Which Bad Book Are You?

[BlackShanglan]

Sister!

The first time I got to stand in a corner in Grade One was because I was reading a Grade Eight science text instead of "Look Jane, look. See Spot run!"

Poor man. I wish you'd been in my kindergarten class instead. They just let me bring my books and get on with things. I still have fond memories of that teacher and that room.

Shanglan

 

[carsonshepherd]

My own Highschool Bad Book Experience was Faulkner's "Light In August". By the second chapter I was overcome with Couldn't Care Less.

Oh God that was a horrible, horrible book.

 

[Equinoxe]

I devoured books in my teens. I wish I'd been the list keeper then I am now, so I could REMEMBER which books I read. Some I'd like to find again, but cannot remember the titles.

I know exactly what you mean; it's a somewhat earlier example, but just the other day I was talking with someone about a book I vaguely remember having as a child (when I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old), but I can't remember the name, the author, or enough about the story to really search for it.

I'm Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand! Noooooooooooo!

You have my deepest condolences. I'm so very sorry.

 

[Guest]

 

[BlackShanglan]

I'm Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand! Noooooooooooo!

May I have the favor of dispatching whomever has suggested that of you in an honorable duel? Some insults really cannot be tolerated.

 

[CopyCarver]

Better to give them something a little more relevant to their lives and which will give them a love of literature and make them read MORE, want to read more. If you teach them how to analyze and write papers on "Harry Potter" then, eventually, you can get them up to "Heart of Darkness." But if you start with "Heart of Darkness" then you lose all but those who are going to be English Majors.

Amen! I've longed believed the answer to "Why can't Johnny read?" is
"self defense" against the superannuated, banal, and/or propoganda-laden crap that most school systems inflict upon their captive audiences.

 

[carsonshepherd]

May I have the favor of dispatching whomever has suggested that of you in an honorable duel? Some insults really cannot be tolerated.

On a retake, I got Heart of Darkness, which isn't quite as bad.

 

[3113]

I'm Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand! Noooooooooooo!

It's okay. You can still be a homosexual even if Ayn Rand didn't like 'em.....

by PaulVarnell RE: Ayn Rand and Homosexuality:
...Rand herself held a strongly negative view of homosexuality....

And commenting on The Fountainhead, Rand said that the love of publisher Gail Wynand, a man, for architect Howard Roark was “greater, I think, than any other emotion in the book.” Rand insisted that the love was not homosexual, but “love in the romantic sense....” Yet in a later essay Rand defined romantic love exactly as “the profound ... passion that unites mind and body in the sexual act.” The contradiction is hard to miss.

By 1983, a year after Rand died, Branden [her successor] was willing to say that she was “absolutely and totally ignorant” about homosexuality

 

[Guest]

I agree that there are ages at which some works of literature are inaccessible. Personally, I've never understood why Hamlet is taught so often in high schools; it seems to me that the emotions and motives in it are largely incomprehensible to teenagers, although Lear would worse yet.

With this in mind, perhaps the most charitable thing one can say about the compiler of a list of bad books that includes "Beowulf," The Hobbit, and "Heart of Darkness" is that he or she has the literary tastes of a twelve year old. That's for The Hobbit, of course, which I think quite accessible after (if not before) that age; for "Beowulf" perhaps fifteen for the quick and twenty for those not very interested in poetry or heroes, and for "Heart of Darkness" I would hazard the guess that twenty-five would not be too late a date to attempt it for the first time.

Shanglan

(ETA: Oh, and I'm quite delighted to be Beowulf.)

As it happens, I have two translations of Beowulf I've read, and I've heard a recording of Seamus Heaney reading his (which is Quite Readable).

Of course, you'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I say that, at 17, I liked "Grendel" better

 

[Guest]

It's okay. You can still be a homosexual even if Ayn Rand didn't like 'em.....

Well Roark and Wynne was certainly obvious in the MOVIE, no matter what Gary Cooper might have intended.

Sorry to admit it, but I liked both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (better). Didn't care for or finish Anthem or that other one she wrote that I liked so little I can't even bother to get up and look at the spine. I didn't give two pins about her politics or philosophy. I just liked the writing. Philosophically Atlas Shrugged dropped me at the end, but the WRITING...the mechanically perfect, almost like a train running on the tracks WRITING. I remember the sound of that writing even though it's been nearly 20 years since I read the book.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Love in the romantic sense between two men is, uh, homosexuality. to Ayn Rand.

 

[Guest]

Love in the romantic sense between two men is, uh, homosexuality. to Ayn Rand.

I suspect she was pulling on the OTHER meaning of romantic, the way Byron is a Romance writer and Beethoven's music is Romantic

 

[Guest]

 

[carsonshepherd]

I suspect she was pulling on the OTHER meaning of romantic, the way Byron is a Romance writer and Beethoven's music is Romantic

Then she shoulda capitalized it. *raspberry*

 

[Guest]

Then she shoulda capitalized it. *raspberry*

She was Ayn Rand. She spelled her name with a "y", glamorized smoking, and made up her own political/philisophical movement still popular with certain segments of adolescent/young adult students today.

Hell, in Dirty Dancing, that was the book Robbie the Shit Waiter handed to Baby saying "Some people matter. Some people don't."

 

[cheerful_deviant]

Apparently I'm "The Crying of Lot 49" and 'incomprehensibly weird'.

I can live with that.

Ditto.

I've never read it so I really can't comment on it.

 

[rgraham666]

Ayn Rand was such a submissive. And she never really got over the Marxism that shaped her early life.

I got my perversions and psychological problems, but I try real hard not to make a political philosophy out of 'em.

 

[3113]

Love in the romantic sense between two men is, uh, homosexuality.

Oh, Carson. You just don't get it. You seem to think Ayn was that linear...um...wait....

See, um, Howard *was* a man, but Gail there (notice the name) was really suppose to stand for all the women, but since there weren't a lot of women publishers back in Ayn's day Gail had to be a man but he was really symbolic of a female so it wasn't romantic love between a guy-and-a-guy but a guy-and-a-female stand-in.

Heterosexual. See?

I mean, a publisher named "Gail Wynland"! That's not only a girl's name, it's a girl's name right out of a romance novel!

 

[BlackShanglan]

As it happens, I have two translations of Beowulf I've read, and I've heard a recording of Seamus Heaney reading his (which is Quite Readable).

He reads it beautifully, doesn't he? From time to time I still have float across my mind his voice saying, "Now that was a good king."

Of course, you'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I say that, at 17, I liked "Grendel" better

I forgive anyone for preferring narrative to Anglo-Saxon poetry at that age. I am quite willing to accept that I am the only person alive who gets that ridiculously carried away by the mere enunciation of caesura-split alliterative kennings, and I acknowledge that on that account if no other, I am indeed a strange and eccentric old crank. I have been an eccentric old crank from my grammar school days, and it would do no good to deny it now - not to anyone who knows me.

Mostly because they were still quite stunned to have a foal in the classroom. Damn, I'll bet you were adorable at that age.

*blushes* You are much too kind. I was only too glad to be amongst persons whose immediate reaction to paper was not to eat it, as alas is too common in my brethren. However, in our favor I will say that I've never met a horse with an instinctive and uncontrollable urge to jump on a human and ride it around a playground, or to try to pry its eyelids open and see what's inside. For the furred and even semi-attractive, there is no more terrifying phrase than a juvenile human's squeal of "Look, pretty!" It's usually the precursor to a finger in the eyeball.

Shanglan

 

[Equinoxe]

I forgive anyone for preferring narrative to Anglo-Saxon poetry at that age. I am quite willing to accept that I am the only person alive who gets that ridiculously carried away by the mere enunciation of caesura-split alliterative kennings, and I acknowledge that on that account if no other, I am indeed a strange and eccentric old crank. I have been an eccentric old crank from my grammar school days, and it would do no good to deny it now - not to anyone who knows me.

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum
þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgðum meodo-setla oftēah.

(Now, I'm trying to imagine a horse being very excited).

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

So Carson, as one Atlas Shrugged to another, how'd you like to be stuck in an elevator with AR for an hour?

As for REALLY bad books, consider being stuck on a desert island with nothing to read but these three: Bleak House (Dickens), War and Peace (Tolstoy), and The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner). On second thought, don't consider that if you have a weak stomach and/or heart.

note: In comparison to Sound and Fury, Light is August is young adult reading, and that's coming from a Faulkner fan.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[BlackShanglan]

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum
þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgðum meodo-setla oftēah.

(Now, I'm trying to imagine a horse being very excited).

It's absurd just how excited. I want to hurl myself into those words and become nothing but them.

Thank you, Equinoxe.

Shanglan

 

[3113]

As for REALLY bad books, consider being stuck on a desert island with nothing to read but these three: Bleak House (Dickens), War and Peace (Tolstoy), and The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner). On second thought, don't consider that if you have a weak stomach and/or heart.

I think I'd learn how to weave a noose from palm fibers very quickly. And how to climb the palm trees so I could hang myself.

Really, Rumple, that wasn't a nice question at all. I'm not even on the Island and I'm contemplating cutting my throat with a razor.....

 

[Equinoxe]

It's absurd just how excited. I want to hurl myself into those words and become nothing but them.

Thank you, Equinoxe.

Shanglan

I can certainly appreciate that sentiment. The other week I spent a while reading texts in Old High German, which I don't even understand, just listening to the sounds and cadence of it in my head.

You're welcome.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

I think I'd learn how to weave a noose from palm fibers very quickly. And how to climb the palm trees so I could hang myself.

Really, Rumple, that wasn't a nice question at all. I'm not even on the Island and I'm contemplating cutting my throat with a razor.....

Sorry about that. There's probably some protocal in the Geneva Convention under 'Crimes Against Humanity" outlawing the mere mention of such a fate.

Rumple Foreskin