I collected most of mine from used book stores, but that was over 15 years ago. I think I’m missing a few, but I have most of them. I especially love Melissa, I pull it out every year or two.
You weren’t talking about a writer’s works, you said that you “get that a lot of people don’t get a lot out of O’Connor”.
So . . . you take personal offense when I point out that a lot of people don’t like Flannery O’Connor? Wow.
There are still numerous brilliant novels and plays being written, but I don’t think any of them will ever reach canonical status. There’s too much factionalism among critics and professors of literature for a real consensus to be reached.
When I was at Columbia, we were required to take a pair of two-semester courses, on Humanities (great Western literature from the ancient Greeks through Dostoevsky) and Contemporary Civilization (great philosophers from Plato through Nietzsche). Whenever the core curriculum was set, it must have seemed fairly obvious to the faculty which authors and philosophers had to be included, and figuring out the “classics” was easy. Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, the Bible, Dante, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Dickens… the list practically wrote itself. Or, at least, it did when all the professors doing the selecting were of the same race, gender and background.
Today, adding any book to the canon will require a fight. There have to be enough female authors, enough black authors, enough Hispanic authors, enough gay authors… and of course, there will be an inevitable backlash (“Toni Morrison is overrated, and you’re only putting her on this list because she’s a black woman!”).
I can name all sorts of modern works that I consider magnificent, but I don’t imagine for a second that any of them will ever receive the near-universal reverence that earlier works received. And neither will YOUR favorite books.
In the future, there probably WON’T be one set of universally agreed-upon classics. Just different sets of books regarded as classsics by different circles of readers.
You didn’t say “didn’t like”.
Dude, get a grip. If someone acknowledges that someone else “doesn’t get a lot out of” something, it’s the same thing as acknowledging that something is “not for everyone.” This is bizarre and bewildering. And petty. Me, I don’t get a lot out of, oh say Hemingway, or Melville, or Pynchon, or any number of canonical writers. I know a LOT of people who don’t get a lot of out of Flannery O’Connor. A LOT.
Why don’t you just sheepishly admit that you misread it or misunderstood it, instead of trying to convince me I said something that I clearly did not?
Because “lissener thinks other people are too stupid to understand books and movies and is dismissive of their tastes and opinions” is hardly a rarity?
I read one of Bentley Little’s books, The Store, and was not impressed. I started another one—I can’t remember the title, the one about the guy whose insurance company is out to get him—and I couldn’t even finish it, it was so bad. Maybe I just picked the duds by chance, like someone saying they tried Stephen King and didn’t like him, but all they read was The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher. But I can’t see myself picking up another Bentley Little book unless someone tells me which ones to avoid.
John le Carre is most likely from the-not-quite-serious novelists. Salman Rushdie from the serious pile.
Saying a book or a movie or whatever is not for everyone is nothing at all like that. People say that all the time about Miike movies, Von Trier movies, or whatever. They also say it all the time about Flannery O’Connor. It’s just bullshit and trying to pick a fight to insist–and keep on insisting, and insisting, and insisting–that it’s in any way dismissive or insulting.
You can honestly tell me that there’s never been a time when you’ve liked something that someone else didn’t, or vice versa, and you or they said something “Well, it’s not for everyone”? Never? How is that insulting?
And how is is it possible to interpret my acknowledging that a LOT of people don’t really get anything out of Flannery O’Connor as anything but that? You CLEARLY misunderstood what I meant, but are unwilling to let it go.
Yeah, I was gonna mention LeCarre too. He’s one of the 4 or 5 best writers in English of the past 50 years or so.
Christopher Moore deserves a mention for his satires, which can be quite Twain-worthy. Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, and Fool are very good. Haven’t read his others yet.
To my way of thinking (and not everyone will agree, obviously), when we refer to “the classics,” we’re referring to a set of books that any well-educated persona is EXPECTED to have read.
Even people who HATE Shakespeare and Dante would probably agree that you’re not truly an educated person if you haven’t read Hamlet and The Divine Comedy.
So, are there any modern, contemporary authors who’ll achieve that kind of status? No, not a chance. Even Kurt Vonnegut’s most passionate fans will never be able to argue with a straight face that, “You’re not truly an educated person if you haven’t read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”
Nor could I make that case for any of my own favorite authors. The canon has been frozen for a century or so, and nbody else is likely to enter it. Alice Walker or John Updike, for instance, will have their vocal champions, but they’ll never reach the status once bestowed on Dickens or Tolstoy.
I don’t have any emotional investment in this, but on first read, I thought you meant it in a “pearls before swine” way – that some people are too dense or lacking in taste and refinement to get anything out of Flannery O’Connor. When you explained that you meant it in a “it doesn’t float their boat” sense, that clarified things. So that is how it is possible, to answer your question.
You don’t think educated people are expected to have some familiarity with Slaughterhouse Five?
Two great Italians:
Italo Calvino (if he’s not already there).
Primo Levi.
Define “familiarity.” I suppose every educated person knows OF that book, and could name the author. But I think Kurt Vonnegut is much like Ayn Rand (though BOTH authors would probably be outraged by the comparison): an author who seems profound and insightful to intellectual, alienated teenagers, but whose work really doesn’t hold up al that well.
I guess Jonathan Livingston Seagull won’t be on the classics shelf, then.
[Runs away, hides. :D]
You mean like Catcher in the Rye, which seems to have already been halfway canonized? (Beatified, I guess?)
Nonsense, as far as Vonnegut goes. I can’t speak to Ayn Rand, having zero familiarity there, but Vonnegut holds up perfectly well, thank you. Mother Night still cuts like a razor, for starters.
“Not for everyone,” may apply here as well as anywhere, but I’d need a lot of convincing before I’d take Vonnegut off the list of classics.