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Unpopular Literary Opinions You Hold

I don't like poetry. Beyond Yeats and Eliot, it bores me. I never figured out how to write about it at school or at university.

Thomas Hardy is tortuous and curiously passionless. I can't.

I'm not saying the 80s/90s guard of popular British literary authors - Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - cannot write, but man are they inconsistent from one book to the next. They overuse irony and McEwan especially has a clinical nastiness. He also uncreatively lifts entire storylines and swathes of information from other sources, be they old C-movies or textbooks. Plot recycling never bothers me but his does. The outcome is never more interesting than the original.

HARRY POTTER was a delightful children's series for the first 4 books. It was thereon poorly written and edited. The final books really showed up Rowling's weaknesses as a writer. There could have been one or two books worth of material cut out to no great change to plot.

by Anonymousreply 439May 15, 2021 4:22 PM

But, but everyone loves poetry!

by Anonymousreply 1June 1, 2016 9:22 PM

"2666" is pure garbage. No one has ever finished it. They lie!

by Anonymousreply 2June 1, 2016 9:24 PM

I don't like elderqueeren regurgitating a new version of an old thread.

by Anonymousreply 3June 1, 2016 9:25 PM

OP, Martin Amis once wrote that "[w]hen we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less." So Amis wouldn't be surprised that you find him (and Rushdie and McEwan) inconsistent. (I hate McEwan's stuff, personally.)

Agree with R2 about 2666 (and Bolano in general).

by Anonymousreply 4June 1, 2016 9:26 PM

Charles Dickinson- torture of my high school years muddling through his work. Shakespeare too.

by Anonymousreply 5June 1, 2016 9:33 PM

Not even Tennyson's "Idylls of the King"? I'd have thought that was up your alley OP.

by Anonymousreply 6June 1, 2016 9:33 PM

[quote] Charles Dickinson- torture of my high school years muddling through his work.

I bet the teachers were surprised how you mangled his name.

by Anonymousreply 7June 1, 2016 9:36 PM

r4 all of that Latin magic realist/perception twisting is cliched bullshit. I didn't hate 2666, and I did finish it, but it took me a few tries. It's actually three different books. All of that genre desperately needs a good editor.

by Anonymousreply 8June 1, 2016 9:38 PM

I think Don DeLillo is a poor writer.

by Anonymousreply 9June 1, 2016 9:41 PM

R%. I always disliked Charles Dickinson, but hated his daughter Janice's books even more.

by Anonymousreply 10June 1, 2016 9:41 PM

He's the literary equivalent of Steve Dahl.

by Anonymousreply 11June 1, 2016 9:41 PM

I love Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha".

by Anonymousreply 12June 1, 2016 9:45 PM

I cannot understand the appeal of DEATH OF A SALESMAN.

by Anonymousreply 13June 1, 2016 9:48 PM

Thomas Wolfe was a great writer; Tom Wolfe is hack and clown

Faulkner is overrated. Most of his work is experimental, and most of it doesn't work.

Ernest Hemingway wrote some really bad books

by Anonymousreply 14June 1, 2016 9:50 PM

HATE "To Kill a Mockingbird". It seemed as though every fucking year in school they made us read that book. HATE IT.

by Anonymousreply 15June 1, 2016 9:57 PM

Ocean Vuong is a talentless, prissy "poet", who belives that oddly spaced emotional gripes makes him into an enduring voice of the Asian-American experience.

And those are his readable verses.

by Anonymousreply 16June 1, 2016 10:05 PM

(samuel) chip delany's (unfinished) take on wonder woman is still representative of the shortsightedness of social liberals and utopian marxists.

by Anonymousreply 17June 1, 2016 10:09 PM

The best American writer of the first half of the 20th century wasn't Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, or Steinbeck, but Edith Wharton.

by Anonymousreply 18June 1, 2016 10:09 PM

Poetry is the highest form of literature, and after classical music and painting the highest form of art; it's of course okay to not like it, and many of the few people today who are still interested in culture don't like it, but it is uncultural and ungebildet to do so.

by Anonymousreply 19June 1, 2016 10:11 PM

Love Hardy and Dickens; can't stand poetry and Shakespeare

by Anonymousreply 20June 1, 2016 10:12 PM

The Iceman Cometh is incredibly tedious and hacky

by Anonymousreply 21June 1, 2016 10:15 PM

[R18], um, Virginia Woolf

by Anonymousreply 22June 1, 2016 10:17 PM

R22, I referred to American writers.

by Anonymousreply 23June 1, 2016 10:19 PM

It's the heat and the humidity

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 24June 1, 2016 10:24 PM

So much agreement on the Harry Potter series, OP. The first three books? Terrific; they read like the wind. The remaining books? Where was Rowling's EDITOR? That is some bloated, repetitive mess. Rowling has a fantastic imagination, but she needed someone to hack the actual story out of the final books. Even War and Peace wasn't as meandering. And the fantards will cut you dead if you dare mention it.

Speaking of War&P -- Anna Karenina is better.

Poetry? Not for me. Except for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, which, done right, is swoon-worthy. But singing Emily Dickinson (Janice's slutty cousin) poems to Yellow Rose of Texas is always fun.

by Anonymousreply 25June 1, 2016 10:28 PM

Dolts. Poetry is the highest of the literary arts.

by Anonymousreply 26June 2, 2016 12:49 AM

The fact that Thomas Hardy is read at all is a fucking crime. Indolent, plodding, self-indulgent twaddle.

by Anonymousreply 27June 2, 2016 1:32 AM

Hemingway is extremely overrated , and that's why no talks about him anymore.

by Anonymousreply 28June 2, 2016 2:19 AM

Agree about Edith Wharton.

by Anonymousreply 29June 2, 2016 2:28 AM

Mansfield Park is my favorite Austen novel.

I'm trying hard to understand the "don't like poetry at all," given there are so many great poets in every age. (The percentage people have been talking about for fiction writers, i.e. liking about 50% of their work, is even lower for most poets. If I like 30% of a poet's work I'm happy.)

I must be the only person who didn't read To Kill a Mockingbird in a high school class. Of course it was a relatively new book then.

by Anonymousreply 30June 2, 2016 2:56 AM

[R18], gotcha. Not sure if she's the greatest but I dislike her less than the rest of that bunch.

by Anonymousreply 31June 2, 2016 3:06 AM

Oh yes, and "A Little Life" is still indigestible, interminable, and barely above torture porn. Barely.

by Anonymousreply 32June 2, 2016 3:51 AM

I don't think much of Alice Munro. To me the stories are okay, but lotsa people, to include some respected and accomplished writers say SHE IS THE GREATEST THING EVAR!!!!!!!!!!!

by Anonymousreply 33June 2, 2016 4:41 AM

r28 Hemingway is not talked about anymore because of the politically correct bullshit that has infected college campuses like a virulent herpes virus.

r33 as someone who comes from the area she writes about, she has 3 or 4 autobiographical stories she's written for the last 40 fucking years. Her observations are not as accurate as she's given credit for, either, since she is writing her own story over and over and over again. The people up here who praise her accuracy generally had the same come up, hence the same perspective.

by Anonymousreply 34June 2, 2016 4:47 AM

[quote]Poetry is the highest of the literary arts.

And poetry that employs meter and rhyme is superior to free verse.

by Anonymousreply 35June 2, 2016 4:50 AM

Agatha Christie is much better than P. D. James, whose plots are good but whose writing style is too simple. I hate Hemingway's short direct style too - seems childish to me.

I love Faulkner's short stories but his books are too confusing, ditto Joyce and Proust. I don't like for reading to give me a headache - there's a happy medium. D. H. Lawrence is an easy read but it's emotional and deep, not simplistic. Sometimes over-wrought and misogynistic though. I think of Dostoyevski in a similar way but I like his shorter works, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot better than Brothers Karamazov which meanders all over the place.

Jane Austen and Barbara Pym are great at inner-life and psychological insights.

I love the way Dickinson's and Poe's poetry sings. Yeats is good. Whitman over-emotional or something - bordering on maudlin, like Dickens (which is good for what it was - serial newspaper melodrama).

by Anonymousreply 36June 2, 2016 7:39 AM

Revolutionaries of form, Gertrude Stein is still pleasurable, Joan Didion, not at all.

by Anonymousreply 37June 2, 2016 8:14 AM

Theodore Dreiser

George Eliot

Edward Albee

C.S.Lewis

George R.R. Martin

by Anonymousreply 38June 2, 2016 1:26 PM

Don't care how many awards or trophies and literary accolades, A Gronking to Remember is not memorable. There, said it.

by Anonymousreply 39June 2, 2016 1:34 PM

Rushdie's Midnight's Children did not deserve the Booker of the Bookers award. It is unreadable. All of the Muslim kerfuffle about his Satanic Verses was much ado about fucking nothing.

Donna Leon is one of the best social commentators writing today.

The most sublime book written in the English language is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Every word, every sentence is perfect.

by Anonymousreply 40June 2, 2016 1:39 PM

What about them, r38?

by Anonymousreply 41June 2, 2016 1:41 PM

Im starting to think this is a strategic ploy by the democratic powers to limit the amount of time Hillary has as the nominee. It allows all her baggage to be exposed and while still not being the exclusive nominee, the waters are muddled, press coverage split. And then she can eventually pounce on Trump, and all the racist vitriol he's spewed, shady business practices, while all of Hill's skeletons will be old news. Whatever works, Clinton 2016.

by Anonymousreply 42June 2, 2016 1:42 PM

R42 WRONG THREAD!

by Anonymousreply 43June 2, 2016 1:44 PM

r43, NO SHIT!

by Anonymousreply 44June 2, 2016 1:48 PM

The most overrated writer in history is Henry James -- pompous, overwrought, pretentious.

by Anonymousreply 45June 2, 2016 1:51 PM

R45, I'd say that would be David Foster Wallace. And the same description applies.

by Anonymousreply 46June 2, 2016 1:56 PM

Completely agree R45, especially about the pompous and overwrought part.

by Anonymousreply 47June 2, 2016 1:57 PM

[quote]I'm trying hard to understand the "don't like poetry at all," given there are so many great poets in every age.

I don't think my brain is wired for poetry. I like the way certain poems sound, but I struggle to find meaning in poems (at least those that have literary merit). I can't get them to make sense.

by Anonymousreply 48June 2, 2016 2:12 PM

Woolf's The Waves, the most beautiful English prose I've read.

by Anonymousreply 49June 6, 2016 6:27 PM

I think Oscar Wilde's plays are overrated (I feel like I'm being blasphemous just saying it). However, I do love his novel " The Picture of Dorian Gray", some of his poetry, his quotes. Wilde's children's story book "The Happy Prince and Other Tales" contains a wonderful tale of "The Selfish Giant" which was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. I still find it quite moving as an adult.

I like the Austen and Bronte classics and I don't give a shit if some consider them "chick lit".

I used to read the poetry of Sylvia Plath in my angst-ridden teenage years but I find her kind of depressing now.

It's good to read that I'm not alone in my distaste for Shakespeare. Reading was my favorite hobby but I used to dread every English class in school when his works were discussed.

by Anonymousreply 50June 6, 2016 6:46 PM

Agree about the splendor that is Waugh's Brideshead, R40.

by Anonymousreply 51June 6, 2016 6:46 PM

Sublime until Sebastian disappears and all the dreary stuff remains.

by Anonymousreply 52June 6, 2016 10:53 PM

Writers who teach are not writers.

by Anonymousreply 53June 6, 2016 10:58 PM

Alice Walker hasn't written a good novel in about two decades and a great one in three.

by Anonymousreply 54June 6, 2016 11:01 PM

Junot Diaz thinks people are jealous or prejudiced It's actually because his books kinda suck but are fawned upon by academics.

by Anonymousreply 55June 6, 2016 11:04 PM

I don't think that's an unpopular opinion, r54.

by Anonymousreply 56June 6, 2016 11:05 PM

Catcher in the Rye was the ultimate spoiled white privilege story, and I just hated clueless holden. I do not understand how the writer was lauded for his ability to write a youth "so well" when he was like 25, not 55 when he wrote it. The boy seems like a spoiled moron who couldn't accept how unspecial he was, and therefore decided to save people, when he didn't even know how to save himself.

Harry Potter is a masterclass in human emotion and motivation, and should be taught in school. That is all.

by Anonymousreply 57June 6, 2016 11:13 PM

I don't like Shakespeare. I read the first Harry Potter book and thought the writing was piss-poor, even for a children's book. JK Rowling is a hack.

by Anonymousreply 58June 6, 2016 11:24 PM

I'm still hoping for a "Ulysses" moment when I realize it's the greatest novel of all time but I'm afraid it will never come.

by Anonymousreply 59June 6, 2016 11:36 PM

Gertrude Stein is one of the 20th century's great unsung literary geniuses. She was a much better writer than Hemingway.

by Anonymousreply 60June 6, 2016 11:41 PM

Not sure how unpopular it is, but I love all of John Grisham's books.

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by Anonymousreply 61June 7, 2016 4:39 AM

[quote]Catcher in the Rye was the ultimate spoiled white privilege story, and I just hated clueless holden. I do not understand how the writer was lauded for his ability to write a youth "so well" when he was like 25, not 55 when he wrote it.

Salinger was 32 when Catcher was published, r57, you hysterical vaginatrix.

by Anonymousreply 62June 7, 2016 4:49 AM

Amen, r46. I really tried with DFW, but, um no.

by Anonymousreply 63June 7, 2016 4:56 AM

Trollop > dickens.

by Anonymousreply 64June 7, 2016 5:05 AM

Shakespeare was the greatest English writer ever. He coined phrases 500 years ago that are still used today. He will be read, studied and admired until the end of time.

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by Anonymousreply 65June 7, 2016 5:15 AM

"Unpopular," R65?

by Anonymousreply 66June 7, 2016 5:18 AM

Shakespeare is over-rated, cribbed, patchwork shit that has outlived its usefulness as an educational tool, and should be ditched on high school syllabi, especially in North America.

All of the elements needed to study and understand it, even at a basic level, have disappeared from most cultural memory; it's now impossible to decipher for modern students. Classical languages, myths and rhetoric, not to mention relevant political and military history, are all not taught and have to be shoehorned into dense footnotes. Between those and then contemporary references (actors, animal metaphors, biblical allusions, etc.), it has to be explained to death.

All of the 'meta' topics, like power (Julius Caesar), evil (Macbeth) and time (King Lear) are way above the heads of millennials whose teachers now 'teach to the (evaluation) test'.

by Anonymousreply 67June 7, 2016 6:08 AM

EARTHLY POWERS is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Junot Diaz is a shit writer.

by Anonymousreply 68June 7, 2016 6:39 AM

When Roth and Mailer were treated as important writers, American Literature died. Everything since has been equally unimportant and equally lacking in value.

More Jewish killing.

by Anonymousreply 69June 7, 2016 7:38 AM

R66, see R67

by Anonymousreply 70June 7, 2016 7:53 AM

Literature as a popular art form is dead.

Not only Millennials, but most everyone would be hard-pressed to name a noted literary artist from the past twenty years.

by Anonymousreply 71June 7, 2016 7:56 AM

David Foster Wallace is completely overrated.

And his legions of fanboys are fucking scary.

by Anonymousreply 72June 7, 2016 8:06 AM

[quote]Agatha Christie is much better than P. D. James, whose plots are good but whose writing style is too simple

R36: surely you meant the OPOSITE, non?

by Anonymousreply 73June 7, 2016 8:13 AM

^* OPPOSITE

by Anonymousreply 74June 7, 2016 8:13 AM

r67 is a complaint about how education has devolved, not against Shakespeare.

by Anonymousreply 75June 7, 2016 5:34 PM

Saul Bellow can suck it. Augie March is widely overrated as are most of his other books. Utter snoozes.

Dawn Powell was a better writer than most of the 20th century luminaries. Kurt Vonnegut too.

Stephen King in his best moments is a literary giant.

Also agree about Edith Wharton.

And WILDLY agree about Junot Diaz. He sucks.

by Anonymousreply 76June 7, 2016 5:45 PM

Tolstoy couldn't write rounded women characters.

by Anonymousreply 77June 7, 2016 5:46 PM

[quote] non?

Oh fuck off and just say 'no'. 'Non' doesn't make you sound like gay man, you know.

by Anonymousreply 78June 7, 2016 5:47 PM

Wilde's aphorisms are utterly trite and lack any kind of acuity.

by Anonymousreply 79June 7, 2016 5:49 PM

[quote]Woolf's The Waves, the most beautiful English prose I've read.

It certainly is up there in my top 5.

by Anonymousreply 80June 7, 2016 5:50 PM

Question for the "The Waves" fans - what's your second favourite Woolf novel?

by Anonymousreply 81June 7, 2016 5:52 PM

Mrs Dalloway.

by Anonymousreply 82June 7, 2016 5:53 PM

I've never read a Harry Potter book, nor seen any of the movies, nor do I ever intend to do either.

Most poetry is completely lost on me.

by Anonymousreply 83June 7, 2016 5:58 PM

Saul Bellow was one of those Teacher-Writers who made the game academic instead of artistic.

Because they weren't creative, only cunning.

by Anonymousreply 84June 7, 2016 5:59 PM

All of you sound like the Michael Murphy and Diane Keaton characters in MANHATTAN.

by Anonymousreply 85June 7, 2016 6:09 PM

"Woolf's The Waves, the most beautiful English prose I've read."

Here, here. Devastatingly beautiful - the prose at once formal and ravishing. The book plunges us into the peregrinations of the subconscious (MARY!) like no other. She is the true genius. Not fucking Joyce. Annoys me to no end that The Waves isn't taught in the same hallowed way as Ulysses.

My second favorite is To The Lighthouse.

by Anonymousreply 86June 7, 2016 6:12 PM

Favorite Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; second, The Waves; third, To the Lighthouse. Between the Acts has moments of beauty, too.

by Anonymousreply 87June 7, 2016 6:29 PM

Early to mid-Bellow there are some wonderful novels: Augie March, Herzog, Seize the Day. I love Humboldt's Gift. After the Nobel, nothing really worth that much. Disappointed by Mr. Sammler's Planet. Still haven't read Henderson the Rain King, but told it is more like Augie March than like the latter Bellow, who, I agree, seemed to take his position with the Committee on Social Thought a bit too seriously--maybe all that time with Allan Bloom. Speaking of whom, Ravelstein is a surprisingly loving novel, about someone I still despise and written by someone one would not have expected to have much affection for les homosexuels.

by Anonymousreply 88June 7, 2016 6:32 PM

Literary ambitions tend to get in the way of a good (or pad a bad or boring) story.

by Anonymousreply 89June 7, 2016 6:32 PM

r36. Agatha Christie is head and shoulders above PD James and Ruth Rendell. She's THE master of character, motivation and plotting. She's sublimely straighforward and few can write that way so cunningly. She makes some damning social commentary, unlike the other two, doesn't mock judge her characters or mire them in trendy opinion and politics.

by Anonymousreply 90June 7, 2016 7:59 PM

Some of the best writers of the mid-20th century, MILES better than contemporaries now in the American pantheon, were women whose works were straddled the line between literary and Book Of The Month Club stuff.

Naturally this stuff is rarely mentioned by the promoters of the Bellows and Roths of the same era because they dealt with middle-class women in suburban settings and how art and work can coexist with home and love, historically and socially.

Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Rumer Godden, Muriel Spark, Rebecca West, Christina Stead, Susan Gaspell, Daphne Du Maurier, Jean Rhys and Margaret Kennedy.

The male equivalents, thematically and psychologically, and often more violently (and are to a man held in greater esteem) are Patrick Hamilton, Brian Moore, Richard Hughes, Paul Gallico, Elias Canetti and Stefan Zweig (who has enjoyed a decade long resurgence thanks to Anthea Bell's superlative translations.

by Anonymousreply 91June 7, 2016 8:26 PM

Orlando by Woolf is one of my favorites by her.

by Anonymousreply 92June 7, 2016 8:33 PM

Philip Roth is one of my favorite writers.

by Anonymousreply 93June 7, 2016 8:37 PM

Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen are both TERRIBLE writers.

I have no idea why critics love them both so much.

by Anonymousreply 94June 7, 2016 8:44 PM

Ernest Hemingway was a bad, bad author. I hate how some people try to tout him as the "Great American Novelist" - he never was.

by Anonymousreply 95June 7, 2016 8:45 PM

Books are awfully decorative, don't you think?

by Anonymousreply 96June 7, 2016 8:45 PM

Regarding literary opinions, what's the distinction here between "secret" and "unpopular"? Because I agree with r91, r93, and r94. I imagine "unpopular" as when the opinion is presented at a cafeteria over work lunch, people scooch away from the opinion-holder, squawk "PLEB! PHILISTINE!" or start throwing food and the opinion-holder gets silent treatment for the rest of the day.

by Anonymousreply 97June 7, 2016 8:49 PM

Alice Walker's The Color Purple is nothing more than man-hating lesbian separatist propaganda.

by Anonymousreply 98June 7, 2016 9:30 PM

R40, I wasn't wowed by Brideshead Revisited. It's certainly better than most contemporary fiction, but it wouldn't make my list of all-time greats.

by Anonymousreply 99June 7, 2016 9:48 PM

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, on the other hand, is the tops.

by Anonymousreply 100June 7, 2016 9:49 PM

R78: ooh, vous illettrée imbecile.

by Anonymousreply 101June 7, 2016 10:06 PM

Margaret Atwood should've stopped writing at least a decade ago. Quantity doesn't necessarily equal quality. Although different genres, the same could be said for Stephen King.

by Anonymousreply 102June 7, 2016 10:14 PM

Best-sellers are usually shit, like the current mania for 'Me Before You.'

by Anonymousreply 103June 7, 2016 10:19 PM

Others have said it already but I just want to add that Junot Diaz is not very good and his novel "Oscar Wao" in particular sucked.

by Anonymousreply 104June 7, 2016 10:31 PM

Joyce Carol Oates has beautiful, radiant hair.

by Anonymousreply 105June 7, 2016 10:41 PM

Anne Rice very proudly states on her website that she fought to no longer have an editor after "The Queen of the Damned." That was her first book to go to number 1 and when she started to become supremely popular, but with the exception of "The Witching Hour" which is insanely long and could have used an editor at parts but still grabs you, all her books from 1992 on show that lack of editorship in her work and man, they really suck.

by Anonymousreply 106June 7, 2016 10:43 PM

Jackie Collins' earlier works up to around 1990 could be as read 200 years down the road as a study of the mores of the certain areas of the upper classes and their sexual hypocrisy.

by Anonymousreply 107June 7, 2016 10:46 PM

OP, Poetry, at least from "the canon," requires at least a minimal knowledge of the KJ Bible, mythology (yeah, yeah, "redundant"), history (certainly British), and often science (astronomy, e.g.). I've always regarded such poetry as a puzzle to be figured out, so I love it (and taught it).

But novels I can and do live happily without (except for mystery fiction). I prefer non-fiction for prose works.

Thus, I cannot STAND the "Harry Potter" crap! It's like Rowling had logorrhea! Adjective, adjective, adjective, adjective! Basta! And I find Fantasy Fiction ("Lord of the Rings"; "Game of Thrones") where the author constructs elaborate geographies boring and tedious. Well, I would if I would read them.

by Anonymousreply 108June 7, 2016 10:52 PM

The reason no one has made a movie out of A Confederacy of Dunces is that it's a bad book.

by Anonymousreply 109June 7, 2016 11:24 PM

[R86] It makes me so happy that you share my reverence for The Waves. I never cared for Joyce--his talent is undeniable, but the Irish alcoholic sensibility drives me away.

by Anonymousreply 110June 8, 2016 12:34 AM

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is mediocre reading. Kudos to Tolkien for creating such a world, but the writing itself is lackluster. And don't get me started on the songs and poems.

I've tried to get into Woolf and lose interest a few chapters in. I usually listen to fiction--perhaps I should read her instead. With such high praise in this thread, I have to give Woolf another try.

Poetry is wasted on me.

All the light we cannot see was just okay--how did it win the Pulitzer? The entire time I was listening to it, it felt like the author had written a really good book for a movie.

by Anonymousreply 111June 8, 2016 1:26 PM

Michael Chabon has written exactly one really good novel: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Everything else is fair to middling at best.

by Anonymousreply 112June 8, 2016 4:38 PM

James Ellroy is America's greatest living novelist.

Cormac McCarthy is a close second.

by Anonymousreply 113June 8, 2016 4:51 PM

Friends, "Virginia Woolf is great" does not constitute an unpopular opinion.

r108 - OP here. I love Classics and mythology was one of my passions through high school! One of my undergrad degrees was in literature. I had some genuinely great teachers who published internationally acclaimed books and papers but short of the aforementioned Yeats and Eliot in high school, and they took us through the paradigm shift and historical and social influences. An exam question giving me an unseen sonnet and write a thousand work response would earn me a good pass, but no more. So it's not for lack of trying. It's partly taste and partly my brain. Like Marvel movies or ballet, they're just not for me.

I appreciate it. I don't mind verse; I remember all the great quotes of the poems I didn't enjoy. I love drama and even (some) song lyrics (the beat and harmony of performance, either in terms of acting or music, obviously makes some mental bridge that makes me appreciate it emotionally) but I can't sit and read poetry for pleasure.

by Anonymousreply 114June 8, 2016 9:26 PM

R112: I beg to differ. "Kavalier and Clay" bored me blind. I expected a book about comic books to be fun and fast-paced. Instead, it was a dull slog.

by Anonymousreply 115June 8, 2016 9:28 PM

Agree that Harry Potter is trite. Tried to read it abd the cliches were embarrassing.

Isabelle Allende is a pathetic fraus attempt at magical realism and ends up a book of histrionic cliches. Hate her writing.

The Waves and Orlando are wonderful (as is the movie).

by Anonymousreply 116June 9, 2016 12:42 AM

The best current American authors almost always write short stories as good as or superior to their novels.

by Anonymousreply 117June 10, 2016 11:56 AM

Zadie Smith, the British heir a-fucking-pparent to Amis and McEwan, drives me insane. I'm sure her narratives are fascinating. The stories must be great, because her sentences verge on the incomprehensible. Commas everywhere. Qualifiers appearing multiple times per line. Barely established point of view. A declamatory tone . Idioms all over the fucking place.

I am a fast reader. My habit is to skim the lines, and I don't say the words aloud in my head as I read. But with Zadie I am required to reread. I have to fight my way through the paragraphs. It's too time consuming, so I don't bother.

And read this. This is a single sentence. A SINGLE SENTENCE.

[quote]Sunset has, historically, been a good time for the two men, wherever they have arrived, for at sunset we are all still together: the women are only just back from the desert, or the farms, or the city offices, or the icy mountains, the children are playing in dust near the chickens or in the communal garden outside the towering apartment block, the boys are lying in the shade of cashew trees, seeking relief from the terrible heat—if they are not in a far colder country, tagging the underside of a railway bridge—and, most important, perhaps, the teen-age girls are out in front of their huts or houses, wearing their jeans or their saris or their veils or their Lycra miniskirts, cleaning or preparing food or grinding meat or texting on their phones.

Kudos to you if you like this kind of stuff. Most people do, so I am obviously missing out on something significant by not reading someone so beloved.

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by Anonymousreply 118June 10, 2016 3:06 PM

R118: that does make for rather painful reading.

by Anonymousreply 119June 10, 2016 3:11 PM

R118 It's like reading Henry James. After a few sentences you're both exhausted from the effort and at a lost as to what you've just read.

by Anonymousreply 120June 10, 2016 3:17 PM

[r118] THANK YOU!

Henry James' [quote]The Ambassadors[/quote] demanded closer reading and rereading than what I habituated to. I had to backup a sentence, then to the beginning of the paragraph, and then the entirety of the preceding paragraph to try to grasp context of the sentence that stopped my flow. I didn't have any problems with George Eliot's [quote]Middlemarch[/quote] or Dickens' [quote]Pickwick Papers[/quote], so it's not the expected "21st century brain can't handle walls of text and 600-plus pages" predicament. [quote]The Ambassadors[/quote] appears on many "greatest 20th century novels" lists, and I can't even fall into a comfortable reading rhythm to enjoy it.

by Anonymousreply 121June 10, 2016 3:18 PM

Sorry, meant [r120]. Brain is just waking up to coffee. Maybe my GI system can't handle enough coffee to make Henry James' [quote]The Ambassadors[/quote] a smooth read.

by Anonymousreply 122June 10, 2016 3:20 PM

I didn't find the quoted Zadie Smith passage exhausting or hard to follow at all. And I'm not saying this to be superior - I'll readily admit that I get a slightly headachy feeling as soon as I come upon any overly descriptive passage (particularly of a place), because I feel compelled - and find it strenuous - to visualize it. I guess everyone has their own reading idiosyncracies.

by Anonymousreply 123June 10, 2016 3:35 PM

[quote]heir a-fucking-pparent

Love that. It's a phrase which might have come from an educated exasperated drunk character in a novel by Kingsley or Martin Amis.

On which topic. Kingsley is a better novelist than Martin, and the best of his books will have a longer life. Kingsley's style is more readable, and lets his characters and the story breathe. Martin covers both too much with his brilliant style, so that the brilliant style of Martin Amis is all too often front and centre.

Martin is an excellent essayist and memoirist, but less impressive as a novelist, because he tries too hard to impress. Kingsley was good or very good at many literary forms, and his work will endure.

by Anonymousreply 124June 10, 2016 4:16 PM

R116 - - doubt I'd like her fiction either, but I did like Allende's memoir "My Invented Country" quite a bit.

by Anonymousreply 125June 10, 2016 4:19 PM

[quote]Michael Chabon has written exactly one really good novel: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Everything else is fair to middling at best.

I liked "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" a lot, and "Telegraph Avenue" did not suck, but otherwise, I agree with you. The one that took place in Alaska? I tried to read it at least three times, and never got past page 24 or so.

by Anonymousreply 126June 10, 2016 4:21 PM

I don't read anymore.

by Anonymousreply 127June 10, 2016 4:48 PM

I'm not seeing a lot of posts about t in translation.

by Anonymousreply 128June 10, 2016 5:09 PM

I like Henry James but his final three novels "The Ambassadors" (mentioned above by R121), "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" can be a real chore as he didn't write them so much as dictate them. He'd developed rheumatism in his arm and walked around telling the story while somebody took it down. They're not the beginnings of post-modernism so much as they are unedited, stream of consciousness ramblings.

by Anonymousreply 129June 10, 2016 10:50 PM

I liked Toni Morrison's early novel "Song of Solomon" but could not get through "Beloved." It seemed so self-important. "You are reading a classic and don't you forget it!"

by Anonymousreply 130June 11, 2016 12:25 AM

Well, R128, here's a start: Pevear and Volokhonsky are terribly overrated translators of Russian.

by Anonymousreply 131June 11, 2016 2:55 PM

Which ones would you recommend, r131?

by Anonymousreply 132June 11, 2016 2:57 PM

Translators/translations should be a whole different thread. For readers who do not read the language that the author wrote it in, a translator can make or break the pleasure and comprehension of a book. There are some excellent translators who are able to convey the soul of the work, and there are some who just fuck the whole book through they poor translation.

by Anonymousreply 133June 11, 2016 3:02 PM

^^^^ their, not they^^^^

by Anonymousreply 134June 11, 2016 3:03 PM

R131 Yeah I read the article (TLS?) comparing Pevear and Voloknonsky to earlier translators. I think most of us need not bother with the fine distinctions made there. Translations are discrete works in their own right. And probably the only way we will ever get to read the work.

What I meant was the near total absence here of reading outside the Anglo American canon.

by Anonymousreply 135June 11, 2016 3:14 PM

I dislike the memoir trend, prolifically risen from blogging. It's one thing when a writer recounts an event or has a single organised point (Paul Theroux, and from the more recent celebrity bookshelf, Alan Cumming and Frank Langella). But so many of the collected essays delving into personal musings or accounting amusing thoughts or expressions of personhood are difficult for me to get behind.

ON THE ROAD and the Beats - I'm not sure what I'm reading. My poetry blind spot may be blocking me.

For the Austen-ites, I prefer Mr Tilney of NORTHANGER ABBEY to Mr Darcey of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Wrote a whole post on translations, but scratch that, I'll start and appropriate thread.

by Anonymousreply 136June 11, 2016 10:12 PM

Some non-English language picks for r135:

Maupassant. He's so ironic and smug. I can't bear the story about the necklace.

Chekhov's plays arr incompregensible to me. Aristocrats with money problems, a bunch of techniclities avout country estates. However I love his short stories.

by Anonymousreply 137June 11, 2016 11:42 PM

Haruki Murakami's prose, when translated, sounds/reads better in Chinese than in English. Something about the closer proximity of and elective affinity between the Japanese language and the Chinese counterpart.

by Anonymousreply 138June 12, 2016 9:40 AM

R138 I'm simply grateful Murajami is translated at all. Many in Japan consider his writing rather un-Japanese im told.

I'm sure your point about translation is true of say French books translated into English also. But since I don't know japanese Chinese or French I'm happy with the English translations.

And trust the writers and publishers have selected good translators.

by Anonymousreply 139June 12, 2016 10:03 AM

Jacqueline Sussan should have won he Nobel Prize

by Anonymousreply 140June 12, 2016 10:16 AM

Fahrenheit 451 is absolute dross. Half-baked ideas, poorly written - you can tell it was written quickly.

by Anonymousreply 141June 12, 2016 11:33 AM

By virtue of such works as 'Rules of Attraction', Brett Easton Ellis will be the Fitzgerald of the future.

by Anonymousreply 142June 12, 2016 11:52 AM

R142: my personal fave of Easton Ellis is actually 'The Informers'. Deadpan and darkly funny.

by Anonymousreply 143June 12, 2016 12:00 PM

R143 That's the only one I haven't read. Must get to it then! Cheers!

by Anonymousreply 144June 12, 2016 12:03 PM

'Driver's Seat' is Murial Sparks best work.

by Anonymousreply 145June 12, 2016 12:04 PM

A Little Life is dreadful. The actual writing is poor, the structure is all over the place, and most of the characters (apart from JB) are black and white, one-dimensional stereotypes with no inner life. Just trashy torture porn.

by Anonymousreply 146June 12, 2016 12:31 PM

Northanger Abbey is Austen's best and funniest novel.

Agree about Agatha Christie, a master.

Ian Fleming's 007 novels are actually extremely well written and he's fantastic at evoking an atmosphere. He's more of a wordsmith than people give credit.

by Anonymousreply 147June 12, 2016 12:32 PM

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's views on race, as evidenced by the story 'Yellow Face', was way ahead of his time.

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by Anonymousreply 148June 12, 2016 12:52 PM

Jane Austen's novels are NOT romantic love stories.

by Anonymousreply 149June 12, 2016 1:56 PM

R132 It's hard to be succinct because other modern translators tend to be more piecemeal than P&V, but for a start, Anthony Briggs' version of [italic]War and Peace[/italic] and Oliver Ready's [italic]Crime and Punishment[/italic] (both Penguins) stand out. And while it's de rigueur to dump on Constance Garnett's versions, they aren't that bad -- however, you can often find revised versions of hers, which are preferable.

On a similar note, but for French, the fairly recent Lydia Davis translation of [italic]Madame Bovary[/italic] isn't as good as Margaret Mauldon's Oxford World's Classics version.

by Anonymousreply 150June 12, 2016 2:23 PM

The EPIC of Gilgamesh? Really?

by Anonymousreply 151June 12, 2016 2:27 PM

R150: I assume you read both Russian AND French. That's really admirable.

by Anonymousreply 152June 12, 2016 2:30 PM

R152 I can't really. I'm just talking about the translations' merits as English prose.

And to drag out the translation talk here a little longer (yeah, yeah, yeah): The whole problem, I think, is the notion -- which I know Nabokov held, though I'm not sure if he originated it -- that a good translation has to sound like a translation. But why? It's not as if a Russian sits down to read [italic]War and Peace[/italic] thinking, "Ooh, this is FOREIGN!" So why should we, as English-language readers, need that extra distortion?

by Anonymousreply 153June 12, 2016 2:58 PM

r114, I appreciate your articulate reply.

by Anonymousreply 154June 13, 2016 11:41 PM

Norman Mailer's political works are more interesting than his fiction.

"Shakespeare" was Edward de Vere.

by Anonymousreply 155June 13, 2016 11:50 PM

Whoa...transposed numbers!

by Anonymousreply 156June 13, 2016 11:50 PM

Agatha Christie wrote about 10 great books and about 100 that sucked. And since she never got over being jilted by her handsome husband, half the time you know that the good-looking man is going to be the murderer. Poor Agatha never stopped sending her husband to the gallows.

by Anonymousreply 157June 14, 2016 1:21 AM

Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Franzen can send eternity reading each other their prolix books in hell.

by Anonymousreply 158June 14, 2016 1:21 AM

MFA Creative Writing programs in America - and increasingly in the UK - do far more harm than good.

by Anonymousreply 159June 14, 2016 8:53 AM

Ethnicity and Gender should not be used as criteria in the judging and giving out of literary awards.

by Anonymousreply 160June 14, 2016 10:17 AM

Artists should not have to become college professors and college professors should not try to be artists.

by Anonymousreply 161June 14, 2016 1:34 PM

Any fiction written in first person present tense should be nuked.

by Anonymousreply 162June 15, 2016 4:10 AM

[quote]Poor Agatha never stopped sending her husband to the gallows.

If a sensitive and artistic young man with long hair turns up in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, he's the one that did it.

by Anonymousreply 163June 15, 2016 4:16 AM

African American literature deserves more credit in being stapled in learning about American literature.

Hawthorne's stories were boring expect for a few.

by Anonymousreply 164June 15, 2016 4:28 AM

Science Fiction: FAIL!

by Anonymousreply 165June 15, 2016 4:29 AM

The Harry Potter series is trash.

by Anonymousreply 166June 15, 2016 5:01 AM

I love my Russians - Nabokov and Chekhov

Anything from Jackie Collins is garbage, but exciting garbage!

BELOVED is a pike of self-indulgent crap

Anything from Bret Easton Ellis hasn't come to terms with it's sexuality yet.

by Anonymousreply 167June 15, 2016 5:16 AM

You like?

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by Anonymousreply 168June 15, 2016 3:43 PM

Oh, svp. We all read Russian, French and English and many of us Italian or Spanish.

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by Anonymousreply 169June 15, 2016 4:05 PM

"Genre fiction" is a synonym for "clichéd, formulaic, reactionary crap."

The older I get, the less interested I am in the emotional lives of people who don't really exist.

The New York Times Bestseller List is just a highbrow version of the Billboard Charts or movie box office stats; they are no indication of quality, just popularity, and there is no correlation between the two one way or the other.

Most children's book authors are usually both bad writers and bad people:

—L. Frank Baum was a mediocre writer and a genocidal racist who called for the elimination of all Native Americans; in fact, the entire Oz universe is nothing but Manifest Destiny propaganda, especially the original book where a white girl kills two women of color and longs to go to a "home" built on land that was stolen from Indians to begin with. If it wasn't for the M-G-M movie and its wonderful songs, it would be completely forgotten.

—P.L. Travers was an out and out monster and a pretty shitty writer, and everything based on her works is also shit. Walt Disney wasted his time trying to please her when he should have recognized that there was no there there, and the horrible, awful, terrible, dreadful, completely unwatchable movie that resulted from all their bickering was much better (and ironically, about 1,000% less ideologically, morally and aesthetically problematic) when it was called [italic]Song of the South[/italic].

—Roald Dahl was a vile man in every way imaginable, and I don't understand Jewish filmmakers' preoccupation with his works, even though the 1971 [italic]Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory[/italic] was a huge improvement on the original book. He hated Jews but he gladly took Jewish money for the movie rights to his films, and so has his estate since the old bastard finally died and went to Hell where he belongs.

—J.K. Rowling is just a poor person's Mary Norton, and she lived off taxpayer money to fart out what amounts to a bloated, clunky, self-insistent pastiche of every Disney movie with a witch, a wizard or a magician in it. By contrast, Norton's writing is genuinely charming, engaging to children and adult readers, and a model of efficiency, and her witch only needed two books and one movie (that even in its longest version is still shorter than any Harry Potter movie) to tell her story.

—Dr. Seuss was a sanctimonious, womanizing, bigoted hypocrite whose anti-racist and pro-environmentalist messages grew not out of principle but out of guilt for the racist cartoons he drew in his youth. [italic]The Butter Battle Book[/italic] is appalling in its insistence that the difference between the USA and the USSR is merely like "the side your bread is buttered on." How glibly simplistic and empty-headed can you get? If he had lived in the USSR, then he probably would have been put in a gulag.

—Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were both pedophiles, and frankly I shouldn't be surprised if it is ever revealed that A.A. Milne took inappropriate liberties with Christopher Robin.

—Rudyard Kipling was little more than a cheerleader for British imperialism. Walt Disney was right to tell his animators to ignore the book when he turned [italic]The Jungle Book[/italic] into an animated film.

—Everything by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis is Christian propaganda designed to sell religious superstition to basement-dwellers. And to think New Line Cinema, once one of the US's leading distributors of independent film, almost went broke trying to make secularized versions of that crap with [italic]The Last Mimzy[/italic] and [italic]The Golden Compass[/italic].

—Most young adult fiction is unreadable, melodramatic, patronizing tripe even to its intended audience, and most of it is dated and quickly forgotten by the time the current generation of adolescents graduates from high school. Even a random episode of [italic]The Facts of Life[/italic] is likely to be more believable and a great deal more amusing.

by Anonymousreply 170July 12, 2016 1:39 PM

"Spoken word" performance is not poetry.

Most postmodern "poetry" is not poetry: it's more like a string of self-dramatizing statements dripping down the page in some sort of random effect.

Rap lyrics are not poetry.

by Anonymousreply 171July 12, 2016 2:31 PM

Hamlet was a useless asshole. I remember pushing back on the notion that he was this great tragic hero in class when we studied the play and everyone practically flipped out.

by Anonymousreply 172July 12, 2016 2:36 PM

[italic]Family Guy[/italic]'s Glenn Quagmire was spot on when he called Holden Caulfield a spoiled, privileged brat. In fact, most post-WWII popular fiction will fail the test of time spectacularly. The reason J.D. Salinger never wrote another book again and never sold the rights to Hollywood is because he was an angry jerk who got lucky and grew to enjoy being a jerk. A movie version that angered literary purists could only have been an improvement.

by Anonymousreply 173July 12, 2016 2:41 PM

I LOVE Earthly Powers! A literary gem disguised as a blockbuster novel. Even if it does rely on the old Freudian trope that homosexuality is caused by repressed incest.

by Anonymousreply 174July 12, 2016 2:46 PM

Mention of 'Earthly Powers' reminds me of when Anthony Burgess met Gore Vidal at a literary festival. Vidal greeted Burgess with, 'Still writing books nobody reads?' Burgess replied, "Of course, I'm really a composer.' Even Vidal had no comeback to that, and had the grace to repeat the story.

by Anonymousreply 175July 12, 2016 3:37 PM

Did Rowling ever acknowledge or credit those she stole off? Hogwarts is ripped directly from Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Molesworth trilogy. Been told there are countless other instances but never got beyond the book jacket when I noticed that. Credit where credit is due. They could probably have done with it and it's just polite. Not like she didn't do well out of it all.

by Anonymousreply 176July 12, 2016 3:49 PM

[quote]Did Rowling ever acknowledge or credit those she stole off?

She stole from so many different people it would take forever.

by Anonymousreply 177July 12, 2016 3:51 PM

I liked Jackie Collins' old stuff- Hollywood Wives , Husband's etc... I got bored with them after reading her newer stuff. It was the same boring formula : lovers who can't be together , a secret from the past , a murder , blah blah .

The first books of the Twilight, Harry Potter , and 50 Shades of Gray series was good but you can always tell when a writer is cranking out a mess to fulfill contract obligations .

Shakespeare I always found tedious but I think that was because my high school English teacher was his biggest groupie . She would yell, " People who don't love Shakespeare don't know what life is about ! "

She turned me off him forever .

by Anonymousreply 178July 12, 2016 4:21 PM

[quote]The reason J.D. Salinger never wrote another book again and never sold the rights to Hollywood is because he was an angry jerk who got lucky and grew to enjoy being a jerk.

Hollywood screwed up one of his short stories, so he was pretty mad about that (he could be a big ol' jerk) but he was so PTSDed as well. Add that to a naturally control freak personality, and you get a big mess.

by Anonymousreply 179July 12, 2016 4:44 PM

Heterosexual male writers have no fucking idea how to write for women.

[quote]Hollywood screwed up one of his short stories

His definition of "screwed up" is what normal people consider "adding cohesion and structure to rambling, mean-spirited bullshit." He was a minor league writer with a chip on his shoulder and he used that as an excuse not to write, and he got rich off a bunch of other spoiled teenage brats gullible enough to think this crap is anything other than the usual faux-intellectual trying-to-seem-adult-but-coming-off-as-more-childish-than-actual-children str8 teenage boy bullshit.

by Anonymousreply 180July 12, 2016 4:47 PM

Early American literature of the Canon - James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson - leaves me utterly cold.

The only pre-Edith Wharton works I really enjoyed reading at any level are WALDEN, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and HUCKLEBERRY FINN.

by Anonymousreply 181September 12, 2016 5:16 PM

r171, Love you!

r172 was absent for the lesson on "the tragic hero."

r181, I hear ya, and mostly agree. Hawthorne did write some psychologically interesting short stories.

by Anonymousreply 182September 12, 2016 6:02 PM

So R118 does not actually read books, and he hates Zadie Smith because she forces him to read.

Some would say that she is performing a service for him.

by Anonymousreply 183September 13, 2016 11:53 AM

I hate dialogue in dialect and tend to skip over passages in italics.

by Anonymousreply 184September 13, 2016 12:19 PM

George Eliot takes 700 pages to write what is basically a short story that could be told in 70.

Trollope's best books, The Way We Live Now, Orley Farm and He Knew He Was Right are better than any modern fiction.

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge has the best plotting of all Victorian novels.

Charles Dickens makes me cry. In a good way.

I love all of Edith Wharton except, oddly enough, The Age of Innocence.

Henry James stinks.

by Anonymousreply 185September 13, 2016 12:46 PM

"Henry James stinks." But surely not, r185, as conveyed by Montgomery Clift in "The Heiress" ("Washington Square")!

by Anonymousreply 186September 13, 2016 12:52 PM

[quote]So [R118] does not actually read books, and he hates Zadie Smith because she forces him to read. Some would say that she is performing a service for him.

That opening sentence written by Smith is a literary abomination. Zadie Smith is fashionable.

by Anonymousreply 187September 13, 2016 12:58 PM

Philip Roth is an asshole. But I guess that's a pretty popular opinion.

by Anonymousreply 188September 13, 2016 1:07 PM

My favourite writer is Kevin Grisham.

by Anonymousreply 189September 13, 2016 1:08 PM

I hope the next American Nobel winner is Pynchon, just to guarantee Roth does not win it.

by Anonymousreply 190September 13, 2016 1:10 PM

R86, I took English Lit in France, and we read To the Lighthouse and The Waves. I never studied Joyce (I only like the bit at the end, you know that final page).

by Anonymousreply 191September 13, 2016 1:15 PM

Poetry is a snooze. Absolutely boring.

by Anonymousreply 192September 13, 2016 1:45 PM

[quote]He hated Jews but he gladly took Jewish money

Did you ever hear of a Jew turning down a Christian's money?

by Anonymousreply 193September 13, 2016 2:21 PM

Actually, r186, Henry James' Washington Square is far inferior to the stage adaptation and the film of it, written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, The Heiress. I was pretty surprised when I finally read the novella this summer, having always loved both the play and the movie.

by Anonymousreply 194September 13, 2016 7:40 PM

My unpopular opinion: Austen's books are a snore and the characters unlikeable. I tried to read them when I was young and didn't past the three first few chapters. I tried again a few years ago, thinking I was too young to appreciate them the first time but no, I had less patience than before. For you James' haters, I'd much rather read his novels (and he's not a favorite of mine) than anything Austen wrote.

by Anonymousreply 195September 13, 2016 8:05 PM

[quote]Mention of 'Earthly Powers' reminds me of when Anthony Burgess met Gore Vidal at a literary festival. Vidal greeted Burgess with, 'Still writing books nobody reads?' Burgess replied, "Of course, I'm really a composer.' Even Vidal had no comeback to that, and had the grace to repeat the story.

Vidal's one to talk. He wrote a few middlebrow bestsellers in his prime and a whole lot more titles that nobody reads. He's a fine essayist and mediocre novelist who could only dream of writing something as brilliant as A Clockwork Orange (the book is better than the movie).

I also think it's ludicrous the waynhes held up as a gay role model and icon. Okay, he wrote The City and the Pillar. However, he also trashed just about every other gay writer of his time, from a tribute to Tennessee Williams that was really a poison pen letter in disguise, to his dismissal of the Beats as garbage (Ginsberg, Burroughs) to his deranged lifelong hate of Capote to his dismissal of Yukio Mishima as a literary mediocrity. He was a hypocrite who pretended to be an honest truth teller but was really consumed with envy and jealousy especially in regards to.other writers who happened to be gay.

by Anonymousreply 196September 13, 2016 8:11 PM

I really enjoyed Burr by Gore Vidal

by Anonymousreply 197September 13, 2016 8:21 PM

I loathe Henry James but love Wharton (The Custom of the Country is Wharton at her bitchest best).

Zadie Smith wouldn't amount to anything if she hadn't been a hot, ethnic (but not too ethnic) young thing. Her prose is clunky and she plagiarizes storylines. The Muslim dad who loves jazz subplot in White Teeth was directly lifted from Hanif Kureishi's Black Album.

JK Rowling is an immature moron who turned into a SJW for attention. She has the intellectual depth of a 3rd grader.

by Anonymousreply 198September 13, 2016 8:38 PM

The best and most influential books I read as a young teen were smut and trash, like trashy memoirs such as Going Down With Janis by Peggy Caserta and ghost Dan Knapp, or Jacqueline Susann, or old shit like Anais Nin and Henry Miller,

I feel high literature is best appreciated between the ages of 8 and 13, 17 and 25, and after 60.

by Anonymousreply 199September 13, 2016 8:49 PM

Hated "To Kill a Mockingbird".

by Anonymousreply 200September 13, 2016 8:53 PM

Elizabeth Bennett is a pert and underbred brassy little madam and Darcy will rue the day he ever met her.

by Anonymousreply 201September 13, 2016 9:00 PM

Another vote for Edith Wharton, no impopular in this thread.

Agatha Chistie is extremely underrated. Whoever said that her murders are easy to guess is not correct, in an AC book no one is safe from being the murder. In her better books the murderer is a woman.

That said, A judgement in stone, from Ruth Rendell, is one of the best english books of the last 30 years.

by Anonymousreply 202September 13, 2016 9:48 PM

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think they will sing to me...

by Anonymousreply 203September 13, 2016 10:12 PM

Some authors are just better essayist than novelist:

Susan Sontag George Orwell Joan Didion

by Anonymousreply 204September 13, 2016 10:33 PM

R187, The opening sentence at the link is pretty good....but the sentence quoted by R118 is pretty awful. (I assume it is from that same story.)

That said, Smith is not a great or even consistent writer. But she is certainly not a difficult writer. If you have trouble reading that crazy sentence, it shows that maybe you need to read more instead of skimming. That R118 found it obtuse was just weird.

by Anonymousreply 205September 13, 2016 11:26 PM

[quote]I hope the next American Nobel winner is Pynchon, just to guarantee Roth does not win it.

I beg your pardon?

by Anonymousreply 206September 13, 2016 11:57 PM

Custom of the Country is also my favorite Wharton. Can't believe it was never made into a film. Lana Turner would have been perfect as Undine when she was in her 20s.

Even Wharton's unfinished The Buccaneers is pretty brilliant stuff. Does anyone remember the miniseries with Carla Gugino and Mira Sorvino?

by Anonymousreply 207September 14, 2016 1:42 AM

[quote] Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Rumer Godden, Muriel Spark, Rebecca West, Christina Stead, Susan Glaspell, Daphne Du Maurier, Jean Rhys and Margaret Kennedy.

I love all of those except Rumer Godden and Margaret Kennedy. They're OK, but just not in the same rank as Bowen and Spark and Rhys.

And I would add Penelope Fitzgerald, early Iris Murdoch (up until the 70s), early Margaret Drabble (up until the 90s), and Penelope Lively.

by Anonymousreply 208September 14, 2016 3:50 AM

PD James's writing got better as she grew older. An extremely rare feat.

by Anonymousreply 209September 14, 2016 6:20 AM

^ and by 'older' I mean really older, like in her 70s and 80s.

by Anonymousreply 210September 14, 2016 6:21 AM

I loved Joan Aiken when I was a child...

by Anonymousreply 211September 14, 2016 11:54 AM

The final Dalgleish story wasn't all that great.

by Anonymousreply 212September 14, 2016 12:01 PM

[quote]The final Dalgleish story wasn't all that great.

It was better than "The Murder Room" and "The Lighthouse."

by Anonymousreply 213September 14, 2016 1:39 PM

I don't like Scandinoir or however those Nordic detective writers are categorised by publicists.

I havevtried 6 different authors to no avail. Many of them read as ripoffs of Morse episodes or subpar Barbara Vine books.

I read 4 Wallanders and the only one I could enjoyed had a transgender villain which would be considered hopelessly politically incorrect now. (From memory in the BBC adaptation Tom Hiddleston refers to her as a tranny!)

by Anonymousreply 214September 14, 2016 1:56 PM

I loved A Judgment in Stone, R202.

This thread has inspired me to read more Edith Wharton.

Though it pains me to speak ill of two writers who are not only dead but killed themselves (although not so much that I won't post this and agree with people above), David Foster Wallace's novels (as opposed to his essays) are terrible and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is indeed a dreadful book.

by Anonymousreply 215September 14, 2016 2:36 PM

^ I so agree that DFW is completely overrated; and what's even more insufferable are his deranged diehard fanboys who litter the cyberspace.

by Anonymousreply 216September 14, 2016 2:48 PM

I abandoned Dunces, finding the main character absolutely horrible - anything BUT funny.

Wharton's The Bunner Sisters is a very well done tragic story.

by Anonymousreply 217September 14, 2016 2:58 PM

I'm trying to think when I gave up on "Infinite Jest." I had my doubts when I realised DFW obviously thought calling the new, united Canada and USA, the Organisation of North American Nations, i.e. ONAN, as in onanism, do you get it?? Do you?? - was really funny. I didn't object to the length or subject matter etc, but by gosh I feel I must object to shitty writing.

As you say, R216, the fanboys who follow around critics online saying "you don't get it" are pretty insufferable.

The first three Harry Potter books are fun kids' reads. But very much children's books. Any time Potter gets close to a real issue, she abandons it. Hence no canon LGBT characters (not counting the later confirmation that Dumbeldore was gay). The strange idea that Christmas is celebrated and Harry has a godfather in the Christian tradition rather than establishing magic as a belief system in itself. JKR intriguingly flirts with a form of racism storyline re "mud-bloods" and then clearly drops it as it is too difficult. She has a go at time travel and mucks it up a bit as that's too tricky a concept for what she is doing too. The final few novels are then bloated messes as someone had decided JKR didn't need to be edited. The whole series was derivative and unoriginal, but in the beginning JKR was fairly clever at weaving other people's ideas together into coherent yarns. But the books got less and less entertaining as JKR kept on writing, clearly falling out of love with her own creation despite all the pages she racked up, but contracted to finish. The joke is very firmly on me given the millions they have sold, but most people who pick up a book don't like being challenged too much I guess. Again I am sure JKR will be crying into her piles of cash at that.

by Anonymousreply 218September 14, 2016 3:07 PM

Ruth Rendell's mysteries, and those written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine, are far more literate than anything Agatha Christie ever wrote.

Christie wrote a few undeniable classics, including The Murder of Roger Ayckroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None, all with shockingly good plotting and resolutions, but the rest are really just silly melodramas.

by Anonymousreply 219September 15, 2016 1:11 AM

There are some funny parts of A Confederacy of Dunces (like the part about the Judy garland fans), but I agree most of it is pretty tedious, and aimed at the kind of people who think farting is infallibly hysterical.

by Anonymousreply 220September 15, 2016 1:38 AM

I think sports writing is worthy and fun, despite what I was told in school

by Anonymousreply 221September 15, 2016 1:42 AM

I think Scott Fitzgerald was a bore and Gatsby was almost unreadable. He has only one redeeming quality - beautiful writing (about nothing). His English was glorious but the contents are boring, unimaginative.

by Anonymousreply 222September 15, 2016 7:15 AM

Spanish, or Italian, is the language of love and passion.

French, on the other hand, is the language of hip. Chic, yes. Romantic, not really.

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by Anonymousreply 223September 15, 2016 7:20 AM

r137 Maupassant is a God to me! lol.

by Anonymousreply 224September 15, 2016 7:27 AM

What about Cyrano, R223?

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by Anonymousreply 225September 16, 2016 12:10 AM

Yeats is an asshole! Joyce is an asshole!

by Anonymousreply 226September 16, 2016 12:19 AM

R17 Samuel Chip Delaney is a paedo and used to sexually abuse homeless men in NYC. He is living proof that queer studies and queer theory are a total joke.

by Anonymousreply 227November 22, 2019 2:27 AM

anything deeper than a Jacqueline Susanne type novel is boring to me.... I just want to be entertained!

by Anonymousreply 228November 22, 2019 2:29 AM

I'd like to know what great masterpieces you old literary queens haven written that make you qualified and justified in passing judgment on some of the best writers to ever have lived?

by Anonymousreply 229November 22, 2019 2:40 AM

r218 JKR didn't write those books entirely on her own, she had ghostwriters. It partially explains why she is always announcing new details about the books years later.

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by Anonymousreply 230November 22, 2019 2:41 AM

R230 I wonder how much she pays them? Didn't she also steal or basically plagarise the plot of Harry Potter from another author? Of course she had the help of Time Warner.

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by Anonymousreply 231November 22, 2019 2:47 AM

R230 I wonder how much she pays them? Didn't she also steal or basically plagarise the plot of Harry Potter from another author? Of course she had the help of Time Warner.

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by Anonymousreply 232November 22, 2019 2:47 AM

Jewel is a good poet.

by Anonymousreply 233November 22, 2019 2:48 AM

“No statue has ever been erected to a critic”

by Anonymousreply 234November 22, 2019 2:57 AM

Oscar Wilde was a pretentious, effeminate, pederast queen. If he were alive today he'd be a DataLounger and in jail for underage sex.

by Anonymousreply 235November 22, 2019 3:01 AM

Dead white men write better novels than modern black women.

by Anonymousreply 236November 22, 2019 3:21 AM

Talking of black women; the common house frau who worship at the altar of Oprah would never be able to get their heads around most of the books she has in her book club.

by Anonymousreply 237November 22, 2019 3:29 AM

R237 I thought it was funny how Oprah had the Cormac McCarthy book the road which had zombies that killed people in it, and the women who worship Oprah and think highly of her literary opinions read this novel.

by Anonymousreply 238November 22, 2019 11:46 PM

[quote] I'd like to know what great masterpieces you old literary queens haven written that make you qualified and justified in passing judgment on some of the best writers to ever have lived?

That's a stupid line of argument.

If non-novelists were not allowed to have opinions on novels, no publishing company could ever stay in print.

by Anonymousreply 239November 22, 2019 11:55 PM

The best writers are mostly French.

by Anonymousreply 240November 23, 2019 12:07 AM

Murakami is very overrated.

by Anonymousreply 241November 23, 2019 12:08 AM

I think a big problem is there is no strong market for short stories, like there was 50 years ago. I remember the shock of realizing short stories in magazines could support people living in big cities before the seventies.

People who would excel with shorter books and stories are basically forced to stretch content into big books or long series. For example. Stephen King's best work is shorts and shorter novels like Carrie, as far as I can tell.

Fandom: Rabid fandom is like a warning of mediocre quality. Every DFW and Thoreau superfan has turned me off from reading much of their work. Their fans are weirdly smug about them.

Chabon: Smart enough to transition to film and TV writing. I was a fan until the last 2 books. I lost my place repeatedly and realized it was because of BOREDOM.

Paul Theroux: Funny, bitter, and insightful fiction. He is known for nonfiction, but his fiction is great if you like Fight Club and Lord of the Flies. The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast (also a great movie), and some of his shorts are pretty good examinations of Americans trying to run away from civilization and realizing assholes are everywhere on the planet.

Crichton: Laughably technical for airport thrillers. He;s the master of tangents and details that distract from characters and plot.

Reading and regurgitating medical journals doesn't make someone an entertaining or smart author. He was extremely lucky film executives don't have strong technical knowledge. In pitch form for bored movie executives, his work was probably easy to scan for visual impact (killer dinosaurs, hot bosses harassing middle aged men, talking gorillas in Africa) and dumb down into fun thriller movies.

*Try to read his terrible, libertarian "environmental" thriller without laughing a few chapters in. So bad it's good.

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by Anonymousreply 242November 23, 2019 1:22 AM

J.k. Rowling writes her own books. But John Le Carre is a gasbag.

by Anonymousreply 243November 23, 2019 1:49 AM

Hmmm, I always assumed writers of series have help, like the Sweet Valley High and James Patterson assembly lines. Any proof or rumors of Rowling and others writing using ghostwriters?

I assume airport fiction, like Crichton, may have used them.

by Anonymousreply 244November 23, 2019 2:18 AM

I cannot bear to read Jane Austen's novels. I've tried a few times over the years and quit before I was through the first chapter. (And I have a bachelor's degree in English literature). Her description of characters makes them all sound repulsive.

by Anonymousreply 245November 23, 2019 4:53 AM

I've begun Pride and Prejudice at least seven times, r245. I always find something I'd rather be doing. And I read A LOT.

I also wish I could get through Crime and Punishment.

by Anonymousreply 246November 23, 2019 5:33 AM

I hate WUTHERING HEIGHTS and have never been able to finish it. The writing style has absolutely no personality.

by Anonymousreply 247November 23, 2019 6:12 AM

The Catcher in the Rye blows. It reeks of white male privilege.

Jackie Collins is/was the best trash writer ever. . Upton Sinclair and Rudyard Kipling fucking rock!

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by Anonymousreply 248November 23, 2019 6:22 AM

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of the best novels over written. Everyone should read it.

by Anonymousreply 249November 23, 2019 6:25 AM

[quote]R248 Jackie Collins is/was the best trash writer ever.

I think that title should go to Judith Krantz. She actually researched stuff, while Collins just kind of spewed it all out (of her pussy)

by Anonymousreply 250November 23, 2019 6:25 AM

I believe literary commentary should encourage reading, not discourage it.

by Anonymousreply 251November 23, 2019 6:28 AM

Dostoevsky and Dickins can suck my dick. I find their works insufferable.

by Anonymousreply 252November 23, 2019 7:03 AM

*Dickens

by Anonymousreply 253November 23, 2019 7:04 AM

Jonathan Franzen is an awful writer bordering on unreadable. Self important little suburban cunt. I hated when he had a moment a few years back and critics acted as if he were some sort of genius rather than an overrated hack.

by Anonymousreply 254November 23, 2019 10:52 AM

The short story printed in the New Yorker a few years back, Cat people, was sub par prattle and ridiculously fawned over by hordes of narcissistic Ivy League Frauen. The gist of the story was I Fucked A Guy I Wasn't Really Attracted To and Then He Called Me A Bitch. Yawn. It read like a personal anecdote in Huffington Post but was treated as some sort of work of genius and an insightful commentary on How We Live Today.

by Anonymousreply 255November 23, 2019 11:10 AM

Women have ruined literature.

by Anonymousreply 256November 23, 2019 12:08 PM

Harry Potter mostly does not hold up. I liked it at the time, but he is just such a Marty Stu, and the villains are never allowed to have any shades of gray or motivation besides being evil. It’s all just such immature fan faction a pre-teen girl would write.

by Anonymousreply 257November 23, 2019 12:12 PM

I find Larry Kramer to be both as a person and in his writing boring, a crazy nutcase, professional victim, and racist.

Andrew Holleran was not that bad of a writer but his very early novels are basically just lists and there's racism in them, and then he started writing about nothing but HIV/AIDS.

by Anonymousreply 258November 23, 2019 4:35 PM

r258 = racist! shrieker

by Anonymousreply 259November 23, 2019 4:42 PM

r256, yeah, that fucking Murasaki Shikibu, inventing the novel--fuck her.

by Anonymousreply 260November 23, 2019 4:47 PM

The French Nineteenth Century Realists are terribly underrated. There seemed to be a growing appreciation of them about ten or twelve years ago, but that has sadly died down. It surprises me how few Brits and Americans are familiar with them. Many in the fifty and up crowd simply say they were not considered classics, or worthwhile or required reading whilst they were at school. French speakers obviously are not included in this group.

by Anonymousreply 261November 23, 2019 5:35 PM

Is Hanya Yanagihara literature’s biggest fag hag?

by Anonymousreply 262November 23, 2019 11:02 PM

1984 is a terrible story. Only conspiracy theorists love it.

by Anonymousreply 263November 23, 2019 11:04 PM

R250 I totally forgot about Judith Krantz! Scruples, Princess Daisy, and I'll Take Manhattan which was made into a TV movie with DL fave Valerie Bertinelli. I guess the third in the running would be Shirley Conran, pretty much know only for LACE.

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by Anonymousreply 264November 24, 2019 9:20 AM

[quote] I think that title should go to Judith Krantz. She actually researched stuff

Krantz was smart, well-educated and really knew how to tell a story. It’s so hard to find well-written trash these days.

by Anonymousreply 265November 24, 2019 9:54 AM

Judith Krantz once told me she hated being lumped in with Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel because she knew she was a better writer. Which she was.

by Anonymousreply 266November 24, 2019 12:59 PM

R266, R264, R265 and R250 which books by Krantz would you recommend?

For trash pop lit I enjoyed reading Jacqueline Susann's books.

by Anonymousreply 267November 24, 2019 2:39 PM

I hate Amis, but love the parody of him in the form of David mitchell

by Anonymousreply 268November 24, 2019 2:42 PM

R259 I am not PC and not pro-censorship; but the way Holleran and Kramer both called gay black men 'dinge' is incredibly racist, as well as how Holleran and Kramer made black and latino/hispanic characters into incredibly racist caricatures based on racist stereotypes.

by Anonymousreply 269November 24, 2019 2:48 PM

I hate Murakami.

by Anonymousreply 270November 24, 2019 2:51 PM

Touch my monkey, R19.

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by Anonymousreply 271November 24, 2019 3:01 PM

Emily Dickinson was a Victorian-era version of a DataLounger.

by Anonymousreply 272November 24, 2019 3:14 PM

am i totally forgotten?

by Anonymousreply 273November 24, 2019 4:20 PM

I can’t handle Zadie Smith because of her long run on sentences.

by Anonymousreply 274November 24, 2019 4:35 PM

I'm reading Moby Dick for school, and I just have one question...call WHO Ishmael?!

by Anonymousreply 275November 24, 2019 4:44 PM

R267, Scruples and Princess Daisy.

R266, she damn sure was!

by Anonymousreply 276November 24, 2019 10:22 PM

Not necessarily an [italic]un[/italic]popular literary opinion, so much as one that makes sense when people think about it, but it isn't voiced very often: ask any author to write a fictional 'life of Christ,' and you will learn way more about the author through their approach to the subject than you will ever learn about Jesus. (Handy examples include Nikos Kazantzakis, whose [italic]Last Temptation[/italic] re-cast Jesus as a spiritual and philosophical seeker with an unusual childhood past and serious sexual hang-ups, and Anne Rice, who proved with her [italic]Christ the Lord[/italic] series that "born-again Catholic" was by no means a good look on her.)

by Anonymousreply 277November 24, 2019 11:14 PM

Generally, when one is paid by the word, one will write very, very, very, (you get where I am going with this, no?) very, very, very ,very long.

That taints all the Dickens stuff to me.

by Anonymousreply 278November 24, 2019 11:19 PM

I don’t like Mark Twain, he’s so preachy and talks down to his reader. We get it, you’re a better person than the rest of us, congrats.

by Anonymousreply 279November 24, 2019 11:29 PM

Scruples, of course, but also Till We Meet Again, which has a good story and THREE trademark Krantz heroines.

by Anonymousreply 280November 25, 2019 12:59 AM

[quote]Did Rowling ever acknowledge or credit those she stole off?

Unlikely, and some of them poked fun of her for taking those liberties. Terry Pratchett supposedly jabbed at her a few times through his character Ponder Stibbons, and Pratchett readers have pointed out versions of his fantasy characters as background filler in Rawlings's books. Pratchett was supposedly good-natured about it and spoke favorably of the Harry Potter series, despite Rawlings borrowing liberally from the Discworld books.

by Anonymousreply 281November 25, 2019 1:55 AM

Faulkner failed grammar class.

by Anonymousreply 282November 25, 2019 4:19 AM

Romeo and Juliet is not Shakespeare's best play, and the nurse's line about losing her maidenhead at 12 makes a lot of students surprisingly uncomfortable.

by Anonymousreply 283November 25, 2019 4:39 AM

[quote] r267 which books by Krantz would you recommend?

I like her earliest two best.

SCRUPLES - in which a cool Boston beauty marries a much older multi millionaire, then opens a luxury department store in Hollywood. Vast supporting cast, all having sex with each other in the jet set 70s. Followed by SCRUPLES II (also good), which catches up on the characters a few decades later. (There's a third book in this series I never read.) (LOVERS?)

PRINCESS DAISY - an obscure Russian noble (well, her mother was a movie star) tries to make it on her own in advertising. She fends off a domineering, incest-prone brother while also keeping her brain damaged twin a secret.

I'm not as in love with Krantz's later works, but aside from creating many colorful characters, what she does that's quite amazing is really bring you into their luxurious world. She's great at describing their clothes, their homes, their food and all that; it's like watching a movie it's so vivid. I've never seen an author do that aspect better, frankly.

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by Anonymousreply 284November 25, 2019 4:49 AM

[quote]r267 For trash pop lit I enjoyed reading Jacqueline Susann's books.

If you haven't, you simply must read THE TWO MRS. GREENVILLES by Dominick Dunne. It's aspires to be a serious novel, but it's really trash at heart. The plot is fascinating, based on the true story of doomed socialites Ann and William Woodward.

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by Anonymousreply 285November 25, 2019 4:57 AM

^^ GRENVILLES ... not Greenvilles

by Anonymousreply 286November 25, 2019 5:00 AM

Heterosexual women should be forbidden from writing gay male fiction, even their bastardized version, "M/M Romance."

It's all shit.

by Anonymousreply 287November 25, 2019 5:08 AM

Dickens is overrated .

Jame ellroy is a hack and is only praised because straight white men love the homophobia, sexism and racism.

by Anonymousreply 288November 25, 2019 5:14 AM

R285: Dunne's novels heart is on gossip magazines, but his novels are not trash, they are good written pop corn. Society gossip with a touch of crime. I read one of his novels every summer, they are like an addiction, and it's pretty clear he knew what he was talking about

R288: I can't stand his writing style. Homophobia apart (he seems a little softer lately, at least on interviews) his novels seem incredibly interesting, but i can't stand his writing

by Anonymousreply 289November 25, 2019 2:04 PM

R287 Lesbian women as well. I remember reading gay/all male/bisexual erotica written by lesbian women pretending to be men under a male pen-name, and it was very silly and stupid. In one story a lesbian author had men who were neighbors who saw each other at a gay bar suck each other off with condoms. Who else besides latex fetishists wants to read about this?

by Anonymousreply 290November 25, 2019 4:19 PM

The late Professor Harold Bloom was/is absolutely right just about everything.

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by Anonymousreply 291November 25, 2019 4:59 PM

Samuel Beckett was a closet case.

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by Anonymousreply 292November 27, 2019 4:54 PM

L. Frank Baum was a bigger racist than Margaret Mitchell ever was. Baum wanted to kill all the Indians. Mitchell gave the profits of GWTW to the Morehouse College medical school.

by Anonymousreply 293November 27, 2019 4:57 PM

[quote]Romeo and Juliet is not Shakespeare's best play, and the nurse's line about losing her maidenhead at 12 makes a lot of students surprisingly uncomfortable.

The misunderstanding that killed them both was dumber than an episode of [italic]Three's Company[/italic] after you hit their writers in the head with a 2x4.

by Anonymousreply 294November 27, 2019 4:58 PM

Less by Andrew Sean Greer is pure boring shit. I didn't get the point of it all. Nothing was fleshed out in a way to make me interested in the characters. This may be my fault because I rarely dive into fiction these days.

by Anonymousreply 295November 27, 2019 5:08 PM

[quote] HATE "To Kill a Mockingbird". It seemed as though every fucking year in school they made us read that book. HATE IT.

Do yourself a favor, don't read the sequel. If that is even possible.

by Anonymousreply 296November 27, 2019 5:11 PM

R15, I agree. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example of literature in which a great white man proves how awesome he is by taking up the lost cause of seeking justice for a innocent black man, who is convicted anyway and killed in prison. But all's well that ends well when the white children learn a wry and wistful lesson about life.

It lets white people pat themselves on the back for not being racist. Meanwhile, not one fucking thing changes.

Well, that's life, isn't it? No matter how many wonderful non-racist white people congratulate ourselves for being on the right side of history, even when we step out and try to do something about it, little improves for people of color and we go on with our lives, glad that terrible episode is behind us. And in the case of TKaM, the Finch family can continue having their black housekeeper clean up the shit they are too lazy or too busy or too important to do themselves.

As far as I'm concerned, it's one the most smug pieces of literature I've ever read. Sure, Harper Lee's prose is beautiful. But as a southern daddy's girl, she was much less enlightened than she believed she was.

(I played Atticus Finch in a production of the Christopher Sergel adaptation a few years ago, and I am white. The black actors in our production were not fans, but they took the roles because our director was black and a friend of theirs. He disagreed with me profoundly. He called Harper Lee's writing "poetry." I don't remember his logic, but I didn't buy it then, and neither did the black actors in our show. )

by Anonymousreply 297November 27, 2019 5:46 PM

Fannie Flagg was a better and more prolific writer than Harper Lee even though she couldn't spell a word correctly.

by Anonymousreply 298November 27, 2019 5:48 PM

[quote] Emily Dickinson was a Victorian-era version of a DataLounger.

What does that make me for ripping her off?

by Anonymousreply 299November 27, 2019 5:51 PM

Catcher in the Rye is overrated. Holden Caulfield is a snot-nosed, spoiled brat. Unlikeable character.

The Road by Kerouac is a lot of senseless, high rambling and Sal and Dean are secretly gay and in love with each other. Poor women that got attached to them.

by Anonymousreply 300November 27, 2019 5:56 PM

If I could burn just one book by a woman, then every single word ever written by Helen Lyndon Goff would go up in smoke forever.

by Anonymousreply 301November 27, 2019 5:58 PM

R297, although I don't like the movie (too melodramatic for my taste), Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life is about the same ideas you are talking about.

by Anonymousreply 302November 27, 2019 6:10 PM

All Christian writers are puerile hacks, and all their work is fatally flawed because it promotes an untenable, unsustainable, immoral, irrational, and just plain evil religion. It doesn't matter what genre they write in; if it's Christian, and they wear that shit on their sleeve, then burn it! Their work is more dangerous than pornography.

by Anonymousreply 303November 27, 2019 6:14 PM

French and Russian literature >>>>>>>>>English and American literature.

by Anonymousreply 304November 27, 2019 6:15 PM

R297: God, some of you seem unable to put a book in the context of the time it was written. That says way more about you than about the book.

And by the way, everytime i read that The catcher in the rye is the epitome of white privilege i know i'm reading an idiot. Caulfield is priviledged, yes, but because he is a rich kid, not everything circles around race

by Anonymousreply 305November 27, 2019 6:17 PM

Context, schmontext!

by Anonymousreply 306November 27, 2019 6:20 PM

Nietzsche was an overrated hack.

by Anonymousreply 307November 27, 2019 6:20 PM

Side note, my Sophomore English teacher got away with teaching us parts of the Bible in a Public School because she used it a literary source. I'm Christian so I don't have a personal objection, and her reasoning was sound, but the one Muslim girl in the class was visibly uncomfortable. This thread brought back that memory. Oh, and this was only in 2007, not even ancient history lol.

by Anonymousreply 308November 27, 2019 6:23 PM

Ayn Rand had her moments.

by Anonymousreply 309November 27, 2019 6:27 PM

[quote]R308 my Sophomore English teacher got away with teaching us parts of the Bible in a Public School because she used it a literary source.

I hope she categorized it as fiction??

by Anonymousreply 310November 27, 2019 6:32 PM

It is a complete waste of time to care about the personal lives of people who don't actually exist.

I win!

by Anonymousreply 311November 27, 2019 6:35 PM

I actually don't see a problem with teaching parts of the Bible alongside Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, etc. There are a lot of literary works that can only be fully appreciated if you know what the author is referencing. Sometimes that is a Bible story.

by Anonymousreply 312November 27, 2019 6:40 PM

Most gay literature is hacky trash.

by Anonymousreply 313November 27, 2019 6:44 PM

[quote] I actually don't see a problem with teaching parts of the Bible alongside Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, etc. There are a lot of literary works that can only be fully appreciated if you know what the author is referencing. Sometimes that is a Bible story.

Stick to the Old Testament, skip the New Testament, and run like Hell from the Koran.

by Anonymousreply 314November 27, 2019 6:45 PM

Harry Potter is beyond appalling. The entirely obvious/ not-so-clever-really lit crit references, just so very very very bad.

Walk past the queue of fans at Kings Cross regularly. Mainly Japanese teens and a few US adults.

Despise it.

Literature? Wtaf

by Anonymousreply 315November 27, 2019 7:04 PM

[quote] Harry Potter is beyond appalling.

I liked it better when it was called [italic]Bedknobs and Broomsticks[/italic].

by Anonymousreply 316November 27, 2019 7:06 PM

r315 HP got children, such as myself, into reading. My mother was so proud when she saw me with a non-school book that she asked me read to her on our drive home from school. She later admitted that she thought I might have been slow, so it helped ease her mind a bit. Those car rides, with my mother's complete attention, are my fondest memories of reading. HP will always have a special place in my heart. I wasn't much into other books growing up, but that series caught my interest.

by Anonymousreply 317November 27, 2019 7:11 PM

R317: Thanks for proving that HP changed nothing.

by Anonymousreply 318November 27, 2019 7:12 PM

My grandmother read the books and found them woefully inferior to [italic]Lord of the Rings[/italic], and this is coming from a Jewish woman who was an adult during WWII.

by Anonymousreply 319November 27, 2019 7:13 PM

R314 Unpopular opinion, but the Koran isn't as 'evil' as people make it out to be. The Old Testament is a lot more brutal. That said, the Koran is very badly written and awfully boring.

by Anonymousreply 320November 27, 2019 7:17 PM

Arf r316

by Anonymousreply 321November 27, 2019 7:19 PM

Really have to agree with everyone about Salinger. When I read the novel in high school and in college, I was like "THIS SPEAKS TO ME AND ONLY ME".

I read it now, and I think, "God this kid whines a lot".

by Anonymousreply 322November 27, 2019 7:23 PM

Agreed R16.

The white bookselling world fell all over themselves to sing his (lacking) literary praises.

Sidenote - I did meet him and his partner or husband, a few months back, and they are both delightful.

by Anonymousreply 323November 27, 2019 7:31 PM

Regardless of medium, white people just don't know how to judge their own kind correctly.

by Anonymousreply 324November 27, 2019 7:35 PM

SO sick of the universal reverence shown Toni Morrison. She discovered magic realism from Garcia-Marquez and ran with it. She is--or was--talented...but COME ON.

by Anonymousreply 325November 27, 2019 7:41 PM

People are afraid to criticize anything or anyone black out of guilt.

by Anonymousreply 326November 27, 2019 7:42 PM

R319: If the comparission was with The Hobbit it would make some sense, but HP was made for children (and it's good enough for adults read it) while The lord of the rings is fantasy for adults. They have very llittle in common

by Anonymousreply 327November 27, 2019 7:46 PM

Except it's not that good and the only people who read it read little to nothing else.

by Anonymousreply 328November 27, 2019 7:50 PM

Exactly r328

by Anonymousreply 329November 27, 2019 7:59 PM

R328: That's your opinion. But despise HP is not an unpopular opinion is simply snobish

by Anonymousreply 330November 27, 2019 8:26 PM

I'm tired of the word "snob" being thrown around to justify provincialism, illiteracy, and anti-intellectualism.

by Anonymousreply 331November 27, 2019 8:40 PM

I'm equally sick and tired of the word "elitist" being used as a pejorative? Literally everyone who does turns out to be a vile disgusting pig.

by Anonymousreply 332November 27, 2019 8:41 PM

TKAM does NOT have a sequel. It has what was a first attempt at roughly the same story.

by Anonymousreply 333November 28, 2019 12:13 PM

R331: That's because you are a snob

by Anonymousreply 334November 28, 2019 1:22 PM

I hated House of leaves. I know saying than means you are going to be insulted because you are an ignorant and you don't get it, but the truth is House of leaves could be a good horror novel that is totally spoiled by a secondary storyline with zero interest that interrupts the main narration. And of course there's a lot of literary experiments, which is not bad by itself, but all of them are totally void on content and didn't add anything to the story

by Anonymousreply 335November 28, 2019 1:41 PM

R331/332, I feel like this is (sadly) a distinctly American phenomenon. If you are an intellectual or artsy type, you are viewed at with derision or mistrust by the American public.

by Anonymousreply 336November 28, 2019 4:50 PM

R316 ugh please don't remind me of that troll that used to or probably still does post here on DL.

by Anonymousreply 337November 28, 2019 5:17 PM

r366 - it's British in a way as well. They won't say "elites", but their attitude is "you think you're better than me!" and "you're trying to make me small!".

by Anonymousreply 338November 28, 2019 5:33 PM

HP is terrible but really I think the worst period for American literature was the Henry Miller, Ngaio Marsh, Allen Drury, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capite, John Updike era. These people were fucking mediocrities, not an average level brain among them. No wonder Saul Bellow, who is nothing special, won the Nobel prize when these piggish white male crypto-conservative "personalities" ruled the roost.

by Anonymousreply 339November 28, 2019 5:45 PM

I still don't understand why Sally Rooney gets so much praise. Her prose is pedestrian and she cheats all the time (all her characters have some kind of trauma that explains their behaviour but she never addressed what kind of trauma to avoid being incoherent).

But she appears in all list of the best of the year. Curiously Normal people is one of the worst books i read this year. That an Elif Batuman's The idiot, i really want to know what the jury of the Pulitzer and the Woman's prize had smoke to think that atrocity deserved to be a finalist

by Anonymousreply 340November 28, 2019 6:50 PM

It's hard to believe but Jonathan Franzen may be our best writer currently.

by Anonymousreply 341November 28, 2019 7:46 PM

Since when is Gore Vidal a conservative?

by Anonymousreply 342November 29, 2019 2:12 AM

Gore Vida was not what you think he was

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by Anonymousreply 343November 29, 2019 3:00 AM

Shut up and listen to Dylan Thomas you uncultured swine.

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by Anonymousreply 344November 29, 2019 3:09 AM

Shut up and listen to Dylan Thomas you uncultured swine.

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by Anonymousreply 345November 29, 2019 3:09 AM

R343 is it true Gore Vidal was bisexual, or that he was gay but didn't want to be known as a 'gay writer'?

He apparently had a relationship with Anaïs Nin, and probably Paul Newman as well. I know that when he was with his partner/husband in Italy he would hire male escorts or they both would. While I am bisexual I would never claim that, 'everyone is bisexual or has the potential to be', as this is not true and if it were there would be no need for LGB rights, pride events, etc.

In 1950, Gore Vidal met Howard Austen, who became his partner for the next 53 years, until Austen's death.[117] He said that the secret to his long relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, I have observed, when it does."[118] In Celebrity: The Advocate Interviews (1995), by Judy Wiedner, Vidal said that he refused to call himself "gay" because he was not an adjective, adding "to be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved. Watch out. I have never thought of myself as a victim ... I've said – a thousand times? – in print and on TV, that everyone is bisexual"

by Anonymousreply 346November 29, 2019 5:47 AM

R346 God he must've been an insufferable cunt

by Anonymousreply 347November 29, 2019 10:36 AM

Hmm, excuse me, r339:

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by Anonymousreply 348November 29, 2019 11:50 AM

Maya Angelou always had weird titles to her work. Something like:

"Ode To A Frozen Giraffe That Was Thawed Out in the Amber Sun"

or some crap like that.

by Anonymousreply 349November 29, 2019 4:51 PM

Men are better writers.

by Anonymousreply 350November 30, 2019 6:42 PM

Yes, men are better writers, R350.

The dead and long dead are much better writers than the living.

There are very few exceptions to the above statements.

Anthony Powell is seriously underrated, and all the more now that he is written off as a snob.

Virginia Woolf no. Vita Sackville-West yes, a couple of times.

The best American fiction is almost entirely from the South (and includes a couple of women); the exceptions are some WASPy Cheever sorts.)

David Sedaris is a shit writer but it's brilliant fun to hear his sad voice read his stories.

Joyce is a good writer, sometimes,but oddly like Sedaris his work is better heard than read (they share nothing else in common).

by Anonymousreply 351November 30, 2019 7:26 PM

Crime and Punishment is shitty. If you want to read a decent Dostoyevsky novel, enjoy Brothers Karamazov instead.

by Anonymousreply 352November 30, 2019 7:32 PM

The writing in the Harry Potter series is pedestrian and charmless. The plots are great but the writing sucks - Rowling is no Nesbit, MacDonald, Burnett, Stevenson, or Barrie. The films added the magical charm the books lacked.

by Anonymousreply 353November 30, 2019 7:36 PM

I don't think Anna Karenina is that great, in fact Tolstoi doesn't seem to be my type of writer at all

by Anonymousreply 354November 30, 2019 7:36 PM

R351, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best writers from the English speaking world, ever.

by Anonymousreply 355November 30, 2019 7:37 PM

[quote]He apparently had a relationship with Anaïs Nin

Who didn't?

As an eleven year old, I found a copy of Delta Of Venus on my parents' shelves and rubbed one out.

by Anonymousreply 356November 30, 2019 7:39 PM

Woody Allen was right about movie novelizations in [italic]Manhattan[/italic].

by Anonymousreply 357November 30, 2019 7:43 PM

I cannot fucking stand magic realism.

by Anonymousreply 358November 30, 2019 7:47 PM

R341 No he's not, Donna Tartt is.

by Anonymousreply 359November 30, 2019 7:49 PM

[italic]Around the World with Auntie Mame[/italic] is a huge letdown compared to the original book.

by Anonymousreply 360November 30, 2019 10:21 PM

R347 Gore Vidal is also a notorious liar. He claimed to have slept with Jack Kerouac, but he said that Kerouac was cut but according to Allen Ginsberg who actually did have sex with Kerouac, Kerouac was not cut.

by Anonymousreply 361December 2, 2019 5:15 PM

[quote]but according to Allen Ginsberg who actually did have sex with Kerouac

I thought Ginsberg liked them younger than that.

by Anonymousreply 362December 2, 2019 5:20 PM

The Beats are fucking terrible writers. All of them.

by Anonymousreply 363December 2, 2019 6:50 PM

*Were

by Anonymousreply 364December 2, 2019 6:55 PM

*Were

by Anonymousreply 365December 2, 2019 6:55 PM

Joan Didion takes herself very very seriously.

by Anonymousreply 366December 2, 2019 10:26 PM

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were pretentious hacks.

by Anonymousreply 367December 2, 2019 10:29 PM

Book clubs are just an excuse for women to get drunk on Chardonnay and gossip.

by Anonymousreply 368December 3, 2019 2:03 PM

R368 That's not an unpopular opinion. It's a generally accepted fact.

by Anonymousreply 369December 3, 2019 2:10 PM

Jewel is actually a really good poet.

by Anonymousreply 370December 3, 2019 2:11 PM

I agree, R370.

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by Anonymousreply 371December 3, 2019 11:17 PM

One should really read the Classics, all the novels on the list.

Also, you should read the Novel that was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature each year. If you are behind, read all which came before.

Lean into your Humanity.

READ!

by Anonymousreply 372December 4, 2019 12:46 AM

Fuck them and READ these books.

100 most banned and challenges books, recently.

Add in Charles Darwin (non fiction) too.

To write, it is human.

To read, it is human.

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by Anonymousreply 373December 4, 2019 12:54 AM

R362 Ginsberg was a paedo/chickenhawk and would basically have sex with any guy even his students.

by Anonymousreply 374December 4, 2019 5:13 PM

R374, wasn't Ginsberg a big supporter of NAMBLA?

by Anonymousreply 375December 4, 2019 5:17 PM

Norman Mailer's best seller was the photo collection/rambling essay MARILYN (1973), but I like its lesser received sequel OF WOMEN AND THEIR ELEGANCE (1980) better.

It's told from Monroe's point of view, and lavishly illustrated with pics by Milton H. Greene. A lot of it is really funny, while a lot of it is really sad.

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by Anonymousreply 376December 5, 2019 2:47 AM

For instance, the "Marilyn" of the book discusses the first sitting she did with Greene, saying something like, "It was sexy, and I might have looked like I just crawled out from behind the couch, but it was the first picture of me where, looking at it, you might possibly also be interested in what I had to say."

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by Anonymousreply 377December 5, 2019 3:01 AM

Reading is AWESOME. Grow your brain, motherfuckers.

by Anonymousreply 378December 5, 2019 3:43 AM

Thomas Pynchon bores me.

by Anonymousreply 379December 5, 2019 4:40 AM

R375 yes Ginsberg did support that group but so did Pat/Patrick Califia and even Harry Hay, and others and the worst was when they tried to claim that somehow that group, predators of kids/teens, and LGBT people are linked and in the documentary below which obviously is NSFW it features Ginsberg.

True R379 I read Gravity's rainbow while in university, and all of Pynchon's books starting with vineland in highschool and I agree with you. and with R9 as I read many of DeLilo's novels. It's cliche, especially for someone who majored in English/Comparative literature; but I really like some of Hemingway's short stories and novels; but they remind me of my dad since growing up he would always talk about Hemingway and as a young kid he bought me a used copy of the sun also rises which I still have. I also love the writings of Fitzgerald, Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Victor Hugo, Hermann Hesse, Sartre, Cyril Collard, Günter Grass, Hugo Claus, Hergé, and Arthur Rimbaud as well.

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by Anonymousreply 380December 5, 2019 7:58 AM

Amazon ruined literature when they gave a platform to unvetted writers to publish ebooks.

by Anonymousreply 381December 5, 2019 5:19 PM

R381 don't forget how Amazon allows shitty poets or wannabe poets to get published/self promote their work.

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by Anonymousreply 382December 5, 2019 6:24 PM

Agreed R381.

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by Anonymousreply 383December 5, 2019 6:27 PM

Enid Blyton’s books had a positive effect on the writing of young people.

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by Anonymousreply 384December 5, 2019 6:31 PM

Faulkner's lack of punctuation throughout "As I Lay Dying" pisses me off. #MyMotherIsAFish

by Anonymousreply 385December 5, 2019 7:51 PM

Language is a virus from outer space.

by Anonymousreply 386December 5, 2019 8:31 PM

Nipsey Russell‘s poetry should be taught in universities everywhere.

by Anonymousreply 387December 5, 2019 8:36 PM

R384 I read a lot of Enid Blyton and learned everything about grammar and punctuation by looking at her sentences.

by Anonymousreply 388December 6, 2019 4:37 AM

I have mostly enjoyed the work of Vita Sackville-West, especially "The Edwardians." A British cunt who was kind enough to look down his nose at me pointed out that her work hasn't withstood the test of time. As if any other fucking American would know who she was. I can't recall the title now, but Sackville-West wrote a novel about a lady who was in her senior dotage and lived in Hampstead. Her work was so varied, from "Passenger to Teheran," to the afore mentioned titles. All of it beautifully written.

by Anonymousreply 389December 6, 2019 8:09 AM

Is she that lez that was involved with Grerta Garbo?

by Anonymousreply 390December 6, 2019 1:46 PM

About the OP.

Not everyone gets poetry. Few di actually.

I liked one of Rushdie's early work where he doesn't try to be clever. Rest are unreadable.

Rowling's HP went down because the publishers turned her into a cash cow, stretching her output to create literary sensationalism. The first 2-3 in the series are delightful and better than Tolkien.

by Anonymousreply 391December 6, 2019 2:52 PM

R386 I said that Language is a virus from outer space first.

by Anonymousreply 392December 6, 2019 4:06 PM

Alcohol makes you a better writer.

by Anonymousreply 393December 6, 2019 4:46 PM

I find contemporary literature boring, shallow, depressing, unfunny, ugly and smug. No, I don't give a fuck about your shitty childhood,. I had one of my own. In fact, so did everyone else. You're not special, stop writing sonnets to your armpit hair.

by Anonymousreply 394December 6, 2019 10:38 PM

[quote]Alcohol makes you a better writer.

until it kills you.....then you aren't a good writer anymore

by Anonymousreply 395December 7, 2019 12:13 AM

jane Austen is a poor writer.

by Anonymousreply 396December 7, 2019 12:19 AM
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by Anonymousreply 397December 7, 2019 1:26 AM

I hate Raymond Carver.

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by Anonymousreply 398December 7, 2019 9:14 PM

[quote]As if any other fucking American would know who she (Sackville West) was

Yo dumbfuck!. there was a BBC series ("portrait of a marriage") broadcast in 1992 as Masterpiece Theater about her.. Never assume that all Americans are as benighted as yourself

by Anonymousreply 399December 8, 2019 12:47 AM

I find most modern American writers obnoxious, but for different reasons. Male American writers tend to fall into the same narcissistic tropes again and again. Namely the straight male professor /writer /journalist who gets panties dropping everywhere he goes, despite being an utter bore .

Female American writers tend to write in a faux compassionate tone, that's usually reeking of unintended condescension towards people they view as somehow lesser , no matter how much faux empathy they try to convey.

by Anonymousreply 400December 8, 2019 1:40 AM

[quote]Namely the straight male professor /writer /journalist who gets panties dropping everywhere he goes, despite being an utter bore .

I've lost count of how many Woody Allen movies' plots revolve around this.

by Anonymousreply 401December 8, 2019 3:20 AM

[quote]Male American writers tend to fall into the same narcissistic tropes again and again. Namely the straight male professor /writer /journalist who gets panties dropping everywhere he goes, despite being an utter bore .

Ugh please do not remind me of my former boss when I worked in academia. He fits this stereotype to a 'T' and he is a narcissist. I would see him basically attack or verbally abuse students who did not agree with his theories or tried to challenge them despite how he would claim he was open to discussion, debate, different perspectives/theories, etc.

by Anonymousreply 402December 15, 2019 1:40 AM

Edmund White's biographies are not bad, as in they are well researched; but I laughed a lot when he actually compared himself to Genet and Rimbaud as White is a huge narcissist. White's memoirs, play, and novels are garbage.

by Anonymousreply 403December 16, 2019 11:36 AM

R391 so what exactly is poetry in your opinion?

R171, I do not like post-modern poetry like the poem below. It reads like someone's blog post, or a diary entry, not a poem. No I am not this poet/writer, but she teaches a course on poetry at Yale.

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by Anonymousreply 404January 4, 2020 2:12 PM

James Fenimore Cooper - how that lethally boring novel, "The Last of the Mohicans", ever got a name for itself is beyond me. I was stunned when I finally picked up TLOTM when the film came out with Day-Lewis to find out that it, and most all the films made of it, were based only on the last few chapers, and with good reason.

Boring beyond belief, nearly unreadable, racist, misogynist, parlaying every stereotype in the Western world.

"Lorna Doone" is delicious fast read by comparison.

by Anonymousreply 405January 8, 2020 2:09 PM

I honestly think V.C. Andrews wrote the same novel 100 times. She reuses the same exact themes over and over again. The heroines in each book series are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

by Anonymousreply 406January 8, 2020 2:13 PM

[quote] Not necessarily an unpopular literary opinion, so much as one that makes sense when people think about it, but it isn't voiced very often: ask any author to write a fictional 'life of Christ,' and you will learn way more about the author through their approach to the subject than you will ever learn about Jesus.

That’s very true, but also perhaps not voiced often because it is self evident. Consider that the single most influential person in the past 2000 years of human history was both Man and God in his lifetime and whose followers committed acts of enormous good and extreme evil in his name - any literary interpretation will deeply personal and in ones own image.

by Anonymousreply 407January 12, 2020 12:30 PM

The Harry Potter books are studies in logorrhea.

British drama peaked in the 60s.

by Anonymousreply 408January 12, 2020 12:59 PM

Stephen King ghostwrites his son's novels or is in the beginning stages of alzheimers/dementia and his son now ghostwrites for him.

by Anonymousreply 409January 12, 2020 5:21 PM

True R409, Stephen King has used ghostwriters for about 20 years now.

by Anonymousreply 410January 14, 2020 5:35 PM

r409 and r410, could you explain how you know this? I've always assumed many big authors have ghosts are cowriters uncredited. I guess they have tight NDAs and are credited as researchers or editors.

Any good travel nonfiction recommendations? I'm not spoiled people finding themselves by traveling, but that seems like the majority of new travel books.

by Anonymousreply 411February 8, 2020 12:05 AM

Gunter Grass and his "Danzig Trilogy" are among the best works of literature of the 20th C. Grass won the Nobel for his writing and then it was revealed a few years later he was a former Waffen SS soldier. He lied about his service history. Does that change my opinion of his work? No, it does not. I must bow before genius.

by Anonymousreply 412February 8, 2020 12:23 AM

Many drunky writers (most of the greats) claimed they never wrote drunk. I never bought that. Was it William Faulkner who said, "I took more from alcohol than it ever took from me"?

by Anonymousreply 413February 8, 2020 12:31 AM

R411 if you have read his books it is very obvious. The newer Stephen King books all have a completely different style and they are churned out very fast, and hyped up.

by Anonymousreply 414February 11, 2020 4:43 PM

I concur on Faulkner. We had to read some of his drivel in college and I can tell you my take on it was you're an aggrieved southerner get over it, you lost the war to us damned Yankees. My college professor loved that btw.

by Anonymousreply 415February 11, 2020 5:01 PM

Overrated: Margaret Atwood

Underrated: James Salter

Enid Blyton books were my favourite as a child.

by Anonymousreply 416February 11, 2020 9:42 PM

Yes Margaret Atwood is extremely overrated and boring.

by Anonymousreply 417February 14, 2020 1:15 PM

Kazuo Ishiguro is vastly overrated.

by Anonymousreply 418March 23, 2020 1:30 AM

Hilary Mantel - she's like Wagner: when you get past the hit tunes'high historical points in each work, the rest is forgotten the moment you've heard/read it.

by Anonymousreply 419March 23, 2020 2:44 PM

The Handmaid's Tale was glum and unreadable. Catnip to the fraus, though. A lot victim culture permeating our culture today can be traced to its inanity. Hysteria-inducing pap.

by Anonymousreply 420March 23, 2020 6:38 PM

true R420 just go on reddit's twoxchromosomes to see that victim mentality. I feel bad for Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z women as they get easily offended and angry about everything, and I am really glad my grandmothers, aunts, and my mother while being first and second wave feminists did not get into the whole victim mentality that so many women today have.

by Anonymousreply 421March 27, 2020 1:52 AM

City of night needed to be edited a lot, and the sections about SF and NOLA should have not been included in the book at all.

Rechy's novels and short stories are boring to me as they are basically all the same. I did enjoy both rushes and numbers though, more than city of night.

by Anonymousreply 422April 1, 2020 1:30 AM

Haruki Murakami’s writing became quite tedious post-‘Kafka by the Shore’.

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by Anonymousreply 423April 1, 2020 1:59 AM

epic poetry is crap.

by Anonymousreply 424April 1, 2020 3:02 AM

JK Rowling is a terrible writer. And very derivative. Terry Pratchett isn’t funny. Neither are exactly ‘literary ‘ though, so I should probably shut up.

by Anonymousreply 425August 24, 2020 12:02 PM

Hah! I used to love Terry Pratchett and read lots of his books when in the UK at 13. I stopped after reading I believe 10 or 12. I stopped reading them as they were all very similar, and I sold them for lots of money back in the USA as they were not always easy to find then. I also had a discworld magazine from the late 1990s which I bought for a few pounds and sold for a lot more than this on ebay.

by Anonymousreply 426September 5, 2020 10:24 AM

I heard that Emily Dickens didn't actually like dickens.

She was more into pussens' boots.

by Anonymousreply 427September 5, 2020 11:28 AM

JK Rowling is a terrible person.

Fixed that for ya!

And let the anti-trans trainwrecks add their two cents in three...two...

by Anonymousreply 428September 5, 2020 11:30 AM

Toni Morrison is vastly overrated.

by Anonymousreply 429September 5, 2020 11:57 AM

I love me some good prose (John Mcphee) but I have little use for literary fiction at all.

by Anonymousreply 430September 5, 2020 12:42 PM

Handmaid's Tale is a perfectly strong novel, and it made sense that it was taught so heavily in the 80s as an antithesis to Faulkner and Hemingway in American lit classes (where faculty chafing against these period and ethno- based classes started doing cheeky things like teaching a Canadian in a US-based class since they are both American). Inevitably, though, what was interesting then was the coda (examining the diaries through a centuries-later academic conference, full of in-jokes about the pomposity and posing that goes into such things, and revealing so much more about academic fragility, looking to create something real because, ultimately, most of what lit classes do is raise consciousness, not develop new takes on the works, which would mean most lit professors are in a feedback loop in the classroom for 40 years).

As the reputation expanded, and Atwood embraced being a Feminist Role Model for the next wave, the book became this touchstone for a feminism that was never really the point, and kinda not really there. As much as the first season of the Hulu series was well-done, it was at its best when it was about authoritarianism and the corrosive character of power (Ann Dowd's performance was brilliant, especially as we got a glimpse into her backstory later). The main character (I won't use the miniseries name) is not meant to be fully realized. She's an avatar of the horror prevailed upon her. That is a feminist concern and takeaway, but she's not a feminist hero; the reader is supposed to be for discerning that.

All that has been wiped away in the Frau era. It wouldn't shock me if the next season has her cradling a mug, talking about her fibromyalgia. (And let's not start about the decision to wipe out the Children of Ham so Samira Wiley can keep working, or turning Serena Joy into a flawed heroine; the much maligned movie has a lot of issues, but Natasha Richardson's blank, inscrutable version bouncing off Faye Dunaway's manic, vituperous Serena was so superior to this stuff).

by Anonymousreply 431September 5, 2020 3:35 PM

R431 It's curious because nowaday feminist don't know what to think about Handmaids tale.

But of course it happens the same with Naomi Alderman's The power, for some of them the fact that the male narrator (one of the four narrators) is the most positive character and the world under the women's domination is basically the same shit with different victims it's too much to digest for them.

I think Atwood is a good writer, i really likes some of her short (very short) stories, very very weird. And i know The blind assassin is not everybody's cup of tea, but i liked it a lot.

I hated One hundred years of solitude (but i loved Chronicle of a death foretold)

by Anonymousreply 432September 17, 2020 6:26 PM

Is there any truth to the rumor that Oprah and Toni Morrison, or Oprah and Alice Waters were lesbian couples?

by Anonymousreply 433October 7, 2020 9:52 PM

Most poetry is shit; Shakespeare can fuck-off; No, not all fiction is allegorical and has a hidden meaning; Maya Angelou was a fraud.

by Anonymousreply 434October 7, 2020 10:10 PM

Tana French is obvious and predictable

by Anonymousreply 435January 5, 2021 9:08 PM

Shakespeare was a rent boy.

by Anonymousreply 436January 5, 2021 9:14 PM

[quote] Trollop > dickens.

Unless you're talking about a whore who was greater than Dickens, you mean TrollopE, not "Trollop."

by Anonymousreply 437January 5, 2021 9:28 PM

r16 have you read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous?

by Anonymousreply 438May 15, 2021 2:38 PM

r436 = Ben Jonson

by Anonymousreply 439May 15, 2021 4:22 PM
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