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This is a question Books

We love books. Tell us about your favourite books and authors, and why they are so good. And while you're at it - having dined out for years on the time I threw Dan Brown out of a train window - tell us who to avoid.

(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 13:40)
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I'm wearing asbestos so - let the flames begin!
I love reading. I learned to read early - I was way past the 'Janet and John' stage before I set foot in school. All through my childhood I read avidly and, bless them, my parents didn't censor anything - if it was on the bookshelf it was fair game.
However, at my secondary school I was introduced to the works of one Mr Dickens and some women called Austen and Bronte.

I have never before or since read such overblown, over rated turgid piles of festering toss in my life. I found no redeeming features in any of the stories I was forced to read, they were all unfailingly boring, predictable and, above all, irrelevant. I made the mistake of telling my teachers my opinions. 'But, but, Dickens shows a lot about the hardships of life in his era and Bronte shows what the manners and mannerisms of her time meant to people of her class' Well, big dog's dick. So fucking what. The books are absolutely terrible and they drove me (a fucking looooong way) away from the study of English literature at school. I just couldn't face having to read any more of that interminable dross.
I still read, regularly. I like science fiction, fantasy, autobiographies - in fact I like nearly all genres. The 'classics' of English literature? You can stick 'em up your arse for all I care.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:06, 18 replies)
Dickens was being paid by the word to publish his stories in installments in the periodicals of the day
so they're all, naturally, overblown bullshit where a simple event takes three chapters to happen
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:08, closed)
You're missing out.
There is some toss out there, but Austen is great, and the Brontes and Dickens can be great a fair amount of the time, too.

I've never really understood the "relevance" complaint. What does "relevance" entail, and would count as relevant? Why is it a virtue? Isn't there at least as much virtue in being presented with, and getting your head around, something unfamiliar and non-relevant?
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:15, closed)
Interesting point
I suppose what I mean by irrelevant is that I had no sense of connection to the characters or the settings. I really didn't care about the characters, to my (then) fourteen-year-old self they were irrelevant to my life.
Is there virtue in getting my head around something unfamiliar and non-relevant? Yes, there is! However, I found it difficult probably because of the tedious nature of the writing and that I couldn't identify (and therefore empathise) with the characters.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:53, closed)
My hunch is that your school experience poisoned the well;
which is not to say that with a different teacher, you'd have loved everything. But if your first experience is not so good, it can really bugger up anything subsequent.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 17:49, closed)
*Stands on desk*...

"Oh Captain, My Captain!"
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 18:21, closed)
Ooh!
Like the sig - should also read 'Yeah, but it made top post'!
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 19:36, closed)
I have tried many times to enjoy Dickens.
He was far too long-winded for me to ever enjoy any of it. Same with Nathaniel Hawthorne and "The Scarlet Letter"- a worse pile of old wank I have never encountered.

That said, Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" are very readable, and they were written on 1897 and 1818, respectively. So it's not just because that was the style of the period- it was because Dickens and Hawthorne were shit.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 16:00, closed)
I have to admit that I'm not such a huge Dickens fan as all that.
There're times when he plainly was just being a hack. Yet I'm not sure I buy the readability objection. Granted his reputation - and not only in English (Dostoyevsky was influenced by him, for example) it's hard to sustain the idea that his writing is poor.

Hawthorne is someone with whom I'm not at all familiar. I love Melville, though, and I believe they were neighbours - so that's close...
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 17:52, closed)
So very much this.
I spend a lot of the day reading and writing scientific papers, so when I read it's either a) war stories or b) trashy fiction. I can't be arsed to spend my spare time reading the 'classics'. Ian Fleming, Alsitair Maclean, Charles Stross, John Wyndham - yes. Bronte et al - no.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:16, closed)
My mum always told me how she hated Dickens and I assumed
that it was because she was ill-educated and I would therefore ignore her protestations and show her how a youth with all the knowledge in the world could succeed where she had so obviously failed and marvel at the wonder of this colossus of the English canon and his mastery of our language and the juxtaposed exploration of class, money and the human condition.



To her credit she has avoided ever saying 'I told you so.'
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:19, closed)
For the classics
the reverse of normal thinking about film adaptation is true.

Good books are ruined or at least partialy mauled by TV/film adaptaion, but in the case of Dickens (and the others) they make good TV/films because the stories & characters really are good just obscured with overblown narrative
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:19, closed)
this. hard.
i love literature, i just can't bear the 'classics'.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:21, closed)
^THIS^
Clicked hard for Austen, which also saved me the trouble of pearoasting this
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:27, closed)
At school I was forced to read Pride & Prejudice and Mansfield Park
P&P is undoubtedly a classic - it's essentially set the "plot" for every romcom since and I found it very accessible and readable.

Mansfield Park is a steaming pile of elephant wank.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 15:56, closed)
Except for one honourable exception
The only one I can think of where both forms still shine is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Perhaps A Clockwork Orange but Kubrick's stylized film is not universally acclaimed and Burgess's original is really a top notch pot boiler. Especially if you get an old old copy which has an irredeemably bad extra chapter at the end
(, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 18:02, closed)
Moby Dick
Is a hard one to get through methinks. Or maybe I'm just an idiot.
(, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 20:29, closed)

Some of the early articles for the penny periodicals are great, the one about the French 'aristocrats' dueling in a barrel where they ended up eating each others faces out of hateful desperation is, memorable. Obviously the later paid by the weight fiction will be a bit (lot) more ponderous.
(, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 17:53, closed)
Obviously no "English" graduates here yet from the 80s and 90s
In the rush to embrace the more outre realms of critical theory the validity so called "Canon" was pretty much demolished. This had it's positives and it's negatives. The biggest problem was that once one had, in a rough remembering of Terry Eagleton's words, "driven a coach and horses through someone else's ideas without having to have any of one's own" there was no raison d'etre behind studying "English". The radical English Faculties had lost the baby with the bathwater.

Everything was up for grabs, the author was dead and nothing was "better" than anything else. One could adopt a buffet approach to the amorphous and indefinable mass of text. History, science, philosophy, all just text and all equally valid. English departments thought everyone else was engaged in text production while, I imagine, those other departments thought "what a bunch of Cunts" (Especially about Paul De Man)

The tide has receded now. (Look at how far Jacques Derrida's star has fallen since his death*) The upshot is, however, that you can't do a hatchet job on the so called classics because English departments beat you to it a long time ago.



*Which may be a shame because I think that despite his willful obscurity he was trying to convey something. I just couldn't be bothered ploughing through Being and Time to check. The other French wankers, (with the exception of Foucault) like Deleuze, cixous, Lacan and the rest were just arseholes. Hooray for Alan Sokhal
(, Sun 8 Jan 2012, 4:40, closed)

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