Worst "classic" reading experience ever

[timepiececlock]

What'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.

Comments

[duelingrose.livejournal.com]

Gawd, I know what you mean! I ended up putting Jane Eyre down after a while. Mostly when I realized I was no longer reading, but just staring at the pages.

Here's a book you might like. It's called "Sophie's World" and it's pretty good. It had a lot of phylosophy in it, but it's not boring.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

Who is the author?

[duelingrose.livejournal.com]

Some Swedish guy...


My sister seems to have run off with the book. You should be able to look him up on Amazon.com

[thisficklemob.livejournal.com]

Word on Ethan Frome. Gawd, I hated that book. I say, loathed. I think I might have even read all of it. The same cannot be said for the short story "Billy Budd," which was also required reading. I don't think any of us finished it. And it was a short story, for crying out loud. Awful.

I hated To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It's supposed to be revolutionary in its stream of consciousness style, but I just didn't like it.

Among my "classic" favorites is Middlemarch by George Eliot (female). Warning: this book is unconscionably long. But the main character, despite her flaws, really is rich and interesting, and the character portraits are devastatingly rendered.

I also really came to like Pride and Prejudice once I realized that, despite it's vintage and its literary merit, it really is a romance novel at heart. Once I accepted that, I find it quite charming. :)

I admit, to my chagrin, to never having read any of the Brontes in full. I chalk that up to my junior year English teacher going all experimental in format, by which I got to read Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing instead of Beowulf. (Although Beowulf did eventually come back to get me, it was in a new and apparently much improved translation than any available when I was in high school.) I did start on my brother's school copy of Wuthering Heights when I was in 8th or 9th grade, but I lost interest and stopped reading, rather creeped out by how people kept dying of coughs. (I got bad coughs as a child and teenager, and so the whole consumption thing was unsettling to me. ;) )

caia

[lianhanshee.livejournal.com]

The Good Earth is such a pointless use of time. I am relieved to find someone else who despised it as much as I did. I think you're right, I didn't have any issues with the subject matter but it was incredibly boring. Unfortunately, my freshman English teacher never listened (and still doesn't! He's my Dad, and it's still something I'm trying to get him to understand!).

Also, I wanted to kill myself during Wuthering Heights. That one I read on my own and I wish I'd stopped straight away. I can never get that time back.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

Wuthering Heights I hate at first, and then by the end end kinda liked, once I acknowledged to myself "I don't like anyone in this book. They're all stupid and deserve each other's pain." Once I got over that, it was a more fun read. Like watching a snowball going downhill.

[octopedingenue]

I have to agree about Jane Eyre; I wouldn't DIE if I HAD to read it again, but my life will go on much more happily if I DON'T have to. It shares many of the same 'feminist' traits that "Buffy" does--foremost among them the idea that a man can only be 'good' and 'safe' for a 'strong woman' once he has been effectively castrated!

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:

In the light of the world's attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie's mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?

For all the liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic philosophers, we have but an infantile perception of morals. There is more in the subject than mere conformity to a law of evolution. It is yet deeper than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose's subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of morals.

"Oh," thought Drouet, "how delicious is my conquest."

"Ah," thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, "what is it I have lost?"

Before this world-old proposition we stand, serious, interested, confused; endeavouring to evolve the true theory of morals--the true answer to what is right.

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.

[callherblondie.livejournal.com]

Oh, my. I have never read Sister Carrie but the snippet you included in your post is so cringeworthy that if you didn't say where it was from, I would have assumed it was the winning submission for one of those jokey bad writing contests.

second time's the charm...

[crushw-eyeliner.livejournal.com]

I tried to post...WORD, I LOATHE Ethan Frome, but LJ ate it.

Silly LJ.

Anyway - I couldn't finish it - started it, skipped to the middle, couldn't bear to read more. I always cheered whenever John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank slated it...I do like those morally ambiguous, charming assassin types..especially if they're John Cusack and they hate the same literature I do!

Re: second time's the charm...

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

John Cusack dissed it in a movie? A movie I already liked? Well, I'll have to watch it again then and pay more attention. :D

I had to finish it, because it was an in-depth analyzing thing for scool. Ugh.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I have to admit my eye kept going back to "mournful misgivings." That's just....it's...... well I would never put those two words together that way.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I guess we can all knock "Sister Carrie" off any future reading lists then?

oh yeah!

[crushw-eyeliner.livejournal.com]

When he's walking around his old haunts, and goes back to his high school and runs into his english teacher? He brings up Ethan Frome.

I love that movie.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I liked Wutherign Heights by the end of it. I spent a great deal of time wondering "Why should I read about these psycho people? I don't like any of them and they deserve every bit of misery they bring upon themselves." But then I stopped trying to sympathize with the characters and just sort of watched it go. Then I liked it better; it certainly was well written and had some lovely passages.

I've never read To The Lighthouse, Beowulf, or Middlemarch, so I'll take your word on those. I plan to read P&P someday though.

[cosmicfish.livejournal.com]

I was gone when you first posted this. I'm sorry I missed it -

Anyway, the books I've had to read and hated were A Prayer For Owen Meany and by John Irving and Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton. I especially hated Cry, The Beloved Country for its sentimentality (And I'm a sucker for melodrama), not to mention the constant repetition and the didactic tone.

Now - I do like Wurthering Heights. Actually, I love it. Not for any intelligent reason, mind you. I just loved that I kept thinking Heathcliff would improve himself through his love for Catherine, that he would conform to the 'reformed bad boy' cliche. Only - he never did. Even when he stopped tormenting the younger generation it was out of fatigue, not out of any sense of right or wrong.

Plus, I think prose is pretty. No really, I do. I just like reading it -

And I'll admit to liking novels without liking all of the characters. I intensely dislike Lucie Manette of A Tale of Two Cities for instance (For God's sake! Stop being a 'golden thread' and act just a little conflicted! Grrr-argh!), but I like the novel for Sydney Carton, Madame Defarge, and the mob scenes.

I'm just going to stop before I call my intelligence completely into question -

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

The prose saved Wuthering Heights for me where it failed with Jan Eyre. One weird thing is that our English teacher told us before we started reading that some women apparently fall in love with the character of Heathcliffe, or at least get a crush on him. Now, I knew what she was talking about because I understand the fan mentality for that sort of reaction to a character (OMG! Spike was naked in the episode! I shall never be this happy again!), but some of the other students gave her funny looks at the idea.

We all gave her funny looks when we started reading the book.

Teacher: "So, what do you think of Heathcliffe? Do you see why people like him?"

Students:
"He's abusive."
"He's an asshole."
"He's insane."
"Scary."
"And cruel. I would never date him."
"I wouldn't let my friends date him."

[cosmicfish.livejournal.com]

LOL.

I agree with you there - I thought he was horrible! I just liked that he stayed that way and wasn't saved by THIS GREAT WHOLESOME LOVE, like I expected him to be. I'm not sure if I'm explaining it right - I liked him because he was the cliche who refused to be cliched?

But believe me when I say I didn't fall in love with his character. I was mostly sickened by him, actually.

::makes face::

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I did read this one great scene in an unifinished work-in-progress fic by LA ward that had Spike standing over Buffy's grave, drunk as a lord, cursing her and screaming out chunks of a Heathcliffe monologue vertabim while kicking her gravestone. That was pretty cool. And sad.

[beck-liz.livejournal.com]

I tried to read Jane Eyre and Tess of D'Urbervilles for English class and failed miserably. Not the class, mind; I managed to skim enough to get by. But gah. Haven't read the other two, but I did see the movie version of Ethan Frome. Fast-forwarded through it, actually. It was awful; even the presence of Liam Neeson in the title role didn't do much more than provide eye candy. Bleh.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

They made a movie of Ethan Frome? God help us.

[beck-liz.livejournal.com]

They did. I think Patricia Arquette was in it, too. Like I said, the only redeeming part of it was Liam Neeson.