I despise Little Women even though I enjoy similar chick classic lit. It just pales so much in comparison to other works and its simply…cheesy and bland.
The early books read the way they do because they were adapted from an episodic radio show that Adams churned out virtually on the day of each recording -the main plot arc was pretty loose and everything else was just funny stuff he put in as he went. Once he got past the point of Arthur and Ford being stranded on prehistoric Earth and everyone else “eaten” and had to keep the stories going (for love or money) he started trying to write longer, more coherent stories, which strangely diminished what was lovable about the first books.
Likewise, the first Dirk Gently book was extremely clever. The second one, so-so. And the scraps we’ve seen of the third one (featuring a half-existent cat) looked dire.
Vonnegut’s works make more sense if you realize not only that he’s rapidly disappearing up his own backside but that he knows he’s doing it. Slaughterhouse Five and the Sirens of Titan work because there’s a decent concept behind them but much of the rest is just riffing on the same themes. And Breakfast of Champions is basically a confession that he’s not really contributing any meaningful or lasting insights in his works.
I concur on both counts.
The movie was kinda funky when it came out in 1968, but when I saw it again 15 years later, I had to agree with the title of the Mad Magazine parody: “201 Minutes of Space Idiocy.”
I think it worked in the cultural environment of 1968, but it hasn’t been 1968 for a long time and it never will be again, so that’s that. But even in 1968, the book was clunky.
I can’t stand Ian M Banks’s “Culture” novels. I’ve heard people and critics rave about how great and insightful they are, and the description of them sounds right up my alley, but when I read them I just bounced. There’s one that’s supposed to be an interesting metaphor about the folly of war that I found to be just a bland ‘some stuff happened, then a god reset things’, and another one that people say is deeply psychological with a surprising twist where I figured out the twist really early on and thought it was obvious enough that it couldn’t be what people were referring to.
Dune is one of those books that I absolutely love and yet have zero surprise if someone else doesn’t like it - it’s really easy to see how its thick and heavy prose style and tendency towards talk rather than action puts people off. Also while I like his writing, I think most of Herbert’s stuff can easily come off as ‘this guy thinks he’s so much cleverer than he really is’.
I loved Asimov when I was younger but haven’t reread any recently so I may be wrong, but what I remember is that he was really good at doing the science part of science fiction; he’d take an interesting change in the laws of nature or expand on a particular theory and do a good job exploring how that stuff works in the world and come up with some interesting implications. The characters were generally not real 3-d people though, and were just there to drive whatever idea he had. I always liked the short stories better than the novels since you really need better characters to keep driving the plot of a novel.
So easy - anything by Terry Pratchett.
For me it’s nothing but wannabe Monty Pythonesque pseudo sophistication that has crawled so far up its own ass it has found its way out the mouth and is crawling down for a second round up the ass.
It’s not unusual.
I tried, but I can’t imagine any modern reader finishing the book. But it does make for a fun stage play.
Hmmm, maybe best as a student production. And I’m biased; though not a theater major, I got to be Tom, swordfights, slapstick and all. And my classmates were hooting and hollering as the girl-well-known-as-a-temptress got to seduce me as we greasily made a mess of an entire chicken in the onstage tavern. (Sorry, apparently my life peaked in the '70s)
I didn’t love Gatsby but I liked it well enough. Almost all the characters are unsympathetic, but somehow Fitzgerald made me care what happens to them. Not so with Tender is the Night. All the characters are assholes, and I didn’t care if they all died in a fiery crash. I read all the way to the end because I kept expecting it to get better. It never did.
I don’t normally read condensed versions of novels, but that’s the only way I can read Dickens. The condensed versions of Oliver Twist, *Great Expectations, * and David Copperfield are pretty good. The original versions are impenetrable. It’s apparently not true that Dickens was paid by the word. But he damn well wrote as if he were.
I was required to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. At the time I hated it. I don’t think my fifteen-year-old self was prepared to connect with it. I have the feeling that if I tried reading it again through adult eyes that I might like it better. But I haven’t tried.
The Once and Future King by T H White. Forced to read it in high school. I think it poisoned me from ever being able to enjoy anything pertaining to King Arthur, with the possible exception of Purcell (but that’s music and that’s different).
Tolkein. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when I was, oh, fourteen, and thought it - especially Rings - was the best thing ever written. At around thirty, I thought I would reread them; really enjoyed The Hobbit, didn’t get fifty pages into Rings, flat out hated it as pretentious crap. I conclude that age matters.
Notwithstanding digs’ excellent point, you’re not getting me out of here without me giving Catcher another kicking…
j
Finally picked up a copy of Moby Dick from the library earlier this year. It was one of those books I’d heard of all my life and never read.
I think I was expecting the main character, Ishmael, to narrate with the voice of a rough-life-living, hard-bitten, no-more-education-than-he-needed, seen-it-all kind of sailor.
Something like this, I guess:
Instead, I get this kind of narrative:
:mad:
yeah, I tossed it aside after about 120 pages.
Asimov is like Agatha Christie. The characters are stock and formulaic, but the characters are not what the story is about. The story is about the idea. Like Christie, Asimov wrote so much that he came up with formulae (like The Black Widowers stories) that he could fit his ideas into. When it worked, it worked, but not because he was great at characterization.
Confederacy of Dunces has been mentioned enough. It just sucked. Likewise everything F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. He just isn’t a good writer.
I have only tried to plow thru Dune once, and sometimes I think I should try again. It took two tries to get thru LotR, and I enjoyed the second try. But life is short. I am afraid of it winding up like Nicholas Nickleby - I like Dickens, but the slog wasn’t worth being able to say that I have read all of Dickens.
My only original contribution to the thread is going to be The Brothers Karamazov. It was enthusiastically recommended to me as one of those books “You Have to Read!” Hopefully I only Have to Read half of it, because that is as far as I got. My word, what a grind, and when I got to the shocking part, I had no f*cks left to give.
Regards,
Shodan
May I recommend the University of California reprint of the Arial Press edition, which includes dozens of woodcut illustrations by the great Barry Moser?
I found it was easier to get through the long sections on cetology and whaleboat equipment when you could see what the hell Melville was talking about.
Yep.
I didnt spot the allegory until my late teens, read it as a kid, loved it.
A Hemingway short they can have kids read. It’s Ok.
I tried *Confederacy of Dunces *, couldnt manage it.
I hate Faulkner.
Shelby Foote has been lauded for his Civil war books, but they are too full of Southern Sympathy for me, Foote worshiped that racist murderer war criminal Forrest.
Best thing about *Last of the Mohicans * is Twains takedown of it.
I like Asimov, especially his Non-fiction, but the Foundation Trilogy still stands head and shoulders above most.
Later Heinlein is dreck, sadly, with flashes of brilliance. 
But his earlier stuff, esp his juveniles are classics.
[Cartman]Every time one of these threads appears all you guys do is pile on me for not liking Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn! Huckleberry Finn!
Ahhh, screw you guys, I’m going home.[/Cartman]
All right, then, you can go to hell.
(Clever literary reference. Please don’t censure me, moderators)
lol, no I got it.
If it makes you feel any better, attempts at rendered dialect can often stump native English speakers. Twain did it fairly well, but it still helps to have heard the dialect actually spoken if you’re then going to read it. And if the author is bad at it, forget it. I’m pretty sure I’ve given up on books simply because I didn’t want to try to parse the attempt at representing the dialect.
Twains great job at dialect has been praised by those that study such things, it’s important to have a record of them. For myself, i have no problems with it.