Somebody mentioned Achebe’s Things Fall Apart somewhere up there. It always makes me smile when that book is mentioned, because I quoted Achebe in a paper I wrote for English about A Clockwork Orange (loved it when I was in college; now I think it’s just a tedious novel about a tedious philosophy). My prof gave me a D+ on the paper. He wrote, next to the Achebe quote, that he considered himself to be reasonably well-read, but he had never heard of Things Fall Apart (and implicitly, therefore, not a book worthy of citing in his class). Even though he was an English professor! Who specialized in modern literature!
I hate Marcel Proust. Good God. I only finished Swan’s way, and that was only because I was forced to write two papers on it. I could not believe that anything so long and so dull could exist in the universe. Seven volumes! What have we done wrong?
Agree about Henry James. The Turn of the Screw is like listening to somebody talking in a self-help group… rambling on and on and on and having no apparent point. I’ve framed the paper I wrote on the subject, called “Henry James: A Screw Loose.” This also received a D+.
I loathed The Iliad. Hektor couldn’t just whack Achilles, could he? No. We had to be treated to the complete lineage of both Hektor and Achilles, embellished with censuses of all the goats that somebody’s grandfather sacrificed to the gods, menus of what somebody else’s uncle had for breakfast, ad nauseum. I understand now that Homer wasn’t supposed to be read, but performed… and that it can’t really be translated from Greek without turning it into a dull chore to read. My grade on the paper on Homer? Getting better, got a B-.
I’m risking the Pit for saying this, but there is nothing good by Virginia Woolf except for A Room of One’s Own. Actually, now that I think about it, out of Capital-L Literature I much prefer non-fiction over fiction.
Finally, in re: Gatsby. I don’t hate the book. But even though I’ve been assigned to read it, like, six times, I can never remember anything about it.
