That literally is a foreign language. Middle English.
Shakespeare is Early Modern English, though some of the words and phrasings can be hard to parse for today’s readers.
Doesn’t anyone like the love child of Moby Dick and Silas Marner - Silas Mariner?
I read and enjoyed Ulysses, though it was quite a slog. I’m not surprised by those who can’t get through it though. I don’t think I have enough years left to try Finnegans Wake.
I read The Brothers Karamazov in high school. An excellent Grand Inquisitor scene surrounded by a story about people whose names I could never get straight. Dmitri Dmitrivitch. Ivan Ivanovich.
I got through On the Road as an audiobook on a drive from the Bay Area to Anaheim and back. It was cool I went by some of the cities mentioned when he was staying in SoCal. I might have liked it less if I has something better to do.
I read On the Road as an audiobook, too.
You can talk about how it’s about freedom and life on the open road and the way the nation was changing in those years, but I found the characters to be selfish thoughtless boors, myself. I would’ve hated to have been the girlfriend of any of them.
I guess it depends on the translation. Oddly I REALLY liked Niven & Pournelles take on it in Inferno.
Oh yes, some are great- some- not so great. Henry V, Caesar, A Midsummer- all great.
I liked Heart of Darkness, but could never get more than partway through Ulysses.
It’s shorter than other great books, and melodramatic, which I like, but I probably like it more because it resonates with the time I lived ‘off grid’ as a child.
I disagree. An epic poem! Starring Satan! Hard to go wrong with that raw material. The ending is lame, though:
The fallen angels get punished by the Almighty and transmogrified into serpents for a while.
FWIW I did not hate all books I was made to read in high school. Far from it. I liked all of the ones you listed (although I struggled with “The Odyssey” but I forget which translation I read). But I like the others you mentioned a lot.
I also liked “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Catch-22”, “The Catcher in the Rye”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Flowers for Algernon”. I know they made me read more in high school but those are the ones that leap to mind 35 years later.
ETA: I liked “To Kill a Mockingbird” also.
I’m with w-a-m. I liked nearly everything I had to read in HS. I’ve reread Lord of the Flies several times. I also like Hemingway’s Old Man & the Sea and Farewell to Arms. Loved Grapes of Wrath. Loved the beatnik books I read. Also liked the Scarlett Letter. Obligatory for w-a-m: Loved HSTs books and assorted writings.
That said, there are some books I haven’t tackled and cannot comment on like Moby Dick and Don Quixote. I’m getting to the age where I have to pick and choose what I want to read. When I was young I had the patience and time to devour anything and everything. Now, I have to choose. Same with music. Do I want to listen to something new or listen to one of the thousands of albums I’ve loved that I may never listen to again (I tend to go with new at this point). Sad that I think this way and I’m barely over 50.
I loved “Old Man & the Sea”.
I remember I wrote a paper on it. One of the better papers I ever wrote as a student.
Surprised I forgot to list that. Thanks for the reminder!
I got into a huge argument over Anna Karenina with one of my college professors, who insisted it was “a work of art” and I didn’t appreciate it because I had “no passion” in my life.
I hate the book. I have no sympathy for any of the characters in it, especially the drug-addict adulteress who abandons her child to shack up with her asshole lover, and I don’t care about the whiner who confesses everything to his fiancee and wants to improve the lives of his serfs. I was quite pleased at the way it ends, though. Karenina should have thrown herself under the train after the first couple of chapters and spared me the boredom of having to slog through the rest.
BTW, my daughter, who is half Russian, had to read the book in college, and she hates it too.
Lord of the Rings is one of mine. I almost threw the book across the room a la Dorothy Parker when I got to Tom fucking Bombadil.
Every book with ludicrously long descriptions of some item makes it hard to read on. There was one Stephen King novel (I know, not quite on topic) where he spent about ten pages describing a vase. I can’t even remember which book it was, that’s how much I disliked it. I love Carrie and The Shining - Carrie is particularly brilliant epistolary literature.
Heart of Darkness is a weird one in that I enjoy reading the first half but have never got any further. I think it’s just too much depression piled on top of depression.
I’m not a huge fan of Great Expectations but to my surprise it’s always gone down really well when teaching it in inner London comprehensive schools. The kids, especially the boys, liked Pip, and got invested in what happened to him.
Perhaps it was partly because we read it part by part each week and very few of my students were the type to read ahead, so they experienced it more like it was written, as a weekly serial with something of note happening every episode.
Miss Havisham is one of those characters who’s always seen from the outside and is all the more memorable for it.
Modern “great” literature sometimes feels like reading 19th century novels. Lots of people I know loved The Goldfinch, but everyone in it was utterly dislikeable, except for the one old man we all knew was going to be conned, without any redeeming features at all, and, worse, their sense of humour had been replaced by self-pity. I didn’t give a shit if some of the language was lovely, it was in the mouth of a spoilt whiny man-baby.
Well, that’s not from Shakespeare but from a couple of hundred years earlier, at least, and it was a folk song, never intended to be great literature. But I bet you can understand what it says, apart from meed, sterteth and verteth.
Shakespeare is definitely not meant to be read, apart from the poems. I didn’t like it at secondary school, but did like it at college (age 16-18). The choice of texts made a difference. As a teacher, The Merchant of Venice is the one that went amazingly well, way more than I expected. Most of the language is pretty accessible because the context makes it obvious, and the characters are fascinating. There’s lots of stuff to get your teeth into.
Infinite Jest.
Everyone seems to be focused on old books. But this confusing pile of garbage catapulted into Canada, I never got. I did read the whole thing on vacation many years ago. My friends asked me what I was reading, I said “I don’t know”.
I defy you to find a negative review of this book.
Well put.
Some food for thought.
From amazon:
1.0 out of 5 stars Whoever recommended this isn’t your friend.
Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2019
Out of mountains of books, this is possibly the worst writing I’ve ever read. Each sentence feels as if they were crafted by two separate children being visciously beaten with a thesaurus.
I had a full blown migraine by the second chapter. By the third I wanted to blow my brains out.
Pretentious garbage. Do not fall for it. I can’t wait to pulp this waste of a forest–it’ll make fantastic paper mache for my next sculpture.
1.0 out of 5 stars Pompously inane
Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2018
Such a hill to climb and for what? Endless “literary” passages that boast a clever lexicon and little else. Such deep …eh …deepness.
and so forth.
garbage-genius-or-something-in-between3-ways-of-looking-at-infinite-jest/
“If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders, in terms of sales. The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is. What makes the book’s success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterises many reviews of this novel.
My God, is time again for my biannual ranting about Huckleberry Finn? And then get piled on by the Board by because I didn’t understand it? And for me to respond that ‘I don’t care, it still sucked!’?
Hot damn!
Compared to Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia is just so much more readable and relatable. They don’t have the same rich world building (though I think Narnia is still pretty amazing) as Tolkein’s world but I only made it through the first two of the LOTR trilogy before I gave up out of exhaustion.
Backtracking a little- I read Great Expectations for the first time in my early 30s and the first half was hard to get through but there was just a point mid-way where it all came together and you could see the genius of it. I loved it though would rather watch adaptations of it then try to read it start to finish again.
Their punishment is simply to get what they sought - to be, and to rule, in Hell.
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
The worst punishment imaginable.
Preach it.
I tried, I really did.
And believe me, I have a high tolerance for books that others find difficult. Or pretentious. Or just plain stupid.
But I couldn’t do it.
You are 100% right. And that’s why I love Conrad. Every book, everything he ever wrote.
You think you struggled? In my junior year of high school, we had to read it in Greek.
It was tough. I scraped by and passed the course. With a lot of help from a very dedicated and charitable teacher (thanks, Father Callahan!). I was not invited to join the senior year honors group doing advanced classics.