Originally Posted by nebish
I regard Dickens as one of the most over rated writers in the English language. His characters were paper thin cartoon characters. His style was ponderous even by Victorian standards. Trollope in my view was a much better writer. A value judgement if you like. But that`s mind. Anyway, must go. PulpNet beckons.
I forgot to mention Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer". I new something was wrong when the introduction was spouting some long, rambling, anti-semitic diatribe about sexual repression and anarchy. Despite that, I decided to give it a chance, and was appaled. The fact that that type of tripe is still considered literary infuriates me.
Do we burn blasphemers here or do we just chop their head?
"I regard Dickens as one of the most over rated writers in the English language. His characters were paper thin cartoon characters. His style was ponderous even by Victorian standards. Trollope in my view was a much better writer. A value judgment if you like. But that`s mind. Anyway, must go. PulpNet beckons."
Dickens' style ponderous? I think he is probably one of the greatest master of the prose in the English language (of what I read in English at least, and from what I've read of Dickens). I will have to agree with your view of the characters, but I think this is part of Dickens' style and that it's not a defect.
People, people, is this really the WORST book you've read or is it just that you find them overrated?
Last edited by Etienne; 11-23-2007 at 04:33 PM.
Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion....
The Idiot, Dostoyevsky
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
I very rarely get that far into a book if it is bad....I've not read very many books that started off well and sucked later.Do we burn blasphemers here or do we just chop their head?
People, people, is this really the WORST book you've read or is it just that you find them overrated?
Maybe overrated authors is another thread....I'm new to this site so what the hell? I'll put on my flame retardant clothing and proceed...
I agree totally about Charles Dickens....I would also say that he is a writer than I think children would get more out of than adults....His broadly sketched charcters with funny names and not much depth and the coincidences and ridiculous endings of his books are hard to take as a mture reader....And if I want social commentary about that time in history I'll take Emile Zola over Charles Dicken's in a second.
John Steinbeck I have already mentioned but I also really don't care for F. Scott Fitzgerald....He's a superficial writer for a superficial time in American history.
Jane Austen, John Irving, DH Lawrence, Leo Tolstoy, John Updike, Salman Rushdie are all writers I don't care for at all.
Noramlly I wouldn't respond to a post like this as I believe to each his own but I was wondering where you see Henry Miller as anti-semitic? Could you give some examples....He uses rough language to describe Jews (as Thomas Wolfe uses rough language to describe black people) but ends up praising much about their culture.
I think Tropic of Cancer is, in my mind, what good literature should be....challenging and not spoonfeeding or manipulating the reader. The diatribes as you call them are some best free flowing stream of consciousness writing I've ever read. IMO one of the top 4 or 5 greatest books I've ever read.
I favor burning; it is more energy efficient.Do we burn blasphemers here or do we just chop their head?
Well it was the introduction written by some one other than Miller that I found appalingly anti-semitic, which, I suppose I don't necessarily associate with Miller, but having that as your introduction definately sets off some alarms.
The text itself was almost unreadable by my standards. When Miller isn't Kerouac-ing off, he's making sex duller than I ever thought possible. The only thing I found interesting was the occasional appearance of linguistic flourishes, but these are few and far between.
I've read many a bad book in my time-- mostly for class, although one or two from a simple judgment lapse. However, perhaps the worst and most disappointing has to be The Great Gatsby.
Overall I liked The Great Gatsby, I just thought it was perhaps one of the most pointless books I ever read, but I enjoyed how it was written and the charachers, but it was just one of those things that at the end, I was just like, but just why was it written?
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
The Disappearing Teacher, forgot the author who did it. I got nothing out of it! I don't even know why I bothered to finish the whole book.
but...but...
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
Heart of Darkness, The Alchemist, Old Man and the Sea, The Great Expectations, Portrait of the Artist of a young Man.
At thunder and tempest, At the world's coldheartedness,
During times of heavy loss And when you're sad
The greatest art on earth Is to seem uncomplicatedly gay.
To get things clear, they have to firstly be very unclear. But if you get them too quickly, you probably got them wrong.
If you need me urgent, send me a PM
There are a few books which I read when I was younger and which today I would regard as books only in sense of their form, for their contents were probably not worth the paper they were printed on - mostly I have in mind the works of so-called teen and chic lit which I occassionally used to read up until a couple of years ago. However, nothing but vague images of the front pages of those 'works' come to me right now, and those books obviously had no effect on me whatsoever, so I do not even remember them.
Out of the ones I remember, or are more recent, or have specifically been marked as "recommend-to-enemies" in my mind, the ones to come to my mind would be:
Brown, D. - The Da Vinci Code, the only work I read by him because of the overall fuss about him, after which I figured he terribly lacked any skill in writing and any point to make at all
Coelho, P. - anything, especially that overrated trash of The Alchemist
Harry-Potter-and-alike books. They make me shiver. I used to find their popularity to be comic, now I find it to be tragic.
After the above absolute horror, here are the books which I find to be lesser horror, and are generally included in the canon, but which I still disliked and would not recommend:
Hemingway, E. - The Old Man and the Sea, perhaps I was too young when reading it (13-14 years old, for school), perhaps it was the matter of translation (I did not feel like getting the original, so I went with the flow and read it as the rest of my Literature class did in translation) or reading too quickly (I was a little slacker and read it in the morning the day it was due, if I recall well).
Anything written by Balzac - one of the worse school readings I went through, I find Father Goriot incredibly boring and I only remember fragments from it [whilst after that I did not even bother finishing Eugene Grandet, I stopped somewhere in the middle, and could not tell you what the book was about if my life depended on it].
Any book by Isabel Allende. She is a mediocre, boring writer. Amazing she has quite the following! She sucks!
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