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Post by Satchmo on Jul 1, 2009 16:20:44 GMT -5
True.
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Post by carolina on Jul 2, 2009 3:00:55 GMT -5
I can't stand The Scarlet Letter, either.
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Post by inlovewithcrow on Jul 2, 2009 8:24:02 GMT -5
Oh, lots and lots. I'm not a fan of Russian literature from the 19th century. I too think Hemingway is overrated, except for his short stories.
Most shockingly to people fond of lit classes, I really hate Moby Dick. Read the comic book version--it's better. Melville can write, but he indulged himself, and it's just too damned wordy. Wanna read Melville, read Bartleby, much better writing. There's a famous rejection letter of Moby Dick that people use to show how "silly" editorical rejection is, and I swear, that editor nailed it.
Really, a lot of books from the 19th century seem slow to my modern tastes--too much description and needless asides and weird crap with POV. I like contemporary plotted novels, with a limited third or first person point of view, rising action, and action, period. I'm a TV-raised kid, and that's just how it is.
I could go on a long diatribe about the rise of University English departments from ladies' reading circles, and how since then, they've felt a need to justify their existence in a world of serious scholarship ever since and so how they get all snooty about "good" and "plebian" literature and the roots of that in classism and so on, but it'll just tire me out to state it all coherently. The upshot, though, is just because some insecure goof calls a book "great" and implies or outright states that there's something wrong with anyone who disagrees does not mean anything but that they're insecure and trying to shame you for an honest reaction. It's not the 19th century any more. The world moves on. Get over it.
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Post by Emperor Cupcake on Jul 7, 2009 23:40:33 GMT -5
I can't stand The Scarlet Letter, either. Aw, I love The Scarlet Letter. I'm really into Nathaniel Hawthorne -- he wrote some great short stories too. Can't say I'm a big Dickens fan. I liked the first third of Great Expectations, but then lost interest, and I couldn't get into A Tale of Two Cities at all. And even though Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is probably my favorite book ever, I could barely get through The Mayor of Casterbridge.
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Post by Fred Burroughs on Jul 15, 2009 5:26:46 GMT -5
I hated almost every book I was forced to read in English class (with the exception of To Kill a Mockingbird, awesome book. Also I like some of Shakespeare.)
My least favorites were: The Crucible The Great Gatsby
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Post by Satchmo on Jul 18, 2009 22:57:49 GMT -5
I liked The Crucible. My English class mauled it during a production, though.
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Post by CBG on Jul 18, 2009 23:05:27 GMT -5
I don't know if he's considered a classic (maybe American classic), but Mickey Spillane BLOWS.
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Post by Bix Dugan on Jul 18, 2009 23:16:52 GMT -5
Jane Eyre, anyone?
I just remember...nothing of it.
Seven Gables, too.
They should give kids something interesting to read (by force, in school) like Fear & Loathing or Summer of '42.
I loved reading those...on my own!
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Post by Nuveena on Jul 28, 2009 10:30:32 GMT -5
Aww, I liked Great Gatsby and Scarlet Letter...
Even though I've tried staying positive about school reading, I guess I didn't really like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain. Couldn't really connect emotionally with Huck, and I found the plot a little bland.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 28, 2009 22:57:57 GMT -5
I have to admit that I've always found the "anything I was forced to read I hated" excuse to be a cop out. It's an excuse to be intellectually lazy. My attitude was always: okay, I have to read this. Instead of whining about it, I'm going to learn something from it that shows I can think about what I read BETTER than my idiot teacher. I'm going to know the book BETTER than they do. And I'm going to pay attention to the AUTHOR, and not my teacher.
That didn't mean I liked it, but I always knew that if anyone at any point in history was going to sit down and create a story out of thin air, they probably had an interesting reason to do it. No author ever thinks, "I'm going to write this to bore the hell out of someone in the future." Instead, they're compelled for some reason, and I always wanted to be just as compelled.
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Post by Donna SadCat Lady on Jul 29, 2009 0:21:58 GMT -5
I have to admit that I've always found the "anything I was forced to read I hated" excuse to be a cop out. It's an excuse to be intellectually lazy. You may have a point there, Mumms, and I can certainly see where you're coming from. But I don't think it's always laziness. It can also happen when you're made to read a book that you're just not ready for. I mean in terms of maturity or intelligence, or even having an adequate knowledge of the historical background to have a sense of the author's world. Or maybe it's being made to read a book that you're just not in the mood for. I'm not sure how to explain this one. I don't mean in the sense of picking up a novel and then saying, "Bleah, I feel like reading an action-adventure yarn." I mean reading the book and being profoundly out of sympathy with the author's message, or style of writing, or even certain assumptions the author makes. The only example I can think of is when I would have to read Henry James towards the end of a semester. It drove me crazy, because I felt that he never got anywhere or said anything. Because of the outside pressures of school, I didn't have the patience to figure out his extremely elliptical style. Even nowadays I still get that feeling of irritation when I'm trying to get through one of his later stories. ... I always knew that if anyone at any point in history was going to sit down and create a story out of thin air, they probably had an interesting reason to do it. No author ever thinks, "I'm going to write this to bore the hell out of someone in the future." Instead, they're compelled for some reason, and I always wanted to be just as compelled. Unfortunately, all too many authors seem to have been compelled by an urge to reveal just how awesomely wonderful, deep, sensitive, and perceptive they themselves are. (I'm looking at you, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. And Sherwood Anderson. And Ernest Hemingway. And Gertrude Stein.) Anyway. Maybe that's part of my problem with some of these books I was made to read. I'd read a book and feel really turned off, maybe by the style, or the characters, or something. But then the teacher would be all like, let's read it again and again to find all the clever stuff the author did, with the themes and the structure and the parallels with classical mythology and the surrealism of the underlying metaphor. It's like tasting some dish, and not caring for the taste, but then having to eat a whole serving anyway.
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Post by Bix Dugan on Jul 29, 2009 7:56:55 GMT -5
Oh yeah. I was intellectually lazy. I was like, twelve!
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Jul 29, 2009 10:21:28 GMT -5
I agree with Donna about mood. I tried to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love In The Time Of Cholera" a few years back and just could not get into it. It wasn't the writing or the story--I usually love that style. It just didn't match my mood, and I had to give up before it soured the book for me.
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Post by Satchmo on Jul 29, 2009 13:42:21 GMT -5
I usually like the stuff I'm assigned to read. I loved Huck Finn, The Crucible, and most of the other things, but I just could not like The Great Gatsby. I still did my best on the assignments, though. Just because I'm being forced to read a bad book doesn't mean I should let my grades drop.
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Post by stevehadcrackers on Jul 29, 2009 16:51:14 GMT -5
Catcher In The Rye. I always catch hell for saying that, but there it is. I hate, hate, hate that book. Literally nothing happens; it's the same spoiled kid moaning about how much he hates everything, and how much he hates phonies. It's basically the 1960s equivilent of listening to some Emo kid cry about posers for a hundred pages. What's ironic is that Holden Caulfield is almost an icon of angst and rebellion, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift, and yet it was the conformist-type kids who I remember liking this book in high school. I remember this book so vividly because I really, truly hated every second of it. I kept thinking that Caulfield had to be an ironic character, because there's no way that anyone could find him even remotely likeable, right?
Right?
I'd like to add Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ethan Frome, but hey, we're not supposed to like those. As a cynical teen I was expected to like Catcher In The Rye. But I liked almost everything else we read, to be honest. In fact, the one thing I found to be consistent in school was that the kids who hated every book we read all loved Catcher In The Rye (because it was easy to read and it's about nothing.)
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