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Post by everso on Aug 25, 2009 14:30:47 GMT
have you managed any?I've read Lady Chatterley's Lover, which I found intensely boring, but felt I had to read, to say I'd read it! I've also read Pride and Prejudice, which was lovely.
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Post by housesparrow on Aug 25, 2009 17:17:28 GMT
We "did" Hamlet for A level English. Sons and Lovers was also on the syllabus and although we were advised to read as much Lawrence as possible, the tutor told us not to try Lady Chatterley's Lover because it was boring. Of course we all rushed out to find a copy......and held his word in greater respect after that.
And of the others, like you, everso, only Pride and Prejudice.
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Post by Patrick on Aug 25, 2009 17:46:52 GMT
Hamlet's fab, as is Macbeth and MSND. P & P not a chance  Chatterley - I would have if people hadn't made such a fuss about it - 'cos I usually like Lawrence. I read Sons and Lovers again recently Tolkein is so overrated a to be beyond belief! We attempted Ulysses for the literature O levels at school - and got about half way through before our teacher got bored with it and decided on something else!  |
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Aug 25, 2009 19:17:00 GMT
Most of them sound boring (although I did see a good version of Moby Dick with Patrick Stewart once), and I don't see how somebody could just read "The Twin Towers" and understand it without reading the first book in the trilogy - If I read the twin towers, I'd have to by and read the whole LotR trilogy, and then I'd have to buy the Silmarillion and the other twelve volumes of the history of Middle Earth...that's a big undertaking...
I tried to read Homer's Iliad once, I managed about 20 pages, the language was very awkward and cumbersome.
AH
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Aug 25, 2009 19:23:01 GMT
Tolkein is so overrated a to be beyond belief! Erm, he invented high fantasy...90% of the books I've read and enjoyed would not exist if it was for him, he invented worlds, languages, histories, cultures, Gods etc, he was probably one of the first authors to ever to go to these lengths just for a few stories. AH |
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Post by trubble on Aug 25, 2009 19:36:33 GMT
Hamlet is indeed fab! I can't imagine sitting down to read it though. Maybe it's just me but you need to see a play, don't you? - I mean to really get it. Or join a production of it. Or study it. Preferably all three. I have always bemoaned the way school Shakespeare (or anything) can put you off for life but now I am a convert and think there should be more Shakespeare taught at school. You don't get the opportunity to delve into it like that again, with an expert helping you. I know Macbeth best because it was the one I studied for school. Mini-Trub is doing King Lear and educating me in that. Read it though? No.  The Lord of the Rings  . I crossed it off the list right from the start. Once upon a time a boyfriend tried to persuade me that the Hobbit was actually good. He even bought me a lavishly illustrated version, I think for kids, to try to get me into it. Half way through I decided it was as boring as I'd always imagined. The pix were nice though. We broke up. Lady Chatterley's Lover - Forgettable. War and Peace is the guilt trip on my shelf.  Pride and Prejudice - Yes.  Moby Dick - Yes. When I was young. Someone gave me that and Swiss Family Robinson for Christmas. Perhaps abridged. I read them but I can't say I have fond memories of either book. Or the someone who gave them to me. Ulysses - Now!! This is fun. This is part guilt trip and part excitement. You can read Ulysses for as long as you like - like a lifetime project. I have read a lot of it and skipped a lot of it. The best way to read it, I think, is : a) start with another Joyce book to break the fear (he really is a brilliant writer) and then work up to it as your climax. b) Then just read it a page or two or three at a time. You can do that on-line by the way. c) with maturity. (ie age). I tried reading it when I was younger and it was hell. There's a rumour that no one in the world has ever read it all and, like the Emperor's New Clothes, no one wants to admit it. (And no one can catch each other out). |
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Post by trubble on Aug 25, 2009 19:39:49 GMT
Is it a boy's list with P&P just added in as a token girl's book?
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Post by trubble on Aug 25, 2009 19:41:00 GMT
How about ''books you probably shouldn't read but did''.
Barbara Windsor's autobiography. Tsk.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Aug 25, 2009 19:45:55 GMT
I see no Edgar Rice Burroughs on that list either...wot a swiz! ERB is the master of herioc fantasy & planetary romance...
AH
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Aug 25, 2009 19:52:33 GMT
No Robert E Howard or HP Lovecraft either...this list was obviously assembled by a ponce!
"Tekeli-li"
AH
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Post by motorist on Aug 25, 2009 20:18:02 GMT
Quite right. It's clearly a nonsensical list made up by some wannabe "lookee me, I'm an expert who still lives with his mum at age 50" and can be safely ignored  |
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Post by trubble on Aug 25, 2009 20:22:52 GMT
No!
It's a great list. It's a list of the exact books that stare at you from your shelf and that everybody talks about but forgets to read. I think I lied about Moby Dick. I know I read the Family Robinson but I think even then that Moby just got a flick through and then stared at me forlornly.
I only read any of the others on the list because they were 'must reads'. Duty.
There should also be a Kafka and Dostoevsky there. Iris Murdoch books stare at me too in that menacing way. God! books are evil.
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Post by housesparrow on Aug 25, 2009 20:28:33 GMT
Tolkein is so overrated a to be beyond belief! Erm, he invented high fantasy...90% of the books I've read and enjoyed would not exist if it was for him, he invented worlds, languages, histories, cultures, Gods etc, he was probably one of the first authors to ever to go to these lengths just for a few stories. AH Surely most mythology does all those things? Tolkein just wrote fairy stories for grown ups - yes, I tried the Hobbit and failed. The best fantasy writers combine the real world with the imagined, blurring the boundaries and stretching credibility. |
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Post by percyplum on Aug 25, 2009 20:31:16 GMT
Lady C was definitely the worst of Lawrence...I too enjoyed Sons and Lovers and most of his others.
Tolkien is my hero. I adore the Hobbit and the Rings trilogy...but I confess I couldn't get on with the Silmarilion and the other backgroundy stuff.
I like some of Jane Austen - Emma was more fun that P & P, IMO.
I can't get on with the Russians - OH has read most of them but they're not for me.
Not read Ulysses...always meant to one day.
Read Moby Dick as a teenager and hated it.
I have a whole guilt shelf with stuff I'll never get round to reading.
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Post by housesparrow on Aug 25, 2009 20:32:00 GMT
Trubble, I have struggled through Portrait of the Artist (twice) because people say it is the most readable Joyce. Sorry, but it was tedious.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Aug 25, 2009 22:27:34 GMT
Erm, he invented high fantasy...90% of the books I've read and enjoyed would not exist if it was for him, he invented worlds, languages, histories, cultures, Gods etc, he was probably one of the first authors to ever to go to these lengths just for a few stories. AH Surely most mythology does all those things? Tolkein just wrote fairy stories for grown ups - yes, I tried the Hobbit and failed. The best fantasy writers combine the real world with the imagined, blurring the boundaries and stretching credibility. Nah, not to the extent that JRRT did, twelve volumes of history, tales and events to cover a three volume story...extensive doesn't begin to describe it. AH |
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Post by Flatypus on Aug 26, 2009 3:53:43 GMT
The Hobbit is a children's book. Lord of the Rings is not. It is a Saga or a Legend (not a Mythology because Myth conveys a message beyond the story) and conforms to the conventions of that Dark Age genre. The various fantasies, mostly American, that it has spawned fail because they are trying to tell a modern kind of story with characterisation, not an ancient one where the Quest is all and character emerges indirectly through action. If Tolkien had wanted to take it to absolute emulation than he would have given characters genealogies showing how a trait develops for good or ill in time, almost as if successive generations were incarnations of the same person - which to ancient Teutons they very much were.
My favourite series for the moment is Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars' political science-fiction which sort of updates Ursula le Guin's from the 1960s and 70s. Anything by Ken MacLeod is usually pretty good going too. Classically, I find Jane Austen far more familiar to modern times than Dickens, whom I've never been able to stand, but rollicking Tobias Smollett is fine if you don't mind an attitude that would now probably be called Frat house
I too had to do Sons and Lovers for O or A level in the 60s. Put me off Lawrence (and the England and people he wrote about) for life. "The Bottoms succeeded to Hell Row". Who wants to know about these miserable 'people'? They could be some lost Amazonian tribe for all I care - people do not behave or think like that, inferior sub-humans do and the 20th century consisted of their elimination and liberating such oppressed moronic creatures to the level of people from their working-class subhumanity.
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Post by aubrey on Aug 26, 2009 8:19:30 GMT
Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson, if only to see how bad a book can be and still get published. I can enjoy pulp - like Howard's Conan stories and Charles Hamilton's school stories - because the writers know what they have to do and do it, but Patterson is supposed to be a crime/adventure writer and his crime/investigation bits are arbitary (the villain, when finally unmasked, really could have been anybody: you don't say, "Oh, yeah," you say "Who?") the procedural parts are unlikely, to be kind, and the adventure bits are laughable. And all done with the solemnity of Dostoyevski, or someone, as if lack of humour is enough to make something serious.
There are bits in this book that, if I'd written them myself, I would have destroyed before showing them to someone else.
Tolkien's great. You don't need to read the background stuff, which is like unexpanded legends, and fairy dull. Both the Hobbit and TLOR take a while to get going, which is annoying until you get past it, though then you realise that the slowness is important as well. Though you can skip the songs and the lists of "Son of"s.
Of the rest of that list, I've read P&P, I think. Nothing else.
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Post by trubble on Aug 26, 2009 8:37:45 GMT
Trubble, I have struggled through Portrait of the Artist (twice) because people say it is the most readable Joyce. Sorry, but it was tedious. Yeah. He's great if you like tedious but if tedious is not your thing... ;D |
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Post by trubble on Aug 26, 2009 8:39:19 GMT
Does anyone here like Elizabeth Bowen?
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A.P.P.S
. I crossed it off the list right from the start. Once upon a time a boyfriend tried to persuade me that the Hobbit was actually good. He even bought me a lavishly illustrated version, I think for kids, to try to get me into it. Half way through I decided it was as boring as I'd always imagined. The pix were nice though. We broke up. 
S C 
)
