Posted on 03/02/2022 9:20:32 AM PST by C19fan
They're the books we know we’re meant to have read – but which many of us are too daunted by to actually pick up and start.
That hasn’t stopped nearly half of Britons from pretending to have devoured classics in an attempt to impress others.
An overwhelming 95 per cent of people find reading older novels and plays hard work, a poll has found. However many said they bluff their literary knowledge to appear more intelligent.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
After I read the article on Sam Elliott's comments about it, I went to my Netflix queue to make sure I hadn't put it in my list to watch. I hadn't.
I grant you that. But I find Old Man & The Sea equally overrated.
> > > I find all works by Hemmingway to be my favorites.
Then you might enjoy the works of Elmore Leonard, particularly the crime novels.
Here’s one I recommend. Inspired by the ATF Fast and Furious scandal, it’s about a reclusive soy boy who is forced to grow up:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997539518
‘Battlefield Earth’ by L Ron Hubbard (all 10 volumes)
I think ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ is all I’ve read of his.
I find reading Shakespeare to be difficult. However, watching actors do Shakespeare, this I can understand. I don't know why; but, when someone is speaking Shakespeare, in the context of the play, I can understand it better.
Read 7 out of 10.
I found MOBY DICK boring, although I read it while quite young and had difficulty focusing on it. May give it a reread.
I wish FRANKENSTEIN were on the list. It was a fascinating combo of gothic & romantic literature, with many moral messages. Not at all like the movie version.
Yeah, that was my mistake. I wanted to see it because he is such a good actor; and, it was advertised as a Western; but it really wasn't. My hubby refers to it as that movie with 2 psychopaths. (Cumberbatch's character and the character of the young son.)
I think Moby Dick is as underrated a novel, as “War and Peace” is overrated, but aren't the majority of these works required reading in “secondary school”? (as the Brits call it or High School as us barbaric Americans call it). Most were required in my high school, such that it was, and they even punished us with additional Dickens crap. If I recall they didn't teach “Ulysses” because it was banned for obscenity, which of course is why I had to read it.
Seriously there are Brits that weren't forced to be in or forced to watch the Hamlet as kids? I find that very hard to believe.
I think he meant Moldy Dick
Hamlet is a play. You need to see it, not read it.
Moby Dick is interesting if you are interesting in Living History.
Wuthering Heights is good if you like Gothic.
Animal Farm, even if you are not interested in the politics behind it is a good story and not that long.
Bleak House, I have to admit to never having read this one.
Les Miserables and Hunchback of Notre Dame are ok. Not great but not for people who like things that end on a up note. If you liked GOT you might like it.
The Great Gatsby and Ulysses are both wastes of time. Do not bother.
I would say the majority of the problem with these books is vocabulary. You need to have a large vocabulary to read these books without having to look up a word a page.
I think a problem with many of these books for modern readers - especially Americans - has to do with different writing styles, too. Contemporary people can have trouble with the long sentences and sentence structures of 19th century literature.
It takes more concentration to read Dickens or Bronte, compared with a Hemingway or even with most vaunted contemporary ‘literary fiction’ - and certainly with whatever they’ve been reading in high schools in recent years.
“The Old Man and the Sea” is the literary equivalent of Oscar bait. Of course it got the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature. Spooks didn’t just start giving each other awards recently.
I got my oldest hooked on Bernard Cornwall which lead to CS Forester and then to Robert Louis Stevenson.
It gave him the start on vocabulary and a bit of history.
Start with the current age and start taking them back through history.
By the time you get to Shakespeare they have the vocabulary to understand what they are reading.
Thank You.
I had not seen this before.
Yes. I grew up being raised by pretty old people, and the books in the house were also old. I loved to read from a very early age, and those books were an education.
(My husband is a great fan of the Hornblower books.)
Strange story that you may be able to help me with.
My father served with the Marines in the Pacific during WWII. My grandmother always said that ‘he was at Iwo’, but my father wouldn’t talk much about the war. All I’ve figured out is that he was probably on some kind of ship that lent support there.
When he came back from the war, he was staying with his mom and stepdad, and one night he had a nightmare. He had been reading a novel about a man imprisoned in a tower, who jumped out of the tower to escape; and somehow the story got into my father’s dreams.
Daddy awoke in fear, and tried to throw himself out of a window. A big piece of glass punctured him, and they had to get a lung surgeon to fix him up. He had a big scar under his breast the rest of his life.
What book was that? For some reason, I keep thinking Stevenson; but all I really remember is that it was an old book...
Starship Troopers. Read it! Great movie nothing like the movie.
The last line in that book is a surprise! Nothing like you would expect.
***which lead to CS Forester and then to Robert Louis Stevenson.***
Read lots of books by these two along with Jules Verne!
Moby Dick might have been the most boring book I’d ever read if I weren’t a linguaphile (they don’t see the first whale for nigh onto 400 pages). But Melville is to the New Bedford Quaker dialect as Faulkner is to the southern dialect of late 19th-Century Mississippi. It’s a linguistic time capsule.
Couldn’t get through the first chapter of Ulysses. I have a very high tolerance for profanity and sexual innuendo but I couldn’t see any point to it apart the swearing. It was like reading Penthouse Letters with the best parts left out.
As for Tolstoy, I’d sooner devote the time to reading history of the Napoleonic wars than fiction in the framework of the Napoleonic wars.
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