:smack: Yes.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, me too. Exactly.
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.
If you liked Crime and Punishment, you’d love Anna Karenina.
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
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 just has a way with this sort of thing, doesn’t it?
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).
Here’s an article 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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?”