Books I Hate
Jan. 7th, 2006 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI spend so much time here talking about books I love that I thought I might as well reassure people that I don't in fact, spend my free time perpetrating unnatural acts with folios and taking quartos out for intimate lunches. Well, not all of my free time, anyway. So I decided to write about some books I hate.
Originally, I was going to write about books that had been spoiled for me by overanalysis in horrible English classes, but then I looked over my mental list of books I had in English classes and discovered that while said classes are in fact the source of most of the books I've read that I simply can't stand, I haven't actually developed a dislike for anything based on the way it was taught to me. In fact, it tends to be more of the reverse; my grudging and bitter respect for Madame Bovary is based entirely on the feelings of the professor who insisted for half a semester that it was a black comedy and we were all simply failing to notice the joke. (I have no idea whether Flaubert intended the book to be read this way, but I have to say that it becomes a devastatingly hilarious novel.) I therefore suspect that the reason various classes are my major source for books I hate is that classes have been the major thing that have caused me to read books I would never otherwise have touched with a ten-foot pole. Of course, some good things have come of that-- I did not expect to fall madly and passionately in love with The Scarlet Letter, especially when the rest of the class and the teacher saw it as a cross to be carried-- but there have been some real stinkers. Things I hate for their quality, or for their outlook, or for their prose, or for simply existing; books I would rather bungee-jump from the Great Wall of China than again attempt to open; books whose popularity I simply cannot comprehend.
Mind you, I try to keep an open mind. I am sure that the authors of many of the books I hate are and were good and wise people. Except Wordsworth. Wordsworth was a git. I know full well that many people I like and respect and whose critical views I find essential love books that I hate, and that's absolutely fine with me. I don't like hating books. I enjoy being talked into appreciation of books I originally didn't like, and I try my damnedest to at least come to a technical understanding of the good points of the works and authors a lot of people seem to think brilliant that I couldn't tolerate. Except about Marianne Moore, even if she did go to Bryn Mawr. I think I may be allergic, literally, to Marianne Moore. Nothing anyone can say would help. If you love something I hate, please, please, tell me what you see in it, unless it's William Carlos Williams, because I just can't deal, and I will try very hard to understand.
So, some books and authors I really hate:
-- Wordsworth. Way to hide the real beauty of nature under a veil of staggering banality.
-- Ethan Frome. Why did the chicken cross the road? To die. In the rain. After a period of twenty years. Pointlessly. With the universe laughing at it.
-- Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorrit. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because everybody hated its tribal background, dooming it to a lifetime of extremely poorly worked out metaphor and innately squicky sexuality.
-- The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers. I admit that this is a brilliant book, but I already had my adolescence and do not need to reread a version of it with a much more depressing outcome.
-- Marianne Moore. When people ask me what's wrong with poetry today, I tend to gesture in her general direction. "A poem should not mean, but be?" *retreats behind a defensive barrier of Shelley* *starts assembling automatic weaponry*
-- William Carlos Williams. Every so often, I would like to read a poem that is longer than two lines and fewer than two hundred. Oddly, this does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Williams. The two-line ones require five seconds and an intimate knowledge of the author's biography; the long ones require five days, an intimate knowledge of the author's biography, and random tidbits of information about, say, yachting in California in the 1920s. Life is just too short.
-- Beloved. What in the name of all the saints and little fishes does everybody seem to SEE in this book? I've read almost all of Toni Morrison, in one semester of high school, and although I hated all of it I can admit to technical accomplishment and a fair quantity of interesting argument in most of her oeuvre. This one? Is it IN ENGLISH? Because you couldn't prove that by me. Everyone else in the class fell desperately in love, and the teacher was so delighted and kept going on and on about how this was the best thing he'd ever read, and I could not parse what they were saying about it as having one damn thing to do with the book in front of me. I kept wondering if my copy had slipped in from some alternate dimension in which it had a totally different text. Then I'd go back to clutching my copy of The Scarlet Letter and wondering if they were just all raving lunatics. Seriously, if anyone can explain ANYTHING about why this won the Nobel Prize to me, I will love you forever.
-- The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. Heh. I still have somewhere the assignment in which we were all given the first chapter of this in class and told to extrapolate the ending in an on-the-spot essay. My essay goes on and on about how if this book followed the worst tendencies of novels trying and failing to be feminist, and if it was in fact very poorly thought out as it seemed to be, one thing would happen in the ending, but I really hoped it didn't. The professor called me aside and told me not to bother reading the rest, as I had apparently not only predicted the ending correctly, but in fact extrapolated one of the lines of dialogue used-- a line I was using as an example of a hideous cliche that I hoped would not come into play. I did finish the book, but I shouldn't have bothered.
So. Books you hate? Reasons I should like the ones I do? Rotten fruit? Reassurance? All discussion welcomed. Be my guest.
Originally, I was going to write about books that had been spoiled for me by overanalysis in horrible English classes, but then I looked over my mental list of books I had in English classes and discovered that while said classes are in fact the source of most of the books I've read that I simply can't stand, I haven't actually developed a dislike for anything based on the way it was taught to me. In fact, it tends to be more of the reverse; my grudging and bitter respect for Madame Bovary is based entirely on the feelings of the professor who insisted for half a semester that it was a black comedy and we were all simply failing to notice the joke. (I have no idea whether Flaubert intended the book to be read this way, but I have to say that it becomes a devastatingly hilarious novel.) I therefore suspect that the reason various classes are my major source for books I hate is that classes have been the major thing that have caused me to read books I would never otherwise have touched with a ten-foot pole. Of course, some good things have come of that-- I did not expect to fall madly and passionately in love with The Scarlet Letter, especially when the rest of the class and the teacher saw it as a cross to be carried-- but there have been some real stinkers. Things I hate for their quality, or for their outlook, or for their prose, or for simply existing; books I would rather bungee-jump from the Great Wall of China than again attempt to open; books whose popularity I simply cannot comprehend.
Mind you, I try to keep an open mind. I am sure that the authors of many of the books I hate are and were good and wise people. Except Wordsworth. Wordsworth was a git. I know full well that many people I like and respect and whose critical views I find essential love books that I hate, and that's absolutely fine with me. I don't like hating books. I enjoy being talked into appreciation of books I originally didn't like, and I try my damnedest to at least come to a technical understanding of the good points of the works and authors a lot of people seem to think brilliant that I couldn't tolerate. Except about Marianne Moore, even if she did go to Bryn Mawr. I think I may be allergic, literally, to Marianne Moore. Nothing anyone can say would help. If you love something I hate, please, please, tell me what you see in it, unless it's William Carlos Williams, because I just can't deal, and I will try very hard to understand.
So, some books and authors I really hate:
-- Wordsworth. Way to hide the real beauty of nature under a veil of staggering banality.
-- Ethan Frome. Why did the chicken cross the road? To die. In the rain. After a period of twenty years. Pointlessly. With the universe laughing at it.
-- Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorrit. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because everybody hated its tribal background, dooming it to a lifetime of extremely poorly worked out metaphor and innately squicky sexuality.
-- The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers. I admit that this is a brilliant book, but I already had my adolescence and do not need to reread a version of it with a much more depressing outcome.
-- Marianne Moore. When people ask me what's wrong with poetry today, I tend to gesture in her general direction. "A poem should not mean, but be?" *retreats behind a defensive barrier of Shelley* *starts assembling automatic weaponry*
-- William Carlos Williams. Every so often, I would like to read a poem that is longer than two lines and fewer than two hundred. Oddly, this does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Williams. The two-line ones require five seconds and an intimate knowledge of the author's biography; the long ones require five days, an intimate knowledge of the author's biography, and random tidbits of information about, say, yachting in California in the 1920s. Life is just too short.
-- Beloved. What in the name of all the saints and little fishes does everybody seem to SEE in this book? I've read almost all of Toni Morrison, in one semester of high school, and although I hated all of it I can admit to technical accomplishment and a fair quantity of interesting argument in most of her oeuvre. This one? Is it IN ENGLISH? Because you couldn't prove that by me. Everyone else in the class fell desperately in love, and the teacher was so delighted and kept going on and on about how this was the best thing he'd ever read, and I could not parse what they were saying about it as having one damn thing to do with the book in front of me. I kept wondering if my copy had slipped in from some alternate dimension in which it had a totally different text. Then I'd go back to clutching my copy of The Scarlet Letter and wondering if they were just all raving lunatics. Seriously, if anyone can explain ANYTHING about why this won the Nobel Prize to me, I will love you forever.
-- The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. Heh. I still have somewhere the assignment in which we were all given the first chapter of this in class and told to extrapolate the ending in an on-the-spot essay. My essay goes on and on about how if this book followed the worst tendencies of novels trying and failing to be feminist, and if it was in fact very poorly thought out as it seemed to be, one thing would happen in the ending, but I really hoped it didn't. The professor called me aside and told me not to bother reading the rest, as I had apparently not only predicted the ending correctly, but in fact extrapolated one of the lines of dialogue used-- a line I was using as an example of a hideous cliche that I hoped would not come into play. I did finish the book, but I shouldn't have bothered.
So. Books you hate? Reasons I should like the ones I do? Rotten fruit? Reassurance? All discussion welcomed. Be my guest.
