(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

From March 19, 2009: What’s the worst 'best' book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?

Easy: Moby Dick. I'd heard great quotes from it on X-Files and Star Trek and it sounded brilliant. So only a few years ago I sat down and read it cover to cover, and haven't been so bored (or frustrated) by a novel since Ivanhoe. But I understand why some people might like Ivanhoe, or, rather, might have done so in the 19th century. Moby Dick? I just didn't get it.

It quotes well, though. Ignorance is the parent of fear.

It was a sharp, cold Christmas.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

What grabs you, grabs you.

So true! Lots of people don't like Dickens, whose stuff I love.

I chuckled when I saw that the first set of people answering this question on the 'booking' site all mentioned Twilight. The moral of the story: you're not going to automatically like a book just because it's famous.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention Dickens because I've never seen the allure. LOL

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

While I love Dickens with a passion, and never saw the allure of Austen. So it goes!

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

I can appreciate Dickens, but I don't love it. Whereas Austin grabs me :D

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much the other way around - Dickens grabs my feelings and doesn't let go. Austen seldom touches my feelings at all. Just faintly, maybe, in Persuasion, but really not even there - I like it because I like Anne Eliott and her story, but it's an intellectual appreciation rather than anything with much passion in it.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I find Dickens, like Scott, works best in abridged or dramatised versions. Both of them over-write: Dickens, especially, was paid by the word and it shows. Also, frankly, English fiction of that time doesn't hold a candle to French or Russian.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The Russian authors I have read and loved (in translation) are Pushkin and Dostoevsky. The 19th century French authors I have read and loved (both in French and in translation) are Zola and Dumas. But I never got over my early love of Dickens and probably never will.

[maisedoat.livejournal.com]

Dickens was not paid by the word, I wish he had been, that way there might have been even more of them to love.

I'd buy his laundry lists, in fact I do, the Pilgrim Edition of his letters, costs anything upto £100 a volume. I save up or buy them shop-soiled and have only 4 more volumes to find.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Dickens was not paid by the word, I wish he had been, that way there might have been even more of them to love.

Yes - I wish!

the Pilgrim Edition of his letters, costs anything upto £100 a volume. I save up or buy them shop-soiled and have only 4 more volumes to find.

Oooh, lucky! I've never even seen those. How wonderful.