lesliesage wrote: I have no idea why that book got any recognition whatsoever.
The prose sounded pretty? Although I never about the potshots at his ex-wife thing until now. Then again, my English class focused more on The Great Gatsby as a commentary on The American DreamTM than anything else, and whether the text was criticizing the ideal or supporting it.
Yeah, I don't think it was supposed to be about how great rich life was. If anything, I read it as a rebuttle to the idea that the American dream is to be rich and famous and have lots of interesting parties, because that isn't as cracked up as it sounds.
And as it didn't get popular until after WW2, I think it also had to do with being a nostalgia piece for times (the 20's) when life seemed better, though the past is often romanticized in this way.
year in the sun wrote:if so, then i completely revise my assessment of it and of him by association. it's nothing short of sheer brilliance. i truly almost completely missed the punchline, the bit that puts a techtonic shift on your head and makes you break the entire book apart and reassemble everything in a different way. i think it's like a throwaway half a sentence at the end of a paragraph somewhere near the end of a book, which comes right in the middle of a completely different scene about something completely other than that. i swear, my eye took it in and travelled halfway down the next page before my brain went 'hang on' and got the whiplash. and he never does a single thing that i recall to point and wink at where you should look.
Now I'm wondering exactly what you're referring to. (It's been ten years, after all.)
he gives you the answer to whether or not barney really did murder his . . . um, whoever it was that was killed. his best friend? it's been a while for me too.
I though the book was horrendous. It simply is a book about a whiny teen who didn't want little kids to "lose their innocence", couldn't/wouldn't handle his emotions of becoming an adult, and swore entirely too much. Also, after reading that book, I never want to hear the word "phony" again. Unfortunately, my English teacher stretched it out for about a month so we could analyze it thoroughly.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
the.coding.eye wrote:Catcher in the Rye. Also, after reading that book, I never want to hear the word "phony" again.
i felt the same way about 'loaf' while reading it.
how do you analyze catcher in the rye? i just couldn't understand it or find a way into it at all. i tried again recently because i'd just read franny and zooey and adored it, but it was just as impossible. the only thing i did find the second time around was the explanation of why the book was called 'catcher in the rye', where
Spoiler:
holden's saying there isn't anything he's ever wanted to be, but then remembers when he heard the song. he got this image of a field of rye, full of little kids running around unaware that it's at the edge of this really high cliff. so he thought a catcher in the rye was someone whose job was to stand at the edge and catch the little kids if they came close, to keep them safe. he says that's something he'd like to be.
. that did kind of break my heart and make me completely love him for a moment, but it just didn't last.
I had to read a play for AS Drama called Restoration - it was terrible, I could find no evidence that anyone had ever actually performed it and I can see why. It was horribly written, contained no message beyond "urrr rich people are stupid", and it's pitiful attempts at comedy were just embarrassing to read. How it ever got on the curriculum is beyond me.
...because Waffles Are Better Than pancakes. support Alternative capitalisation.
the.coding.eye wrote:how do you analyze catcher in the rye?
We discussed why Holden did the things he did and what the authors purpose in writing the book was (what his message to society was).
We just seemed to rip apart Holden's character without any reference to why the author wrote the book. As far as we were concerned Salinger sat down and went "I know, I'll write a book about a kid who doesn't know what to do with his life and is hypocritical sometimes."
Indigo is a lie. Which idiot decided that websites can't go within 4cm of the edge of the screen? There should be a null word, for the question "Is anybody there?" and to see if microphones are on.
In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier. RAGE! I hated that book so much, it made me sick.
"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." Hunter S. Thompson
"Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all." Neutral Milk Hotel
Lithium33 wrote:In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier. RAGE! I hated that book so much, it made me sick.
Is that the same guy who wrote Fade?
Hey, cool, someone else read Fade. One of the raciest books I'd ever encountered when I read it in eighth grade. Of course, I read it independently - no way something like that would end up as assigned reading, at least not outside of French class. (I'm not kidding.)
Corimer is much more famous for The Chocolate War, but Fade is the only work of his that I've read.
Roĝer wrote:While bunnies taste better, nothing beats the desperate death cry of a puppy, especially when accompanied with the grinding of a chainsaw on canine bones.
my son dropped out of a special voracious-readers' book club in 6th grade because they 'chose' lord of the rings and it afflicted him with unbearable rage. and i quote: 'frodo whines for nine pages, gandalf tells him too bad, and they go'
Roĝer wrote:While bunnies taste better, nothing beats the desperate death cry of a puppy, especially when accompanied with the grinding of a chainsaw on canine bones.
The Scarlet Letter I hate because all of the main characters were overly religious idiots, and the only character I felt any sympathy for was Pearl. Even then she annoyed the hell out of me.
The Great Gatsby in a nut shell was this: "I'm rich, let's watch me screw up my life with my materialism!" Couldn't relate to the characters at all, and it was just dull.
Moby Dick: A long speil on how we're all slaves to fate.
Any thing about the freaking transcendentalists! We had to read pages from a work by some idiot who went off to live in a cabin for a while so that he could learn "truth" or some nonsense like that. Instead he ended up watching ants making analogies to humanity. My opinion, you want to learn any kind of final truth, study the sciences. You want to learn about humanity? Last thing you'll want to do is lock yourself in a secluded cabin.
"Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." ____Carl Sagan____
Kendo_Bunny wrote:Why I don't like Gatsby: I have never found a tell-all book about how empty the lives of stuffy rich people are interesting. To me, the book seemed nasty, gossipy, and shallow... which it kind of was, considering that it's an extended potshot at Fitzgerald's ex-girlfriend. I think he wasted his amazing talent for description writing the gossipy books he did.
THIS. I can't stand hearing about rich people doing nothing but party and drink. There are only two unreasonably people who I enjoy reading about in works which I think have some literary merit, and that's because they DO something useful with their wealth. One is Eliot Rosewater. (Gotta love Vonnegut) The other is Batman.
"Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." ____Carl Sagan____
theSleepingMan wrote:I can't stand hearing about rich people doing nothing but party and drink. There are only two unreasonably people who I enjoy reading about in works which I think have some literary merit, and that's because they DO something useful with their wealth. One is Eliot Rosewater. (Gotta love Vonnegut) The other is Batman.
May I suggest Barney's Version and other works by Richler?
Apologies for necromancing this thread, although it's probably going to be brought up again when school is back in session, but I have some contributions:
I'm reading several books over the summer for an Englisg III Hon class, and a lot of them are mentioned in this thread:
-The Crucible 6/10-It's okay,
Spoiler:
But dude, just sign the damned paper and give it to the judge. I know you are trying to make a stand, but seriously: Your wife even wants you alive. Don't try to start drama with your executioner; it never ends good for you.
-The Old Man and the Sea 8/10-I liked this book, it spoke to me.
Spoiler:
I still don't like how the sharks came in and ate up the giant fish. That was just wrong and malevolent of Hemmingway to do.
-A Streetcar Named Desire 6/10-Average,
Spoiler:
Basically, a whore goes to live with her cousin in an apartment, she takes up the bathroom for hours, lies to her family, and then yells at her sister for letting her husband puch her. That's the only right point that the girl (Blanche) has throughout the book. She can't even bear to be in the light, and she screams when her boyfriend tears off the paper lanterns she has covering a lightbulb. She eventually goes crazy when her boyfriend (Mitch) finds out she's a whore and dumps her. She blabs on about some rich guy she "met" and eventually gets sent to an asylum by her sister. I genuinely laughed at that part. Blanche's story: As a girl, she goes out with a guy. She finds him in bed with another guy (and apparently that he is bisexual), but she is drunk. She drives them to a casino, and he kills himself. She loses her house (Belle Reeve) through ways we don't even find out, moves into a hotel, becomes a whore for soldiers on leave (Her house was even on the "Don't go here" area for the army base), and eventually gets kicked out by the mayor. So basically: She's a whore.
-The Great Gatsby 2/10-This book seems very dry. I haven't read much of it, but I will have it done tomorrow (I'm pacing myself so I don't read every book in a week, since that didn't work out for me last year) -Red Badge of courage -Of Mice and Men -The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
While it is probably their (The school's) intention to keep us reading, a set of books has discouraged me from reading other books through the summer, because it makes me tired of reading when I have to force myself through all of this poetic nonsense. Not to come here to complain: Does anyone here use SparkNotes when they can't stand a book? I know I have done that on one occasion.
You are now breathing manually. Also, you just lost a certain Game...
It's a compilation of short stories from residents of an apartment complex in India... and it is absolutely terrible. In fact, my entire class was so adamant in their hatred for the book to the point where it was omitted from the final exam, and excluded from future offerings of the course.
Could God write a program so long that not even he himself would have the memory to compile it in a single pass? -- Hamish Campbell
Thinking back on it, I'm not sure why I hated it so much. I think it was rather too disjointed in the grammatical and plot sense to have a decent flow, while not being disjointed enough to appreciate it for the poetry.
alitheiapsis wrote:HEY NOW DON'T TALK SHIT ABOUT BRONTOSAURUSES
I reviled nearly every piece of literature from 10th grade. My 9th grade teacher was amazing, and my 10th grade teacher was an idiot, which didn't help, but I hated:
Wuthering Heights Julius Cesar Lord of the Flies The Pearl
I still do not understand James Joyce. The Dubliners was just so boring.
I hate Hemingway in all his horrible forms. We had to read A Farewell to Arms. Even as a dude, Catherine Barkley (Berkley?) made me want to retch. We didn't even read The Old Man and the Sea, we just watched the movie in class. It was basically required by the AP exams, but our teacher hated it too (This is (one of) my senior English teachers).
Also, while St. John was a thick-headed, idiotic, chauvinistic pig, and the coincidences (of which I think there is only one, really) are a little silly, I really liked Jane Eyre.
Shakespeare is clearly amazing; however, some of his works are not. This shouldn't be surprising when you consider how many authors write one good book, and the rest are trash (Kafka, Stoker, etc.). We're just lucky that a great deal of Shakespeare's work is worthwhile.
It was a short story by Kippling that I just couldn't read. I couldn't keep my focus on it and it just didn't make sense. It was about some Indian man/prince/guy, talking animals, some morals and it just didn't make sense.
I honestly couldn't finish it (I tried but not all of the words processed) so I just didn't bother and skipped the questions.
Edit: As to above: Fess- I didn't finish Jane Erye, but I meant to. I enjoyed it ^^
¡No tengo miedo a fantasmas!
Spoiler:
Cytoplasm: I have catoragized some of my family into lolcats. Felstaff: For a drudging Thursday afternoon, that level of cuteness has really made my day. Can... Can I keep you?
The Lemming Condition. Oh, good God, I hated that book. It's about a lemming who has to "go against the crowd", and the whole book is based on the false belief that lemmings commit mass suicide. Trying to find the symbolism was even worse, as is with all books read in school.
*Edit Oh yes, and A Break With Charity. It was so hard to keep reading the whole thing. This wasn't a case of "It came from school so it's awful" because I had read my brother's copy long before we read it in class and it was still terrible. Pretty much the entire class was bored with the book halfway through.
Blanche DuBois isn't just a whore - she's a woman with severe mental illness attempting to cope by pretending that nothing in her world has changed. She's actually an archetypal symbol for the dregs of aristocracy left in the South... basically, the Old South in 1950-ish. I find her a really compelling character for that reason (and also because her actress in the film, Englishwoman Vivien Leigh, also played the other archetypal symbol of the South in Scarlett O'Hara).
Spoiler:
Also, I thought it made a very interesting point about male assumptions at the time towards women of "low virtue". Mitch attempts to force himself on her sexually and Stanley rapes her, both reasoning that she shouldn't mind, since she's been with other men.
A Catcher in the Rye, and another one about a boy and an old man who teaches him how to live from the woods. I remember him dying at the end. I HATED that book.
I'm not disorganized. My room has a high entropy.
Bhelliom wrote:Don't forget that the cat probably knows EXACTLY what it is doing is is most likely just screwing with you. You know, for CAT SCIENCE!
kernelpanic wrote:A Catcher in the Rye, and another one about a boy and an old man who teaches him how to live from the woods. I remember him dying at the end. I HATED that book.
OH SNAP. DYING?!
Yeah, my friend said it was a terrible book and rather depressing in the way where one wants to burn the book. I never had to read that book for some reason (same with Animal Farm, Farenheight 451, To Kill a Mocking Bird..and other classic things that one usually has to read..um.. yeah.
¡No tengo miedo a fantasmas!
Spoiler:
Cytoplasm: I have catoragized some of my family into lolcats. Felstaff: For a drudging Thursday afternoon, that level of cuteness has really made my day. Can... Can I keep you?
kernelpanic wrote:and another one about a boy and an old man who teaches him how to live from the woods. I remember him dying at the end. I HATED that book.
kernelpanic wrote:and another one about a boy and an old man who teaches him how to live from the woods. I remember him dying at the end. I HATED that book.
The Foxman, by Gary Paulsen, perhaps?
No, definitely not that one
I'm not disorganized. My room has a high entropy.
Bhelliom wrote:Don't forget that the cat probably knows EXACTLY what it is doing is is most likely just screwing with you. You know, for CAT SCIENCE!
Wuthering Heights is AWFUL. It has potentially put me off anything pre-1900 for life, which is a shame because I have really enjoyed some classics (Jane Eyre, Hound of the Baskervilles, and many others are great).
I think half the problem with Wuthering Heights is that the main characters are so unlikable. Cathy's a spoilt brat, Heathcliff's a grumpy sod, Edgar's a wuss, Isabella's vain and annoying...need I go on?
Luckily our teacher was kind enough to put us out of our misery and just let us watch the film after we had read about half of the book. Film's terrible too, but at least it's easier to understand (and I don't normally have a problem with complex language).
I rather enjoyed Beloved and As I lay Dying, but that particular style (post-modern, I believe?) is an acquired taste. Much like Indian food - when you first try out you say, "WTF IS GOING ON IN MY MOUTH?!" but if you're brave enough for for a second or third helping, you find you like it.
My least favorite was a semi-autobiographical book titled Riding the Bus with My Sister. It's about exactly what the title says, and then some. The author talks unceasingly about her crappy relationship with her mentally retarded sister, her crappy childhood, and her crappy adult life. She tries develop a better relationship with her sister (who obsessively rides city buses 24/7) by riding the bus with her. Then, somehow, she falls in love with one of the bus drivers and marries him in an incredibly random end to the story.
Now, don't get me wrong! The whole ordeal is an inspiring tale of sisterly bonding and learning important lessons about life and overcoming prejudices - which is good and moral and all that. I approve of the messages, and believe they are worth looking into. However, the author's style completely irks me - she simply is not suited to writing that sort of book. It was by far one of my most painful reading experiences ever.
I'm probably weird, because I genuinely enjoyed Great Expectations. Sure it was a whole lot of gunk to slog through to actually get to the point, but I found the plot interesting and I felt so superior for actually understanding it as opposed to me dumb-as-a-brick classmates. I also liked The Great Gatsby- didn't love it, found it slow and boring and not my type of thing at all, but I liked it for one main reason: IT WASN'T THE SCARLET LETTER.
That book LITERALLY bored me to tears. If I ever have to do a "find the symbolism!" type assignment again, I'll probably kill myself. I hate explaining symbolism, since I tend to take books at face value, so unless the symbolism is right in front of my nose, or pointed out to me, it's just words. The only time I actually enjoyed that damn story was when we had to make a soundtrack for it- we had to find a song that fit the four main characters and one that captured the book itself, make a little album book and burn a CD for extra credit. I picked country songs, and then picked five Phoenix Wright themes as a "bonus track".
After that mess, The Great Gatsby was practically heaven.
Face, Skellig, Refugee Boy, Holes, The Memoirs Of An Otter (I forgot what it was called), Something to do with pens and King Arthur and Empire of the Sun. I hated them all!
TheGirlWhoStoleTheHat wrote:Wuthering Heights is AWFUL. It has potentially put me off anything pre-1900 for life, which is a shame because I have really enjoyed some classics (Jane Eyre, Hound of the Baskervilles, and many others are great).
I think half the problem with Wuthering Heights is that the main characters are so unlikable. Cathy's a spoilt brat, Heathcliff's a grumpy sod, Edgar's a wuss, Isabella's vain and annoying...need I go on?
Luckily our teacher was kind enough to put us out of our misery and just let us watch the film after we had read about half of the book. Film's terrible too, but at least it's easier to understand (and I don't normally have a problem with complex language).
I didn't think it was 'that' bad when we had to study it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's amazing but had I read it in my own time (which I plan to do at some point) then I think I could have quite liked it.
Therein lies the problem for me, to enjoy reading I need to read what I want, when I want and reading at school always felt too forced. I also read quite quickly and having to stick to the pace of someone reading out would be enough to stop me enjoying any book. However, when we read Schindler's Ark it didn't appeal to me at all and I can't say that it made me want to read more. We didn't read very much of it though so maybe it was the fact that we only read excerpts and had to try and piece them into the film that was the problem.
year in the sun wrote:my son dropped out of a special voracious-readers' book club in 6th grade because they 'chose' lord of the rings and it afflicted him with unbearable rage. and i quote: 'frodo whines for nine pages, gandalf tells him too bad, and they go'
This made me smile (and laugh). I know some people who couldn't stand reading LOTR. What your son did there reminds me of a particular website that summarises stories and films in hilarious brevity.
For what it's worth, it took me until after they left Bombadil before I was gripped by the book. This was when I was 10-ish?
By the by, can anyone link me to that website? I can't find it anymore.
icanus wrote: Pigs are a bit of an edge case, but I square eating them because 1. they're delicious, and 2. a pig tried to eat me once.
