Posted on 04/10/2012 2:14:07 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It is a classic from 1931. It is quite gripping, IIRC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth
I thought everyone got assigned it in HS. Maybe not...?
“Bonfire” is sort of like the recent unpleasantness in Sanford and the press and political maneuvering around it, except 25 years ago in the Bronx.
Who thinks Clancy ever intended the Ryan books to be great literature, anyway? I don’t. I don’t think even he thought he was writing the next great American novel when he started writing “Red October”. He probably thought it sounded like an interesting story, he maybe thought other people would, and..he was right.
Well, on the one hand, most of the “literary” writers since the 1940s are pretty much worthless, I would agree with that.
On the other hand, Tom Clancy may be fun to read, but he is not a great novelist, either. No real depth to it.
There haven’t been very many truly great novels written since the Second World War. I’d include Evelyn Waugh among the few great writers. He started a bit earlier, but the Sword of Honour trilogy is up to his best, although less well known than Brideshead Revisited and the earlier novels.
Flannery O’Connor is another undeniably great writer, and even the academics are forced to admit it.
Another great novel, or trilogy, is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The academics hate that one, because it’s so politically incorrect, but they have found it difficult to stop people from reading and admiring it.
I would tend to agree that some of the best novels since the 1940s have been genre novels—science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries. The novel became “realistic” in the nineteenth century, but that left out a lot of things that were in great literature of earlier periods—the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy, for instance. Those gentre novels profit by admitting things that the “realistic” or purely materialistic novelists refuse to admit, and they gain by it. Not all SF is great, but some of it is.
Recently, I've been reading lots of the classics available free on Kindle. There is a large selection of several thousand -- H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and others. The writing styles are often different from current styles, but that enhances my enjoyment.
I can name one Faulkner book and that is enough for me. Read, “The Sound and the Fury” and you will not only realize that the teacher that assigned it and glowed about it knows nothing, but they also have some serious problems.
Just read the first part of the book and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Ghastly.
I’d rather read every Clancy book than Faulkner’s POS again.
In case you missed my message, it’s a horrible book horribly written.
I'm going to look it up right after I have some Pablum with a wallpaper paste chaser.
I loved the movie and read the book several times.
Pablum: 1.Bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment, etc.; pap.
2.A soft breakfast cereal for infants.
Unfortunately, starting in the 1950's, the publisher decided to update the series by dumbing the stories down, removing difficult or archaic vocabulary words and phrases and making them politically correct. I started to read the newer version of The Hidden Staircase (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1987), but put it down after reading only a few pages. The original was far more interesting.
The same thing happened with the Hardy Boys series, published by the same company. If you desire to read a Hardy Boys book, or want to get one into the hands of a young reader, search the used book stores, the Worldcat library database or the Internet for books published before 1959.
Red Storm Rising was a very good depiction of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in the mid-1980s, the defense postures and how a war might start and be fought. It is well worth reading for this. And it is a good story.
Cheers!
Comments indeed! Tom Wolfe, Allen Drury way ahead of Clancy. Btw—Willa Cather was never included in any feminist canons, and Margaret Atwood (whose Handmaiden’s Tale was misread initially by feminists) dropped off immediately after revealing herself as religious. .
As did I.But I liked The Right Stuff better and his essays better than any of his books. But Clancy, so far as I’m concerned, wrote two decent books: his first (Hunt) and Patriot Games. The rest were downhill. Those written with a partner aren’t even worth reading when there IS no other reading.
Tom Clancy doesn’t write literature, he writes prophecy.
WTF!
There weren't many Southern Republicans around when Faulkner was writing in the days when FDR won 98% of the vote in South Carolina. This guy is way behind the curve, but if there's still some cartoonish old image of the South in the Northern urban mind nowadays, I suspect Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, Walker Evans, Al Capp, and newspaper stories themselves have had more to do with it than William Faulkner.
Bonfire of the Vanities? Tom Wolfe is as close to a conservative as any well-known, half-way-respected novelist writing today is. I doubt he's "foundational" for any kind of liberal thinking. Liberal or left writers hate and abuse Wolfe. Read the attacks on A Man in Full from John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. Why does this idiot-moron think Tom Wolfe is some example of liberal thinking or academically-respected literature?
“The Life of Pi” was a very entertaining book with an uplifting moral. Listen to the audio version.
I read (listen to on tape actually) most of W.E.B. Griffin’s works. Having spent time in South American, particularly at the Embassy in Buenos Aires, I enjoy reading about places I’ve been to. My complaint with him is his repetition: Maj. Harry J. Smith, USMCR, which is repeated everytime Harry makes an appearance. He does get a bit blasphemous from time to time, but most authors do.
They call them ‘penny awfuls’. If you don’t know the difference, that’s your loss.
Well, Literary Blogger, that's your opinion. I enjoy reading Tom Clancy, but, well, he's Tom Clancy, and you get exactly what it says on the label: submarines, the CIA, big explosions, increasingly over-the-top plots, and a particular sort of stilted and repetitive writing style. Also, Clancy's personal politics have moved front-and-centre since Executive Orders—not that I necessarily disagree with those opinions, but I find him heavy-handed and preachy in presenting them. His characters are "drawn from life" insofar as your exposure to "life" consists mainly of Navy bases.
Life of Pi, on the other hand, has an entertaining protagonist with a humorous history who is caught in an original situation (Pi is a castaway, stranded on a lifeboat with an improbably-named tiger that he has to keep happy lest he become its next meal), and it concludes with a twist ending that compels you to re-evaluate everything you've read up to that point. I don't buy into the postmodern premise of the novel (that true faith consists in believing the more engaging story, even if it flies in the face of cold, dry facts), but even a bad message can be packaged in good art.
BTW, I suspect that most of the reason we regard Twain and Hawthorne as both great literature and popular fiction is simply that the intervening 100+ years have winnowed out the now-forgotten crap. Who's to say that in 2112 we won't think back fondly to Yann Martel and Kazuo Ishiguro, and have forgotten all about Tom Clancy?
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