I read Pride & Prejudice last summer ('04) and Oliver Twist this spring/summer. I really enjoy Dickens. P&P I liked as a romance and as an engaging story; I’m not sure if there was more I was supposed to get out of it. Well written, though.
I also recently read Sophie’s Choice for the second time; the first was almost half my life ago. I liked it, but it didn’t speak to me as viscerally as it did when I was a few years shy of being the narrator’s age, instead of a decade beyond it. But the last hundred pages were still as gripping as anything I’ve ever read.
Not quite sure whether this counts – either as a classic or a novel – but I just finished reading The Right Stuff. Liked it a lot. It truly elevated my regard for the movie, which was already on my list of favorites. Now and then, of course, the prose style becomes a bit grating, seeming overly concerned with clever catch phrases. But I can say without a doubt that this is far and away the most readable work of non-fiction I’ve ever encountered.
Got around to reading Ivanhoe last year. Great book. Normally fiction from that era bores me to tears. Soooo slow moving, impossibly pendantic dialogue, and countless obscure references that kept me Googling into the wee hours. Not so this book. Against all possible expectations I found myself reading many passages aloud, so taken was I with the sheer beauty of the language.
I recently read In Cold Blood, Capote’s “non fiction novel” (his phrase), and thought it was excellent. I’d read most of his short-stories and Answered Prayers but this was the first time I’d read his magnum opus, which was in preparation for the movie. It was almost as good as he said it was.
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Now I understand where Philip K. Dick got the genesis for many of his ideas; Bester is Dick without the methamphetemine-induced paranoia and schizoid delusions.
I’ve One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the To Read: Soon stack, but there’s no telling when I’ll actually get to it.
Earlier this year, I read On the Road, Sons and Lovers, Invisible Man, Brave New World, and Sound and the Fury.
[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
The mea culpa at the end, where the protagonist apologizes to Lolita and pointing out that he indicated the work should not be published until after her death (a moment whose poignancy, owing to specific dates mentioned in the book which when combined with the publication date, indicate Lolita, still a young woman, had died almost immediately after the narrative, was initially lost on me due to the great remove of time) came as too little, too late to cover up the fact that this is basically pedophilic porn for a repressed age.
Is this some definition of porn that I’m not aware of? Something like “written with intent to disgust?”
I was sorta disappointed with Lolita (I read it the better part of a decade ago, so I don’t necessarily remember it all that well), but not because it was porn. I thought that aspect of it was handled extraordinarily well. I just thought that after the first third, most of the book (the picaresque part) was just kinda boring – by then, you’d either thrown the book down in disgust OR made your peace with Humbert’s monstrosity, so an extended portrait of Humbert’s further monstrosity didn’t do much for me. I agree with scot’s spoiler about the end, though.
I really loved the Ardian Lynne movie of some years ago; I thought he really got it right, and there wasn’t time in a hour and a half to get bored as I did after a hundred pages. I also really liked the ending of the film, although it’s very different in tone than the book’s.
There also exists at least one recording of Joyce’s reading of a brief excerpt from Ulysses – worth investigating. It probably should be read aloud or heard, especially on a first read. I would find no fault with one who purchased one of the skeleton-key-type books to aid with the references, although I think the book is understandable to some extent without a sure knowledge of the (many) fancy references. That said, I’m not sure I’d bother spending much time getting at the hard kernel of that scat-obsessed attempt at humor. It’s at the very bottom of the heap of important 20th-century novels, in my own canon. I don’t think it will stand the test of time as well as, for example “The Man Without Qualities,” or “Life: A User’s Guide,” or “Nostromo,” but we’ll see, I suppose.
And you’ve already read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man too, right?
I’ve read Catcher in the Rye and Lolita years ago and wasn’t too impressed with them. I read Godel, Esher & Bach and Far from the Madding Crowd, they were interesting. The last classic I read was Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, but I had an old Readers Digest Classics version, and I enjoyed it. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was really good too.
I watched **Bridge of San Luis Rey ** this past weekend but it didn’t do much for me. I understand it’s quite different from the book which I may read in the near future.
