I love Dickens and Moby Dick. I guess I’m just a dick kind of guy.
However, I’ll join in the Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein bashing. I thought Catcher in the Rye wasn’t great, but I didn’t loathe it.
Incidentally, if there’s anyone else out there like me who would like to catch up on some of the classics, I found a great way to do it is via audiobooks at librivox.org. They’re like the Project Gutenburg of audiobooks. They only do public domain stuff, and the readers are all volunteers, so the performances aren’t always great, but hey - free audiobooks! I’ve gotten through a lot of the books mentioned here thanks to them.
Huh-that’s interesting…I’d like to hear more about your theory, but I gotta tell you I’m starting out skeptical of it .
You can’t have PTSD without traumatic stress…and other than Holden’s brother passing away quietly from lukemia, he’s got nothing to be stressed about: he’s got no real problems at all (IMO, of course), other than being spoiled and indulged.
Oops…I forgot about the suicide. Objection in previous post withdrawn. The leukemia thing though–it might traumatize one, but it shouldn’t give one PTSD as such, should it?
Two points: Holden is screwed up throughout the book, but he doesn’t reconnect with the teacher until like 2/3d of the way through the book. So while the teacher may have made things worse, he’s not a cause of the screwed-uppedness.
Also, one bit I liked in the book was the ambiguity of that scene. The teacher may or may not have tried to molest him…Holden is an utterly unreliable witness and doesn’t respond to any sort of tenderness. All we know is that after a few drinks, the teacher is stroking Holden’s hair. That could just as easily be read as “Oh this poor kid…he was one of my favorite students and he’s so very screwed up” as it could be read “Now I’ve got the sexy little minx where I want him.” And given that Holden reacts badly to any sort of positive emotion…
I agree - I eventually decided that the teacher was trying to be supportive of a bright but emotionally-disturbed student and Holden was misreading the situation, as he did with so many things in his life.
Has anyone actually read Rememberance of Things Past by Proust? I’ve been trying for the last 20 years (seminal novel, study of memory, a “must-read”), and I still haven’t made it to the hundredth page. After reading a page or two, my mind just wanders off and I think of more interesting things to do, like counting lint.
I love A Confederacy of Dunces and I love most of Dickens, but I’ll go for David Copperfield. Everybody keeps talking about how “sweet” and “impractical” Dora is. I think that must be Victorian jargon for “mentally challenged.” Dora should have been in a home of the sort for which we pay taxes.
I think it depends on whether he saw his brother in some kind of emergency death state… ‘‘sudden death of a loved one’’ can be a qualifying trauma according to many psychologists. While Holden’s brother Allie may have had a long, slow, illness, there could have been some traumatic moments there. (It’s hard to say because IIRC not many details are given of Allie’s death.) What is clear is that Allie meant the world to him and he took the loss very hard.
I just don’t think of Holden as spoiled at all. Sure, he has material advantages, but he’s surrounded by all the ugliness of human nature. He’s imprisoned in a society where all of the nasty realities of life are swept under the rug, and he’s so bitter because so much is screwed up but everyone in his life wants to pretend otherwise.
Yeah, in some ways he’s just an arrogant, rebellious, teen - and that’s kind of the brilliance of it. He’s young enough to rebel against the bullshit that most adults just swallow as ‘‘a part of life.’’ He’s wrong in thinking we don’t care, but he’s also right – we accept it all too readily.
This is true, but the character’s perception is all that really matters. If he took it the wrong way that’d definitely complicate his already existing issues (and I don’t think it’s just PTSD - the boy’s got some problems.) I’m not suggesting he isn’t deeply flawed. I just think he is more sympathetic than most people give him credit for.
Thirding or fourthing Confederacy of Dunces. Gad, that was dull. It was recommended to me as this big laugh fest. Not so much as a a chuckle, even once.
And F. Scott Fitzgerald is just a bad writer.
My nomination is Turn of the Screw. The recipe seems to be one cup of ghost story mixed with a hundred and eighty six gallons of endless, droning prose.
Thanks for reminding me – mine is Tropic of Cancer. There is one gorgeous, inspired, enlightening paragraph in that book that is truly brilliant and worth reading. The rest of the book was tediously awful.
I hate to hijack this into a *Catcher in the Rye *discussion but I’m on board with olives, because it is one of my all time favorites. I don’t know about PTSD, but Holden definitely deals with some heavy stuff for a teen. I wonder if someone read the book when they say he had no real problems. There’s the death of his younger brother and the molestation by a teacher, who to that point was pretty much the only adult Holden trusted. olives covered all that pretty well.
Holden actually came off to me as having a pretty funny, sarcastic sense of humor, despite his issues. I didn’t personally identify with the teen angst, I just thought it was a well-told story.
As I said before, I don’t have much of an opinion on Catcher in the Rye, but I wanted to add that I’d heard the PTSD theory elsewhere before this thread, so it’s not a wholly new idea. Sadly, I can’t remember where I saw it…
Pretty much anything by Joseph Conrad, but most especially Lord Jim. Dear God, what a trudge that book was. You’d think it would be full of high seas adventure and South Seas fantasy, but instead it’s just a tedious slog.
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As I said before, I don’t have much of an opinion on Catcher in the Rye, but I wanted to add that I’d heard the PTSD theory elsewhere before this thread, so it’s not a wholly new idea. Sadly, I can’t remember where I saw it…
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Not exactly a reputable source, but the comedy site Cracked discussed this in a recent article.
To get this thread back on track… if Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein may be regarded as classic writers, I have to say I’ve never been impressed. I read Anthem in high school, and it just wasn’t very well written.
I love science fiction and tried to love Heinlein, starting with Friday and then Starship Troopers. I couldn’t finish either of them. The female in Friday was so ridiculously caricatured and then Starship Troopers was just… I don’t know what. Both of these writers tend to be pretty heavy-handed ideologically, and not in a way I really support, so I guess that’s the rub.
I can’t think of a “great book” that I absolutely loathed, but the first “great” writer that comes to mind that I just didn’t really get is Kafka. I don’t hate him, but I’m not really a fan, either.
Well, another “list” that will act as a catalyst for people to think their negative opinion against canon somehow is validated. On top of that, the list is heavily anglo-centric so the likelihood of me agreeing with it may increase
Reading that Slate article I see mention of Don Quixote at which point I start laughing, hysterically.
And, also, for the OP, to reference a scene from Seinfeld where Jerry is attempting to return purchased blazer “for spite”, you can’t not like the book for that reason.
What gets me with these lists is that I rarely see someone not liking the book for some in-depth idea promoted by the book or the consistency of the main protagonist or artificiality of human condition exposed.
With that in mind…
One of those not necessarily in the canon but respectable book in literary circles, that I read twice just to make sure I did not miss something important, is The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq.
It sucks on three levels:
character development of two kids from the same mother who grow up into suggested two opposites of the same pole only to end up being pretty much similarly screwed up (it appears that the writer himself is not aware how wide the spectrum of human condition is so for him it made perfect sense to make such a microscopic distance between the two),
general idea of the book that attempts to explain alleged decay of Western society post 1960-ies as a result of societal youth fixation (whereas the decay exposed is the same one attributable to any past decade back to Louis IV), and
utter lack of clarity in the voices of several characters that leads to confusion and loss of cognitive strands (you know those cognitive strands that fire up curiosity and you accept them and you maintain the fire hoping that something will turn around the corner, you know some sort of the suspense of precognition… alas, not only there is nothing around the corner – simply, there is no corner!)
Anyways, once I realized that the journalistic fury about the book (the whole right-winging “scandal”) has nothing to do with what’s in the book it became clear that the book itself may be used as a proof of Western society decay.
Another vote for Eliot, with particular loathing for Mill on the Floss. I’ve written about that book before and I agree with previous posters. I’d add that the most unbearable thing about it is the complete lack of character development; the characters start out as toddlers and remain so for the duration of the book in spite of physically aging.
I suspect a lot of the hate for certain classics come from forced high school readings. As a former high school teacher I must agree with the poster who said most high schoolers simply lack a frame of reference for many of these books.
I teach middle school now. I get a certain type of student every year, almost always the Tracy Flick type with an overbearing, overeager mother. The mom will come in and show me a list of all the classics her little genius has read and want more recommendations (and pats on the back). I try to convince them that even if their child is an advanced enough reader to understand the text of many of these novels, they don’t have the emotional maturity or experience to understand them in any meaningful way. Sorry, but eleven-year-olds just won’t understand the emotional, symbolic, or cultural significance of **Vanity Fair **or Barchester Towers even if they understand the vocabulary and plot.
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