Shit Books

Hmm. See, I understood that part. Covenant's a prick because he doesn't want to lose the reflexes that are keeping him alive in the "Real World". He starts being less of a prick when he starts seeing both worlds as real. What gets me about Donaldson is diarrhea of the thesaurus. in Runes of the Earth he used the word Formication six times in 2 pages. Yeah, I get it. It's the feeling of ants on the skin, and once, maybe twice, would have worked. But SIX fucking times? Steve, buddy, I know you're smart. I have seldom seen so brilliant an exercise in world building, but there's no need to rub people's faces in it. In short, I'm just the opposite: I think he's an awful writer, but I love his ideas.

I've done that. I HATED the Plague in High School. Read it in my 30's. Turns out to be a great book.
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Had the same experience with Chalker, then later in life with Turtledove.

 

True, but there's a lot of space and a lot of books between the two.
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I mean, I can only dislike what I have tried to read. You don't see me dissing Danielle Steele because I have never read her stuff. I won't dis Stephanie Meyers here (though anywhere else she's fair game) because I haven't read her.

 

Other than overly convoluted language done poorly, those are all upsides to Fantasy for me (though I Far and Away prefer Cook and Brust to Donaldson, and Martin's... odd in a lot of ways. What I have read of his non-GoT work is mostly quite excellent.)

 

Hemmingway's best was For Whom The Bell Tolls. The rest - meh. I can get through them, but they're a little over the top for me.

As far as The Grapes of Wrath goes, that there's nothing good that happens is kind of the point.

 

probably the most annoying, stupid book i've read is allan bloom's the closing of the american mind.
this is followed closely by a book about derrida and prayers and tears that i can't remember much about because i threw it out the window of a moving car. i was asked to review it. so i did.
this is followed closely by the astonishingly bad writing of people like dan brown and---worse even--anne rice.
this is in turn followed by a clot of writers who have convinced me that fantasy is a genre i will never like.
i can't get through stuff like koontz or what's-his-name the lawyer guy who gets himself into linear plot problems and start blowing shit up...gresham. can't get through it. one-dimensional cookie cutter bullshit.

i think i have a problem with most genre fiction, actually. except noir fiction for some reason. i like the sentences. i like well-crafted sentences.

"convoluted" language to me means one of two things: either the reader isn't willing to do any work to understand a piece---in which case i've no sympathy---or the sentence isn't well-crafted. badly crafted sentences are the stuff of fantasy fiction.

dfw i like quite a bit. pynchon too--but especially the crying of lot 49 and v. gravitys rainbow has some really lovely sentences, but it's more uneven when you get into the second half. faulkner sentences are mostly lovely. i imagine people would call gertrude stein convoluted. i would refer to those people as goofy.

 

I agree with you. What reinforced my feelings about Catcher in the Rye was hearing what my extremely book-ish high schooler had to say about it. He despised the main character and found the exercise of slogging through the book painful. He didn't care for the writing style of Caulfield as well, which was my main beef. What I find most troubling is that 30 years later the exact same book lists are being offered to kids that they were to me. There's been nothing--nothing? written in 3 decades that could substitute in quality for The Catcher In The Rye? Lord help us. That said, I did like The Jungle, Death Be Not Proud and Heart of Darkness. Was completely clueless in understanding The Merchant of Venice though I blame the sub-standard, hick-town high school teacher for not understanding what she was teaching. Great Gatsby was a steaming pile, IMO. I got 20 pages into that and Cliffs-noted the rest of it.

 

personally, i never really like salinger. i didnt like s.e hinton either. maybe because i dont have space in my head for adolescent angst. other folk do, and they find these texts to be otherwise for that.

heart of darkness is a fun book if the person teaching it knows how to let you into the sentences. it's an anti-colonial novel written at a time before a real anti-colonial politics, so it works from inside that rationality and dismantles it from the inside. i have a whole dog-and-pony show worked out around this novel---i can't count the number of times i ended up having to teach it.

 

I can't recall reading anything that I thought was 'shit.' Maybe because I am pretty particular and stick to authors I know or have been suggested by people whose judgment I trust.

With very few exceptions, I don't read science fiction, fantasy or 'bestsellers.'

 

Troll answer: The Bible.

Actual answer: Neuromancer (I know, I know, groundbreaking cyberpunk, blah blah) I tried three times to get through it. Put it down each time.

 

Constitutional Law by Stone, Seidman, & Kush



I don't think I've ever read a bigger piece of shit.

 

i'll agree it was tough to follow, but it really is amazing

 

Lol, to clarify, it's not that textbooks are inherently sucky, it's that sucky textbooks are shit. That textbook is so poorly written and devoid of cohesive thought that I had to purchase another textbook to self-study in order to understand what the first textbook was talking about.

 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it doesn't make ANY sense unless you've seen the movie. i mean, fuck punctuation right?

 

Makes perfect sense if you read other Thompson first. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and Hells Angels (that last is particularly excellent, I thought) give one enough sense of what he's going about to make F&L in LV coherent and enjoyable. Intensive experience with chemically altered perspective is also a true aide to understanding that book.

Most definitely NOT for everyone though.