Posted on 02/17/2006 8:31:22 AM PST by Borges
Dickens is unsurpassed when it comes to creation of characters and the Tale has memorable ones. Who can forget the scene where the disbarred lawyer, Sidney Carlton, is sitting doing the work for the law firm he is the brains of with wet towels on his head to cool it off because all that thinking makes his head hot. And the theme of giving one's life for another is timeless.
One could have put just about every Dickens work on this list as far as I am concerned.
I guess it's desire....
I just counted, and I've actually read about 40 or so of the list.
War and Peace again? No way. Uh huh. I read for enjoyment, not to slog through pages of detailed misery.
Please, it's a great book, but no, snow, death, freezing, war....hmrpt. No.
Anything by Austen, yes, I'd re-read. Same with books like Jane Eyre, Three Muskateers, etc.
But many of the classics just annoyed the bejeebers out of me....
Scarlet Letter, while great, the unfairness was grating.
Lolita made me squirm as a young girl reading it.
Grapes of Wrath, great, but a slog through misery.
Clarissa!?! Dear lord in heaven, let me just jump off the roof and be done with it.
All I'm saying is the 'pull' isn't in these books. You don't walk by and say to yourself "Wow, I know it read it last week, but I want to read it again!"
Can't see it with Moby Dick, that's for sure.
So the deepest novelist of all time, Doestoevsky, went after "low hanging fruit"? Hilarious.
And the creator of the greatest satirical novel of all time, Pride and Prejudice, is "trivial"? Even funnier.
Austen created a whole new style of writing and that novel is screamingly funny even today. I was so happy to hear than my oldest boy read it while on his first mission on the newly renovated Ohio.
Sounds of choking/dying/barfing.
I think Gatsby is very much highly overrated, myself. It tells the sordid soap-operaish story about the rich and pampered in a rather weird time of American history.
You might as well have picked Babbit.
Dickens is considered low brow by most of the critics and Tale is not his most important work but it is one of the most accessible and fascinating clearly demonstrating the contradictions of the Revolution and its mixed impact. Sidney Carton is one of his most memorible characters and of course the book has some of the most well known phrases of any novel. There should be a new movie made of it since it would be perfect for the big screen and highly exciting as well.
Lewis doesn't have anywhere near the lyricism of TGG.
That's only because it's 2006, and because of imitation and proliferation, the story and style has become trite and hackneyed by now.
I just read Middlemarch a few months ago and did enjoy it but found it annoying too. The characters where just too annoying for me to place it high up. Too predictable and the heroine drove me crazy.
I thought the Hamlet trilogy much more interesting than The Sound.
The Possessed more clearly showed Russia's fate than F&S which was ok but a bit too simple.
I'm actually re-reading it right now, and I've got to say, Melville's description of a New Bedford church and a sermon given therein, in chapters 7, 8, and 9 (The Chapel, The Pulpit, and The Sermon), are downright chilling they're so spot-on and good.
Any comments madame?
As a native Russian speaker I prefer the literal translation 'Demons' to The Possesed. But that's a great, great novel indeed. But again 'Fathers and Children' (another direct translation) predates it by almost a decade (and evern Notes from Underground by a few years.)
I guess all I'm saying is I don't care about anyone in Moby Dick....
Except for the Whale :)
Nabokov didn't try to portray a young female mind. It was only Humbert's delusions about what Lo was really thinking that we're privy to. And my statement about tragedy is good old Aristotle.
PING
I've never read it, but it's on my list. Thanks for the heads up.
Again,
I'm not Aristotle. I'm just me, and I know what I like.
And I won't fake liking something because I'm told it's great, or important, or brilliant when I find it a miserable bore hun ;)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.