A bound-together copy of all three Gormenghast books (Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone) is right here on my desk. It’s been there for years. It’s serving as a monitor stand.
I tried. I really did.
The transition I am (was?) reading is by Constance Garnett. I have no idea if it is a good translation or not. It’s a version I downloaded from some free e-book site.
But I do have a copy of the Maude translation of “War and Peace” that GreenWyvern suggested, so I’m going to take a crack at that one once I get through a few more books in my “dead tree” pile.
So you found the book uplifting? 
It’s the base for all his views.
A good friend of mine loves the Gormenghast books and got me to try them. I think I got through one and half. They do have a certain … something. And they do portray a dull, suffocating, ancient, conservative society rather well. Rather too well, I think.
Oh, I like reading Shakespeare too. His plays work better than most as written texts - though they’re not the only ones, of course.
But for a lot of people, especially young people, who find them difficult at school, seeing them performed (even if it’s in a movie version - especially the ones that are closer to the known texts) can make a big difference. For some people just “thee” and “thou” create stumbling blocks, but in performance they naturally comes across as “you,” since you can see them being used that way.
Three major but many others. Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn.
Rosie, Goldberry, etc.
Arwen is certainly not a major character in the books.
Even “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”?
A lot of times we read stuff like this in school because the book has some sort of cultural, historical, or literary significance not because we’re expected to like it. Steinbeck is a pretty important author in American literary history who won the Nobel Prize in literature because his work was so influential worldwide. The Grapes of Wrath was a best seller though it remained controversial for man years being burned or banned in many places throughout the US. But I think the story is still relevant today. Put me down as someone who quite likes the book.
None of them is extremely faithful to the original epic, but I have a soft spot for the Hallmark version starring Armand Assante
The 1954 Ulysses with a young Kirk Douglas and a young Anthony Quinn isn’t that bad, either
I wouldn’t call any of them major. Sure Eowyn kills the one dude but that doesn’t make her a major character.
Also - it’s been years - but do any of them interact?
Yes, there are several scenes where Arwen interacts with her father and Aragorn. And several scenes with Eowyn interacting, and Galadrial interacts with just about the whole party. You have not read the books?
I have, years ago. I meant women with each other.
They are like nations apart geographically. Why is that important?
I was just curious how isolated the women are from each other.
The essential structure of the book is that a group (the Fellowship of the Ring) travel a great distance and stuff happens along the way. As the female characters mentioned are each from very different locations, and the Fellowship of the Ring is all male, the answer is no.
I have read the books. It was a long time ago so I didn’t remember if any of the females ever met each other.
Same. There’s not much of a story when it’s basically just “Here’s some happy people. Here’s some more happy people. Here’s some even happier people.” We get it - everyone in Heaven is happy. But apart from some of the weird allegorical shit thrown in at the end, Purgatorio is pretty good.
SO MUCH GORE. I saw a staging that caused an audience member to run off and puke due to the gore. The interval was spent literally mopping the stage. It was awesome.
Reminds me of the “Shakespeare” scene from Dead Poets’ Society. Shakespeare is pretty fucking amazing but one should come to that conclusion on one’s own, not merely accept it because your teacher said so.
A reminder that “I liked/didn’t like X” is not the same axis as “X is good/bad”. There are things I acknowledge that are of high merit that don’t appeal to me at all, and some things that are absolute crap that I love.
I just took the eBook (“Infinite Jest”) out from the library due to this thread and hearing someone point it out in the airport bookstore. It felt as if fate were elbowing me toward it. I’m only about fifty pages in, but so far it’s fun and I’m not getting the sentence wrangling vibe with obscure vocabulary those reviews are giving me. Then again, I have read a couple Nabokov books in the last month, and when it comes to exhuming every word of the English language for its meaning and sonority, Nabokov is up there with the best of them. Reading Pale Fire as an eBook was tremendously helpful, with the ability to look up words instantly and also as the book requires a lot of cross-referencing. Anyhow, looking forward to reading the rest of Infinite Jest and hope it doesn’t take a turn for the dull and intractable.
I will also agree with the LOTR readers. Lord knows I tried to read that massive tome and fought my way to about the halfway point before just giving up. Fantasy fiction was never my bag, but I was told this transcends the genre, And to be fair, it probably does, but the writing style just didn’t do it for me. It was mildly interesting as an intellectual exercise — I enjoyed the made up languages and lore and general world building. I just didn’t care about it.