Worst "classic" reading experience ever
Aug. 18th, 2003 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockWhat's the worst experience you had with a famous or classic book? What noted title makes your teech grind and your cheek twitch with flashbacks of literary torture?
A.) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Two books that are supposed to celebrate strong women of the Victorian Era, but mostly it just pissed me off. Instead of being inspired by the so-called "endurance and strength" these women seemingly displayed, I was bitterly turned off of them because of their constant dependence upon men to determine what makes their lives "good," the constant accepting of blame on behalf of those men, and the willingness to endure any emotionally abusive and manipulative treatment for the sake of "standing by your man, because he's truly good at heart, but only I know him enough to see it." I just wanted to smack those women repeatedly. I wouldn't have even finished the books had they not been assigned reading for a class that I needed to write essays for. They might be vaunted as literary classics about "strong and independant women," but apparently they're really only "strong and independant women who are only complete when they sacrifice themselves to have men in their lives that don't deserve them by any stretch."
That kind of thinking still regulates women into submissive roles. "Wuthering Heights" was the better Bronte novel, if only because EVERYONE in that book was messed up except the very youngest generation, and I didn't feel obligated to sympathize with a character I had no respect for.
B.) Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Had to read this one too; it's only saving grace was that it was short. A few weeks later I was explaining the plot and characters to my mother. After I finished a rather detailed fun-down of the novel from beginning to end, my mother asked "That's sounds horrid. Why don't these people all just kill each other and put everyone out of their misery?"
I said "I spent most of the book hoping for it. I was sadly disappointed. It wasn't just that I didn't like any of them, it's that they were all so stupid I couldn't bare it."
She said, "Hm. I think I'll live a happy and fullfilled life without ever reading that."
I said, "I only wish."
C.) The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
It's about a Chinese family, and basically how much life as a Chinese peasant sucks dead karma eggs.
Actually, reading a book that boring is what sucks dead eggs. For much of the time I felt like standing up in the middle of my 10th grade English class and borrowing a line from Hook: "Why doesn't someone just shoot me in the head?"
**
Now, I don't bitch at every old English novel. For example, I loved Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And not because it was scary-- it wasn't. I loved it because the themes actually said something of value, in a way that didn't put me to sleep.
A.) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Two books that are supposed to celebrate strong women of the Victorian Era, but mostly it just pissed me off. Instead of being inspired by the so-called "endurance and strength" these women seemingly displayed, I was bitterly turned off of them because of their constant dependence upon men to determine what makes their lives "good," the constant accepting of blame on behalf of those men, and the willingness to endure any emotionally abusive and manipulative treatment for the sake of "standing by your man, because he's truly good at heart, but only I know him enough to see it." I just wanted to smack those women repeatedly. I wouldn't have even finished the books had they not been assigned reading for a class that I needed to write essays for. They might be vaunted as literary classics about "strong and independant women," but apparently they're really only "strong and independant women who are only complete when they sacrifice themselves to have men in their lives that don't deserve them by any stretch."
That kind of thinking still regulates women into submissive roles. "Wuthering Heights" was the better Bronte novel, if only because EVERYONE in that book was messed up except the very youngest generation, and I didn't feel obligated to sympathize with a character I had no respect for.
B.) Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Had to read this one too; it's only saving grace was that it was short. A few weeks later I was explaining the plot and characters to my mother. After I finished a rather detailed fun-down of the novel from beginning to end, my mother asked "That's sounds horrid. Why don't these people all just kill each other and put everyone out of their misery?"
I said "I spent most of the book hoping for it. I was sadly disappointed. It wasn't just that I didn't like any of them, it's that they were all so stupid I couldn't bare it."
She said, "Hm. I think I'll live a happy and fullfilled life without ever reading that."
I said, "I only wish."
C.) The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
It's about a Chinese family, and basically how much life as a Chinese peasant sucks dead karma eggs.
Actually, reading a book that boring is what sucks dead eggs. For much of the time I felt like standing up in the middle of my 10th grade English class and borrowing a line from Hook: "Why doesn't someone just shoot me in the head?"
**
Now, I don't bitch at every old English novel. For example, I loved Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And not because it was scary-- it wasn't. I loved it because the themes actually said something of value, in a way that didn't put me to sleep.
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Date: 2003-08-18 07:11 am (UTC)The most GAWDAWFUL 'classic' book that I have ever read, though, is the dreary 'turn-of-the-century epic' Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. There's an essay I like by Garrison Keillor about the book, named "Why Did They Ever Ban A Book This Bad?" The main character is a wimpy, dull, unsympathetic, selfish, wishy-washy, limp dishrag of a girl who wanders vaguely through her own life with no particular ambition or intelligence and who I just want to shake, and the highly forgettable secondary characters who plod dully after her are no better. And the prose itself is purple, awkward, pretentious, convoluted, melodramatic SLUDGE that is almost physically painful to wade through. The worst thing about the book for me, though, was that during my senior year in high school, it was the assigned book for Literary Criticism (a state academic competition that involves reading assigned works of literature and taking timed tests on them), and I had to read it three times. *shudders at the memory*
I copied a portion of Chapter 10 (which has the winning title of 'THE COUNSEL OF WINTER--FORTUNE'S AMBASSADOR CALLS'--absolutely thrilling, I tell you!) to paste as proof of just how bad it is:
Never trust anyone who:
1. lapses into Olde Englishe at random intervals in the midst of a novel set in turn-of-the-century urban Chicago
2. thinks privately to himself "How delicious is my conquest" and means it
3. stops dead the already weakened narrative flow of a work of fiction in order to wax purpley poetic about "why the heart thrills" and moral evolution
4. does anything with mournful misgivings and admits it in those very words
Books like Sister Carrie make me love & appreciate Jane Austen, the Snarky High Literary Bitch-Queen, all the more.
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Date: 2003-08-18 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-18 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-18 01:51 pm (UTC)