Okay, Okay…I know I’m the Lone Ranger here, but I absolutely couldn’t find a shred of greatness in “On The Road”. Jack passed me by like a side dish he didn’t order. What the…??
Did a moment of literary greatness leave you slack-jawed and wondering why your idea of great isn’t even on the same planet as everyone else’s? Please share!
There are certain authors who just roll off my knife. I’m not saying they can’t write, of course; they’re just not my cup of tea. Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Theo. Dreiser, James Joyce . . . I’ll read a back-issue of People before I’d pick up one of their books.
Purely a matter of personal taste, and if you like those fellows, more power to you.
I agree with Eve. While I understand the point of Hemmingway and Twain. I avoid reading them (now that I no longer have to) like the plague. I (gasp) also feel that way about Steinbeck.
Do you think Dorothy Parker really threw Hemmingway’s typewriter into the ocean? Oh please don’t say it isn’t so!
Echokitty-I totally agree with you on “On the Road”. It’s supposed to be this life changing book, but to me it just seems to fall down.
I think the problem is I was born into the wrong generation. This book was written before hippies existed (from what I know) and inspired the beatnicks (I think).
Put in the right perspective I think the book could be great.
The Dharma Bums is better, if you MUST read Kerouac.
I never developed much of a taste for the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
Never been much of a Jenna Elfman fan, myself . . .
Oh man - where do I begin?
John Updike - do not get it (yet I love Nicholson Baker, who loves Updike so much he wrote a book about it, U & I)
Postmodern writers - Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Rushdie (IMO) you get the picture - any writer who seems (to me) to be writing more to show how they are great technical writers. The whole thing that led to the essay by Jonathan Franzen about the need for characters and linear stories…
Vonnegut - He seems pessimistic and philosophically moribund - I did like God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, though…but the almost cult-like adoration - he almost is the Grateful Dead of authors. Or maybe that’s Tom Robbins, another writer I really don’t get…
the list goes on…
I’m reading Tom Robbins’s “Skinny Legs and All” for the second time right now. While I admit that some of his points may be slightly lost on me, his style is so unique that I would definitely continue reading his work. I think the trick to enjoying his work is to not take it too seriously. Rather, just relax and enjoy the textures, colors, and sensations created by his best passages and strangest analogies.
Even though I write horror, I just can’t get through any of Lovecraft’s stories. For me it’s like trying to read a technical manual.
I mentioned that a con this past weekend, and from the reaction I got from a few people, felt like I had committed blasphemy in church.
Sheri
Faulkner - I’d rather take a sulfuric enema than read his claptrap.
EchoKitty - count me in on the don’t-get-it camp for “On the Road.” I’ve tried several times to read that book, and it just bores me to tears. I tried reading it in high school, in university and once since. It’s never spoken to me.
Wow, Eve. You’ve managed to name pretty much my top 5 writers. Subtract Joyce and add Nelson Algren and Vladimir Nabakov and you’ve got my list. 
Claude Simon won a Nobel prize in 1985, and I’ve tried and tried and tried to get even a quarter of a way through one of his books, and never managed to come close. He’s one of those writer who likes paragraph-long sentences and tons and tons of precise, almost scientific description (yes, I know, that was his point.) Yeesh.
Ginsburg I’m also not too particularly hot for. Bukowski, for some odd reason, I like, though he can easily become a parody of himself if you read too many of his works.
Dear T.S. Eliot gets on my nerves. Though I do appreciate his genius and love his Four Quartets and Prufrock, and even have a recording of him reading “The Wasteland,” taken a university course on him, wrote more papers analyzing his poetry than I would ever wish upon my worst enemy, I can’t say I’ve ever really gotten into his poetry. Auden, on the other hand, I totally dig.
A great big second to James Joyce. Uck. Rocks are transparent in comparison to his opacity.
Also, Toni Morrison. I’m sorry, but her work just leaves me feeling cheated. Too bad, because she can really churn out some lovely prose when she chooses to.
Again - Hemingway.
Lord I detest reading Hemingway. The first exposure to him that I had was The Old Man and the Sea. I was reading it, thinking, “this is written for 4th graders!” I hated the style, I didn’t mind the ending too much, but the only reason I actually finished the book was because I had to. I adore reading, but I can’t stand Hemingway. It didn’t help that my English teacher was obsessed with symbolism, often to rediculous levels. She’d say that there was meaning in the fact that each word in the title had three letters, and there were 6 words in the title, and 6 is evenly divided by 3 (heh, one group assignment I had to do was on the symbolism. My friend made it extremely overdone intentionally by saying, “manolin rhymes with lanolin, which as we all know is sheep oil. A baby sheep is a lamb… Manolin to lanolin to sheep to lamb to LAMB OF GOD!” heh heh).
Walt Whitman - This was the one book (Leaves of Grass) that I never finished for a class. I would read a poem and not remember a damn thing it said since I was concentrating so hard on thinking, “YES, another page down, one less to read!” Then I would spend my time thinking of Homer saying, “WALT WHITMAN? Damn you, Walt Whitman! Leaves of Grass MY ASS!”
Henry James – just recently re-read The Turn of the Screw - and all I kept think was “Did this guy get paid by the word or WHAT?”. Admittedly, I was reading it on my Handspring Visor, but one sentence filled the whole screen, for goodness’ sake!
Hawthorne strikes me the same way - one entire chapter on describing the dooryard? C’mon!
And don’t start me on Thomas Hardy - I had to teach Tess of the d’Ubervilles - guess who brought Cliff Notes to class… :rolleyes:
My vote is for james Joyce-I have absolutely NO idea what he is trying to get across in ULYSSES! I find his weird puns to be idiotic, and his characters are unbelievable. I wonder how many engish majors have suffered, trying to plow through that awful work!
I agree with “On the Road.” I read it in college, after one of my friends said it was incredible and, while I thought it was very well written, the story didn’t do anything for me. In fact the way some of the characters acted really put me off.
I do like Tom Robbins, although his last two books haven’t impressed me as much as some of the earlier ones. Skinny Legs and All, Still Life with Woodpecker and Another Roadside Attraction stand out for me.
photopat- I like Tom Robbins for the most part, but he is sometimes tough to get into. I read Another Roadside Attraction and it took me about a month to get into it. I didn’t like his frantic change topics every paragraph style of writing.
John Irving. I read A Prayer for Owen Meaney and got about half way through Cider House Rules. My main impression was that Irving seemed to have real issues with women and sex. I’ve heard so many people go on and on about the guy, and I just don’t get it. Was Owen Meaney a decent read? Sure. Was it inspirational, meaningful, or life-changing? Not hardly.
I was also not impressed by On the Road.
My brother has pretty much adopted Bukowski’s way of life, which I’ll never understand in a million years. I haven’t read him, but I’m a little scared that he might have the same effect on ME! AAAAGGGGHHHHH!