve read Moby Dick. I love Finnegans Wake (and Ulysses). I managed to get all the way through the Gormenghast books (and promptly sold them).
But I could barely make a dent in Tristram Shandy.
That would be Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I loved them in high school… re-read them last year and they didn’t hold up well at all.
Perhaps my favorite book of all time!
If you don’t mind, are you male or female? It’s definitely a guy’s book. My wife couldn’t get more than 30 or 40 pages.
Yeah - that one to! Just couldn’t muster any sympathy for a rapist - even though he figured it was all a fantasy. Just plain disgusting.
I like my heroes at least a little bit heroic.
Paul Fussell made Rainbow sound very interesting in The Great War and Modern Memory (which is a great book) so I gave it a whack. I made it about halfway down the first page. It was completely impenetrable.
But then again, my reading in my formative years was 50s sci-fi, where the premium was on clarity and brevity… 
I’m a female, but I only attempted to read it due to the urging of several female friends…so I don’t know what to tell you. 
It’s rare I’ll find a book that I won’t read entirely. I lasted about two pages of The Catcher In The Rye. It annoyed the fuck out of me.
I’ll give it another try someday. Maybe I’ll just start at Rivendell and go from there.
Heh, it certainly gets faster. I suspect one has to love the purple prose to really enjoy Gormenghast, but Steerpike is the real protaganist of the story - and his various plots become more frenzied and murderous in the second volume.
For me, it’s a hoot - I love every moldering, decadent detail. Who could not like stories like the duel of cleaver and sword between the hideously bloated head cook Swelter and the stick-dry chief butler Flay in the deserted Hall of Spiders? Or the taunting of Flay by Swelter that precedes the duel … the deranged cook sneaking up to place a single decorated cup-cake each night ever closer to Flay’s sleeping head?
Another favorite detail is the truly perverse nursery rhymes the Duke’s daughter Fuschia keeps in her attic - the one about the cake and the knife being particularly Freudian.
Yep. Reading it (and Joyce) were too much like work and I work hard enough doing my job. For me, reading is an escapist experience and I don’t enjoy it near as much if I have to keep stopping and saying “OK - I don’t get this reference at all” or “I don’t speak Italian so this means nothing to me.”
I can certainly appreciate the craft involved, the sheer labor and intelligence it took to write them, but they don’t connect with me and I give up on them.
This is what I came to mention. I have made more than a dent, but I doubt I will ever finish it.
Of course, it doesn’t matter that he thought it was fantasy! Because, yeah, the first thing I do when I think I’m in a fantasy is rape a perfectly nice young girl. :rolleyes: It was unbelievable and it didn’t sell, in my mind. To me it shows he was either an incorrigible pyschopath or just…you know, the premise was idiotic.
And yes, I like my heros to have some redeeming qualities. Lord Foul’s Bane set him up to be as much of a bastard and arrogant shit as possible. I get mad just thinking about the book. grrr…
So I don’t just continue with the hijack, I’ll add: The World According to Garp. That whole book was just one massive WTF?
ETA: never mind, I did slog through Garp eventually.
It is one of my life goals to find Thomas Wolfe’s grave and kick it very hard. My friend who lives in Asheville refuses to tell me where it is.
My list:
*Heart of Darkness: I can see why so many African writers were inspired to refute this novel: it suck-diddly-ucks. So very boring and so very pointless.
*Lord Foul’s Bane: I have never read such a misanthropic fantasy novel as this. I do, however, like Fantasy Bedtime Hour, which manages to make the story halfway interesting.
*Vladimir Nabokov: I’ve tried to read a couple of his novels, but I keep getting bogged down in his language. I’d like to find a story in there somewhere, but there are too many words in the way. I’m going to try Lolita and then I’m done with him.
FWIW, there’s a very good hamburger recipe in Grapes of Wrath. I made a burger according to the description of the one in a roadside diner and it was wonderful.
LOL.
Funny how both Thomas Wolfes have shown up in this thread.
Lolita - many people whose opinions I respect love it, but I’ve tried it three or four times and it bores me to tears.
Anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Thomas Hardy.
A Confederacy of Dunces - tried to slog through it, found it terminally boring and unfunny (and not terribly well-written).
OTOH, I actually enjoyed Heart of Darkness, Gravity’s Rainbow (once you make it past the first 300 pages, it clicks somehow), and Ulysses (nobody’s mentioned this one, but most people seem to find it impenetrable).
I’ll probably be flogged for this but here goes:
Well, I’m baffled. Did you not find it funny at all? There were times, especially in the first 100 pages, that I literally had to set the book down and just laugh for a minute. Then, later in the book, it gets serious enough to save it from burning out.
I don’t enjoy reading online either. But when it’s a choice between reading online or working? Well, I’ll take the Dope, really, but reading novels comes in a long way before working.
Emma. I have come to the grim conclusion that Austen is a one-hit wonder. Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite novels, but I have never been able to finish anything else she wrote. And a second for Confederacy of Dunces. A guy who worked for me raved about it. It was dull and I just gave up.
No kidding - turn that damn screw a bit faster there, Henry!
Loved Moby Dick, and slogged all the way thru Tristam Shandy, which is - well, odd. All that stuff about fortifications. :puzzled:
I never even tried with Joyce, or War and Peace. Not that much of a masochist, I guess.
I tried to read The Bourne Supremacy. I’ve seen the movie, and I couldn’t make it to the hundredth page. It is supposed to be escapist - I don’t want to have to take notes.
Regards,
Shodan