I don’t really despise authors so much as I despise certain books.
Catcher in the Rye was okay, story-wise, but I was a bit put off by the whining and continual cursing. It didn’t seem to me that obscenity really made the character what he was. Still, I would encourage people to read it.
Hemingway, Dickens, Hawthorne, et. al have easier-to-stomach novels and some that are…just indigestible.
Just MHO.
Mark Twain is way overrated.
And the kids just highlight and repeat the hot quotes like this one:
“My goodness! A boiler explosion on the steamboat?! Was anyone hurt?”
Tom “No’m, killed a nigger.”
“Well, that’s good, because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Sure it was mean to show the tenor of the times, but Twain was a man of his times as well, and not above racist remarks.
I’m not a huge fan of Annie Dillard. Had to read some of her short stories, it sucked. Drawn out, just a Thoreau (who I’m not a huge fan of either) wannabe. Teacher kept trying to convince me that she was a good writer because he liked her and she won a Pulitzer. Newsflash, teach: tastes in authors are opinions!
I sometimes wonder, when I hear comments like this, what would have happened had Joyce never written (or at least never published) Finnegans Wake. I think a lot of people take the fact that FW really is almost indeciperable and make that their excuse for hating Ulysses, which is difficult but far from impossible. If Joyce’s reputation rested on Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, I think a lot more people might read and enjoy those works.
I’m glad someone mentioned him. It wasn’t long before I felt drowsy just glancing at an entire paragraph of that book… and there was stuff in there which I swear was not even grammatical. “Mastery of the English language,” my butt! Fortunately, the teacher gave us the choice of writing an essay on HoD or Apocalypse Now. Guess which I chose.
I kinda liked Dickens myself, just not the fact that I had to read three whole novels in one semester.
We read The Scarlet Letter last year in Jr Eng. It sucked. At the end of the reading, we had to write papers about a variety of topic choices. They were all like “Explore such-and-such as a symbol” and so on and so forth etc ad nauseum. I chose “Write an informed exposition setting forth your opinion of this novel. THIS IS NOT A BOOK REVIEW. DO NOT SUMMARIZE THE PLOT.” My review was basically:
I went on for three pages, staying mostly within the boundaries of high-school sensibilities, except that towards the bottom of page 2 I said something about how “sex is an intrinsic part of the background to this story, yet somehow it is never mentioned at all. The closest Hawthorne comes to mentioning this taboo topic is a scene in the forest, where it’s just Hester, Dinsdale and [the kid’s name, which I have forgotten – Pearl?]. Hester actually takes off her bonnet, and they dare to call each other something besides Honored Sir and Mistress Prynne! Why, it’s practically X-rated!”
So yeah, I vote for Hawthorne. I hated that book.
I remember talking to a friend of mine about The Red Badge of Courage, which, incidentally, I haven’t read, but have started several times. It’s not that I find it boring- I just can’t get through it somehow. Anyway, the gist of the conversation was that RBoC (hey- if it were a red badge, the acronym would spell “cobra” backwards…) is actually a very complicated book, but when it’s taught in high school it’s reduced to “He learned how to be brave.” After a while, we came to the conclusion that books for high school are chosen on the basis of a few simple criteria:
Short. RBoC wins that one!
No sex.
No dirty words. (Hence “Catcher in the Rye”, whose main audience is high school students, is never assigned for them. Then again, if I were writing a book for high school students, I’d deliberately put in dirty words in order to make sure that no teacher mangled it.)
Easy to boil down into a soundbite moral.
I consider myself fortunate that I managed to avoid reading most of the classics for class, so I can enjoy reading them now, as an adult, when I can better appreciate them. I also had a very good English teacher who read us “The Miller’s Tale” in class, with, IIRC, some warnings not to tell anyone that she was doing so.
As for the author to be worst taught, it’s hard for me to contribute much, since my teacher was so good, but I’d suggest Shakespeare. Although I like reading Shakespeare, I do so having seen plenty of plays performed before, so I have some grasp of how to read a play. Plus, I just don’t like Romeo and Juliet- it seems to me that it is not even remotely on the same level as, say, Hamlet or Merchant of Venice, and I suspect that they teach it because it has no sex, no dirty words, and can be condensed into a soundbite.
Incidentally, I find it interesting (and unfortunate) that to most people, the “classics” are what you read in high school. I consider Pale Fire and Naked Lunch to be classics, but you will never see them being taught in high school.
-Ben
Oh lordy, this English major is sputtering at the screen. Shakespeare? Dickens?? Hemingway and Fitzgerald??? I’m about to cry. I adore all of these authors. I’m not nearly as well-versed in Shakespeare as DRY, but I do worship him. And I am so thankful that my teachers taught me to love Romeo & Juliet, Great Expectations, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Great Gatsby. They led me to discover Twelfth Night, MacBeth, Hamlet, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, and Tender is the Night on my own.
That being said, I agree with Faulkner - he should not be taught in high school. I had no idea what he was saying in tenth grade - someone compared him to “a syphilitic monkey,” which is fitting. However, I attended a graduate-level Faulkner seminar at the permission of my Amer.Lit. professor, and I loved him! Much better the second time around.
I was lucky enough to be in an international program, so I also read Chinua Achebe, Henrik Ibson, Kamala Markandaya, Tolstoy, and Flaubert (Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are two of my favorites). I know people who read Shakespeare and Hemingway every year of high school English, and I guess the variety of subject and setting helped a lot.
Okay, I’ve had enough. I have to defend a few authors here.
Hemingway: He writes short, concise sentences that can be as to the point as a needle. He does not agonize over detail, nor does he dally in irrelevant sidetracks. Instead, he writes from life without sounding pretentious or tormented. When he is read, the text itself, the little chickenmarks on the page, do not detract from the story or the style. He simply writes to tell a story and make a point.
Salinger: He is the only author I have yet seen who can write from the point of view of a socially disturbed person and not sound like he’s forcing it. The Catcher in the Rye is one of the best coming-of-age novels because it never hits you over the head with symbolism or brags about how ‘different’ the main character is. The author just lets the story speak for itself, and in that way makes it effective.
It is funny how people can read the same work and come to exact opposite conclusions. For instance, I love Heart of Darkness; it’s definetely one of my favorite books. There are passages that I can not read without being struck by their beauty. There’s a couple of passages early on in the book that get me every time; one is the unnamed narrator’s (not Marlow, but the man who listens to Marlow tell his story on the river boat) description of the Thames. Another is Marlow’s musings on what it would have been like to be a Roman come to Britain during their period of settlement. And yet others have persumably read those passages and thought “how boring” or “Conrad couldn’t write”.
For what it’s worth, I did not read the book in high school. I got interested in the subject a few years ago, and decided to read the book, and ended up liking it. The only Conrad we read in my school was The Secret Sharer, which, though there are passages that I think are very well written, has never quite appealed to me.
Great defense of Conrad, Amok. Heart of Darkness has appealed to me like few other works in the English language. It is dreamy yet incredibly concise. The reader must have patience, however, and allow himself to be captivated by Conrad’s incredibly prose.
And for those of you bitching about Moby Dick…has anyone ever read Billy Budd? That is truly a monstrosity.
He clicked his mouse and glanced at the screen. Faulkner and Dickens seemed to have many detractors. Somewhat more surprising were Joyce, Shakespeare and Twain. He pondered these a bit. Then he saw Hemingway’s name. His finger twitched along the surface of the mouse. This was not right, Hemingway, he felt, was a truly great writer. Yet, here where the digerati met he was confounded that some were of the opposite opinion. He clicked the mouse. He responded.
Shakespeare. Why teach subject matter written in archaic English when most students haven’t gotten modern English mastered? Plus, Shakespeare is terribly overrated.
Do not bash Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote about issues right at the heart of human life. He wrote about love, hate, self-doubt, and life itself. Shakespeare did not write in a ‘foreign language’ or ‘obscure dialect’ either. His language is just as much English as Huckleberry Finn’s in Mark Twain’s novel. All it takes to understand it is a little patience and some reading skills. Footnotes are provided in any decent rendition of his works. Besides, Shakespeare influenced the rest of English, and then American, art, culture, and civilization immensely. Every good author references his works at least once. Most of the movies today have plots essentially the same as his. And everyone should know his soliloquys, if only to hear how well the English language can be used. Follow this link and be enlightened: http://www.cowtown.net/users/chashays/hamlet.txt
I too HATED Heart of Darkness. I love to read, almost anything. But this book <shudder>, this book, I LOATHE.
I was supposed to read it for grade 12 English, I got through all fo the others, including Crime and Punishment and A Separate Peace and enjoyed them. Then I got to Conrad, YUCK.
annalamerino—the point of those racist phrases in Twain is that he was skewering the idiots who used them. It was a subtle point, though, and one that many people, it seems, fail to grasp.
By the way, I have tried to like Twain and I just don’t—not for political reasons; he just ain’t my cup of tea. Now, William Dean Howells and Booth Tarkington? Can’t get enough of 'em!
Thank you Maeglin, I’m happy to see that I’m not the only one who loved “Heart of Darkness”. I think it was an amazing piece of literature, and quite frankly, I feel that I am better equipped as a reader and an author now, having read it.
Maybe it’s the teacher that makes the books horrible. Every single book that is mentioned here that people hated (Well, the ones I have read anyway) I loved. But I’ve had some amazing teachers. I’m struggling to understand why people hate The Scarlett Letter, a book that changed my whole life. Or Heart of Darkness, a book that stunned me with its beauty. I never understood why people disliked Catcher in the Rye. Maybe they have never experienced what the Halden was talking about? Me? The whole time I was reading it I was like, “Yeah, that’s me! Fuck, I’m not the only one.”
Oh, the list can go on and on and on. I guess it’s just interesting what some people take from what they read, whether it be good or bad.
Eve wrote:
That nice miss Bronte?!
I’ll have you know I just (just!) finished chugging my way through Wuthering Heights last night. I’ve been out of school for almost a decade now, so the decision to read it was one not made for me by any schoolteacher. I read it because it was “supposed” to be a classic, and I felt like I “ought” to read it.
I will never, ever get back those precious, precious hours of my life I squandered reading that mountain of dreck.
It’s page after page after mind-numbing page describing a dysfunctional family. Who the hell wants to read about somebody else’s dysfunctional family? “Ooh, but it’s a rich dysfunctional family! That makes it all worth while!” Like hell it does. And why the hell didn’t Cathy Junior just annull her forced marriage to Heathcliff Lynton, and get all her property back that way? She could have easily gotten it annulled because her marriage was obviously never consummated – I can’t imagine anybody in this straight-laced hyper-Victorian story so much as touching anyone else below the waist.
Oh, and I just looked up “wuthering” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. It means “blowing with a dull roaring sound”. Well, this book definitely blows, that’s for sure.
Twain? People don’t like Twain? Jeez, even though I hear this from time to time it still hits me like someone saying they don’t like multiple orgasms. Okay, I can understand the criticisms of the other authors even when I disagree, but when someone says they don’t like Twain it causes a fatal exception error in my skull, causing my brain to reboot.
Books I hated:
Catcher in the Rye. Yes, Salinger does a great job portraying a self-absorbed, callous little twit completely obsessed with his own pleasure and wallowing in the disillusionment of growing up. Still, that doesn’t make this book enjoyable or worth the time. I could watch MTVs The Real World and get the same effect.
The Old Man and the Sea. Yes, I GET the stupid Christ metaphor already. Okay, man against the elements. Got it. Next time, might you try these points out in a story mildly more interesting than a test pattern?
The House of Seven Gables. By the third chapter, is there anyone who doesn’t know that the papers are behind the painting, and she’s going to marry the artist and end the curse?
Most everything else I liked, or at least didn’t dislike all that much. My nomination for Best Book Assigned in School: To Kill a Mockingbird.
Ptahlis wrote:
Twain gives you multiple orgasms?! :eek: