My issue is that I find a lot of books enrich me, even if I don’t enjoy reading them. I understand more references, I understand more about the society of the time, I understand more about the history of literature etc.
So count me in as someone who does see merit in slogging through (literature-style) books I don’t like.
[sub]Except Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim should be excised from the face of the earth.[/sub]
Ordinarily I love you and am thrilled that you now reside in the United States.
However, based on your opinion of the divine Conrad, I am going to have to ask you to leave the country now.
[sub]P.S. Please learn to drive so you can visit NY.[/sub]
Odd that you should say this, as your complaint here is far more juvenile than anything I read in the linked thread. Most adults can handle criticism of things they’ve enjoyed without having to insult people with whom they disagree, as you have repeatedly done in this thread.
And as you do here again. I find it interesting that people speaking dismissively of a pastime you enjoy (reading Nathanial Hawthorne) is somehow pit-worthy, but you don’t hesitate to denigrate the actual people involved in a pastime you don’t enjoy (Star Trek fandom, and the “nerds” who enjoy it).
And yeah, if you enjoy debating how fast “Warp 9” is, and you are not interested in the social interactions of 19th century English aristocracy, then engaging in a bit of internet fanwankery is, indeed, less of a waste of time than reading Pride and Prejudice. We’re talking about leisure activities, here, and the only objective standard for wise use of time is, “Did you have fun while you were doing it?”
Or, they might just think you’ve actually listened to some Wagner.
Which says far more about your hypothetical music snob than it does about you.
I find it interesting that you would be so humorless and miss not only the Simpsons reference, but the fact that I’m included in the pool of people who post on the Internet. Oh wait, no I don’t.
It doesn’t even have to be classical music. I have the same opinion of people who say “God I hate country music. It’s all the same.” It sounds juvenile and ignorant.
Well, right is right after all. 
But I liked Silas Marner and I have re-read it for my own enjoyment. And I like Nathaniel Hawthorne a lot, too.
What does that make me? I can’t keep track.
Well, if you don’t find commentary like, “Silas Minas is boring and Hawthoren is teh suxxxor, THANK GOD FOR TEEVEE” is an engaging critique of literature, I guess you’re a snob like me
I think your attitude, which seems common among teachers, is WHY many teenagers feel reading is like eating your vegetables.
I remember reading Scarlet Letter in the 9th grade, and when I told my teacher that I really didn’t like the book (still don’t), she accused me of being physically and intellectually lazy. She told me that the point of reading was not enjoyment. An avid reader of both pulp and literature, this was news to me.
I know so many people who got told crap like this, and were put off books for life. The message they got: Books are all hard, all boring, and if you find a piece of literature unappealing, well then you’re obviously stupid. Why bother?
I agree with your statements, actually. Half the reason the people in the thread I’m pitting hated those books is because they set out to read them like they were doing crunches or something. They weren’t interested in the books, and weren’t prepared for them. I think students should pick their own books in high school, and the teacher should just encourage critical reading of anything.
My attitude is that people on a board that is supposed to be about fighting ignorance should try not sounding like high schoolers. That is all. I’ve explained that like 50 times in this thread. People just keep wanting to call me a snob for liking good books, when I’m actually a snob for a completely different reason.
Well, since I was one of the “high-school” sounding posters in that thread I will say that I read Dorian Gray last fall, I am well beyond high school. I found the book pedantic, dull, thesaurasticized, insipid, vain, and not at all witty. Wilde had a great idea but floundered in the execution. Maybe it reads better when high, I don’t know, all I do know is that I feel that Wilde’s work in that book deserves no more than the “fucking boring” I thought it was.
I know. I just don’t find your explanation convincing, or consistent with what you actually wrote in the OP to this thread, or representative of anything written in the thread you linked to. Which is not to say that I think you’re being dishonest, precisely, only that I’m trying to give you more credit than there is room for in your post hoc rationalization for creating this thread.
Look, that thread wasn’t about detailed analysis of the role of class restrictions in the works of Jane Austen. It was a quick, catch-all “What do you think of these classic books? Worth it or not?” And people, for the most part, answered, “Yeah, that was good,” or “No, that one was really awful.” Sure, it’s not the most enlightening thread out there, but if you’re disappointed with the level of discussion, howzabout you step up and provide some of your own? Or better yet, start your own thread and show all us plebes how one is supposed to express their opinions on the fine arts. Be a snob. Go out there and git yer snob on all freaky-like, for all I care. Just stop with the whining, for the love of God and Graham Greene. Just because a few posters expressed their opinions about literature in conversational tones does not make them lazy, or uneducated, or immature. It just means they’ve found better uses for their anus than as a stick repository.
Part of my outburst was merely the repetitiveness of the posts. More adjectives, as your provide here, would have been a breath of fresh air.
For the record, I quit whining several hours ago and have been defensive since then. And isn’t the pit for the occasional venting? “This is place for all complaints,” etc.?
Pssst… in case you’ve missed your queue… this is the part where you get off your high horse and admit to being overly sensitive to the light hearted commentary on the questionably relevant works of some long dead authors from a by gone era. We all have a laugh about it, consider you a good sport for admiting defeat and call it a day. YMMV.
This works a lot better when you use the right words.
(It’s ‘cue’.)
This thread is foundering on something a lot more interesting than some interpersonal spat. It’s about the difference between criticism and reviewing:
[ul]
[li]Reviewing is all about whether you liked it. A good review helps people decide if they’re going to like it as well, so they don’t need to waste their time on stuff they won’t enjoy.[/li][li]Criticism is all about what the work has to say. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you enjoyed the piece.[/li][/ul]Criticism demands more out of the person doing it, and it is more objective than reviewing. To use a basic, high school example, a thesis is defensible or not based on the elements of the piece in question, not whether the person making the defense loved, hated, or didn’t care about the subject matter.
This is relevant to this thread because classics become classics due to criticism, not reviews. Nobody cares if you like it. That isn’t why English teachers have you read the books to begin with. If English class was about ‘liking’ things, we’d all have read Danielle Steele or Michael Crichton or whoever else was on the bestseller lists of the era.
English class is about learning how to criticise, both to become a person capable of taking a piece apart at a rational level and to become a well-rounded person with more personality than a chunk of drywall. The second part is self-explanatory, but the first one bears some expounding: If you are capable of criticising a piece, be it a Hawthorne novel or an advertisement, you are less likely to be taken in by facile appeals to emotion and shiny graphics. English intertwines with rhetoric (now neglected almost universally) and even mathematics (in a sad, terminal state of decline) in that it makes you more intellectually sophisticated and less likely to be led around by the nose by a group of PR toffs.
It’s nice of you to try and mend fences and all. I regret opening this thread, but that has more to do with me should-have-knowing the consequences more than feeling I was defeated.
I wish I had written Derleth’s post. Very well said.
Perhaps Quicksilver feels there is a long line of posters who owe the board an apology.