Books I Loathed discussion
Loathed Titles
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"Great Books" that you just don't get
Never going to be a favorite of mine, although I love when Fanny & one of those nasty ladies "take a walk" around the drawing room. In my house, that would be a fast 2 minutes.I still think the only interesting aspect to this book is it's one of the few that really opens into the socio/cultural/political (enough slashes there?) life of Austen's time & place, more directly than her other works anyway.
All that being said, Fanny always makes me want to puke. So endlessly self-righteous & dull.
Hmmm. . . .I hate Edward Said, and everything he has done to undermine Western Literature. As for Hardy . . . my introduction to him was the great "The Mayor of Casterbridge." By the time I was finished, I was contemplating suicide I was so depressed. The prose was great, but the story just crushed any iota of hope.
Hardy often crushes hope- "because we are too many."I love Said. Western Literature can withstand a little undermining.
John wrote: "Hmmm. . . .I hate Edward Said, and everything he has done to undermine Western Literature. As for Hardy . . . my introduction to him was the great "The Mayor of Casterbridge." By the time I wa..."
M of C was the one we had to read at school. It seemed to drag on forever, like 'All Our Yesterdays' on TV on Sundays, and by the time we reached the end I'd forgotten what it was about. But even then I found it depressing, and grossly unfair, that someone should have to suffer a lifetime for one mistake.
I read it again a few years back and could appreciate the artistry of it, but it was such a depressing weight as you say. One needs a small spark of hope to live, after all.
And yet Hardy lived to be very old. I'm always amazed at that. Maybe he dumped his despair into his books, onto his characters. I know, as I tell my kids, "life isn't fair" but in Hardy's world it's unbearable. Although it's so over the top that it doesn't actually destroy me inside. No one, at least with any humanity, kindness, creativity in them, stands a chance. It is, if not fair, far more predictable than life: if you're any good, you're going to be destroyed. In beautiful prose. But destroyed nonetheless.
They're generally positive outlook on life & human nature?And I feel the same way about Lolita. I love it but just because it talks about sex, doesn't make it sexual. Certainly not erotic. And I don't think HH's feelings are even ultimately about sexual attraction. More the perversion of power, etc.
Anyway, it's a brilliant book.
I also love Hardy-esp Tess & Jude. Poor Sue!
I could not stand Tess. Had a really hard time with it. The despair was beyond me because there was never any hope, none.
But like you two, I love Lolita. Did not find it sexual, found it wonderful and would love if someone would suggest it for a reading where we could discuss it.
But like you two, I love Lolita. Did not find it sexual, found it wonderful and would love if someone would suggest it for a reading where we could discuss it.
Ellie wrote: "And yet Hardy lived to be very old. I'm always amazed at that. Maybe he dumped his despair into his books, onto his characters. I know, as I tell my kids, "life isn't fair" but in Hardy's world it'..."How right you are Ellie - I couldn't have put it better myself :)
Sherri wrote: "hmmm..I wonder if there is a group around somewhere? Or if we should start our own (I've run many groups here, it's not so hard). Thinking, thinking...what sort of reading list would we have?"I'd love to read it again with other people.
And would you-any or all-be interested in reading Ada as well afterwards? It was just recommended to me.
Sherri wrote: "Haven't read that one...we must cogitate upon this...anyone else up to the challenge? here's my idea -- tackling those classics someone else loves but you aren't so sure about (you can skip the on..."
I'm definitely intrigued. I haven't been all that excited about most of the group reads I've seen, my weirdness I guessM but this sounds like fun-classics that are a bit of a stretch but not torture. And enough to keep a conversation going but not so many you can't pick a reasonably interesting book with some real engagement. Something a little more than "euw yuck" or "wow great". I like how you think. This could actually be interesting. If we can make it actually happen. 5 or 6 sounds like a good number. Enough to have some real discussion; few enough so everyone knows they need to be present. In the "alert" sense of the word.
Let's read 'Mansfield Park' or 'Vanity Fair.' These are books I have a knee-jerk reaction to but feel I 'should' read.
David wrote: "Let's read 'Mansfield Park' or 'Vanity Fair.' These are books I have a knee-jerk reaction to but feel I 'should' read."I'm not sure I could stand another MP read but I' be interested in tackling Vanity Fair again.
What about Conrad? Secret Agent or Under Western EyesV or I'e heard Hardy' Girl with Blue Eyes is his best. I love Hardy but haven't been able to get this one.
What do you think? How about we compile a list of books by authors we like but don't get a particular book. I really want to feel I'm doing this read for a reason.
Any thoughts Sherri?
What about something with "ambivalent"-a favorite word of mine. Like "Classic Ambivalence" or "Classic Ambivalents"
What about Classics we Read but Almost Pre-judge?
Uh-is there an abridged version of that title?
Now we're getting there. Except the Clam part makes me hungry.Classbivalent? AmbiClassic?
Well, imho, I like it :)Now we're out of my depth-you'll have to tell me what we need to do. This is new to me.
OK-I forgot we're not friends. So I'll send you a friends request?"delete you" afterwards sounds so... terminal.
I hated Bless Me Ultima. It is listed as one of the twenty-five books all people should read before their twenty-fifth birthday, but it is one of the worst books ever written. It doesn't move at all. If I don't care about the main characters within fifty pages, I stop reading, and this was the case with Bless Me Ultima.
Alright-I wrote exactly the opposite of what I meant. I don't know what happened but what I meant to write was: "I like Hardy." I have no idea how "like" came out as "hate". Sometimes I baffle myself. :~
My daughter has just started reading Alice in Wonderland (she's eight). At her age, I found it annoying and didn't really get it at all. I re-read it a couple of years ago as a forty something and found it sinister and weird - Not at all the children's favourite everyone else sees it as. BTW my daughter loves it!
I think I like Alice but I also find it sinister. I don't mind weird. But it scared me as a kid & I did not like it. Now I sort of like it but it still scares me.
Deborah wrote: I'll tell you one of the Great books authors I don't get--Kurt Vonnegut. I read and just thought "Cat's Cradle" was godawful!I didn't have quite as much of a reaction as you but I did get to the end of Cat's Cradle and go, "Huh." I mean, it was decent. I really liked some of the lines in it. I got the point. I just didn't get the adulation. Within hours of posting my review, I got an email from a friend saying, "Only THREE stars for KURT VONNEGUT?" Uhm, yes, stalker.
Another friend responded by giving me a grocery bag of 3 Vonnegut novels that I'm supposed to read in order to really be able to appreciate him. I get it. Sometimes we pick the wrong book to start with. But that bag still continues to sit undisturbed while mists of vague dread swirl around it.
Have to say I love the Dickens I've read and The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books ever. What are you people trying to say about me?? :)
Chris wrote: "My daughter has just started reading Alice in Wonderland (she's eight). At her age, I found it annoying and didn't really get it at all. I re-read it a couple of years ago as a forty something and ..."As a child Alice in Wonderland frightened me: the dreamlike horrors she encountered did not fetch me. Even as an adult I've had trouble with a lot of satirical comedy, like the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, which I'd put in the same class as Alice.
I love the Marx Brothers-the movies, not so much Groucho on his own. Fields has a nasty, hateful streak (streak?) that puts me off. The surreal dimension in Alice, what I would imagine a drug-induced world might be like with hostile forces everywhere scares me. Oddly, Tim Burton generally frightens me as well which made the pairing, imo, perfect.
I loved the Tim Burton film of Alice, but perhaps because it seemed more aimed at kids.
To paraphrase Pascal, childhood has its own logic whereof logic knows nothing.The scene where Auntie Em's face changes into the Wicked Witch has haunted me for years. Not to mention the nightmares I had from the flying monkeys and apple throwing trees. I'm not sure why the apple trees scared me so much. Today they seem a little silly but maybe it was my first realization that the natural world might not be so benign, being a city girl and all. Who knows. Anyway, even with the nightmares, Oz has always seemed to me more of a child-world than Alice's more adult one. Maybe the sexual themes of your body changing unpredictably & frighteningly or ... I'm not sure. Somehow, though, Oz is frightening in the way most fairy tales in fact are. In the way I think childhood is-the massive unknown world not yet rationalized into faux control. Whereas Alice has this tinge of something more, or other. Maybe the prurient male controlling the show has something to do with it for me.
What kindred spirits -- I hated the green face of the wicked witch of the west.
I really hated Catcher in the Rye when I was forced to read it in high school. What a bore it was. I also hated The Color Purple, which was recommended to me by my 8th grade student advisor, after I had just moved into a new school district. The advisor just loved it, but not so sure why she would recommend a book about incest (among other things). The movie was good though.
I tried to read the Great Gatsby when I was younger too, but I just couldn't get into it.
Loved To Kill and Mockingbird.
So glad that I wasn't forced to read Animal Farm or 1984.
I totally agree with you, Sherri-I loved The Color Purple but just because Celie is a child when the story begins, does not make it even remotely appropriate for children! It's a very adult book.I also agree that incest is, unfortunately, one of many sufferings that Celie endures. Racism and sexism are major themes in all of Alice Walker's work, including this one.
I read The Color Purple when I was a teen and didn't really like it. One of the very few books where to me the movie outshone the book. The movie is excellent. I read Gatsby for a high school class and liked it. I read it over as an adult and still liked it and found some of it more poignant with age. But, my book club is reading This Side of Paradise this month and that is a snore. Amory Blaine and his ascot-wearing buddies suffer ennui and his family isn't so rich after all.
I am in the wrong category, :) I loved both Gatsby and The Color Purple.
I have never experienced drugs so Alice in Wonderland was an acid trip for me. Imagination and brute distortions. Creepy? Yes, most certainly but different and magical. Crazy loon.
I have never experienced drugs so Alice in Wonderland was an acid trip for me. Imagination and brute distortions. Creepy? Yes, most certainly but different and magical. Crazy loon.
Yes, Sonia. I think you put it well. What I was trying to say. But also for me very scary. And now that's manageable but as a child, for some reason, he scared me more than Kafka. (I read Metamorphosis at 9, demented child that I was). Go figure.
Now, I read Alice when I was a kid and found the book facinating, although a little bizarre, and I've never experience drugs either. My husband went with me to see the most recent version in the movie theater and since he was raised in Europe, wasn't familiar with the story - and didn't enjoy it, but I loved it.
I read Alice in Wonderland at eight or nine, and thought it was fantastic. Then again, I was a kid who was obsessed with the 1960's and trippy things. I was the kind of kid who thought that just because her parents were born in the late '60's meant that they would know and remember hippies, and regularly asked them about them.
i luuuurve alice in wonderland and thru the looking glass, was obsessed with them as a kid and still luv them now
I pretty much hate any book written by Joseph Conrad... but especially "Heart of Darkness". He just goes on and on about boats. wtf? I know it's supposed to be a story within a story, but WHO CARES. It's boring. Unfortunately just about every professor I had in college thought Conrad was the greatest writer ever...
Ketutar made a comparison between Charles Dickens and Harry Potter...I just pushed myself about halfway through the audiobook of David Copperfield (before I had the sense to stop torturing myself and find something else) and kept making those same comparisons. Harry Potter and Jane Eyre, too, had nasty childhoods and then something happened. Something changed.
I kept waiting for something to happen or something to change in David Copperfield but on and on it went with not even a glimmer of hope on the horizon. I felt annoyed because the narrator was agog over this obnoxious friend from school, his step family were horrible and the story read like a series of unfortunate events (not the amusing kind).
Halfway through I even tried to figure out why other people like Dickens but I was unable to discover a reason. Unable to slog through, I gave up and rented non-fiction.
When I was in high school and HAD to read "A Tale Of Two Cities" I was bored and didn't read much of it. Many years later, an attorney entering my windowed office said I reminded him of Madame DeFarge. I read the book and liked it very much. Not so sure about the comparison....maybe because I had a good view of events. How time can change things.
Of Mice and Menis one of the few I remember reading but I never could figure out why my teacher kept saying it was so good.I never cared for Dickens either.
Ooh I love Dickens, I grew up reading him. But I understand why not everyone likes his books. I'll probably get in trouble for saying this but I can't finish reading anything by Jane Austen. I want to like her but I can't. I own Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but I stopped reading Emma after 100 pages (for Pride it was much less). Maybe when there's nothing else to read I'll try her again. Or just watch all the movie adaptations of her novels; I think they're okay.
I haven't read Pride and Prejudice although I've seen a movie "You've got mail" which got me thinking it would be a good book to read. Maybe I'm not old enough yet, but I just don't get that book.
Wuthering Heights. Moby Dick. Nicholas Nickbley. You know, I could go on forever but I wouldn't.
I HATED Daisy in the Great Gatsby, and couldn't for the life of me understand why all these men were falling all over themselves for her..which is kind of the whole book in a nutshell. So two big thumbs dwon from me.
Jimbo, I totally agree! Adolescents are too immature or inexperienced at life to grasp the full meaning... and reading Moby Dick so early may turn them off to Hemingway altogether.
Marilynn wrote: "Jimbo, I totally agree! Adolescents are too immature or inexperienced at life to grasp the full meaning... and reading Moby Dick so early may turn them off to Hemingway altogether."Moby Dick and Hemingway? The structure of your sentence seems to imply that Moby Dick was written by Hemingway. Mr Melville is turning in his grave if that's the case.
Anna wrote: "Shelley wrote: "How has no one mentioned Anna Karenina?Anna Karenina just about killed my love of reading. Those were the hardest 800+ pages to trudge through. The characters were insufferable ..."
I have had two distinct and totally opposite reactions to Anna. As a 19 year old student I hated it but in my 57th year to heaven, I had to read it for our book club and despite my best prejudices I enjoyed it. Ah, the fickleness of women!!!!!
Vanessa wrote: "Deborah wrote: I'll tell you one of the Great books authors I don't get--Kurt Vonnegut. I read and just thought "Cat's Cradle" was godawful!I didn't have quite as much of a reaction as you but I ..."
I am the exact opposite. I LOVE Vonnegut, and Cat's Cradle was the first of his books I read and loved. On the other hands, I have never much cared for Dickens or Steinbeck.
Books I Loathed
Books mentioned in this topic
The Catcher in the Rye (other topics)War and Peace (other topics)
Madame Bovary (other topics)
Madame Bovary (other topics)
Of Mice and Men (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Paulo Coelho (other topics)Paulo Coelho (other topics)
Ian McEwan (other topics)
Robert A. Heinlein (other topics)
Joseph Conrad (other topics)
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The redeeming grace of Mansfield Park is certainly not Fanny. But it is the only Austen I know of that touches on British imperialism & slavery (their plantation in Barbados). Edward Said wrote an interesting essay about that - wish I remembered the name - which changed my thinking about MP. Although it remains my least favorite. Fanny needed to get seriously drunk, imo.