David's comments (member since Aug 12, 2007)

David's comments from the Books I Loathed group.

Dianna:

I think that might explain some of the discrepancy, though Limerick was probably a more homogeneous place, with less physical separation. It's probably also true that some of my mistrust of McCourt's account stems from nothing more than a certain streak of orneriness in my own nature.

A month after finishing this book, I still have conflicting opinions.

On the plus side:

Easy to read: Dolores is funny. Though her actions can be exasperating to the point where you want to shake some sense into her, she is always engaging, keeping a sense of (sometimes gallows) humor as she recreates her story. And it’s impossible not to admire Lamb’s skill in writing from the perspective of an overweight, overwhelmed woman as he tracks her history over the 25-year span of the book.

Growth and development: It’s incremental, it’s painful, there is backsliding – but there is growth. The ending offers a measure of comfort, but to a degree that seems deliberately subdued – there is no fairy-tale ending here. Lamb is showing us that adversity can be overcome, but doing so is hard work. And don’t get too comfortable – any ground that you gain in life could be lost overnight. There is something completely admirable in the way that Dolores doesn’t simply buckle, but – against considerable odds – manages to reach a level of self-awareness that affords her a measure of contentment in her own skin

As against that:

Hard to read: For the same reasons that the book of Job is not your favorite book of the bible. The tribulations just keep coming. Guilt about parents divorcing? Daddy abandonment issues? That’s just the baseline. Let’s pile on a little molestation, rape, 150 or so excess pounds, several years in a psychiatric facility, peer rejection and gratuitous cruelty, marriage to a philandering narcissist, abortion, and the death of almost everyone dear to you. You can almost hear Satan betting with that dear old-Testament God about when the breaking point will happen. Dolores’s failure to conceive is almost a relief – at least we’re spared the prospect of a child-immolation scene.

Growth and development: Wait now. Didn’t I list this under the ‘things to like’? Well, yes I did. So sue me for also disliking it. Because there is that unavoidable Oprah sticker right on the cover of this book. And it’s completely obvious why – the kind of uplift that is doled out makes this book a shoo-in for Oprah-approval. But it’s hard not to feel that one is being emotionally manipulated throughout, on a grand scale. To which my – possibly irrational – response is “Dude, if you’re going to play the reader like a cheap violin, then at least have the decency to provide more of a feel-good ending than you do”.

Dead whale metaphors: Give me a break, Wally! Was this really necessary? Best you could come up with? Why not just club me over the head and have done with it?

And, if I were a lesbian, I think I’d be within my rights to be offended by this book.

You can tell, I’m all over the map where this book is concerned. Which means it got under my skin more than I might like to admit.

Abi:

The reason I believe that McCourt's account does not ring true is because I grew up in Ireland and my maternal grandparents lived in Limerick during at least part of the interval in question. So I grew up with my grandmother's stories about Limerick. Which really paint quite a different picture. My impression is that most people in Ireland had a similar reaction to mine, though my empirical evidence on this is limited to friends and relatives.

To be fair, I suspect much of the inaccuracy arises not so much from a deliberate intent to mislead, but because of the natural recall bias that leads memoirists to select memories, or present them in a way, that they feel will please their readers. This bias often works primarily on a subconscious level, but that doesn't reduce its considerable potential to distort.

It's also been my experience since moving to the U.S. that many Irish-Americans have opinions about Irish life and history which are very entrenched, but sometimes completely inaccurate. I think McCourt would have been quite familiar with Irish-American attitudes while writing the book, and that this definitely had an influence.

As a math major in college, one of my heroes was the great English mathematician, G.H. Hardy. So it irks me no end to see him maligned in David Leavitt's latest book "The Indian Clerk". This annoyance comes through in my review:

So how exactly are we to understand the phrase 'historical biography'? Apparently, as practiced by David Leavitt, it involves picking over the lives of his chosen victims - for some reason he has a predilection for gay English intellectuals - and tarting up the factual record with embellishments that appear to be more a projection of Leavitt's own unresolved issues than any kind of added insight into the character being assassinated. In this latest excursion Leavitt dishonors the memory of G.H. Hardy by portraying Hardy's natural reserve as a kind of pathologically stunted emotional growth. This caricature is bolstered by Leavitt's invention of a completely fictitious relationship between Hardy and a young soldier, Thayer, during World War I, in which Hardy is portrayed as behaving atrociously. G.H. Hardy deserves better than David Leavitt's dehumanizing portrayal in this invented version of his life.

The last time Leavitt tried a similar stunt, he was sued for his efforts by Stephen Spender, and lost. The New York Times review of 'The Indian Clerk' comments that:

"Luckily, or circumspectly, Leavitt has chosen this time to portray people who are no longer around to file lawsuits."

Which is certainly one way of looking at it. An equally valid conclusion would be that this is an author with no shame whatsoever.


Ramanujan, too, deserves better than his portrayal by Leavitt, who is completely incapable of conveying the essence of his particular genius, despite the various equations spattered through the book. Nowhere does he manage to convey the fascination of the Indian's peculiar and prodigious talent, or why Hardy would be sufficiently excited to bring him to Cambridge. His treatment of Ramanujan as a person is equally murky. (In stark contrast to Leavitt's clumsy, meandering effort, an excellent account of Ramanujan's life is available in Robert Kanigel's "The Man Who Knew Infinity").

But then this hodgepodge of a book is stuffed with so much detritus that it becomes clear that Leavitt would rather pad things out with semi-salacious gossip about various other Cambridge luminaries, the amorous dalliances (both real and invented) of various secondary and tertiary characters, and the obligatory maundering about the love that dare not speak its name, than attempt to cast any real light on the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan.

In an essay discussing the Leavitt-Spender dispute, Thomas Mallon makes the point that Leavitt's error had far less to do with plagiarism than with simple bad manners, a moral failure, if only on a small scale. This latest misrepresentation, of the life of someone unable to mount a defence, shows that Leavitt has not, apparently, had the grace to learn from past mistakes.

Fortunately, the genius of Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan is such that their names will live on long after Leavitt's work has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Memo to Cormac McCarthy:

Just what is your beef with punctuation? For the most part, it's as easy to get it right as wrong. For cases which still give you difficulty, there are these people called editors and proofreaders. Failure to deploy apostrophes correctly is a distracting affectation.

Jesse:

If I despise the writing of Bret Easton Ellis as the disgusting, self-indulgent scribblings of a cynical, emotionally stunted, thoroughly nasty individual, and say so here on goodreads, then I assume that is my right. Just as everyone else has the right to disagree.

How you construe this as placing a boot on your throat is quite beyond me. If you need to feel persecuted or victimized, fine. But it's got nothing to do with me.

I don't even wear boots. Enjoy BEE.

Holly:

I am a person who loathes Winnie-the-Pooh - always have, and probably always will. Why? Because I think it's mind-numbing twaddle that condescends to children.

I can assure you that I'm not "a truly cold-hearted freak of nature". If you really have an unfulfilled wish to meet someone who fits this description, I wouldn't be your guy. :)

The 'Freddy the Pig' stories, on the other hand, are awesome.

The statistician in me feels the need to point out that, while one can find a few negative reviews of "To Kill a Mockingbird" on goodreads, these should be interpreted bearing in mind that it is the book with the second highest number of ratings (about 40K) on the site*. Given that 40,000 people rated it, it would be hard to imagine no negative ratings. But a handful out of 40,000 obviously has different implications than the same handful out of 400.

For the record, here are the top 10 most frequently rated, with approximate numbers of people who rated them:

HP1 - 44K
Mock - 40K
Rye - 40K
Gatsby - 38K
HP2 - 37K
HP3 - 37K
1984 - 28K
Flies - 25K
P&P - 24K
Farm - 24K

Numbers rounded to the nearest thousand.
HP= Harry Potter; Rye = catcher in the rye; Flies = Lord of the flies; P & P = Pride and Prejudice;
Farm = Animal Farm.


*: Technically, these are the books *on my list* with the highest number of ratings. It's possible that there are books I haven't read that have more ratings than those I've listed - if so, I wouldn't know about them. For instance, if the large Outlander (Highlander?) fanbase were rating books at a great rate, they wouldn't show up on my list.

"We just brought gold and frankincense", the Magi demurred.

(Sorry: I have a long-standing weakness for Tom Swifties. I'll stop now, but register my liking for the King James version of the bible. Actually "liking" may be an overstatement, more the sentiment that if you are going to bother to read it, no other version comes close)

I just finished "The Master and Margarita", and strongly second Ryan's recommendation. An awesome book! (I posted a review, which I'm not sure how to link to here - it explains in a little more detail what I liked about it).

Dianna:

Coincidentally, just yesterday I listed "Faust" as a classic I wish I had liked more over on the 'Books I wish I had liked more" thread. I read it in German (I lived there for a couple of years), but remember it as being very heavy slogging.

I wish I could find good things to say about Goethe's "Faust", but I remember it as being a very hard slog. As many Germans will tell you it is the pinnacle of achievement in German literature, it just reinforces my suspicion that, where certain classics are concerned, I will always be a Philistine.

I do no better with the crown jewel of Spanish literature, "Don Quixote". Not even in the recent, highly acclaimed, translation.

On the plus side, I did read Dante's "Inferno" this year, and enjoyed it a lot, though I would caution anyone intending to read it to choose the translation carefully, as there are enormous differences in the quality of the many available efforts. (I read two different translations - part of the fun was comparing them.) I recommend the relatively recent translation by my compatriot, Ciaran Carson. One of the surprisingly few translators who makes the effort to do justice to Dante's 'terza rima' rhyming scheme - when I was browsing the available efforts, I was astonished by how many translators just made no effort whatsoever to reflect this aspect of the work.

Xysea: Thanks for saying what I was thinking. I was beginning to wonder if there was a set of rules for participating which some posters (Laura, for instance) had access to, but which I was unaware of.

Sarah: For me, starting a sentence with "I can't understand how someone can say X..." seems non-conducive to a genuine exchange of opinions, as it more or less advertises that you have dismissed opinion X out of hand.

As far as weighing in on the question "American literature is ....", the only adjectives that seem to fit in the sentence are words like 'varied', 'diverse', 'idiosyncratic', so that generalization seems meaningless. Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Breece D'J Pancake, F.Scott Fitzgerald - not that much in common, except for the three-barreled names.

One of life's conundrums: why do so many people hate the word 'moist'? I subscribe to a site called wordie, for people with an interest in words, and 'moist' shows up regularly as a most-hated word. (personally, I think it's innocuous).

The most-hated word on Wordie? Schadenfreude. Why? It's a mystery.

As Maria and Sarah wrote, the number of plots is definitely finite. Some authors meet that challenge better than others. For instance, the great majority of Stephen King's books have a plot that can be summarized as "creepy phenomenon terrorizes isolated community", but he finds ways to flesh out the details interestingly enough to keep our interest. Shakespeare recycled like crazy, but his command of language and knack for telling detail keeps us reading.

Yes. I remember it got rave reviews when it came out, so that I - like an idiot - actually bought a copy. It started out well enough, but became progressively less interesting as the book went on. And (as you point out, Kate) less plausible.

Absolutely nothing of this book stuck with me - I think I had completely obliterated it from memory within a day of finishing it.

Which does raise the question of why it got such good reviews at the time. Was it the "hip narrator" thing? lord spare us all.

¡¡¡ IRREGARDLESS !!! Alex. ¡¡¡ Making your way to the top by random deployment of "punctuation" "marks" - one reader's journey????¿¿¿¿¿¡¡¡¡!!

I question the notion that if one didn't like a movie, one didn't "get" it. I just didn't like it, for the reasons I gave earlier. Obviously, other people's opinions differ. Which is fine.

Well, Clare, we are *so* just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. But there's nothing like a little healthy disagreement to fuel some interesting debate, eh? :)

I should have mentioned that the book "Forrest Gump" was nowhere near as bad as the movie, but my posts on the topic were already way too long.

But, Sherri, "The Mansquito" was one of those movies that was so horrifyingly dreadful, it almost crossed the line to achieving classic status, no? :)