Herman Hesse
Well I quite liked “Sidhartha”, but his other works, especially “The Glass bead Game” leave me feel like I am trying to untangle a bal of elastic bands…
Well, “Journey to the East”, is interesting too, but not if you actually expect a plot or anything…
Re: Burroughs while high on grass… Oh man… totallt the wrong drug… Yohimbe, Mescaline and heroin… THOSE are the drugs to get through “The Lost Boys” or “The Ticket that Exploded”…
regards
FML
I’ll third Ayn Rand–although I did like Anthem.
Other authors that have bored me silly:
Faulkner (decaying South yadadada)
Joyce (pretentious git)
D. H. Lawrence–confused man, no?
Hardy–wordy, wordy, wordy.
Dicken, ditto.
Walter Stephenson (Stevenson?)–I can’t even remember if this is his correct name (Wallace?). I read it for a book club–I wanted to throw it across the room. I have suppressed the title, mercifully. It was about two couples in New England post WW2 (or during). One couple was nasty, the other was clueless. Sorry I don’t have more info.
Whoever wrote Bonfire of the Vanities. I hated that book by page 7 and never read another word. I hope he got all that was coming to him and more.
John Irving. IMO, he is contemptous of women.
Danielle Steele et al–I don’t “get” these books, but to each his own, I suppose.
Whoever wrote The Chocolate War–I suck at remembering names. I hated that book–had to read it for class last semester. Maybe if I had been 15 when I read it, my reaction would be different. Doubt it, though.
I could go on.
Who is this “Tolkein” to whom people keep referring?
I’ve never been able to get through The House of the Seven Gables. Brilliant descriptive prose, but somehow I couldn’t connect with it as a story. Maybe I should try some of Hawthorne’s short stories.
Never been able to get into John Updike’s stuff. And I’ve tried reading Cormac McCarthy, but I find his style so self-consciously turgid that it gets in the way of the story.
The Gilded Age writers… Henry James, Edith Wharton, gag me with a stick. Early English novels are alternately charming (Burnie) and amusing (Richardson). I adore the Victorians, I mean, I could eat them with a spoon. I can read Fin-de-Siecle, though it rather makes me feel that I’m picking through a mucky swamp where I occasionally come across a gem-encrusted tortoise. Then, literature enters this period when (as far as I’m concerned) basically nothing good happened–except Forster the Man Child, but he’s totally on his own planet. Eventually the world snapped out of it and we start to get the Moderns, who I can read but who are sooooooo incredibly last-generation that they never surprise or delight me. They’re best translated onto film, I think.
James. Wharton. Lawrence. Hurk (coughs up a hairball)
I don’t like George Eliot much, either, and for some reason I throw her in the same group, even though she was half a century earlier.
I’ve never read any highly-praised authors and then go “meh, doesn’t do it for me!” I’m pretty gullible to the book-chat crowd.
What has happened, though, is that I’ll read a highly-praised author and then, by accident, read something by someone else that blows the doors off the first book.
I read Bonfire of the Vanities and thought “OK, that’s a big cross-section of NYC society, maybe a little more at home with the upper-crust, but still it showed the lower civil servants in crappy apartments and scary black kids on the subway.” Then I read a book by Jimmy Breslin, and realized Tom Wolf missed a lot at street-level.
Or I read a new translation of Issac Babel’s Polish-Russian War stories that the magazines said was so great. It was OK, lots of stuff about horses. Then I read the Civil War stories of Ambrose Bierce, which not only had horses, but the smell of them being burned after the battles.
Point is, there’s probably a better author out there.
Another vote for Dickens.
The Pickwick Papers is chloroform with a fancy leather binding.
The saddest thing is that modern editors have cleaned up Cooper’s writing to the point that he verges on readable. Not all the way, but we don’t get the full flavor of Twain was railing against. Still funny, though. He was a bitch!
I have never finished a Dick. I get to the last ten pages and realize that I don’t care what happens to any of the characters.
Heinlein I’ve already spoken of recently.
Yeah, that nails it.
Oddly, I find the opposite. I read the whole Hitchhiker series when I was in middle school, and I loved them then. Now I find them kind of random.
Chuck Palahniuk is one of them- I kinda liked Fight Club ( the movie) and a friend recommended Survivor. Bleh… I just don’t get it. You can make up any kind of fantastic, ridiculous crap and it’s a good novel?
My sister tried to turn me onto Tom Robbins as well… same complaint. I guess when I read a book, I prefer to have characters I can understand or at least find interesting and a comprehensible plot. That’s just me… I guess…
smokinjbc, that’s me too. I missed out on the surreal gene, I guess.
It’s weird that I can accept vampires and ghosts and a zombie virus and aliens and intelligent graveyard rats, etc. etc. etc., but I can’t accept a woman with a over-sized thumb.
I failed to finish True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, and read Theft last year, hating it. I’d like to like him, but I find him smug and unreadable. Lionel Shriver is meant to be brilliant, but I found Kevin to be over-written and The Post-Birthday World was a cool idea about five hundred pages too long. I read the first and last fifty pages, and don’t feel I missed anything in between.
Enlightenment concerning R.A.W. comes when you realise that the fact it will not come together, but is a random grab back of contradiction, is his point.
As to Peter Carey, try Bliss. The movie is good too. He is a smug smartass though. He’s a great writer who’d be better if he wasn’t so obviously conscious of just how great he is.
That was Robert Cormier – I loved the Chocolate War.
And since I’m here, let me add Susan Sontag for writing “In America.” Inexcusably pretentious and smug. I wanted to shred the pages and use them for kitty litter.
One of my favorite American novels. Some of the best-ever lines skewering race and class relations in America. I like pretty much everything Wolfe writes, even when I don’t agree with him. I even enjoyed From Bauhaus to Our House.
One author I can’t read, but only because his novels are so painful, is Cormac McCarthy. He’s brilliant, but The Crossing left me half dead, and I just can’t go through that again.
People I respect keep talking about how great Neal Stephenson is. I’ve tried, and I bounce off his books every time. I couldn’t finish Cryptonomicon.
I think that’s Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. My mother loved this book. I found it unendurably tedious.
I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” out loud to myself at present – it’s the only way I can keep with it. I’ve tried to read it before but all that soulless violence and endless descriptions of the terrain put me right off my feed. But reading the prose aloud allows the beauty of his language to be more prominent than its content, and hence I am motivated. Well, so far – I’ve made it only to chapter four as yet.
“The Road” I loved and couldn’t put down, though. .
I’ve tried to read Stegner’s “Angle of Repose” and couldn’t do it – “unendurably tedious” is right.
I loved it too, and was impressed by the Border Trilogy but didn’t enjoy those books all that much. I’m too chicken to read Blood Meridian.
He’s doing his Oprah interview on June 5. I wish it was going to be live, but it probably won’t be.
James Baldwin. Another Country was an exquisitely crafted little dystopia that managed to be both hugely depressing and yet make you feel guilty for feeling depressed.
I’ll probably get shot for this, but:
Asimov. Pompous, overblown git.