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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

'Classics are books that everyone praises and noone reads'

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13:22 / 18.01.02

After reading this thread. I was thinking of that old quote.

What books are supposedly 'classics' or 'great literature' that you think are complete and utter shit? Or just really unenjoyable for you?

I'll start. I don't think they're shit but I can't stand Steinbeck or Salinger. I really don't dig Hemingway either.

And I usually get angry looks of horror and shock when I say that I really hated the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I also thought Steppenwolf was really boring.

Next?

13:29 / 18.01.02

Oh dear, there are lots, but to start with:

Thomas Hardy, works of.

I suffered from a triple dose of Hardy at A-Level/GCSE (Mayor of Casterbridge, Selected Poems, more bloody poems) and haven't been able to look him in the face ever since.

I got bogged down in New Grub Street, too, but that might be slightly more understandable.

13:31 / 18.01.02

I find Dickend tedious by design -- he was poor and paid by the word so of course he was going to stretch is books out to ridiculous lengths...

Wuthering Heights
two people who fancy each other proceed to torture each other without even having to get married.

But don't get me started on the void that was victorian poetry...

Christina Rossetti was such a refreshing change from the monotony of Tennyson...[/LIST]

13:36 / 18.01.02

But while i hate Brighton Rock on my first reading i really enjoyed it years later...

13:37 / 18.01.02

Oh yeah, Dickens, I think I blanked him out of my memory. I couldn't stand his stuff either.

13:40 / 18.01.02

Ohhhh... I love Hardy's novels. But that's off-topic, isn't it?

<grimly getting out the list>

mentioned in other thread, Henry James and Virginia Woolf

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo and Victory

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Gertrude Stein, Melanctha and Ida

Wm. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ...this one especially cruel because I try to read it now and again and am just thinking, now this isn't so bad, and then I get to the Quentin part and am thrown unceremoniously into WTF-land.

And I loved Jane Eyre, but under no circumstances read Villette!

[also Herman Melville, Moby Dick and The Confidence Man

and George Meredith, The Egoist]

[ 18-01-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]

13:41 / 18.01.02

quote:Originally posted by Lothar Tuppan:
Oh yeah, Dickens, I think I blanked him out of my memory. I couldn't stand his stuff either.

Not even Great Expectations? That's a nice, juicy one.

13:48 / 18.01.02

"my first name being phillip and my father's christian name being philip my infant tongue could fashion nothing more sophisticated than pip, so pip i was and pip i became."

don't you just want to kill him already?
(NB the above isquoted from memory... )

as opposed to moby dick's relatively concise
"call me ishmael"

13:51 / 18.01.02

quote:Originally posted by sleazenation:
as opposed to moby dick's relatively concise
"call me ishmael"

Funny, I just edited my post to add Melville... ah well, mr. nation, we do not oscillate in the same rainbow.

[ 18-01-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]

13:57 / 18.01.02

hmmmm maybe we are antimatter
twins... or had a fight in the womb...

14:04 / 18.01.02

quote:Originally posted by Persephone:

Not even Great Expectations? That's a nice, juicy one.

I stopped before getting to Great Expectations. To be fair I'll give it a shot. If I hate it then I can be justified in saying that I hate Dickens and if I like it then I'll have another great book on my shelf.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:11 / 18.01.02

Right, well for a start, The Sound And The Fury is brilliant. So there.

Dickens: well, there's Dickens and there's Dickens. For example: Hard Times = shit, Bleak House and Great Expectations (despite opening line) = genius.

Hardy I'm not as fond of as I used to be, but I'll still stand up for the later stuff: Jude The Obscure and Tess. He lays it on a bit thick with the tragedy, sure, but there's some really affecting moments in there too...

14:17 / 18.01.02

The most affecting moment in The Mayor of Casterbridge is when the bloody goldfinch dies.

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:17 / 18.01.02

I struggled against Dickens for many years, then actually enjoyed Great Expectations. Which is odd.

Wordsworth's "The Prelude", though. Fuck that - with bells on.

autopilot disengaged

14:17 / 18.01.02

dickens is great, dammit. conrad, too - though i can't say i was much taken with 'the secret agent'. 'moby dick' i got halfway through before walking away, whistling (though 'bartleby the scrivener' is fantastic).

'on the road' had to happen, i guess, and is worth reading once, but... shrugs...

and 'steppenwolf' starts boring, but by the end is *majestic*.

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:20 / 18.01.02

Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers!

Damn. And I was hot-to-trot about reading The Mayor Of Casterbridge, too.

Laughing? Me? No, that was coughing. Honest.

And Moby Dick is absolutely genius; mad passion, Queequeg and whales! It's got it all!

14:27 / 18.01.02

I agree that Salinger and Hesse are overrated, as are Hemingway's novels (but NOT the short stories). Conrad, I've only read "The Heart of Darkness" in which I vainly searched for some sort of gripping plot (though I still want to read "The Secret Agent"). Melville is fabulous, except for Billy Budd. Faulkner is also fabulous, but I don't like the "Sound and the Fury" as much as "As I lay dying" or "Absalom, Absalom!".

Kerouac, although his novel is not horrible, has caused a horrible blight on Western Civilization and for that reason must be censured. Ginsberg, too, though I did find one his poems incredibly arresting when delived by Patti Smith to Philip Glass's piano. But I won't buy a book of his poetry ever, ever.

The Stranger - Overrated, and they really shouldn't let high schoolers read this. (If I was in charge, I would ban Camus, Kerouac, and Salinger from high school syllabuses, and teenage prose would tremendously be improved as a result.)

DH Lawrence - Sons and Lovers, though I loved "Women in Love".

15:07 / 18.01.02

The only Conrad I've read was also 'Heart of Darkness' and the problem I had with it was that by the time that the story was translated from the first character that was relating a story told him by another character which was essentially really about a final character it had lost any power for me. It just seemed very dry. Sort of a 'let me tell you a story that happened to a friend of a friend of mine.'

15:16 / 18.01.02

Oh how I wish I could love The Sound and The Fury! Especially as the part where they nail the coffin into the face of the mother in As I Lay Dying is so frightful. Fury to me is like this *fascinating* guy who transfers to your high school, whom you throw away all your honor roll manners for... but you can just never *make it* with him.

Women In Love ...ergh, it should have been called Women In Stockings. "Hermione went down to breakfast, wearing yellow-and-purple striped stockings, her green polka-dot stockings being in the wash..."

But the reason I came running back to this thread is because I neglected to mention the later James Joyce:

Ulysses:
No. Well, maybe later.

Finnegan's Wake:
[Dominique Dunne]WHAT'S HAPPEN-N-N-N-IIINNNG???[/Dominique Dunne, R.I.P.]

15:48 / 18.01.02

First of all, I want to go on record as saying that Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" is one of the most brilliant and creepy short stories of all time. It has been a really, really REALLY long time since I read "The Sound & The Fury" so I can't really say much more other than "Well, I remember liking it when I was 15..."

Hesse? Overrated? I dare say "Siddartha" is an absolutely amazing book, and deserves all of its praise. Strangely enough, I was out with a gentleman the other evening who related a story in which he got so drunk that the next morning he discovered that he had thrown up all over his copy of "Siddartha." I expressed the shock and horror I would have felt, finishing with, "I would really take that as a bad omen. 'Something in my life's gotta change, I just threw up on 'Siddartha.'" It's magic.

I love "Apocalypse Now," and I absolutely adore some of the nice touches in "Heart of Darkness," such as the head-measuring, but I feel like reading Conrad's prose is like trying to maneuver one's way through a densely grown forest with a dull machete. Bleh.

On the other end, I absolutely hate Hemmingway's spartan writing style. But I will admit, I've read only "The Snows of Kilamanjaro" and attempted "The Sun Also Rises." It's been a long time, and I *want* to like him.

16:16 / 18.01.02

Ayn Rand's stuff is horrible, at least The Fountainhead is. I read the full 800 and some odd pages of the thing and I wish now that I had been like everybody else in my english class and bought the cliffnotes. The entire damn book can be summed up in one sentence, "Do what you want to do, Don't let society dictate your decisions". Why did this woman need to kill so many trees just to say that?

09:03 / 19.01.02

Henry James' The turn of the screw is fantastic and all the more wonderful because you must hold two contrary world views throughout the reading...

09:03 / 19.01.02

Okay, yes, I did like The Turn of the Screw. But Portrait of a Lady was depressing, The Bostonians offensive, and The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors impenetrable.

I do like Henry James novels made into films, though.

gentleman loser

09:03 / 19.01.02

Any work by Thomas Pynchon. After trying to read some of his stuff I decided that it would probably be more entertaining to slam my head repeatedly in a car door.

In my personal experience, Pynchon readers think they are a lot more smart and clever than they actually are.

09:03 / 19.01.02

quote:Originally posted by gentleman loser:
In my personal experience, Pynchon readers think they are a lot more smart and clever than they actually are.

I haven't actually red any Pynchon, but my Dad read some of _Gravity's Rainbow_ to me over winter break, and I thought it was brilliant. But then, I'm probably just smarter and more clever than you.

"Classics" I abhor include _Wuthering Heights_ (to the nth degree), _Tess of the D'Ubbervilles_ and anything by Gertrude Stein. I think "The Song of Solomon" is overrated tripe and the Bible as a whole is far from "the greatest story ever told," no matter which version you read. I'm also lukewarm on the middle part of _Lolita_.

I do like Dickens, though, especially _Bleak House_, and Browning alone redeems Victorian poetry in my eyes.

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

18:48 / 19.01.02

I agree wholeheartedly about tolkein; LOTR should be renamed ' a bunch of people with pointy ears go on a really long walk.' Joyce, i semi agree with, I don't get it, but suspect it's my fault rather than Joyce's- Robert Anton Wilson's gushing praise of him makes his work sound a lot more interesting than actually reading it is. And Pynchon... hmmm. Gravity's rainbow seemed like the sort of book I should love, but was written in such a turgid way.... And On the Road seems interesting in retrospect, but was actually kind of dull to actually read. Oh, and only considered a classic in Scotland, but Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song is really really rank, and I hold the fucker personally responsible for me missing out on an A in higher English.

14:28 / 20.01.02

Hmmm. I hated Wuthering Heights until I studied it in university. Then I think I enjoyed the way it was written, rather than the story itself.

My father is a huge fan of Dickens. I passionately hate his work. Even trying to read a Christmas Carol is hard and it's a pretty good story.

Hated Tolkien for a long time but I recently tried reading LOTR again and am enjoying it immensely.

Steinbeck. About as dry as the dust-bowl era he writes about. But maybe that's the point....

Conrad. Ugh. I was so, so disappointed by Heart of Darkness. I did a study of it, comparing it to Alice in Wonderland as a psychological journey, which worked nicely. But goddamn that book was boring.

Only read Bartleby by Melville. I loved it. BUt when I went to read Moby Dick it failed to entrance me the same way. Probably should have invested a little more time.

Shakespeare anyone? I love him.

I "read" Stendahl's The Red and The Black in uni, but it sucked. Hard.

As far as Ayn Rand goes, it sounds like she's a one trick pony. I've only read "Anthem" and it sounds like the message in the Fountainhead is much the same one in here. So read Anthem, 'cause it's like, 5 pages long or something. And Rush based their album 2112 on it.

A lot of classics are rubbish. A lot aren't.

Zoom.

[ 24-01-2002: Message edited by: Captain Zoom ]

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

15:47 / 20.01.02

quote:Originally posted by Trijhaos:
Ayn Rand's stuff is horrible, at least The Fountainhead is. I read the full 800 and some odd pages of the thing and I wish now that I had been like everybody else in my english class and bought the cliffnotes. The entire damn book can be summed up in one sentence, "Do what you want to do, Don't let society dictate your decisions". Why did this woman need to kill so many trees just to say that?

There is a very old joek that they are going to make a new movie out of that book, and it will be filmed in one dimention to capture the essence of the novel and its characters.

As with many others, I have tried to read Moby Dick a number of times...and each time I give up less than 50 pages in and decide I want nothign to do with boats and oceans.

And I fucking hate James Joyce. Pretentious twaddle.

Of course, I also don't much care for the "beat" "novels" of the 50's. I know we need to experiment with form, but if all you do is experiment, what's the point?

The Return Of Rothkoid

16:37 / 20.01.02

Persephone: you didn't finish Ulysses and you got through Finnegans Wake? Holy fuck!

I'd like to defend Joyce here, though. I really, really hated Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - felt it was just shithouse. But then I read Ulysses and it all seemed to make sense; it was experimental, yes, but I found the key to enjoying the book was reading it in tandem with someone and then being able to discuss it with them - in a lot of ways, it's almost like poetry in that it's designed to be read aloud at times. Honestly - give it another go: it's easier than Pynchon, and a lot more real, I think, too.

Anyone who's a frustrated Joyce reader should check out The James Joyce Portal (IQ Infinity), perhaps the Joyce site on the web. It's got voluminous notes on all his works (including the Schemata for Ulysses which will make the reading of it a lot easier, especially in terms of the style-jumping) and a lot of incidental stuff which will clue it in. In terms of a work that attempts to cram an entire day - every skerrick of it - into a novel, I think it succeeds pretty well.

Rant ends.

18:57 / 20.01.02

Ok. I think there's a really interesting issue in here somewhere that's being lost among the list-making. But I'll start a new thread about that, and join in for the time being.

Ironically, most of the books that are considered classics taht I've hated or not think are worth the paper their written on have been the ones that I read at school - and many of them I've reread later in life and thoroughly enjoyed.

Example - Tess. Hated at school. Loved later. Of Mice and Men. Hated at school. Read in two hours on a cold afternoon a few months back and LOVED it. Fucking amazing book.

When you're talking classics, I always get confused with contemporary greats. Like Rushdie. Just can't get on with him.

And I have to confess that I'm with the Dickens-haters in the audience. I can't imagine anything more dull than ploughing through one of his books.

07:21 / 21.01.02

But coming back to the threads title it would seem that classic books are indeed still read and equally loved and reviled today - but this is probably because Barbelith has high population of English graduates than is strictly normal.

Now how about the true classics of the greek variety.

07:27 / 21.01.02

Yes, I would like some help in that department too...

07:31 / 21.01.02

Just a brief word in defence of Dickens - Sketches by Boz, his little pen-pictures of figures from everyday London life. Great for dipping into, well-written, some nice little observational stuff that every journalist should read.

11:38 / 21.01.02

Oh God, Rothkoid... I didn’t get past page 2 of Finnegans Wake!

That’s a lie. I didn’t get past page 1.

My Finnegans Wake story: Where I first heard of Joyce was in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, as Esther Greenwood faces her hateful summer at home writing her senior thesis. She opens the book and reads:

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronn-
tonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoo-
hoohoordenenthurnuk!

And here’s me thinking, Right, she’s losing it right now. Because I had no idea that FW was actually this way.

You know, I think I will try Ulysses again. Some years ago I was on the verge of starting over, and right then there was a scandal about the so-called “corrected text” edition --all wrong, apparently-- and that was the edition that I had on my bookshelf, and that detained me. I was thinking anyway about following The Iliad with The Odyssey, and then maybe on to Ulysses.

[ 21-01-2002: Message edited by: Persephone ]

13:54 / 21.01.02

quote:Originally posted by Persephone:

You know, I think I will try Ulysses again. Some years ago I was on the verge of starting over, and right then there was a scandal about the so-called “corrected text” edition --all wrong, apparently...

A quick digression on Ulysses texts: basically, the original edition, as published, had a good many errors in it that resulted from, among other things, editorial ignorance and poor typesetting of Joyce's manuscript. This has led to much salivating and pontificating among the academy. The last edition containing corrections by Joyce himself is the widely available 1961 text, which is still (supposedly) slightly flawed. In the mid-80s or so a crackpot by the name of Gabler released his "Definitive, Corrected" text, which was widely admired until people began to notice that his "corrections" basically consisted or arbitrary re-writings and re-punctuations, some of which had a rather horrendous effect on the music of the original work. I'm assuming this is the edition Persephone has on her bookshelf, which to judge from this and other "Books" threads, must be quite formidable.

If I didn't make it quite clear earlier, avoid the Gabler edition like the plague. It's published by Viking, as I recall, who quietly replaced "The Corrected Edition" on the cover with "The Gabler Edition," when it became clear what had gone on. The 1961 text is published by the Modern Library and Vintage International, and perhaps Everyman's. Obviously, I'm something of a Joyce fan, and I recommend all of him, though I've not yet got to Finneagan's Wake.

This was a longer digression than I intended. Sorry.

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