Bukowski's a jam tart, soft in the middle and hard on the outside.Originally Posted by deguonis
Bukowski's a jam tart, soft in the middle and hard on the outside.
Well yes it does but Beckett's obscurantism is a distraction too far in my view and if you thought that Godot was pointless, what about Endgame. I attach an extract from Wikipedia's summation of the play.
The implication in the play is that the characters live in an unchanging, static state. Each day contains the actions and reactions of the day before, until each event takes on an almost ritualistic quality. It is made clear, through the text, that the characters have a past (most notably through Nagg and Nell who conjure up memories of tandem rides in the Ardennes).
Whoopee! Book me two tickets.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Just joined this forum and was thrilled to discover that I'm not the only one who HATES Moby Dick! I love reading and it was books like this - forced, assigned reading in a college class - that suck the life and fun out of reading. This is the only book for which I bought the Cliff's Notes :-/ After reading endless pages on the tying of nautical knots in ropes, I was about ready to scream. If I wasn't being tested on the content of this book, I would have burned the thing.
I completely understand why anyone would identify Shakespeare in this list. But my main defense of Shakespeare is that he wasn't meant to be read, he was meant to be watched. I doze off reading Shakespeare, but I love watching any of his plays being performed, be it college productions, community theater, movies, what have you. The stories are timeless.
Jane Austen's "sense and sensibility"
Last edited by Jurt; 07-27-2011 at 05:06 AM.
מצוה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד- It is a great command to be constantly happy
Feel free to correct howlers which I commit because I want to learn English properly.
Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia
Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez
Martin Eden by Jack London
The Misunderstanding by Camus
Les Catilinaires by Notomb
Homo Faber by Frisch
Oscar and the Lady in Pink by Schmitt (hate him)
12 chairs by Ilf&Pertov (the other book The Little Golden Calf is much better)
Can't remember more...
Last edited by Ome; 07-27-2011 at 05:20 AM.
`Кто смеет убить себя, тот бог. Достоевский
`I Speak to God, but the Sky is empty. Plath
`I'm an artist just because I'm ugly. Andy Warhol
That sounds like the worst class ever! "To the Lighthouse" is the dullest, most pretentious and just plain shi@@y novel ever written. I hate it with all the passion of my heart. I have read a lot of classics and many of them tend to the dull side, but this novel is the worst reading experience I've had in my life.
And Henry James.....right up there with the most overrated writer Ginny Woolf.
George Eliot is kind of hard to read. I definitely wouldn't say it was the most boring writing ever though. But I have had to have a break from reading Daniel Deronda for a while, and read something slightly quicker paced, I'm just impatient.
I can't really say what I found the most boring book ever because I doubt I even bothered reading many pages to remember. Also too many books I haven't even tried reading yet.
jACKIE cOLLINS is pretty boring, if I wanted to read that trash I'd go on literotica or something. Also she seems to think the name Raphael is spelled 'Rapheal' - That's like spelling the name: Michael as 'Micheal' - which is apparently the most uneducated, low-class, inbred incorrect spelling ever, according to freakonomics and some people who know about word roots, anyway.
Last edited by ariella; 08-16-2011 at 09:59 PM.
Why was this boring? I have it sitting on my shelf and its such a short book that Ive been meaning to read it so I was just wondering about someone else's opinion on it.`
Even though I found "Great Expectations" to be rather dull (partly thanks to high school nightmares...), I'm giving "Bleak House" and "A Tale of Two Cities" a shot eventually. Hopefully, my opinion of Dickens will change...Some of these I can fully understand. I have yet to read any Joseph Conrad, but many, many people claim to find James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens very boring.
I love them all, personally, especially Virginia Woolf, but she wrote with so much empathy and far more passion than the average author, which, I think, could confuse many readers.
Some historical novels, yes, I can see the downside. I have enjoyed most of them, especially several Russian works, but, for example, I could never read Gore Vidal's Creation over again.
"We look at the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry." -- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
Anything by Faulkner, Morrison, Dickens, and Shakespeare. With Shakespeare I can watch the plays but thank God I don't ever have to read any of it again.
All good books have one thing in common- they are truer than if they had really happened. (Hemingway)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Had to abandon it half way.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
When you find a famous book boring (like "Moby Dick" or "Dr Zhivago") it's usually because you're too lazy to read it.
That's ridiculous. I call Argumentum Ad Populum. (Many people like a book, not liking it makes you lazy is a complete nonsequitur.)
Anyhow, let me think... I recall being fairly bored by certain segments of Crime and Punishment, but conceptually it was at least interesting enough for me to remember most of it... That's the thing about most boring books, if they're so uninteresting, what is there to remember about it?
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear."
-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
That's ridiculous. I call Argumentum Ad Populum. (Many people like a book, not liking it makes you lazy is a complete nonsequitur.)
There is a difference between a book that is "popular" and one that is recognized as a "classic." Of course we all like what we like... but there is something to be said for the ability to recognize that there is a difference between what we "like" and "dislike" and what is "good" or "bad." If we find this or that "classic" to be dreadfully boring it probably says more about us as readers than it does about the failings of the author.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
True, but the word used was "famous," which essentially means "popular".
I agree, though, that it's important to understand that personal taste and "objective" quality are not the same thing.
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear."
-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
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