OK, just to throw more petrol on the fire: I did have to read a Shakespeare play at school - Julius Caesar. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't realise he had been killed until the second time through. Not a fan of reading the bard.
I like Shakespeare, but I NEVER understand his plays in live performance unless I know the plot beforehand.
I’m the other way around. I always had a hard time following Shakespeare when reading his plays, but when I’d see it (competently) performed it made much more sense to me.
Inteteresting. I've only ever read Shakespeare under academic tutelage, so I usually had at least a rough idea of what was supposed to be going on.
Actually, it generally wasn’t so much the plot I had trouble following (and teachers did help on that point), but rather just the dialogue itself. I had trouble parking out what the characters are saying.
FWIW, when and where I was coming through school, the pattern was Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, Julius Caesar in 10th grade and the Scottish play in 12th grade. (Eleventh grade was American literature only.)
But A Midsummer Nights Dream, which I have formally studied at least three times(summer arts camp, high school English, university), I still find somewhat hard to follow on stage and screen. Though I think there's a theory that Shakespeare made the play deliberately confusing(eg. the female lovers having similiar names) in order to capture the chaotic spirit of the story.
OK, just to throw more petrol on the fire: I did have to read a Shakespeare play at school - Julius Caesar. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't realise he had been killed until the second time through. Not a fan of reading the bard.
As someone who's taught Julius Caesar for many years, I have to say this seems like a major failure on your teacher's part, rather than yours or Shakespeare's.
I thikn it was a) the teacher assumed it was obvious and b) I was so bored/overwhelmed by it that I didn't follow what was happening.
Regarding Shakespeare, there are English teachers who dislike Shakespeare, and poetry, and say as much to their students - that these are things to be endured rather than enjoyed, which immediately poisons the well. I'm with @Trudy - if there's a problem, it probably lies first with the teacher. In high school (which was five years at the time) we did one play per year, even in the American Literature year (Grade 11?): A Midsummer's Night Dream, Henry IV Pt I, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. I was blest to have two English teachers (not that it makes any difference, but one was English and one was Welsh - odd for a remote-ish small Ontario town) one of whom was very good and the other excellent. Makes all the difference.
@KarlLB I want to be very clear about this - I am not taking a swipe at you when I say this. What you wrote above about your take on Tolkien, Dickens, and Asimov makes your hostility to Joyce and Ulysses more comprehensible than anything that you wrote on that rancorous Joyce thread of three or so years ago. Now I have a much clearer sense of what you were expressing there, and while I still disagree with you, what you said there now fits into a coherent picture for me. (That was one occasion I recall that if the six to eight principal contributors to that thread were in the same room there would have been furniture and punches thrown.)
There's more room to manoeuvre in a novel. You can develop things, put in things that will pay off later, or that depend on cumulative effects.
Everything in a short story has to have shown it was worth while by the end of the story.
IMHO a short story is like a watercolour, everything has to be captured quickly and economically. A novel is like an oil painting where there’s scope to build and develop, and even go back on yourself. The comparison is not exact as a glance at, say, Kipling’s manuscripts shows how much work goes into the short story form.
We probably carry assumptions based on our own strengths and weaknesses. I never needed any help avoiding going over word counts at university for example - rather the opposite. Brevity and conciseness seem to come fairly naturally. I blame writer's cramp.
I'm not sure if we're to go with 'perhaps' for O'Connor and Spark, that one couldn't equally make a 'perhaps' case for Kipling?
It's not that Kipling doesn't have psychological insight and character development, but that he usually has other stuff going on.
Kipling's The Gardener has a lot of stuff about grief and consolation, but it also has the big twist at the end that one should have spotted at the beginning (and I don't mean, who the gardener is).
There are novelists who write crisply and tersely. Hemingway comes to mind.
One could say he overdoes it.
I think reading Hemingway at an early age hobbled my ability to appreciate more elongated prose. Everything seems ornate and flowery by comparison, and I think somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking "Why doesn't everybody write like Hemingway?"
On the Shakespeare thing, I've never understood why they often use 'Julius Caesar' to introduce him to school kids.
I think at my high school, the informal pattern was Julius Caeser for Grade 10, Macbeth for 11, and Hamlet for 12. But in Grade 10, we had a teacher from Manchester, left-wing in a ban-the-bomb sort of a way, who didn't like teaching violent stories, so had us read A Midsummer Night's Dream instead. I didn't mind(mostly because I had a major crush on this woman), except that I had already studied the play at arts camp(see above), so woulda liked the opportunity to read something else.
(I think I mentioned this teacher on that brillianly meandering Watership Down thread on the old Ship: she also disliked Lord Of The Flies for anti-violence reasons, so had us read Watership Down instead, apparently not considering that if the rabbits are recognized as stand-ins for humans, the body count for Watership is pretty high.)
I had to read The Mayor of Casterbridge at school. I have not read another Thomas Hardy since. I also did Great Expectations, but that didn't put me off Dickens in the same way.
When CBeebies did Midsummer Night's Dream for early years, they helpfully dressed the two couples in blue or red depending on which pair they ended up in. (It was for the Shakespeare anniversary the other year, and was actually a decent abridgement).
OK, just to throw more petrol on the fire: I did have to read a Shakespeare play at school - Julius Caesar. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't realise he had been killed until the second time through. Not a fan of reading the bard.
As someone who's taught Julius Caesar for many years, I have to say this seems like a major failure on your teacher's part, rather than yours or Shakespeare's.
I thikn it was a) the teacher assumed it was obvious and b) I was so bored/overwhelmed by it that I didn't follow what was happening.
There are far too many "c" named characters in that play. I can't keep track of them.
On the Shakespeare thing, I've never understood why they often use 'Julius Caesar' to introduce him to school kids.
It's got a lot of stabbing, which can be good for keeping kids engaged.
After teaching Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Midsummer Night's Dream over and over and over for many years, I have a lot of opinions about all of them, but the main one is that JC is pretty much over after Antony's funeral speech and the rest is just filler. (Ditto Midsummer -- it should end when the charm is lifted. Nobody needs to see Pyramus and Thisbe, although the 1999 movie version has some fun with it). I think Shakespeare was quite shackled by the convention that plays HAD to have 5 acts, and had often used up all his best material by the end of Act 3.
Oh, but i love Pyramus and Thisbe, it's so remarkably bad. On purpose, of course... it's lovely as a source of rude quotes in slanging matches and such.
In my experience when staged Pyramus and Thisbe gets more laughs than the rest of the play put together.
But I agree that Julius Caesar degenerates into Romans marching on stage, announcing that they've lost or won a battle, and marching off to make way for other Romans to do the same. So does the middle bit of Anthony and Cleopatra.
I had to read The Mayor of Casterbridge at school. I have not read another Thomas Hardy since. I also did Great Expectations, but that didn't put me off Dickens in the same way.
When CBeebies did Midsummer Night's Dream for early years, they helpfully dressed the two couples in blue or red depending on which pair they ended up in. (It was for the Shakespeare anniversary the other year, and was actually a decent abridgement).
Great Expectations is Dickens at his best I think. That and 'A Christmas Carol.'
I enjoyed Hardy as a teenager but wouldn't go back to him now, I don't think - other than his poetry.
I think there are a lot of paradoxes and inconsistencies in much of our reactions to books and other art forms.
For instance, I have no idea why I enjoyed Mervyn Peake as a teenager but not Tolkein.
One would think that I might have liked neither or both.
I can't account for it.
I had the opposite experience - I still love Tolkien but detested Gormenghast with a passion. Still I acknowledge that the detailed crafting of quite such an oppressive world populated by quite such unpleasant people is an impressive feat. It's a convincing universe; I just have no desire to spend my time there; whereas I'd visit Middle Earth in a heartbeat. I got a similar feeling from "The Handmaid's Tale" which I never got more than a few dozen pages into.
Still I'm not sure I'd classify Gormenghast under "shouldn't have read". At least I now know that I don't want to read it again.
OTOH I'm re-reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which I enjoyed years ago on the INTERNETS. The "utilising technical loopholes of magic" bits are still good fun. But my goodness the smug preachy humanism is almost unbearable - it has all the subtlety of a Chick tract! Perhaps one I should have left alone...
I rather regret spending so much time trying to appreciate Faulkner when I was in college. I only did it because a good friend whose taste I respected was an enthusiast. I forced myself through The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, as well as a few short stories before giving up. It's not that I think Faulkner is bad, exactly (though I think there's an adolescent urge to shock, which I find irritating). Some things are just matters of taste, and gothic realism about characters who are all either nasty or pathetic doesn't do much for me (I don't get on with Hardy for much the same reason--I can't remember if I actually finished anything by him, though I tried a few times). Actually, I don't care much for classical modern realism in general, though I remain fond of the early Hemingway, especially the short stories.
I read a lot of fantasy, but like Karl I have no use for the attempts to rewrite LOTR. Anytime I see a book subtitled "Book One of the X Trilogy" I generally leave it on the shelf unless I have reason to know it doesn't contain elves, wizards, or quasi-medieval empires.
Since it's had multiple references here, a film version of A midsummer Night's Dream that I highly recommend is the 2014 version directed by Julie Taymor. It's a filming of a stage production which I think captures so much of the anarchic spirit of the play. It's really a joy. Part of the reason that it has such a vibrant urgency is that it was filmed in seven days, between Christmas and New Years of 2013. During the Q&A Taymor was asked how it was possible in seven days, and she it was because they had to wrap by 2 January, and everyone was on holidays, especially the lawyers.
I was thinking about Pyramus and Thisbe a few days ago because an actor was being interviewed on the radio (I can't recall who it was) and he said that his first stage role was as the Wall. I found that very funny. I wonder how one 'methods' the Wall. I also love the rude mechanicals.
I always thought that the popularity of Julius Caesar on curricula was in large part because of an assumed familiarity with the basic plot, so those unfamiliar with Shakespeare's language can fit it into a known context.
In a different direction, I'm another one who is fond of Hardy's poetry. (Gratitude for that goes to the Welsh teacher I mentioned above.) I noted that it got quite the bump when the film version of The History Boys came out. There's a delicate but quietly devastating scene between the teacher Hector and the student Posner in which they discuss Drummer Hodge. If you watch it (again?), pay attention to the physical business in the scene - at least as revealing as the dialogue. When the film was out I noticed that the Palgrave edition of The Complete Poems was much more easily found in book shops. Deservedly.
I rather regret spending so much time trying to appreciate Faulkner when I was in college. I only did it because a good friend whose taste I respected was an enthusiast. I forced myself through The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, as well as a few short stories before giving up. It's not that I think Faulkner is bad, exactly (though I think there's an adolescent urge to shock, which I find irritating). Some things are just matters of taste, and gothic realism about characters who are all either nasty or pathetic doesn't do much for me (I don't get on with Hardy for much the same reason--I can't remember if I actually finished anything by him, though I tried a few times). Actually, I don't care much for classical modern realism in general, though I remain fond of the early Hemingway, especially the short stories.
I read a lot of fantasy, but like Karl I have no use for the attempts to rewrite LOTR. Anytime I see a book subtitled "Book One of the X Trilogy" I generally leave it on the shelf unless I have reason to know it doesn't contain elves, wizards, or quasi-medieval empires.
Unfortunately, in the fantasy genre, that doesn't leave much!
The Handmaid's Tale is not as depressing as I gather the tv series is. Atwood likes to find people behaving humanely even in horrible situations and not slap them down for it. Also I like her prose.
How much I enjoy Dickens depends very much on what mood I read him in. If you're at all in a mood to read Classic English Literature stay away from him. And Austen.
I bought Jane Austen’s novels in a book club offer (I had been given Persuasion some years earlier as a birthday present (along with a selection of other books including R. H. Dana’s Two years before the mast, and D. M. Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman)). The Austen say unopened on my shelf for a while until I had flu, and then I had several enjoyable days reading them.
Interesting to read our likes and dislikes. Despite my mother in law being a huge fan she was never able to persuade me to like Dickens, though I do think A Christmas Carol is a great book. I like both Austen and Tolkien, and haven't tried Peake since I was a teenager, and didn't get on with it. I read a lot of Hardy at the same time too, but Jude the Obscure rather put me off him. What do we think of Russian novelists? I like Dostoyevsky even though it sometimes feels like reading an unfinished screenplay, but not quite so keen on Tolstoy as I was as a young woman.
Interesting to read our likes and dislikes. Despite my mother in law being a huge fan she was never able to persuade me to like Dickens, though I do think A Christmas Carol is a great book. I like both Austen and Tolkien, and haven't tried Peake since I was a teenager, and didn't get on with it. I read a lot of Hardy at the same time too, but Jude the Obscure rather put me off him. What do we think of Russian novelists? I like Dostoyevsky even though it sometimes feels like reading an unfinished screenplay, but not quite so keen on Tolstoy as I was as a young woman.
Too long and full of names that are too easily confused with each other.
The only problem I had with Gormenghast was that I desperately wanted to know how it related to our world historically and geographically. Who built the castle? When? Who enobled the first Earl? These were questions deliberately not answered it seemed and I found that unsettling.
I tried to read Crime and Punishment but found it so unutterably depressing that I gave up after about 20 pages. I managed about the same with Gormenghast. A work colleague was very enthusiastic about the series. I can't even remember which volume it was that I started. Unlike Crime and Punishment, though, it wasn't the depressiveness. It was just boring.
But couldn't one pose the same kind of questions about Middle Earth or any other fantasy setting?
Ok, I get that Tolkein created a systematic theology to explain it, which Peake didn't.
But I rather think the unsettling aspect is part of the point. As when Titus escapes from Gormenghast only to find himself in a more 'modern' dystopia not dissimilar to our own.
It is unaccountable isn't though, this question of taste?
I admire some Austen novels but can't get on with others.
I didn't take to LoTR but did take to Gormenghast.
Why one and not the other? No idea.
On Dostoyevsky, I loved 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' but have struggled to read anything else by him.
I've only read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' which I found much easier going than I expected. Not read 'Anna Karenina'.
I've read Eco's 'The Name of The Rose' which I enjoyed but have yet to read 'Foucault's Pendulum' which is taking up space on my heaving bookshelves.
I think we go through phases. I used to like reading Marques and Latin American 'magic realism' but no longer relish the prospect now.
I really like Crime and Punishment, and like Karamazov Brothers, and Demons, but I've had trouble keeping going with Dostoyevsky's other work. I approve of his theology and aesthetics more than I do Tolstoy, but I love Anna Karenina. War and Peace I would like except it's depressing. Tolstoy's short(*) stories are on the whole amazing even though by that stage Tolstoy was quite mad.
I read a lot of fantasy, but like Karl I have no use for the attempts to rewrite LOTR. Anytime I see a book subtitled "Book One of the X Trilogy" I generally leave it on the shelf unless I have reason to know it doesn't contain elves, wizards, or quasi-medieval empires.
Unfortunately, in the fantasy genre, that doesn't leave much!
Actually, it leaves quite a bit, particularly in the urban fantasy zone (e.g., Charles De Lint, Stephen Brust, Emma Bull) and some of the Black writers working with African mythos traditions (the late Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisen). And there's more--it's not all swords & sorcery.
I have read quite a few Dostoyevsky, and War and Peace, I quite enjoy the Russians, but the names can get confusing.
@Gamma Gamaliel mentioned Eco, who is, IMO, a superb writer with massive depth to his writing. Foucaults Pendulum is wort hreading if nothing else because there have been so many attempts to copy it without the depth of knowledge he has.
I read a couple of Ecos academic works for my studies, and it shows the level of his understanding.
I have read quite a few Dostoyevsky, and War and Peace, I quite enjoy the Russians, but the names can get confusing.
@Gamma Gamaliel mentioned Eco, who is, IMO, a superb writer with massive depth to his writing. Foucaults Pendulum is wort hreading if nothing else because there have been so many attempts to copy it without the depth of knowledge he has.
I read a couple of Ecos academic works for my studies, and it shows the level of his understanding.
I remember a friend of mine reading Foucault's Pendulum. When she'd finished it I asked her what it was about.
"I've not the faintest idea" she replied.
Thought it probably wasn't one for my reading list.
OTOH I'm re-reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which I enjoyed years ago on the INTERNETS. The "utilising technical loopholes of magic" bits are still good fun. But my goodness the smug preachy humanism is almost unbearable - it has all the subtlety of a Chick tract! Perhaps one I should have left alone...
Actually I've now found that there's more of the former and sufficiently little of the latter that I can grit my teeth and bear it... so I don't regret re-reading after all...
I am quite fond of Foucault's Pendulum. When I was reading it, I was thinking that there were a heck of a lot of tangents from the plot...until it finally clicked that those tangents were the plot.
And ever since, I have never been able to think of "Rick of Casablanca" without smiling.
OTOH I'm re-reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which I enjoyed years ago on the INTERNETS. The "utilising technical loopholes of magic" bits are still good fun. But my goodness the smug preachy humanism is almost unbearable - it has all the subtlety of a Chick tract! Perhaps one I should have left alone...
Actually I've now found that there's more of the former and sufficiently little of the latter that I can grit my teeth and bear it... so I don't regret re-reading after all...
I'm reading this right now after you mentioned it. I'm not sure what to make of it. I like the cleverness (the loopholes etc.) but I can't settle to any particular view of any character because they keep doing about-faces every 30 seconds. Like, are you guys friends? enemies? frenemies? Is this an enemies-to lovers thing? lovers to enemies? WTF is going on, anyway? And there are levels beneath levels beneath levels on everything, some of which are certainly bunkum, but you don't know which...
Eddings came up with one story, and wrote if four times with about a factor of three too much dribble in the middle of each one.
Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that he more or less admitted this. He started writing "The Diamond Throne" first, then went away to write the Belgariad to learn how to write.
Katharine Kerr? I enjoyed the first several of her Deverry novels, but she's another author who ran out of plot long before she ran out of books. Your characterization of "an ongoing D&D campaign with yet another monster around the next corner" is not unfair. I enjoyed the whole "nonlinear time" presentation of the story in the first few books; the stories got less compelling as she jumped around in time less.
FWIW, I'd argue that Janny Wurts's "Wars of Light and Shadow" has failed to jump the shark in the same way. I suspect this is because she had the whole greater story arc planned out before she started writing the first one, so although there are a lot of words, there's precious little repetition. Of course, if she'd actually get around to finishing the last book... (I bought the first book from my school bookshop as escapism from A-levels. It's been a while.)
OTOH I'm re-reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which I enjoyed years ago on the INTERNETS. The "utilising technical loopholes of magic" bits are still good fun. But my goodness the smug preachy humanism is almost unbearable - it has all the subtlety of a Chick tract! Perhaps one I should have left alone...
Heh. Child #1 did a high school class based on that.
The Russians were raised, above. I quite agree about Dostoevski reading like a screen play, and Nabokov in Lectures on Russian Literature (he taught a number of places, but I think that the Lectures are from his time at Cornell) makes much the same observation.
A lesser known work is Vladimir Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. Briefly, in 1941 a Private Chonkin is assigned to guard a downed plane near a remote village. He falls into village life, and through a series of misunderstandings becomes both a villain and a hero of the Soviet Union. It's brilliant satire - so good that Voinovich was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile. Now that's a five red star review in Pravda!
Russian nomenclature is not so difficult as it's made out to be, when it's formal. When it's informal, and the speaker is using a diminutive form, it can become more of a challenge, as a formal name can have multiple diminutive forms which indicate the speaker's intimacy with the person named and, for that matter, their attitude to that person at the moment of the utterance. Off the top of my head, for Pyotr (I was listening to Tchaikovsky this afternoon), there are Pyetka, Pyetusha, and Pyetrushka, and I'm no doubt forgetting others; Ivan can be Vanya (as in the play), Vanka, Vanyechka, Vanyushechka, etc. Like any of these things, it just takes practice. One could always make a list of characters and their variant names. The ironic thing is that the "diminutive" is often longer than the proper name.
My nomination for A Book I Read and Shouldn't Have would be Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. It's not terribly long, but its relentlessly demanding style without discernible payoff make a joyless labour. I could see what he was doing, but it was kind of pointless, unless that was in fact the point. Oh, yes, and for those put off y such things - it's quite bleak.
Eddings came up with one story, and wrote if four times with about a factor of three too much dribble in the middle of each one.
Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that he more or less admitted this. He started writing "The Diamond Throne" first, then went away to write the Belgariad to learn how to write.
Katharine Kerr? I enjoyed the first several of her Deverry novels, but she's another author who ran out of plot long before she ran out of books. Your characterization of "an ongoing D&D campaign with yet another monster around the next corner" is not unfair. I enjoyed the whole "nonlinear time" presentation of the story in the first few books; the stories got less compelling as she jumped around in time less.
FWIW, I'd argue that Janny Wurts's "Wars of Light and Shadow" has failed to jump the shark in the same way. I suspect this is because she had the whole greater story arc planned out before she started writing the first one, so although there are a lot of words, there's precious little repetition. Of course, if she'd actually get around to finishing the last book... (I bought the first book from my school bookshop as escapism from A-levels. It's been a while.)
Some of the "didn't finish the last book" people are caught in a publisher's trap where, if the first two (ten) books didn't earn enough, the publisher simply doesn't WANT the last book. And so it never gets out there.
I have a habit of recommending books to people that I haven't read myself, but which quickly become their favorites.
For example, I gave up on Lolita about halfway through, mostly because I have a short attention span for fiction, and it really is a just a whimsically mindless piece of writing. About six years later I gave my copy to a friend who was almost completely unfamiliar with the book, and he quickly fell into a dolorous haze of literary obsession. I think he ended up reading it several times, at least once in an Italian translation. (My friend is a language-nerd, and that book is an onslaught of puns and wordplay.)
I also once bought a copy of Mary McCarthy's The Group, which I never picked up(again, fiction), but gave to a friend who was a women's studies minor and took an interest in feminist and feminist-adjacent writing. I don't think she fell head-over-heels like my other friend did for Nabokov, but it seemed to make a substantial impression on her.
A few years back, I recommended the movie It's A Wonderful Life to a student who was going through a Jimmy Stewart phase. She quite enjoyed it, but I think it was over a year before I watched the film myself. (Reviewed it on the old Ship's movie thread.)
Some of the "didn't finish the last book" people are caught in a publisher's trap where, if the first two (ten) books didn't earn enough, the publisher simply doesn't WANT the last book. And so it never gets out there.
FWIW, I just discovered that her final book (#11) is now complete and in the hands of the editor. Which probably means publication in about a year, maybe. I'd warmly recommend the series to anyone, but be warned that you'll want to read it carefully - this isn't your generic turn the crank simple story, by any means.
Of course, if she'd actually get around to finishing the last book...
{Waves at George R. R. Martin.}
Patrick Rothfuss has been working on the third book of his Kingkiller trilogy for 11 years now (the first two were very good). I've heard that some fans are so mad they've publicly vowed not to read it, even he does finish it someday...
@Pangolin Guerre - I think this is fine when you have a small-ish number of characters, and so can keep a track of the various names they are called by. And there is the unfamiliarity issue (we might easily recognise "Bob" as a short version of "Robert" and so not ahve a problem, whereas - say - Potyr to Petrushka we might not so easily recognise. It is a cultural thing).
The problem with, say War and Peace is that there are so many characters. Feodor I find easier as there are generally fewer.
Comments
FWIW, when and where I was coming through school, the pattern was Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, Julius Caesar in 10th grade and the Scottish play in 12th grade. (Eleventh grade was American literature only.)
That theory seems reasonable to me.
For instance, I have no idea why I enjoyed Mervyn Peake as a teenager but not Tolkein.
One would think that I might have liked neither or both.
I can't account for it.
I thikn it was a) the teacher assumed it was obvious and b) I was so bored/overwhelmed by it that I didn't follow what was happening.
@KarlLB I want to be very clear about this - I am not taking a swipe at you when I say this. What you wrote above about your take on Tolkien, Dickens, and Asimov makes your hostility to Joyce and Ulysses more comprehensible than anything that you wrote on that rancorous Joyce thread of three or so years ago. Now I have a much clearer sense of what you were expressing there, and while I still disagree with you, what you said there now fits into a coherent picture for me. (That was one occasion I recall that if the six to eight principal contributors to that thread were in the same room there would have been furniture and punches thrown.)
I've heard this said before and I cannot understand how it could be true. I can imagine writing short stories; I can't imagine myself writing a novel.
Everything in a short story has to have shown it was worth while by the end of the story.
Kipling's The Gardener has a lot of stuff about grief and consolation, but it also has the big twist at the end that one should have spotted at the beginning (and I don't mean, who the gardener is).
One could say he overdoes it.
On the Shakespeare thing, I've never understood why they often use 'Julius Caesar' to introduce him to school kids.
I fell in love with 'The Tempest' at school but know plenty of people who don't rate it.
I think reading Hemingway at an early age hobbled my ability to appreciate more elongated prose. Everything seems ornate and flowery by comparison, and I think somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking "Why doesn't everybody write like Hemingway?"
I think at my high school, the informal pattern was Julius Caeser for Grade 10, Macbeth for 11, and Hamlet for 12. But in Grade 10, we had a teacher from Manchester, left-wing in a ban-the-bomb sort of a way, who didn't like teaching violent stories, so had us read A Midsummer Night's Dream instead. I didn't mind(mostly because I had a major crush on this woman), except that I had already studied the play at arts camp(see above), so woulda liked the opportunity to read something else.
(I think I mentioned this teacher on that brillianly meandering Watership Down thread on the old Ship: she also disliked Lord Of The Flies for anti-violence reasons, so had us read Watership Down instead, apparently not considering that if the rabbits are recognized as stand-ins for humans, the body count for Watership is pretty high.)
When CBeebies did Midsummer Night's Dream for early years, they helpfully dressed the two couples in blue or red depending on which pair they ended up in. (It was for the Shakespeare anniversary the other year, and was actually a decent abridgement).
There are far too many "c" named characters in that play. I can't keep track of them.
Um yes. Like the parody which almost isn't:
Guns. Blood. Drink. Woman.
It's got a lot of stabbing, which can be good for keeping kids engaged.
After teaching Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Midsummer Night's Dream over and over and over for many years, I have a lot of opinions about all of them, but the main one is that JC is pretty much over after Antony's funeral speech and the rest is just filler. (Ditto Midsummer -- it should end when the charm is lifted. Nobody needs to see Pyramus and Thisbe, although the 1999 movie version has some fun with it). I think Shakespeare was quite shackled by the convention that plays HAD to have 5 acts, and had often used up all his best material by the end of Act 3.
But I agree that Julius Caesar degenerates into Romans marching on stage, announcing that they've lost or won a battle, and marching off to make way for other Romans to do the same. So does the middle bit of Anthony and Cleopatra.
Great Expectations is Dickens at his best I think. That and 'A Christmas Carol.'
I enjoyed Hardy as a teenager but wouldn't go back to him now, I don't think - other than his poetry.
I had the opposite experience - I still love Tolkien but detested Gormenghast with a passion. Still I acknowledge that the detailed crafting of quite such an oppressive world populated by quite such unpleasant people is an impressive feat. It's a convincing universe; I just have no desire to spend my time there; whereas I'd visit Middle Earth in a heartbeat. I got a similar feeling from "The Handmaid's Tale" which I never got more than a few dozen pages into.
Still I'm not sure I'd classify Gormenghast under "shouldn't have read". At least I now know that I don't want to read it again.
OTOH I'm re-reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which I enjoyed years ago on the INTERNETS. The "utilising technical loopholes of magic" bits are still good fun. But my goodness the smug preachy humanism is almost unbearable - it has all the subtlety of a Chick tract! Perhaps one I should have left alone...
I read a lot of fantasy, but like Karl I have no use for the attempts to rewrite LOTR. Anytime I see a book subtitled "Book One of the X Trilogy" I generally leave it on the shelf unless I have reason to know it doesn't contain elves, wizards, or quasi-medieval empires.
I was thinking about Pyramus and Thisbe a few days ago because an actor was being interviewed on the radio (I can't recall who it was) and he said that his first stage role was as the Wall. I found that very funny. I wonder how one 'methods' the Wall. I also love the rude mechanicals.
I always thought that the popularity of Julius Caesar on curricula was in large part because of an assumed familiarity with the basic plot, so those unfamiliar with Shakespeare's language can fit it into a known context.
In a different direction, I'm another one who is fond of Hardy's poetry. (Gratitude for that goes to the Welsh teacher I mentioned above.) I noted that it got quite the bump when the film version of The History Boys came out. There's a delicate but quietly devastating scene between the teacher Hector and the student Posner in which they discuss Drummer Hodge. If you watch it (again?), pay attention to the physical business in the scene - at least as revealing as the dialogue. When the film was out I noticed that the Palgrave edition of The Complete Poems was much more easily found in book shops. Deservedly.
Well, ain't you a bright boy.
Not much of a recommendation............
Unfortunately, in the fantasy genre, that doesn't leave much!
On Dickens, no, I'm not a big fan.
I like 'Great Expectations' and think 'A Christmas Carol' is one of the best novellas in the English language.
On The Gormenghast thing - yes, I found it oddly compelling as a teenager but not sure I'd revisit.
I may revisit Middle Earth again one day.
I've got a copy of 'The Hand Maid's Tale' but have yet to steel myself to read it.
So much literature to catch up on. I have only recently started reading African novels for instance.
How much I enjoy Dickens depends very much on what mood I read him in. If you're at all in a mood to read Classic English Literature stay away from him. And Austen.
Too long and full of names that are too easily confused with each other.
The only problem I had with Gormenghast was that I desperately wanted to know how it related to our world historically and geographically. Who built the castle? When? Who enobled the first Earl? These were questions deliberately not answered it seemed and I found that unsettling.
But couldn't one pose the same kind of questions about Middle Earth or any other fantasy setting?
Ok, I get that Tolkein created a systematic theology to explain it, which Peake didn't.
But I rather think the unsettling aspect is part of the point. As when Titus escapes from Gormenghast only to find himself in a more 'modern' dystopia not dissimilar to our own.
It is unaccountable isn't though, this question of taste?
I admire some Austen novels but can't get on with others.
I didn't take to LoTR but did take to Gormenghast.
Why one and not the other? No idea.
On Dostoyevsky, I loved 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' but have struggled to read anything else by him.
I've only read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' which I found much easier going than I expected. Not read 'Anna Karenina'.
I've read Eco's 'The Name of The Rose' which I enjoyed but have yet to read 'Foucault's Pendulum' which is taking up space on my heaving bookshelves.
I think we go through phases. I used to like reading Marques and Latin American 'magic realism' but no longer relish the prospect now.
The second half seemed to lose that immediacy and urgency.
I have read The Brothers Karamazov, but it didn't make as much of an impact on me.
(*) this is a relative term.
Actually, it leaves quite a bit, particularly in the urban fantasy zone (e.g., Charles De Lint, Stephen Brust, Emma Bull) and some of the Black writers working with African mythos traditions (the late Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisen). And there's more--it's not all swords & sorcery.
@Gamma Gamaliel mentioned Eco, who is, IMO, a superb writer with massive depth to his writing. Foucaults Pendulum is wort hreading if nothing else because there have been so many attempts to copy it without the depth of knowledge he has.
I read a couple of Ecos academic works for my studies, and it shows the level of his understanding.
I remember a friend of mine reading Foucault's Pendulum. When she'd finished it I asked her what it was about.
"I've not the faintest idea" she replied.
Thought it probably wasn't one for my reading list.
Actually I've now found that there's more of the former and sufficiently little of the latter that I can grit my teeth and bear it... so I don't regret re-reading after all...
And ever since, I have never been able to think of "Rick of Casablanca" without smiling.
I'm reading this right now after you mentioned it. I'm not sure what to make of it. I like the cleverness (the loopholes etc.) but I can't settle to any particular view of any character because they keep doing about-faces every 30 seconds. Like, are you guys friends? enemies? frenemies? Is this an enemies-to lovers thing? lovers to enemies? WTF is going on, anyway? And there are levels beneath levels beneath levels on everything, some of which are certainly bunkum, but you don't know which...
But the cleverness is fun.
Eddings came up with one story, and wrote if four times with about a factor of three too much dribble in the middle of each one.
Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that he more or less admitted this. He started writing "The Diamond Throne" first, then went away to write the Belgariad to learn how to write.
Katharine Kerr? I enjoyed the first several of her Deverry novels, but she's another author who ran out of plot long before she ran out of books. Your characterization of "an ongoing D&D campaign with yet another monster around the next corner" is not unfair. I enjoyed the whole "nonlinear time" presentation of the story in the first few books; the stories got less compelling as she jumped around in time less.
FWIW, I'd argue that Janny Wurts's "Wars of Light and Shadow" has failed to jump the shark in the same way. I suspect this is because she had the whole greater story arc planned out before she started writing the first one, so although there are a lot of words, there's precious little repetition. Of course, if she'd actually get around to finishing the last book... (I bought the first book from my school bookshop as escapism from A-levels. It's been a while.)
Heh. Child #1 did a high school class based on that.
A lesser known work is Vladimir Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. Briefly, in 1941 a Private Chonkin is assigned to guard a downed plane near a remote village. He falls into village life, and through a series of misunderstandings becomes both a villain and a hero of the Soviet Union. It's brilliant satire - so good that Voinovich was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile. Now that's a five red star review in Pravda!
Russian nomenclature is not so difficult as it's made out to be, when it's formal. When it's informal, and the speaker is using a diminutive form, it can become more of a challenge, as a formal name can have multiple diminutive forms which indicate the speaker's intimacy with the person named and, for that matter, their attitude to that person at the moment of the utterance. Off the top of my head, for Pyotr (I was listening to Tchaikovsky this afternoon), there are Pyetka, Pyetusha, and Pyetrushka, and I'm no doubt forgetting others; Ivan can be Vanya (as in the play), Vanka, Vanyechka, Vanyushechka, etc. Like any of these things, it just takes practice. One could always make a list of characters and their variant names. The ironic thing is that the "diminutive" is often longer than the proper name.
My nomination for A Book I Read and Shouldn't Have would be Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. It's not terribly long, but its relentlessly demanding style without discernible payoff make a joyless labour. I could see what he was doing, but it was kind of pointless, unless that was in fact the point. Oh, yes, and for those put off y such things - it's quite bleak.
Some of the "didn't finish the last book" people are caught in a publisher's trap where, if the first two (ten) books didn't earn enough, the publisher simply doesn't WANT the last book. And so it never gets out there.
For example, I gave up on Lolita about halfway through, mostly because I have a short attention span for fiction, and it really is a just a whimsically mindless piece of writing. About six years later I gave my copy to a friend who was almost completely unfamiliar with the book, and he quickly fell into a dolorous haze of literary obsession. I think he ended up reading it several times, at least once in an Italian translation. (My friend is a language-nerd, and that book is an onslaught of puns and wordplay.)
I also once bought a copy of Mary McCarthy's The Group, which I never picked up(again, fiction), but gave to a friend who was a women's studies minor and took an interest in feminist and feminist-adjacent writing. I don't think she fell head-over-heels like my other friend did for Nabokov, but it seemed to make a substantial impression on her.
A few years back, I recommended the movie It's A Wonderful Life to a student who was going through a Jimmy Stewart phase. She quite enjoyed it, but I think it was over a year before I watched the film myself. (Reviewed it on the old Ship's movie thread.)
FWIW, I just discovered that her final book (#11) is now complete and in the hands of the editor. Which probably means publication in about a year, maybe. I'd warmly recommend the series to anyone, but be warned that you'll want to read it carefully - this isn't your generic turn the crank simple story, by any means.
Patrick Rothfuss has been working on the third book of his Kingkiller trilogy for 11 years now (the first two were very good). I've heard that some fans are so mad they've publicly vowed not to read it, even he does finish it someday...
The problem with, say War and Peace is that there are so many characters. Feodor I find easier as there are generally fewer.