The Classics

[dr_mabeuse]

The first law of reading: If you don't like the damned thing, don't force yourself to read it! What in the world is the point of that?

It is good to challenge yourself and read above what you usually might choose for the beach, but what in the world good does it do you to force yourself to read Dickens or Flaubert or Milton if you don't enjoy it? Just so you can say you endured it? Why do people still think they have to torture themselves with books?

Classics are considered classics because a lot of people over the years have found that they seem reward the reader with deep pleasure. But if it doesn't do it for you, then the hell with it.

I was an English major too, and I would never curl up with a copy of Plato or Dickens or Jane Austin half the stuff they had us read in college, bcause I just don't care for them and find them dull as dirt. (And honestly, whose going to curl up a glass of lemonade and a copy of Kant or Marx or Nietsche? You'd have to be insane! Or a philosophy major, which is the same thing.) We were being taught the history and evolution of prose and poetry in college, so we had to read that stuff, but you don't, and trying to force your way through War and Peace will probably do nothing more than produce another person who thinks that this whole business about "literature" is just a bunch of academic bullshit

My all time favorite short story:

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What a totally creepy little weirdo story

 

[Guest]

The first law of reading: If you don't like the damned thing, don't force yourself to read it! What in the world is the point of that?

Very much the conclusion I've come to, now that I'm looking more toward the end than the beginning of my time here. Life's too short to read books I don't like.

There is a prestige to go along with reading "classics" but it's sort of a funny one. I do like some classic literature. I'm constantly rediscovering things out of the past that appeal to me. But I keep a box just for books I buy that don't work out. I can take other people's recommendations and read reviews, but in the end, it is all down to me and the author and the little world they created. If I don't want to be there, I no longer feel committed to staying through the whole trip.

Any hour I waste struggling through a book that I don't like is an hour I could be spending reading something that I find completely wonderful. If a book doesn't "get good" within a few chapters or a certain number of pages, the author isn't doing his/her job, which is to bring me into the story and start building the world. I've yet to read more than a third through a book I didn't like from early stages and have it get any better. If I have to work that hard to like a book, it's just not worth the effort.

No more "clean plate" syndrome reading for me. There are just too many books!

 

[Aurora Black]

Were these mentioned?

Swift's Gulliver's Travels & A Modest Proposal.

 

[cantdog]

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler and The Maltese Falcon by Dash Hammett

Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes books

Gun with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin-- this is a fantastic book, repays rereading. Read it to your teenagers.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by RLS. Short! But every word placed just so.

The Man Who Would Be King, one of the very few Kipling works I would recommend to anyone. Short! But such a well-written little gem.

allow me to add dittos on the Three Musketeers and Dracula, Mark Twain

Avoid Fenimore Cooper, avoid Dickens, and for that matter, avoid Booth Tarkington. Victorian verbiage is tedious.

The Code of the Woosters by my idol, P.G. Wodehouse


Making lists like this is such addictive fun.