You want me to read what MKF?? Wednesdy 1/15/03

[dulcinea]

I used to be the type of person who would ALWAYS finish every book that I started. but, now I don't have as much time, so I am slowly amassing a pile of unfinished books by my bed.

I do find, the more someone raves about how great it is, the less likely it is that I'll enjoy it.

Recent books that I've found boring and/or painful -

The sound of One hand clapping - "boring" I can't even remember who wrote it.

The Horse Whisperer. My mothers friends raved. My mother and I both ranted that we both wasted an afternoon reading it. I'm still bitter, almost 3 years later that I can still remember the plot.

the catcher in the rye didn't appeal to me either.

taralicious - The yellow wallpaper - I'd forgotten all about that story. To be honest, despite my 6th Form English teachers' best efforts to destroy any enjoyment the class might have gotten reading this - I still kinda liked it.
but then, I really loved "the poisonwood bible" - but my flatmate never got further than about 50 pages in...

[Still Waters Run Deep]

Patches, its now around 39,500 signatories.

One thing the petition did'nt say was what the reasoning was for this licencing. It strikes me as just a money raising venture, which will cost more to administer and enforce than in receipts.

and this from a so called Labour Govt. It's jaw-dropping in it's crassness.

Sigh

[urnofosiris]

In Highschool my English teacher sort of pushed me into reading S by John Updike. I needed one more title for my list eventhough I had well exceded the minimum of 2000 pages, we also had to read 10 different titles and seeing as Stephen King was forbidden (arrogant snobs, they never even read any of his books) I needed one more title. Well it bored the living daylights out of me and the worst of Stephen King easily outshines it as far as I am concerned.

I usually know whether I will like a book before I read it but I have read some real stinkers. Not many, but they all had these must read reputations such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, ye gods, I know it was written before the word emancipation existed but the high damsels in distress and noble gentlemen content was still too much to take. Other snoring boring books I've read include the old man and the sea and Daisy Miller. That's about it really. I am sure some of the books on my shelves that I have yet to read will be added to this list later, but no one suggested them to me so I'll have no one to blame.

[bowieinberlin]

[quote:8b9466335b]Quote:

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2. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

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[/quote:8b9466335b]

Too bad, I absolutely loved this story. I always thought it was about this woman's struggle to be free of her controlling husband. But, whatever. I liked how the wallpaper person was considered "free" as compared to the protagonist.

But, yanno, maybe I'm just a geek like that.

[lustandrhymeremover]

Looking over these books so far, I've seen a few that I liked and a few that I think I may have killed a few brain cells trying to get through. Figured I might as well through my thoughts to the stack though. Sadly I have been subjected to a great many books that are nearly as exciting as licking sandpaper as a result of having an English teacher as a grandmother. She's been teaching so long that, and so... formal... that I end up with some truly frightening books on holidays.

I think the absolute worst book I've ever tried to read though was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Good Glordy! Was there actually a plot anywhere in there? I got about a third of the way through it and I was still bored, confused, and asleep. Not one to wallow in my own pain - I told my grandma I loved it and yes, I did think she should teach to all of her classes. Other page burners that I can think of have included Last of the Mohicans and Vanity Fair. Though I am determined to try the latter again.

[tiyodragon]

OMG! My list is mostly about books I haven't had time to finish lately. I hoping to get back to reading something other than pens fic!

The list of bad books might take some time to regurgitate...I've burned the names from my brain.

The list of things to get back to soon would be:
Seven Military Classics of Ancient China
and
The Book of Five Rings
and
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past

Linda

[Firefoot]

Oh, this is a FUN thread!!

Let's see...

I read about a third of Mists of Avalon and simply could not finish it. I'm not particularly interested in the Arthurian myths anyway, and the characters simply didn't appeal to me. MZB has a nice writing style, but IMO, this story was just way, way, way, way too long.

When I was a teenager, someone recommended The Thorn Birds to me. I read the first half-dozen pages and hated it, threw it down, never finished it.

My brother recommended Good Omens over and over to me, and even loaned me his copy. I love Neil Gaiman, but I just can't get past the first chapter of this book. I don't hate it, I just can't get into it.

The Bible-- ha! There's another one. I can't make it past Genesis without falling asleep.

Thomas Hardy. Woah. The only writer in high school English classes I simply could not read. Long-winded, tedious, tiresome! I finally had to read the Cliff Notes to find out how Return of the Native ended, the only time I ever did that. He was like a literary sedative.

I only picked up Lord of the Rings this year. Before that, I was literally the only one of my friends who had not read it. I saw Fellowship in the theater last January, and was aware that about 60% of the story was going right over my head. I got the books as presents, and finally read them. I'm glad I did: it was one of the best reading experiences of my life. I didn't want it to end! I picked up The Hobbit almost right away, because I didn't want to leave Middle Earth.

OTOH, I picked up the first Harry Potter book in January 2000, and have been rabidly hooked ever since. No prodding at all was needed on that one!

Finally, my top contender for "book I would not use as toilet paper" goes to Caleb Carr for Killing Time. What an utter piece of donkey shit! It's like a horrible attempt at sci-fi/ speculative fiction, penned by a seventh grader with no talent. The faults of this book are almost without number: a lame plot, utterly unmemorable one-dimensional characters, way too much exposition, too little dialogue, and an oh-so-convenient "deus ex machina" ending. All the interesting stuff is glossed over, while he focuses endlessly on pointless garbage. (Don't even get me started on the Mary Sue of a lead female character.)

And it's even more baffling to me that this crap came from the same guy who wrote the terrific Alienist and Angel of Darkness, both of which I would recommend without reservation to anyone. Go figure!

Firefoot

[Pipsqueak]

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Wanted to gouge out my own eyeballs. WORST. BOOK. EVER.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Some woman decides she doesn't like being a mother and hates her life, so she drowns herself, and this is supposed to be empowering. What the fuck ever.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. The whole skipping-around-in-time thing confused me. Couldn't follow it.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Boring, boring, boring. A bunch of rich people sit around and drink. Goody for them.

Billy Budd by Herman Melville. Didn't get past the first 5 pages. I just listened to what my English teacher said about it in class, and bullshitted my way through the tests.

Anything that relies on symbolism to make its point. I don't get symbolism. Just say what you wanna say.

On a somewhat related note, I have also read quite a few Buffy fanfics that were recommended by someone, and later wondered what on earth they were smoking. I 'm talking about intelligent, well-read, respected members of fandom who rave about a fic that turns out to be utter crap, and I'm like "what the hell??" You could fill up a whole other thread with bad fic recommendations.

[Ittybittykitty]

Well the only book I have ever not liked was Great Expectations I thought it just sucked beyond all telling. I read the cliff notes for my school project, but the book was awful. My favorite book so far is The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizebeth Moon. I must have read that book like sixteen or seventeen times. Best book ever IMHO.

[maudmac]

Wow, now I know I'm actually not the only person who hasn't read the Harry Potter books or The Lord of the Rings books. After reading The Hobbit, which I loved, in about the 7th grade, I was all set to read The Fellowship of the Ring. And I tried, I really did. Over the course of many years. But it was some of the most boring stuff I've ever read. Hemingway-level boring.

I had a terrible, terrible fight once after ending a rant about the literary canon by saying something like, "And James Joyce? Please. Have you read Ulysses? It cannot be read! It's a joke! That's not literature, that's..." My Irish friend's glare was plenty enough to shut me up. I offered her the crappiness of Faulkner, but she was not consoled.

I have issues with the canon. I think it kills kids' passion for reading (if they even have it to begin with) to read some of the crap they have to read. Now, sure, we should all be challenged, and we shouldn't just be exposed to things we are predisposed to liking; we shouldn't just be entertained, we should also be enriched. Minds and perceptions should be stretched by literature, poetry, art - but not in only a few directions. Sprinkle some life in there. Don't just hold up all those Dead White Guys' work as the end-all and be-all of human literary accomplishment. Bleh. The most striking thing to me about Faulkner is that one chapter in As I Lay Dying that just says, "My mother is a fish."

I have even bigger issues with the poetry canon, but I won't go into that because it would be very long and likely to end in an incoherent spew of profanity. And it's good for me to make at least a few more or less coherent posts every now and then.

But, hey, I remember reading some stuff I liked, too. I liked Plath and Kerouac and Vonnegut. Candide, Don Quixote, and To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. And I remember being pleasantly surprised every now and then. I hated Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, but I loved The Mayor of Casterbridge. And I felt for Hardy's pain that he really wanted to be a poet. I even liked some Shakespeare. Particularly, As You Like It.

I really think Stephen King will get his day eventually. Some of his writing is crap and, while I like him a lot, I will freely admit that. But some of his writing is also brilliant.

It's a shame the canon snobs look down their noses at so much excellent work while foisting authors like Hemingway on folks as a literary god. Just my opinion, of course. And you know what they say about opinions...

[darkmagicwillow]

I want you to read The Lord of the Rings.

I understand exactly why most of you got stuck where you did in the beginning. Tolkien didn't know where he was going at that point in the story with the hobbits just getting out of the Shire and he didn't know how to write an epic fantasy, which is understandable since he almost created the genre himself. He does hit his stride later. Don't take the early bits as representative of the book as a whole. They made a great decision in the movie of [i:db8242c4f2]Fellowship[/i:db8242c4f2] by cutting most of this early part out.

Skim the beginning, skip all the way until you're almost in Rivendell. Savor the excitement of the Ringwraith's final chase of Frodo, and begin reading from there. You'll find it much better.

[TromDeGrey]

DMW- I totally agree about LOTR. You really have to slog through it at first. My brother hated it anyway though. He said it never picked up.

Firefoot- Arrrgh!!! Caleb Carr! I totally forgot about him! I loved the Alienist, but you know what? I thought Angel of Darkness was totally predictable. I was disappointed.

maudmac- I hate the dead white guy syndrome too. It seems to suck every high school english class dry. I was very lucky my senior year though. We had to read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I've devoured everything of her's I have been able to get my hands on since.

[seurat]

I have read and enjoyed, and in some cases loved, a lot of books on this list. I have read LOTR a frightening number of times, for instance. Never have been able to make it thru all of Ulysses though, and I agree about Killing Time. I'll throw in The White Goddess by Robert Graves, which I know is a real important book that I absolutely should read. I love many of his books, but to me that one is impenetrable no matter how many times I try to tackle it.

[tommo]

Ack, Thomas Hardy. Why in the world publishers saw fit to bring his brand of misery to the masses, I will never know. Jude the Obscure. Pitiful. Nuff said.

[themagicpixie]

Thing is I find a lot of Thomas Hardy really readable. And then you read it, and you're thinking: "NOOOOO!!!! Don't let x die, don't have y do that, oh God no damn you man, can't anyone be happy!?!?"

For sheer dullness in the "classics", I am afraid DH Lawrence and Virgina Woolf are unrelentingly tedious. I remember watching the TV adaptation of "The Rainbow" a few years ago (I think I was 12 at the time), and they made the lesbian subtext (all of a page in the 300 pages+ novel) into a really big storyline. Now I'm not complaining, especially with Amanda Donohue playing the older woman there, I'm just saying, they had to emphasise this, because most of the book is people going into kitchens, sitting down and taking their boots off, and thinking about the nature of family, and that would not make for good television (whereas two women having sex in a river does ).

[tommo]

Oh god, I loved that description of The Rainbow. Fantastic. There was a televised adaptation of Sons and Lovers on here last weekend, and after watching it, I went and found my copy of the book, thinking that surely it couldn't be that dull.

It was. I mean, Oedipus complex. Virgin/whore dichotomy. Bless good ol' D.H. Lawrence for throwing the lot in there, covered in the grit and much from going down t'mine. Uh huh. Life is grim, then you die. Apparently.

[urnofosiris]

[quote:26a4fae3be]Quote:

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Just my opinion, of course. And you know what they say about opinions...

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[/quote:26a4fae3be]

... Mine's right and yours isn't?

About LoTR, I agree with darkmagicwillow, I can understand the beginning of the book not being very appealing, I think it helps to have read the Hobbit first. The entire chapter about Tom Bombadil skipping merrily along and singing was the part I certainly didn't miss in the movie.

[karenk]

Books... I used to practically live in the library and I would borrow something like a dozen books at a time. Those were the days when I used to read on average around 1 per day.

Recommended books that I hated? The Little Prince. My uncle highly recommended the book to me and gave me a copy of it but I never got into it. Don't know why.

Books that I had borrowed that I hated? Homer's Greek classics, Ulysses and Odysessy. I figured that since I loved reading about Greek mythology that I would like them but I didn't.

Recommended books that I loved? Harry Potter. A couple of friends that I hang out with after university kept raving about the series (the 4th had already been out for months at that time). I felt left out of their excited discussions so when a bookstore had a 20% off storewide, I gave in and bought all 4 at once. Then I left them on my shelf to collect dust for a couple of months before finally one night, after having nothing new to read in fan fiction, started the first one and proceeded to stay up all night to finish reading that. Needless to say, I was hooked and am eagerly looking forward to June.

But my all-time favourite genre of books that I love are the ones dealing with crime. Started with the Enclopedia Brown series then Sherlock Holmes and then to true crime cases. But I like the cases solved - missing persons or unsolved crime always make my tummy rumble.

[Firefoot]

Peter Jackson IMO very wisely cut the entire Tom Bombadil section. It really doesn't have much impact on the plot as a whole.

LoTR is one series that is definitely worth giving a try. Get to the point where the hobbits encounter Strider, and the story begins to pick up. Once they're all in Rivendell, it kicks into high gear and rarely falters for the remainder of the trilogy. I found it useful, after I had completed Return of the King to go back and re-read the first book, beginning with all the prologue-y stuff that preceeds chapter one. Once you know the whole story, a lot of those small details make sense. And it also helps to have read The Hobbit, as a few events and characters from that story are mentioned in Rings.

A lot of the early material with the hobbits was cut from the movie of Fellowship; however, the extended DVD restores many of those scenes. There's some very funny material in there. Later in the movie, there is a scene involving Merry, Pippin, and lembas that I thought was just hilarious.

Firefoot

[Nix42]

I had to read A Passage To India by E M Forster as one of my A Level English texts. Thankfully it was an open book exam, as I never did anything more than skim it. Somehow managed to pass the exam with a decent grade - thank God for movies

I trudged through the 1st 50 or so pages of LoTR, but keep giving up. Maybe I'll give it another go sometime...

Last one - Interview with The Vampire by Anne Rice just didn't catch my imagination

[bearthirteen]

haha..i never finished interview with a vampire too...never could get past the half way mark.
same thing with the english patient - anyone here wants my copy?
catcher in the rye? i kept hoping that something remotely intersting would happen - nothing did. hemingway pains me, how can anyone be this boring...my opinion only of course...
i have yet to tear off the plastic on my LOTR which i bought years ago - should i?

[urnofosiris]

If you like the Fantasy genre you really should try at least. The beginning is slow, but as has been said before it really picks up speed as when they meet Strider. Of course you can't blame me if you don't like it, you already bought the book.

[reppa36]

well, it took me almost 7 years to read Interview with a Vampire... and I still don't like it...
took me 6 months to get past the first 50 pages of the Belgariad...
still can't get through anything by Stephen King...(except Christine, but that might've just been boredom...)

[darkmagicwillow]

Don't bother spending a lot of effort getting into David Eddings. [i:8fc22dc467]The Belgariad[/i:8fc22dc467] isn't bad, but others have done the same ideas better long before he started writing. Definitely, [b:8fc22dc467]don't[/b:8fc22dc467] read his next series, [i:8fc22dc467]The Mallorean[/i:8fc22dc467]. It's almost exactly the same as his previous one. The same characters. The same quest. The same dialog. Pretty much everything is the same. I've said that some authors write the same book over and over, but it's never been as true as in this case.

[darkmagicwillow]

Interesting that I mentioned that law about reviewing digital media without the producer's consent as there's an article in today's New York Times as well as at CNET
where you don't have to register.

Free speech won this time, but they're going to appeal.

[Patches]

Ive noticed a fairly common trend here. Seems most of the books we dont like are/were required reading in school. Thomas, (I love architecture so Im going to spend 15 pages describing a brick wall) Hardy perfect image of me in high school as I tried to slog through his work. Never did finish it (Coles Notes ruled). I liked Shakespeare; no actually, I loved Shakespeare! As the one unanimously voted the official class intellectual idiot, it was a delight to look at the self proclaimed geniuses and say, what dont you understand about the theme of this play, here let me explain it to you in words you can understand. What can I say; it was one of lifes little victories.

I liked Robert Ludlum for a while, but hes too much like Eddings same story told repeatedly. I sear some of these authors have a computer program that writes the story for them, all they do is plug in the character names, gender, physical descriptions and a city, the computer does the rest.

Ive tried to read Jane Rule, honesty, Ive tried but I just cant get past the first few chapters of any of her books. I tried Memory Board two or three times, and now the only thing I remember about it is how much I wanted scream and throw it against the wall. (Yes, I know, Im a lesbian heretic, and no, I didnt finish Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle either) .

[dreiser]

it's sad that as a former english major i almost solely read material that has pictures these days. aka comic books and manga. of course there's my bad fanfic addiction but that's needless to be said. about the same as mentioning i still reread all the books of theodore dreiser's work and i remain a huge fan.

mostly because his books are very naughty for the time they were written in and i respect that. it's quality.

i hate anything charles dickens has touched. there's just something about his writing that i despise and i'd rather be forced to watch a pauly shore marathon than read great expectations about that stupid weiner pip.

once upon a time i read everything tolkien wrote. including the silmarillion which is the only thing i can remember with any clarity and i admit freely the reason why is because it's all about those damn pretty elves.

but i will say here with utmost conviction, i hate the hobbit. not just THE hobbit but all hobbits. ah! hairy footed midgets... you take away sexy legolas screentime!

nic

[xita]

*glares disapprovingly at nic...

[dreiser]

i'm just making sure you don't live in denial, moof. this is your punishment on behalf of kathy and all the BAMMERS.

BAMMERS unite! rofl. at least until HAG gets started.

nic

[xita]

Dude TIff doesn't look like xena, so mean!