That’s exactly how I feel when I read fantasy and science fiction. The authors seem to put so much effort into the technical aspects of the books (ie. what kind of monsters the heros will encounter, what gadgets will exist 100 years from now) that no one seems to realize just how much their characters suck. IMO, F&SF seeks to appeal, almost without exception, to readers who could care less about the characterizations and onward with the technical details, which is why they represent basically the flip side of the contingent of literature fans who read Joyce, Pynchon, etc even though they don’t get a single word of it.
I actually straddle both camps, having grown up reading both F&SF and horror but gravitating in latter years toward… Joyce & Pynchon!
Let’s not forget, there are also books like “100 Years Of Solitude”, which one can’t really “get” but are nonetheless captivating reads.
I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter, even in high school, but I agree, his short stories are much better, my favorite being the perrenial high school fave “Young Goodman Brown”.
While there are many of the authors whose works I detest mentioned in this thread (Vonnegut, Updike, Whitman, Tolkien, and may I add Tom Wolfe) because of the writing styles, I wouldn’t go to so far as to say I didn’t “get” them. I got them, I just didn’t care.
A writer whose novels I truly don’t get is actually a writer I like: Marget Atwood. I had high hopes because I found The Handmaiden’s Tale quite compelling, but it’s one of only two of her novels I’ve actually had the patience to finish. The only other I’ve read completely, instead of giving up on, is Surfacing, and despite having had to discuss it in a class, I’m still not confident enough to say I actually understood it.
In my mind she’s a lot like Nathaniel Hawthorne: someone who is a good writer who should have stuck to short stories. Her books of short stories are wonderful, and the stories even make sense!
I can’t say that I have an author that I truly despise or that I don’t get.
I’ve finally managed to make it almost all of the way through The Two Towers after about 25 failed attampts. Something about Tolkien’s prose in the later LotR parts is just, urgh. It almost feels like he was sitting at his typewriter and saying to himself, “Oh Christ, I don’t know what the hell to do next. Maybe I’ll have someone go on and on and on for 4 or 5 pages about some of the ancient history of Middle Earth. Yeah, that sounds good.”
As for Tom Wolfe, I lovedThe Right Stuff and I thought Bonfire of the Vanities was decent, even though upon re-reading it, all of the characters seems to be stereotypes with very little depth to them.
Then along comes A Man In Full.
It took me 28 tries just to get through the first 50 pages. Finally, about 3 years ago, I just said “Fuck it,” and the book has been sitting on the shelf ever since.
I’ve tried to read Cold Mountain about 5 times but have never gotten thru more then about the 1st 60 pages.
As far as Hemingway, I read The Nick Adams Stories one summer while in high school and I liked them. Hemingway was a very clean writer.
I read Heart of Darkness and loathed it, every page. The only thing I ever read of Conrad that was even mildly engaging was Typhoon. I wrote a paper about Heart of Darkness. I understood it. Not even a bad idea for a novel, but that was a bad book. Hemmingway too. Yes I get Hemmingway and he bores me to tears. I am grateful that I was not forced to read more of his odius macho overhyped excrement.
Hawthorne’s novels. Those hammer at symbolism so hard, you can see the dents in the back cover. In one of his novels he goes on for over ten long pages about a guy who died while checking his watch. Such boring drivel being touted as a great novel makes me weep. The man wrote decent short stories. Not as good as Poe’s, but readable. Why do English teachers inflict his novels on students, where there are so many good novels to read?
I hate Hawthorne, and Thoreau. Walt Whitman. Hemingway.
Tried them all. Tried & tired.
I couldn’t get into Thomas the Unbeliever series, tried more than once. Who was that anyway…Stephen R. Donaldson is the name I think of.
I do try more than one time, I hated Sara Paretsky the first time I tried her, now I quite enjoy reading her.
Goodness, were they worth the effort, though? If I can’t get into something after three attempts or so, I chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and move on to something more accessable. There are lots of books out there and nothing is so important to get through that I’m going to torture myself to do so; I did enough of that while reading assigned works in college.
I just read Animal Farm the other night. I don’t think I got the point at all. Unless of course the point was “all leaders are asses,” or in this case pigs. I didn’t like it at all and I think I would have enjoyed re-reading Brave New World.
Animal Farm is an unsubtle metaphor for Marxism: that in the end, even revolutions crumble as the leaders become greedy and try to maintain the trappings of power. Power corrupts and all that malarkey. The pigs walking on hind legs on the end is the ultimate proof: they’ve become those that they revolted against (humans), contrasting clearly with the early revolutionary slogans.
Wow…I could argue with some of you for days on some of these books. Hemingway haters: TOMATS is likely his worst work, period.
As an ABD in English (Contemporary Lit for MA, 20th C. American for Ph.D., minor in 20th C. Brit.), I’ve come across my share of love and hate.
Hate:
-Dickens. Any Dickens. Anyone who tries to write like Dickens. They were 19th C. soap operas, ferchrissake.
-George Eliot
-T.S. Elliot, except Prufrock
-Toni Morrison, especially Paradise
-William Styron
-Flaubert
-Henry James
Dislike:
-Dreiser
-Cather
-Chopin
-Some Joyce
Love:
-Nabokov
-Kerouac (a roman candle to any who get my screen name)
-Cormac McCarthy
-Pynchon
-Hemingway
-Faulkner
In defense of Catcher in the Rye (since no one seems to have pointed it out yet), one of the things that makes it great is the fact that it’s written from the point of view of someone who’s mentally disturbed. I don’t know of any other novels that take this tack (well, except for Stephen R. Donaldon’s - which are complete dreck). And I did identify with Holden.
Also: Tom Stoppard: brilliant.
Huckleberry Finn: Twain’s masterpiece, even if a little uneven.
Thomas Pynchon: I slogged through V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, but I felt is was worth the slog. Some writers make you work. Pynchon makes you work - HARD. If you want fluff, go somewhere else.
There are plenty of writers that I didn’t think worth the slog, most of whom have already been mentioned. I’ll just add The English Patient. I don’t know if I “didn’t get” this one, or if I got it but it left me flat.
Man, I feel like the odd man out. I love Hawthorne, (Scarlet Letter is actually a personal favorite), Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness, The Awakening, several of Faulkner’s stories, some of Hemingway, absolutely adore Steinbeck.
The only book I really, really have ever hated is Pride and Prejudice. I see zero redeeming qualities, I hated every second I read it, and it’s one of the few books I actually had to work to finish it.