"Great Books" that no one seems to like...what are we missing?

[GreenWyvern]

@Son_of_a_Rich

I think maybe the better translators should be given much more credit. You hear about the poetry of some Russian writer, but it’s moot if it’s being translated by some educated piece of wood.

Yes, that’s why the the Maude translation is better. Louise and Aylmer Maude lived in Russia for a number of years before WWI, when the old regime still existed. They spoke perfect and fluent Russian, and personally knew Tolstoy well. They were able to discuss their translation with Tolstoy himself.

Modern translations tend to focus too much on getting the exact meaning of each individual word and expression correct, and end up with a stilted translation that doesn’t flow easily. They focus on the details and don’t see the wood for trees.

[Lumpy]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I decided that the whale was a metaphor for the book’s plot, which remained mostly submerged beneath the calm waters of the book’s chapters, and I was Captain Ahab, hunting that plot desperately and in vain.

Unlike the Captain, I abandoned the hunt before it destroyed me.

That’s funny enough to stand beside Mark Twain’s review of “Last of the Mohicans”.

[Gyrate]

@GreysonCarlisle

Exactly what I came in to say. Holden has got to be the whiniest little fuck in all of Great American Literature.

I know I phrased it in comic terms but I did actually intend to highlight what was great about the book: that it changes as you change. And that is the point of it.

[Kelby]

@XOldiesJock

Hemingway generally, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, in particular. Dull, dull, dull.

Steinbeck, however, is a different story. I enjoy just about everything he ever wrote, including the previously-mentioned Grapes of Wrath,

To each his own, I guess.

For Whom the Bell Tolls was my introduction into Hemmingway’s work, one of the “classics” I wanted to enjoy once I had more time to read in retirement.

I didn’t enjoy it, hell I didn’t finish it. Dialogue was clunky and the plot way too slow moving. I think it was more a reliving of Hemmingway’s romanticized experience in the war.

[Ponch8]

Here’s what I wrote in a similar thread a couple of years ago:

@Ponch8

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The narrator does nothing but hitchhike across the country, meet with his friends, have drinks at bars, etc. In spite of it all, there was nothing remotely relatable about the characters, and I gave up after 40 pages.

[BigT]

In school I remember being very disappointed by The Great Gatsby in school, but it had nothing to do with not liking the characters. It was more that it felt like the plot never got going. Only toward the end does it feel like there might be something going, but then the big climax happens off-page, because of how the narrative is presented. So it felt like a huge anti-climax.

I do remember thinking that A Scarlet Letter had an annoying narration style, but it didn’t bug me nearly as much. The main book I remember liking is Flowers for Algernon, one of the rare downer ending stories that I really got into.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@BigT

The main book I remember liking is Flowers for Algernon , one of the rare downer ending stories that I really got into.

I remember reading this in middle school (just on a lark, not for class). About halfway through I turned to the back page to see how many pages long it was, and my eye landed on the final sentence, and I was brutally introduced to the concept of spoilers.

Never read another page of that book.

[Ponch8]

@BigT

I do remember thinking that A Scarlet Letter had an annoying narration style, but it didn’t bug me nearly as much.

I thought Scarlet Letter was OK when I read it in high school, but then when I reread it when I was about 30, I found it so boring and pointless. Usually these things work the other way around.

[panache45]

@Crane

Silas Marner - what am I missing? What’s in there of value that I should have mined?

Not a goddamn thing. The only thing resulting from making that book mandatory reading is to turn kids off from reading.

[Dewey_Finn]

I’ve never read Silas Marner, but the plot was adapted by Steve Martin for a decent film called A Simple Twist of Fate. Similarly, I’ve enjoyed film adaptations of many other novels I could never get through or never even tried to read.

[tofor]

@Crane

Silas Marner - What I am missing is what was I supposed to learn by reading the book?

Isn’t it a story about love changing a heart? A person alone is broken, but by sharing his heart Silas becomes a whole man? And theft is deadly.

It’s been a long time since I read it. I thought it was ok.

[Springtime_for_Spacers]

@GreenWyvern

That’s the thing with Tolstoy’s War and Peace . Someone once said that when you get to a certain point in the book, it’s as though great bells begin to sound, and solemn music begins to swell up.

Yup that was my experience. I slogged through it for a while then one night looked up from the book to realise I had just read two hundred pages in a sitting. It’s a proper page turner is what it is.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@tofor

@Crane

Silas Marner - What I am missing is what was I supposed to learn by reading the book?

Isn’t it a story about love changing a heart? A person alone is broken, but by sharing his heart Silas becomes a whole man? And theft is deadly.

It’s been a long time since I read it. I thought it was ok.

Yeah, pretty much. I read it as an adult and thought it was a fairly typical Victorian novel, and I didn’t have particularly strong feelings about it pro or con. George Eliot has written better books (Middlemarch, The Mill On the Floss) but they’re significantly longer.

[pulykamell]

Oh good Lord, yes to On the Road. Perhaps I should try re-reading it, but I couldn’t get past maybe twenty pages of that book before I decided it was excruciatingly dull. And this was at a point in my life when I thought I could relate to the characters, the wanderlust, and the general ethos – hell, I was doing a lot of wandering and traveling myself at the time – went coast to coast on a Greyhound, even. This is the book for me! Nope. Just did not resonate with me in the least. I wish I could remember specifically what I didn’t like – all I remember is that I had no interest in this guy and his travels nor his storytelling ability.

[asterion]

@Gyrate

I know I phrased it in comic terms but I did actually intend to highlight what was great about the book: that it changes as you change. And that is the point of it.

I couldn’t stand Holden as a teenager. I thought he was a pretentious whiner and any idea that fifty years after publishing I was supposed to somehow relate to this guy wandering around New York and getting drunk ridiculous. The only that that’s changed is that I have more sympathy for him now as someone who was somewhat let down by the people around him. Dude should have gotten a guitar and written crappy prog rock songs about isolation and abandonment or something.

[susan]

Search for a thread in which someone suggested reading Moby Dick as Ishmael’s blog.

[Maserschmidt]

I come here not to bury Ulysses, but to praise it. [lest this thread turn into just another catalog of books we don’t like]

Let’s start with the notion that nobody likes it - on Goodreads, it has 42,852 five-star ratings, 30,019 four-star ratings, and an overall rating of 3.73…that rating is “okay”, but it’s clear that many people, like me, like it quite a bit.

As to why, I am only going to describe what I like about it, not speak in absolutes…people like different things in their reading.

What I like, then, is that for me Ulysses is a text rich in empathy, ambiguity, and technical complexity. I’ve read it maybe half a dozen times, and each time I come away with a different feeling for some of the characters, and I’ve also noticed more of the connections Joyce made in the text - Joyce was a great one for planting a seed in one chapter that gets echoed in a thematically-appropriate way in another chapter. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s just a hint of phrase that recurs as (for example) Bloom waits for the 4 o’clock hour when, he rightly suspects, his wife Molly will engage in a dalliance, or (for another example) how the memory of his dead son lingers at the edges as he tries to usher the young man Stephen Dedalus through some dicey situations.

Joyce also does a lot of showing-off in his text choices - some of which I enjoy greatly, some of which I can take or leave - and in his references to philosophers, literature, science, etc, which usually shine a light on something.

The book is a lot of work, and I enjoy that work, but I’ve never recommended it to anyone for that reason.

[susan]

Yes, but this chapter foreshadows Ahab’s fate.

[Tusculan]

I’m surprised at the lack of appreciation for For Whom the Bell Tolls. I read it in high school and it touched me profoundly as a description of a yearning love, tragically cut short. Possibly I happened to be in the right frame of mind when I read it.

The problem with many classics may simply be that we are not its intended audience. In the past the reading public had few other amusements to stave off boredom, and may have been glad to read long stories with endless descriptions, as there were no movies or TV-series to show a different world. Now we pick up a book and expect it to dazzle us in the way a Marvel movie may do with CGI and pretty images.

When I’m not in the mood to read, I also find it hard to appreciate novels. But I have also realized that books have advantages over movies and series: the joy of a beautiful phrased thought, the intimate description of the character’s inner thoughts in much more detail than visual media can ever offer. Some of the classics excel in those areas, and if you like those features, you may indeed enjoy them. Ulysses is a case in point: I found it an effort to work through, but in the end it was rewarding in a way that no movie ever managed.

Edit: after posting just saw the post of Messerschmitt who makes this point far more eloquently.

[Martin_Hyde]

I’ll echo not liking Grapes of Wrath, I also didn’t like East of Eden, but I did like Of Mice and Men–so I can’t say I dislike Steinbeck, but his longer novels didn’t resonate with me.

I like pretty much all of Dickens stuff, so I enjoyed Great Expectations (that I was required to read) and enjoyed a number of his other books I read in High School for my own pleasure.

I didn’t like Scarlet Letter much either, but I kind of respected what it was trying to do, it’s a dig at the puritanical and hypocrisy of religious leadership. Just not that entertaining for me.

I liked all of Twain’s stuff we had to read in school.

I loved Lord of the Rings, but it’s such a slow paced and heavily descriptive book that I’m never very surprised when someone tries to read it and dislikes it, that style of writing just isn’t for everyone. Despite really liking fantasy I never could get into the Narnia books, I actually never even finished the first of those books and I tried a few times, just never crossed the “entertaining” threshold for me.

I’ve always been kinda “Mehhh” on the “coming of age” style books like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace (I liked Peace > Catcher, but both in my opinion are dramatically overrated.)