# "Reading Thomas Hardy is like eating a pillow." **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 31, 2009, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416 "2009-08-31T22:13:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/41 "2009-09-02T13:29:40Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > Henry James, no? :smack: Yes. ---
**Author:** ![Speak\_to\_me\_Maddie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Speak\_to\_me\_Maddie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Speak_to_me_Maddie)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/42 "2009-09-02T14:59:15Z")
> [@Jamaika\_a\_jamaikaiake](#): > > If I may make a suggestion? (Dostoevsky is my favorite author.) Look at who is the translator of your editions. If it is **Constance Garnett** , throw it in the garbage can, and please give him another try. She totally sucks. If you can, get anything by **Pevear and Volokhonsky**. They totally rock . . . My **Brothers K** is translated by David McDuff. I think my **Crime and Punishment** got sold to the used bookstore. Thanks, though. I’ll make a note of your suggestion if I decide to try for Dostoevsky again. ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/43 "2009-09-02T15:21:03Z")
I’ve been trying to read _Rememberance of Things Past_, for, what, about 15 years or so? It’s the seminal novel and all that. I think I’m up to about page 42. I loved Myers’s article that \*\*Leaper \*\*cites. I tried to read a book by Anne Rice’s son, Chris, and gave up after two pages. I told my wife it was like reading his sophomore creative writing project, but with good copy editing. Myers’s description of Proulx’s writing nailed this perfectly. ---
**Author:** ![Saintly\_Loser](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saintly_loser/32/4045_2.png) [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/44 "2009-09-02T16:09:18Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > I was never a fan of Hardy. I love Dickens with a passion, consumed most of his novels when I was young, as I did those of his predecessors, Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), Tobias Smollett (Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker) and Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy). I feel like I’m looking into a mirror here. I never could warm up to Dickens (although I love his contemporary, Anthony Trollope), but reading Hardy for the first time was one of the great experiences of my life. Yes, \*Tess \*and \*Jude \*are difficult, but if you start with \*Far from the Madding Crowd \*and _The Return of the Native_, then move to _The Mayor of Casterbrige_, and only then go to \*Tess \*and _Jude_, you’ll have gotten into the right frame of mind for those admittedly somewhat downbeat books. I’m with you on Sterne, by the way, and _Tristram Shandy_ is routinely (and rightly) cited as one of the most important and revolutionary works in the English language. > [@aldiboronti](#): > > Thackeray I could always take or leave. As to George Eliot, Middlemarch was fantastic, as were Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss, though Daniel Deronda didn’t work for me. Yes, me too. Exactly. > [@aldiboronti](#): > > Who else? Jane Austen. Enjoyable, but Emma and Pride and Prejudice were enough, I never sought out the others. Oh and Samuel Richardson. I actually got about a third of the way through Clarissa Harlowe, supposedly the longest novel in the English language. I loved the character of Lovelace and the epistolary convention didn’t deter me (Humphrey Clinker and Les Liaisons Dangereuses used the same form) but life must have intervened, I guess, I never did finish it, although I remember some really powerful moments. I’ll have to give it another go one day. Austen, for me, was soap opera about uninteresting people with too much time on their hands, and not all that enjoyable. I loved _Clarissa Harlowe_. > [@aldiboronti](#): > > Nearly forgot the Russians. War and Peace was a wonderful read, as was Crime and Punishment. Never made it to the end of The Brothers Karamazov, I can’t remember why. If you liked _Crime and Punishment_, you’d love _Anna Karenina_. ---
**Author:** ![Daylate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9dc877/32.png) [@Daylate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daylate)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/45 "2009-09-02T16:11:46Z")
You know, of course, that Henry james had a classic poem written about him. Don’t remember the author, but do remember all of the poem. _Henry James, Whatever his other claims, Is not too Deuced Lucid_ ---
**Author:** ![Jamaika\_a\_jamaikaiake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/7993a0/32.png) [@Jamaika\_a\_jamaikaiake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/46 "2009-09-02T17:12:58Z")
> [@Speak\_to\_me\_Maddie](#): > > My **Brothers K** is translated by David McDuff. I think my **Crime and Punishment** got sold to the used bookstore. Thanks, though. I’ll make a note of your suggestion if I decide to try for Dostoevsky again. If I may emphasize the point, since I feel he is unfairly judged: Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were, for a long time, the only thing available to English readers. Many people have gotten a feeling that their writing is “stuffy” because of her, and this is simply not true. I’m sure there are reasons to dislike Dostoevsky, but he is not “stuffy.” **Pevear and Volokhonsky**! [QUOTE=wikipedia] However, Garnett also has had many critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors[1]: ``` "The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett." ``` In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for “readability”, particularly in her translations of Dostoevsky.[2] In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![Chicken\_Fingers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Chicken\_Fingers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chicken_Fingers)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/47 "2009-09-02T17:58:22Z")
I was never able to get through any Dostoevsky. It was just too dreary. Good point about the translation. Maybe I’ll give him another try one day. I had no problem with Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy, and really enjoyed his novels, once I sorted out the characters and their many names. Samuel Richardson’s **Clarissa** was absolute torture, and I had to give it up halfway through, leaving poor Clarissa forever to sit by her coffin, whining and waiting to die. I love me some Proust, and have read all his books several times over, even **Jean Santeuil.** I change many of his female characters back to the males they were based on, and then just wallow in the lovely prose. He rambles along, full of interesting ideas on a wide range of subjects. I really like George Eliot and Jane Austen. My memory is poor enough that I can go back and reread them every few years and they’re like new. I read and liked a number of Hardy’s novels when I was young, but yes, he’s too ridiculously depressing. I’ve never been able to get through **Ulysses,** though I read the shorter Joyce works without any pain. I couldn’t slog through **Don Quixote.** ---
**Author:** ![gigi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a587f6/32.png) [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/48 "2009-09-02T18:34:48Z")
> [@salinqmind](#): > > I read Jude the Obscure, and was I ever sorry! Most depressing read of my life. Truer words were never spoken. I was thinking about Middlemarch the other day. I read it for a 19th century literature class in college and we had to read the whole thing in two weeks. This meant cramming in the reading and then having maybe three full hours of lecture on it. I mean, yes, it was a survey course in the sense that we read a book a week (except for Middlemarch and maybe one other one), but how much could we really learn? It was an effort just to finish it let alone really analyze or digest it, and then there wasn’t much time to put it in any context through the lecture. Yeah, I can say I read it years ago but that’s about it. It seems to really shortchange the books that were included. ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/49 "2009-09-02T18:39:55Z")
> [@Chicken\_Fingers](#): > > I couldn’t slog through **Don Quixote.** That was another one cited in the BBC podcast. It’s been on my To Read list but I think I’ll take it off. I went ahead and ordered the Myers book. I like that he gives examples of “good” writing. Another fun book about reading and writing is by Francine Prose, but I’m too lazy to look up the title. I lunched with a couple of MFA candidates on my train trip. They were returning from a writers’ workshop on Whidbey Island. One of their assignments was to write in the style of other authors, which I thought might be interesting. I was going to pimp the famous LotR thread but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with those two (both of whom **loved** Annie Proulx). ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Some\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ad7895/32.png) [@Just\_Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Some_Guy)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/50 "2009-09-02T20:04:46Z")
Like others here I have no problem with Moby Dick. On the other hand Charles Dickens and I have decided to go our separate ways with no hard feelings after many attempts to get along. ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/51 "2009-09-02T22:20:41Z")
> [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](#): > > At least _Ethan Frome_ is short, though very boring, and it doesn’t help that the main character is boring and unlikeable. _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ suffers from that fate as well, on top of being written by James Joyce. I couldn’t get through 5 pages, and I don’t know how anyone could enjoy that dreck. If you couldn’t even get through five pages of _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ how could you determine that the main character (Stephen Dedalus) was “boring and unlikeable?” He was still a small child at that point in the story. (And yes, I did like the book.) It’s too bad you bailed on _Portrait of the Artist_ early. You missed the sections with the priest’s vivid sermon on hell and Stephen Dedalus’ alternately funny and terrifying demon-ridden nightmares. I’m not defending Henry James, however. His stories (especially the later ones) seem like page after page of solid margin-to-margin small text without so much as a paragraph break or period. It’s like cutting through thick jungle with a machete. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2009, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/52 "2009-09-02T22:38:06Z")
> [@Swords\_to\_Plowshares](#): > > At least _Ethan Frome_ is short, though very boring, and it doesn’t help that the main character is boring and unlikeable. This is probably one of my singlemost loathed books of all time, and I agree with your assessment of the main character wholeheartedly. I hated Moby Dick too. In fact there a lot of books I am supposed to have read that I just couldn’t get into. On the other hand, I love Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky would probably in fact be my favorite author of all time if his books didn’t make me want to shoot myself in the face. _Notes From Underground_ wasn’t too disturbing, but I had to quit reading _Crime and Punishment_ about halfway through because the existential horror was just a bit much. My problem with the classics is that even if I really like them, I inexplicably stop reading them. Especially Dickens. I think I love Dickens, yet I’ve never completed a single book he’s written. [The Onion](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30996) just has a way with this sort of thing, doesn’t it? ---
**Author:** ![eleanorigby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ee7513/32.png) [@eleanorigby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eleanorigby)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/53 "2009-09-03T00:20:29Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > But authors like Austen, Dickens and Hardy were all writing for a broad audience, and all trying to write in a transparent fashion, so they shouldn’t be that hard to read today. Of course, with Austen you have to carefully keep track of who has the money and who is eligible to marry whom; and Hardy’s greater novels like Tess and Jude can be very depressing; but I wonder about anyone finding Dickens that hard to read. I beg to differ. I understand and love Austen; I really liked _Far From the Madding Crowd_ (hated Tess), loved\* A Tale of Two Cities\*, but I cannot stand any other Dickens book. I’ll watch _A Christmas Carol_ (I prefer the Muppets version). Dickens is overly wordy, repetitive and slow. I also love Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ and the Barchester series by Trollope, as well as Charlotte Bronte (can’t stand _Wuthering Heights_ by her sister). Please don’t assume that if someone finds Dickens hard to read it’s because they are somehow lacking. For me, _Great Expectations_ is just a densely worded work of boredom. Miss Havisham is slightly interesting. IMO, Pip is second only to Lord Fauntleroy in obnoxiousness. Estella got just what she deserved, too. I have tried and tried to get into _Middlemarch_, but I just haven’t been able to. Perhaps I should try again this winter. I also liked _Moby Dick_ (but not enough to reread it), have no patience with Joyce (Portrait of an Artist was good), and find Henry James unbearably pretentious, as I do Faulkner. To each his own. Just because it’s Great Literature doesn’t mean one must respond positively to it or even approve of it. Nobody likes all the Old Master’s paintings, so why do we feel bad if we dislike Hemingway or Lawrence? You like what you like. Life is too short to spend it on feeling bad because someone thinks you’re some how “lesser” because Fitzgerald leaves you cold (he doesn’t leave me cold, just saying). ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/54 "2009-09-03T02:17:02Z")
[Here’s an article](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574377163804387216.html) that speaks to what **Leaper** was talking about earlier – story being sacrificed on the altar of style. This guy thinks that story (and literary quality) can be found today in genre fiction. Interesting. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/55 "2009-09-03T03:17:43Z")
> [@olivesmarch4th](#): > > [The Onion](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30996) just has a way with this sort of thing, doesn’t it? I spent a year (I’m a slow reader) reading all but the last 35 pages of a bunch of Philip K Dick novels. In each case I realized I didn’t like anybody in the book and didn’t give a shit what happened to them. ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/56 "2009-09-03T13:20:26Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > And after I read and enjoyed an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe, I tried to read the unabridged one, but almost died of boredom. If you skip all the pages about praising God, God’s plan, God’s revelation, offending God, or any of the other interminable pages about God, it’s a pretty good read. It’s almost a how-to manual for hermits. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/57 "2009-09-03T15:03:53Z")
Loved _Anna Karenina_. Loved _Don Quixote_. I’ve been trying to finish Hundred Years of Solitude (in Spanish) for a while, and can’t seem to get through the last 10 percent of it. Due mainly to that guilty feeling referred to in the OP, I’m gonna finish it, starting tonight. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/58 "2009-09-03T15:42:32Z")
Do those of you who find Dickens hard to read also feel the same way about _A Christmas Carol_? That was probably the first “real” book I read. Any other classical literature, I’d only read simplified versions. And I found that work to be slightly more difficult. ---
**Author:** ![Ichini\_Sanshigo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d9b06d/32.png) [@Ichini\_Sanshigo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ichini_Sanshigo)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/59 "2009-09-03T15:47:31Z")
_Tale of Two Cities_ was hard to get into at first (excepting that first paragraph, of course), but once you made it past the first chapter or so, it picked up. Well, I liked it, at least. On the other hand, I despised Nathaniel Hawthorne. Even more once I realized that taking the plots of his books as a whole (specifically, _The Scarlett Letter_ and _The House of the Seven Gables_), they should have been incredibly compelling reads. Soooo boorrriiinnnggg. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2009, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/60 "2009-09-03T16:11:59Z")
Hawthorne’s strength is in his short stories. I had to read Hardy’s _Mayor of Casterbridge_ and _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ in high school, but I was probably too young for them. I read _Jude the Obscure_ more recently, and found it worth reading—I was fully warned going in that it was depressing, so it didn’t bother me too much. Still, I wonder what he would have written if they had had Prozac in his day. I’ve read and liked a number of Dickens’ novels, but I fully sympathize with those who find him too long-winded. I think he could benefit from a bit of light abridgement, and possibly also from being read aloud—Patrick Stewart’s reading of _A Christmas Carol_ is a successful example of both. Audiences in his day flocked to hear his dramatic readings from his own works. And I liked what Norrie Epstein said in [The Friendly Dickens](http://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Charles-Dickens-Norrie-Epstein/dp/0670839434/ref=ed_oe_h): something to the effect that Dickens’ characters were like the recurring characters on Saturday Night Live, with their mannerisms and catchphrases, to help readers who were reading the novels in weekly installments keep track of who was who. _Crime and Punishment_ was great: intense and suspenseful, like a modern crime thriller but with more philosophical depth. _The Brothers Karamozov_ was good too, though more rambling. I liked _Pride and Prejudice_; it’s entertaining and I can see why people love it. Austen’s other novels are also well worth reading, though harder to get through. Henry James is _blech_, and I’m not going to read him again if I can help it. George Eliot (at least _Middlemarch_ and _The Mill on the Floss_) is good to read with the attitude “what can I learn about people from this?” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416.md?page=4)