Given that the antagonists in the books are religious cultural conservatives who prioritize beliefs over facts and are wielding their political power, you might be surprised.
Yeah. I speedballed through much of Hesse as a teenager, but never got around to The Glass Bead Game, the novel that got him a Nobel. I picked it up at age 40 or so, read a hundred pages, then put it back down.
Oddly enough, I still love The Journey to the East, and reread it every few years.
Even weirder, I read all of Richard Brautigan in my teens (yeah, yeah, it was the ‘70s). I wouldn’t reread him…except for In Watermelon Sugar, which is uncharacteristic of him and which I consider a great fantasy novel.
Ditto.
Haven’t read Glass Bead Game even yet, and sounds like I shouldn’t bother. But given what you’ve said, maybe I’ll pick up Journey to the East, just to see. i remember it was fairly short.
But I’ve re-read Siddhartha, and was surprised how little ‘there’ was there. And I’ve tried to re-read Demian and Steppenwolf, and said, ‘fuck this shit’ partway in, in both cases. I remember enough of Narcissus and Goldmund to be fairly confident my reaction would be the same there.
Never read In Watermelon Sugar, just his poetry and Trout Fishing In America.
Been a long, long time since I’ve read any of it. I think I may still have one of his poetry books, buried in one of our many bookcases. I’ll have to see.
Douglas Adams had a definite gift for prose, but almost no talent at actual story-telling. HHGTG is a bunch of decent jokes that fail to cohere into anything interesting. His real metier was writing travel guides, not fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut’s books read like being lectured to by a college freshman. His insights are, generally, pretty trite, so he compensates by talking down to everyone around him.
RTFirefly:. Whenever a friend tells me s/he is getting rid of a musical instrument, I am gripped by a cold fear.
In A Journey to the East, the narrator’s role in the League is as its principal musician and general music master. When he sells his violin, it’s symbolic of his loss of connection with the League and a higher life in general.
Most of Brautigan’s poetry is shite, but his “Homage to Baudelaire” series is a lot of fun. Do pick up a used copy of In Watermelon Sugar; it’ll snap yer stix.
I had an interesting experience here. Read it once and didn’t get very far. Tried it several years later and loved it. I happened to find my first copy in a box and, wait, it didn’t read so well again. Side-by-side I realized: one was a terrible translation, one a really good one.
For the most part I agree with you, but I remember Cat’s Cradle and Sirens of Titan as being pretty good. Don’t mess with a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum.
I’ve mentioned this many times before, but when I bought a copy of Last of the Mohicans at our local Borders, the cashier actively tried to talk me out of it.
I should have listened to her…
Read the book long before the movie came out. It doesn’t improve much.
The later books in the Hitchhikers series (basically anything after Restaurant at the End of the Universe) to me read like an SNL skit that drags on after the main punchline is told. I think Adams himself realized this, which was why he was desperate to get away from the story in the first place; problem was, the fan-boys kept clamoring for more. Mostly Harmless (never read myself but I have it on good authority), the last book, depending on your level of devotion to the Hitchhikers Saga, is either an embarrassment or a betrayal.
I had read little of Heinlein and didn’t care for much of it. I loved Philip K. Dick. A co-worker was a Heinlein fan and challenged me to read (I forget how many) a few of his books, and he would read some Dick books that I picked. Maybe one of or both of us would change our minds? Flash forward a few weeks, and I returned his Heinlein books to him saying they were just o.k., but didn’t really change my mind. He had not read *any *of the books I’d lent him.
That just added an extra level of disdain to my opinion of Heinlein. 
Sounds like the beginning to a solid horror story.
Cat’s Cradle is the specific book that crystallized my dislike of Vonnegut.
No argument from me that they get worse as they go along, but I’m not talking about any of the sequels.
Like them both, but Dav Pilkey is better. Majority of kids still like Roald Dahl. My students, like me, dig The Twits more than his better knowns works.
Got that impression from Kerouac. Devoured him as a kid, but then eventually, as Truman Capote once (rightly) said of him, “he doesn’t write - he types”.
Another offender is Jon Dos Passos, whose “Manhattan Transfer” was the most self-indulgent exercise in prolix wankery - I’ve never seen adjectives subjected to so much abuse (overuse).
Holden Caulfield seems to be getting a good shit-kicking here, and rightly so. Another protagonist as equally punchable is the mook in “Portnoy’s Complaint”. Christ what a pain in the ass.
After slogging through its first third (oh great - heaps n’heaps o’Russian penury and dreariness - the usual drill), I was about ready to put it down, but was glad that I persisted, and eventually got enmeshed in some of the most finely-drawn characters and riveting plot I’ve ever read. One of my all-time top five.
In school, Dickens’s “Bleak House” was thrown at me. At the time - ridiculously tl;dr for this partying reprobate; not so sure if I’d be any more patient now.
“The Prophet” - Khalil Gibran
I have a relative who is an English professor who goes ga-ga at the mention of On The Road. Boring, tedious, I am unimpressed. I have tried and simply don’t get it. (What is so great??) No can do. (weren’t they closeted gays IRL?)
I remember when the Dune movie came out years ago and Roger Ebert made some complaint about it being impenetrable and hard to grasp for the average moviegoer, and Mr. Salinqmind said in a huff, ‘well, why doesn’t he just read the book?’ :eek: I said, Roger Ebert has a full time JOB and doesn’t have time to read that doorstop. I gamely gave it a try and got lost right away. (and I have loved and read The Lord of the Rings trilogy more times than I can count).
And I can’t get into Ernest Hemingway, everyone says 'oh, his writing is so spare! so pared down! '…zzzzzz…sorry, I LIKE descriptions of things.
Huh. Now I’m curious enough to read it again. I was 14 the last time. I remember liking the idea of “karass” and of ice-nine.
*Beloved *by Toni Morrison. Ugh, what a terrible, boring book. I was hoping I’d like it because it was billed to me as a horror-ish novel (I had to read it for a writing course) but I hated every minute of it. I don’t even think I finished it, and faked my way through the discussions by reading summaries on the net.
(Then again, I really liked The Goldfinch, which I had to read for the same class and expected to hate because I normally don’t care for literary fiction.)
Oh, and I remember trying to read *Dune *in high school, and not getting very far. What a slog.
A lot of books from “back in the day” were insightful, life-changing books AT THE TIME. Holden Caulfield only makes sense in a repressed post-war society where conformity is enforced, and when every other book written with a young protagonist is a sappy morality play. A teenager who was allowed to be cynical was revolutionary.
Ditto for Kerouac… a road trip is no big deal today; back then it was a spiritual journey, and the polar opposite of the “squares” who were trying to settle down in one white-picket-fenced yard.
Vonnegut, Brautigan, Kesey, Wolfe etc. were radicalizing. Kids were reading stuff that called their parents’ values, and their parents’ literature, into question. When I was in school, everyone had to read Great Expectations , Moby Dick and Our Town.
It was only the one “Hippie Chick Teacher” who’d let you read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Cat’s Cradle, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (and got in trouble with disgusted parents, who rightly feared their iron grip over their children’s loyalty would be undermined).
The Beatles (to change media) broke new ground because the airwaves were full of trite easy listening drivel. If a student says “Yeah, but that stuff’s all been done by other bands.” I tell them "But the Beatles did it first. Look at what the Top 40 songs were that you heard non-stop in 1963… Pat Boone and Petula Clark. Nothing else on the radio until one day you hear the Beatles…
AT THE TIME they were ground-breaking, and mind-blowing.
Some of the literature that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century was like that back in the mid-20th.
- It was a brick when I first tried it, it was a brick when I tried it again, it remains a brick. Both book and movie.
Having been very glad to discover that his full works were available on the kindle for nothing or thereabouts, I’ve discovered I can only read Twain in translation. His attempts to represent the pronunciations of words rmake him incomprehensible to me in the original 
I still like those of his books I’ve read… but they need some masochist to have slogged through those rendered pronunciations for me.