Posted on 04/12/2013 8:28:36 PM PDT by MNDude
Good Night Moon
A depressing litany of “farewells” uttered to various “things” arranged about a small, dark bedroom. Was forced, by my wife, to read this book every night to small children. Their infantile intellect failed to offer any insight or meaning to this boring novel.
Even THEY would fall asleep before the last page...
WHAT? To Kill A Mockingbird is my favorite book of all time!
Yeah, much better to stay within a system that regards you as a slave, and forces you to work under ever-increasingly difficult rules, all so that the vast majority of the product of your labors can be taken from you, and used for the benefit of others, to the credit of the ones who stole it from you. Pretty stupid for a successful person to walk away from that, and leave the idiots to suffer under the consequences of their own impossible ideas. You're a genius.
Ditto on the “Lord of the Flies”, could not stand that book in school.
Alfred Hitchcock called the New York Times Bestseller list "Sleeping Pills with Dust Jackets"...
The Cathcer in the Rye. Ugh. That book sucks.
On The Road. Incoherent babble.
Any book by the Bronte sisters
I like Catcher in the Rye but never thought it as good as many say it is, but for me Salinger’s Best Book is “Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters” it transports you to a time long past when formal occasions were an affair that required social protocol and how people react when those protocols were disrupted.
Reading Moby Dick was an almost unbearable experience.
I tried the same with "Finnegan's Wake". Each time, about 40 pages in, I decided that whatever the reward might be, it wasn't worth the effort.
Life's too short to read bullstuff, too. If it doesn't entertain, or if it doesn't make you a better person, take a nap. You won't be sorry.
That said, I enjoyed both LOTM and The Deerslayer. Never got around to the others yet.
JFC was a stiffish writer with no great style, but I liked his story.
That said, the Daniel-Day Lewis version really was much better than the book.
True and fair or not, this is absolutely hilarious!
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
An excerpt:
"There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale.
Ethan Frome was awful, as was Paradise Lost (both inflicted on me in high school).
Fortunately, we were also forced to read the Canterbury Tales and Candide, which balanced out the bad.
First three books with Hunter Thompson as author.
***The Last of The Mohicans was unreadable. Long, boring and did I mention long & boring. And lets not forget boring. And long.****
You aught to try RODRICK RANDOM. It is an adventure story told in narrative. Lo-o-n-g and boring. even though there is lots of adventure in it they just could not deliver the story in an exciting way.
Dhalgren: Delany
Almost every book Oprah ever featured.
James A Michener
guy could write 1,000 page short stories
ugh
Interesting. I’d never read or heard that before. Enjoy the pivo.
Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell.
It was in 12th grade English, it was hell.
Anything written stream of consciousness is.
So was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Also, 12th grade English.
Joyce Carol Oates - only know the early stuff, but they were disturbing.
But I loved anything by Steinbeck.
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