# Have you ever read a classic, and thought...



## Chris Lord (Feb 22, 2014)

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## noirhvy (Dec 29, 2015)

You bought a used book that is 50 years old? Or did you buy a book that was written years ago but typeset recently? I've read 70 year old books when they were fairly new with no typos and then read copies of the same book years later, with typos introduced by careless editors and typesetters fairly recently.
I was watching a John Ford Western movie recently and noticed how old hat some of the action was. That's because a million low budget film makers have copied him to death since the movie came out. It was new stuff when Ford made the film.


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## Chris Lord (Feb 22, 2014)

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## Chris Lord (Feb 22, 2014)

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## xbriannova (Sep 23, 2016)

Stephen King is a living legend, and many of his books are pretty much classics. If they're not, they will be in a decade or two.

Some of them are still disappointing. Pet Semetary takes like 80% of the long-winded book to build up, and it built up immediately to an unsatisfying climax and ending. Only good thing is that the thrill and horror comes in small throbs, and is consistent, but that's only one facet of a horror book. There's too many that wasn't done right.

I'm reading From the Buick 8 right now, and it seems to be suffering from the same problem, but not as bad. The weird fiction factor does a good job, and the background horror's good. It just builds up slow, and a lot of the time, it's just people barfing or feeling like barfing.

And you know what's worse? I'm very afraid that it might have rubbed off on me and my writing. My debut novel is 158,000 words long on final count. I spent 55,000 words building up to the first major plot development. That's the 1/3rd / 33% mark. It's not like Stephen King, who reaches the point of no return only at 75%, but it's already behind schedule compared to the 25% mark prescribed by many for major plot developments.

If there were major plot developments on the way to Ol' Stevie's plot developments, they seem invisible, just one long stretch of road.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

I must admit I never understood why _Catch-22_ is held up to be a classic. I usually love that kind of zany satire as well.


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## Kate. (Oct 7, 2014)

xbriannova said:


> Stephen King is a living legend, and many of his books are pretty much classics. If they're not, they will be in a decade or two.
> 
> Some of them are still disappointing. Pet Semetary takes like 80% of the long-winded book to build up, and it built up immediately to an unsatisfying climax and ending. Only good thing is that the thrill and horror comes in small throbs, and is consistent, but that's only one facet of a horror book. There's too many that wasn't done right.
> 
> ...


I've noticed the same effect. The majority of Carrie is a slow, character-focussed buildup with brief glimpses of the supernatural. Then the pig blood drops and suddenly it's FIRE and DEATH and SCREAMING and EXPLOSIONS all over the place.

I still love King, though.  A big part of his appeal for me is how unpredictable his stories are.


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## Jennifer Mueller (May 14, 2015)

I was a peace corps volunteer in Kenya 20 years ago and modern best sellers cost far too much of my meager pay, but classics and Agatha Christie were cheap so I read a lot of them. And there was a library for volunteers to exchange them. Some of them were nearly unreadable, accents so strong that you couldn't decipher it, some of them I found fine but once back in the US I would go back to reread them and they were so slow I couldn't keep reading.  Page after page of nothing happening.  Some are great stories, but many more I just wonder how they were classics.  Would a modern editor allow Victor Hugo to go off for 40 pages with the history of the Paris sewers? There's a reason that the original is hundreds of pages shorter than the edited version. Or Ayn Rand spend 40 pages on one speech, I know its her whole doctrine and people consider her a legend, but as a story device it stopped it cold.


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## KelliWolfe (Oct 14, 2014)

Chris Vaughn said:


> PS: Really shocked how many typos were in it too for a $12 book that is fifty years old.


Was it an ebook? Because publishers have developed a nasty habit of scanning in their back catalogs and publishing them without bothering to do even a basic editing pass first. I've had quite a few that were completely unreadable because of all the errors introduced in the scanning process. And for some reason they love to charge as much or more for them as they do for their current releases.

Fortunately Abebooks and eBay are around to avoid most of that nonsense.


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## Abalone (Jan 31, 2014)

I read War and Peace for fun in April or May 2010. It changed my entire outlook on life. It made me a better person.


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## alawston (Jun 3, 2012)

Abalone said:


> I read War and Peace for fun in April or May 2010. It changed my entire outlook on life. It made me a better person.


So much this. Mine was _The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby_. Probably there was a typo in it somewhere. I couldn't give less of a tinker's cuss. I had a similar experience reading Casanova's _Histoire de ma Fuite_, which ended up with me translating the whole book into English.

I don't read as many classics as I'd like, these days, but my wife is ploughing her way through Dickens, Austens, assorted Brontes and a bit of George Eliot. And loving every minute of it.


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## Lyndawrites (Aug 7, 2011)

I'd read, and loved, quite a few Agatha Christie's before I got my hands on "her acknowledged masterpiece", _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_.

In the course of my long life, I've now read all of her mysteries - some of them many times over - but Ackroyd remains the only one that I "got" as I read it, and didn't need the explanation of whodunit in the last chapter.

Strangely, any pleasure I got from defeating the Queen of Crime at her own game, was offset by the disappointment that there wasn't another twist I hadn't seen coming.


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## Guest (Oct 20, 2016)

I've read classics that I loved and that have stood the test of time (Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird) and others that just seem flat (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises). Besides the fact that writing styles change, I think sometimes it reflects the mood I'm in. If I just want entertainment, I want something easy to read and that I can relate to my own life. Then sometimes I want something that takes me out of my world, and I'll put the effort in to a book like Silas Marner, which I loved.

I find I'm pretty fickle!


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

Why in the world didn't you get the book from the library? There's no way I'd pay that much for a book you could have gotten for free, or nearly free at a thrift store/secondhand shop.

Also, agree the typos are likely OCR errors. There have been discussions before about how badly trad pub did their scanning.

I've read many, many classics over the years and I tend to give the writer a bit of a pass because writing styles change. Classics become so for their effect on culture and society, not how they're written. I'd like to think that fifty or so years from now, readers will give me the same break.


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## SerenityEditing (May 3, 2016)

LilyBLily said:


> What you may not be taking into account is whether the book had great impact at the time it first came out and/or has been imitated so many times that what was groundbreaking no longer is.


This is spot-on. 
A friend of mine who knows of my love for sci-fi insisted I read some of Heinlein's work. I was bored out of my skull and thought it was ridiculous, oversimplified, and trite. (I think it was _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ but I don't remember - I bought three or four all at once, read one of them, skimmed through the others, wrote them all off.) When I told her I had not been impressed, she thought for a while, then said the difference was probably that when she'd read them, they were new releases. The ideas were mind-blowing and completely shook up everything she'd been raised to believe and accept as a given. I tried re-reading the book I'd finished with that in mind, and she re-read it with an eye to seeing how it holds up by comparison to today's works. She had more success seeing my angle than I had seeing hers, but not by much.


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## Writer&#039;s Block (Oct 29, 2014)

I've read a lot of oddball stuff over the years. Recently finished 'The Vicar of Wakefield', Oliver Goldsmith, 1766, that's going back a bit. It was great, loved it. Read Dracula before that, bit of a slog. 

It think there is a lot to learned from the old stories, mainly that the human condition really never changes. Love, loss, betrayal, envy, survival, all the same motivations that propel the contemporary genres.


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Chris Vaughn said:


> PS: Really shocked how many typos were in it too for a $12 book that is fifty years old.


Are you sure it wasn't just British spelling?


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

Try re-reading some books that you read and enjoyed as a teenager or young adult. You'll more likely find that you can't read them - and can't understand what you saw in them previously.


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## Chris Lord (Feb 22, 2014)

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## Chris Lord (Feb 22, 2014)

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## Douglas Milewski (Jul 4, 2014)

I've been reading through Goodread's list of Best Fantasy Books from the 1970s. Lots of stuff that I missed back then. Some have been great reads and some have been ... well, not so great. I don't understand why people love them. Some books have held up well while others scream their datedness. Some were groundbreaking while others were just sorta meh but held up really well.


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## Thetis (Dec 23, 2015)

My favorite novels are considered 20th Century American classics now.

I agree that it's sometimes the impact the novel had at the time, but TBH, it's probably a matter of personal taste and the type of books you've read throughout your life. I started reading classics like _A Tale of Two Cities_ in junior high (that one was lost on me... I thought maybe I was just too young, but then had to read more Dickens in grad school, and eh...). Some of us just have different expectations for great literature, and to me, it's about the feeling a certain book evokes and the unique voice of the author.

That being said, I'm not a mystery reader. I couldn't care less if the plot is fairly straight forward.


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## Guest (Oct 20, 2016)

I understand. Recently, I made a point of reading some classic Noir detective fiction because I wanted to get the flavor right for my next book. And who best to get that from but from the pioneers in the genre? I got through most of my list, but it was difficult. I could see how well-crafted the books were for their time, but except for Raymond Chandler, I could only read one of each of the authors. Besides the dated style, somethings in the books were hard to stomach. The sexism and racial stereotyping in the last book was so heavy-handed, I couldn't finish it.

Some of the books and authors mentioned in this thread, I loved, but like someone else said, when I read them, they were groundbreaking. Since subsequent writers have borrowed heavily from them (nothing wrong with that), I can see why the books don't have the same impact on readers today.


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## noirhvy (Dec 29, 2015)

People who read novels that are new today fifty years hence will think we're terribly prejudiced, have everything all wrong, allow slavery on every streetcorner (sex workers being forced into the biz) and are wrecking the planet. They would be right, of course, but the point is things were diferent back then especially attitudes. And, oh a "Tinker's dam" is not swearing, it is a small wall a tinker builds up to hold oil to cool his drill when he is drilling through glass.


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## lauramg_1406 (Oct 15, 2016)

Yes! I have three like this (that I didn't find awesome, can't remember about typos)

1. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) - I was forced to read this one though, but by the end I was wondering what's the point.

2. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald) - it just didn't "sparkle" for me in the same way it seems to for others

3. Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein) - honestly I found this one boring, and I really shouldn't have because high fantasy is a genre I love 

On the flip side I remember enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read that (and being pleasantly surprised by it) and Dracula remains one of my all time favourite books, and a big inspiration  for me.

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## Guest (Oct 20, 2016)

Often, your ability to appreciate a classic depends on your overall knowledge. And before someone gets all upset, I'm not talking about general intelligence. I am talking about deep cultural literacy. We talk about books being "dated" by references to certain pop culture references, but ALL MEDIA is influenced by the world in which it was created. It is very hard to understand The Scarlet Letter without having an understanding of the time period in which it was written. You might "get" the plot, but not understand the depths of the human psyche being explored, unless you also understand the associated context of the time period.

What we lack, desperately, in modern culture is deep cultural literacy. We tend to read on a very superficial level from our own limited worldview. Everything we consume is done through that narrow prism of our own current life. So when we go back twenty years or 80 years or 200 years, we lack the knowledges that the readers of those times had. It is almost impossible to understand most Medieval literature without at least a basic knowledge of the Bible. 

No fiction exists in a vacuum. It is all a by-product of the author's interpretation of his or her times. If you don't understand the time period a work was written in, it can be very hard to understand the author's point.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Even back in high school, I found Shakespeare overrated. I appreciate his puns more as an adult but his dialogue is overdone. Characters take forever to say nothing. If you cut the dialogue to the bone, the plays would be half as long.


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## Douglas Milewski (Jul 4, 2014)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> What we lack, desperately, in modern culture is deep cultural literacy. We tend to read on a very superficial level from our own limited worldview. Everything we consume is done through that narrow prism of our own current life. So when we go back twenty years or 80 years or 200 years, we lack the knowledges that the readers of those times had. It is almost impossible to understand most Medieval literature without at least a basic knowledge of the Bible.
> 
> No fiction exists in a vacuum. It is all a by-product of the author's interpretation of his or her times. If you don't understand the time period a work was written in, it can be very hard to understand the author's point.


I've been writing book reviews of the 70's, and this is exactly the fun part of some novels, the one where you can link into the time. A grand example of this is "The Stepford Wives." Outside, it's just a silly robot story. Inside, it's an argument for feminism, arguing for the ordinary competence and capabilities of women, only to see those women wedged into a robotic stereotype demanded by male culture.

I finally understand the early Xanth novels, not as just stupid sexism, but as really smart sexism, where the writer is very aware of the sexism of his time even while he's blinded by it. If this is what women had to put up with, you quickly understand why they started burning bras and demanding equal rights. Indeed, men are often decrying the shallow selection of women, because the sexism of the time not only left women with few options, it left men with a meager selection.

L'Engle's books are particularly illustrative of her time, and what Christianity is wrestling with in the world. (By Christianity, I mean the Main Street sort of Christianity.)

When I was adapting MacBeth into a novella, I really had to scratch hard into culture to realize what was going on. "Did those witches just make a fart joke? Why, yes, that was a fart joke."


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Many classic print books are scanned to convert to an eBook, and so are prone to typos that get missed. It's sloppiness on the publishers behalf.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

she-la-ti-da said:


> Why in the world didn't you get the book from the library? There's no way I'd pay that much for a book you could have gotten for free, or nearly free at a thrift store/secondhand shop.


Because a lot of people take books into the bathroom with them.










It's like buying a used couch. No thank you.


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## Guest (Oct 20, 2016)

Anarchist said:


> Because a lot of people take books into the bathroom with them.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


My cheapness and desire to read these books overrides my germaphobia.


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Often, your ability to appreciate a classic depends on your overall knowledge. And before someone gets all upset, I'm not talking about general intelligence. I am talking about deep cultural literacy. We talk about books being "dated" by references to certain pop culture references, but ALL MEDIA is influenced by the world in which it was created. It is very hard to understand The Scarlet Letter without having an understanding of the time period in which it was written. You might "get" the plot, but not understand the depths of the human psyche being explored, unless you also understand the associated context of the time period.
> 
> What we lack, desperately, in modern culture is deep cultural literacy. We tend to read on a very superficial level from our own limited worldview. Everything we consume is done through that narrow prism of our own current life. So when we go back twenty years or 80 years or 200 years, we lack the knowledges that the readers of those times had. It is almost impossible to understand most Medieval literature without at least a basic knowledge of the Bible.
> 
> No fiction exists in a vacuum. It is all a by-product of the author's interpretation of his or her times. If you don't understand the time period a work was written in, it can be very hard to understand the author's point.


This hits the nail on the head. I love ancient Greek and Roman plays but they don't make a damned bit of sense or do anything for most people if you don't understand the culture (which was my focus in college, which is the only reason why I get any of it either).

The book that really did it and still does it for me is Wuthering Heights. It's bleak, it's old, it's completely demented and about horrible people. The characters I despise the most are the ones with the happy ending. And I love it. I've read i 6x and I"ll read it again. It's not even in a genre I like! But emotionally I connect with Heathcliff's struggles (what does this say about me? <__<) and feel sympathy for the normal people affected by the madness. Plus I like moors. Who doesn't?

Some things just hit the spot, but I think context is still important; however, that context comes in at different ways for different people. Just like lauramg_1406, I have no idea why The Great Gatsby was such a big deal. It was boring and dry and I didn't give a rat's butt about (what read to me as) bored rich people with too much time and money, very little self-worth, and long conversations while everyone's sitting around lazily drinking. I can't actually remember all of the story, but those parts (and something about a billboard), I do remember. Bleh.


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## lauramg_1406 (Oct 15, 2016)

Crystal_ said:


> Even back in high school, I found Shakespeare overrated. I appreciate his puns more as an adult but do his dialogue is overdone. Characters take forever to say nothing. If you cut the dialogue to the bone, the plays would be half as long.


You know my main issue with Shakespeare is that all of the plays I was forced to study were tragedies. I saw a Midsummer Night's Dream performed once and really enjoyed it! Far more than Macbeth, Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet (the latter is highly over rated and a little creepy considering Juliet was meant to be 13!)

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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Often, your ability to appreciate a classic depends on your overall knowledge. And before someone gets all upset, I'm not talking about general intelligence. I am talking about deep cultural literacy.


From middle school on, I was forced to read _Romeo & Juliet_ so many times I got to know the text so well that I could quote from it from memory. So well, that I could tell when a professional actor flubbed his or her lines doing the play.

It was my high school teacher, Mr. Hanold, who truly brought the story---and other Shakespeare plays---to life because he explained in detail the history and culture of what was going on during the time Shakespeare wrote the plays and about the culture and history of the periods Shakespeare was trying to reproduce in those plays. Because of this, I was able to find it enjoyable reading and watching Shakespeare's plays from then on. Understanding context makes a huge difference!

There are a number of "classic" books that were hoisted upon me in my youth that I would like to read again, just to see if they are just as terrible as I remember.


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## lauramg_1406 (Oct 15, 2016)

WDR said:


> From middle school on, I was forced to read _Romeo & Juliet_ so many times I got to know the text so well that I could quote from it from memory. So well, that I could tell when a professional actor flubbed his or her lines doing the play.
> 
> It was my high school teacher, Mr. Hanold, who truly brought the story---and other Shakespeare plays---to life because he explained in detail the history and culture of what was going on during the time Shakespeare wrote the plays and about the culture and history of the periods Shakespeare was trying to reproduce in those plays. Because of this, I was able to find it enjoyable reading and watching Shakespeare's plays from then on. Understanding context makes a huge difference!
> 
> There are a number of "classic" books that were hoisted upon me in my youth that I would like to read again, just to see if they are just as terrible as I remember.


We had a teacher like this for Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. While the book isn't one I'd ever really pick up on my own but that one teacher taught it so well I came to enjoy it!

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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

lauramg_1406 said:


> You know my main issue with Shakespeare is that all of the plays I was forced to study were tragedies. I saw a Midsummer Night's Dream performed once and really enjoyed it! Far more than Macbeth, Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet (the latter is highly over rated and a little creepy considering Juliet was meant to be 13!)
> 
> Sent from my SM-G800F using Tapatalk


I actually enjoy the stories of the tragedies but I don't like reading/watching them as is. It takes too long to get to the point. I've only seen/read Midsummer, but I found the story to be silly and pointless.

There have been some great modern remakes (_10 Things I Hate About You_!).


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## lauramg_1406 (Oct 15, 2016)

Crystal_ said:


> I actually enjoy the stories of the tragedies but I don't like reading/watching them as is. It takes too long to get to the point. I've only seen/read Midsummer, but I found the story to be silly and pointless.
> 
> There have been some great modern remakes (_10 Things I Hate About You_!).


Definitely! I love 10 Things I Hate About You! The BBC did a series of modernised Shakespeare maybe you 10 or 12 years ago (I remember watching them at school) that were pretty good.

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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

*Alert!*

I'm going to move this over to the Book Corner as it seems like the _perfect_ discussion for that section of the forum -- and we might even get some input from the non-authors among us. 

Me: I enjoy or don't enjoy 'classics' for the same reason I enjoy or don't enjoy current novels. I can recognize often WHY they're considered classics, but that doesn't mean I will personally find the story interesting. And that's o.k.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

As alluded to in another reply, it's interesting to see how my response to certain books has changed over the years. I read _Moby Dick_ back in high school (1970s!) and enjoyed it as a rousing good tale. When I re-read it a couple years ago or so, I found the story less interesting, but was more attuned to the wonderful writing; making it a different experience yet roughly equally rewarding.

I think I first read Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_ some time in the '80s, then re-read it a year or so ago. First time I was blown away from how different it was from almost anything I'd read before and mostly just relished its absurdist humor. The latter time, it no longer had that nothing-like-it feel, but in compensation I think I picked up a lot more of what Vonnegut was trying to say, and possibly came away even more satisfied than the first time.

On the other hand, I started trying to re-read _The Count of Monte Cristo_ a few years ago, and just could not get into it; yet I recall burning through it pretty quickly when I read it decades ago. I think I just couldn't get in tune with the older style and pacing when compared to what most novelists are writing now.

Oh, and as far as Stephen King goes, I think I finished _Carrie_ way back when it was pretty new, but I've never finished any of the 4 or 5 others of his novels I've tried. I kept trying because so many people kept gushing about what a great writer he is, but pretty much without fail I find myself not giving a bleep about any of the characters and just moving on to something else. There's no accounting for taste, right?


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

NogDog said:


> Oh, and as far as Stephen King goes, I think I finished _Carrie_ way back when it was pretty new, but I've never finished any of the 4 or 5 others of his novels I've tried. I kept trying because so many people kept gushing about what a great writer he is, but pretty much without fail I find myself not giving a bleep about any of the characters and just moving on to something else. There's no accounting for taste, right?


I agree with you 100% about King!

In the first place, I'm not a huge fan of horror but had always heard how wonderful a writer he is. So I tried a couple books that were supposed to not be 'horror' per se, but more psychological freak out. I couldn't finish any of them . . . . . I found the writing to be pedestrian and even when the story was moderately interesting, the people were so NOT anyone I wanted to have anything to do with that I didn't much care if monsters got them or cars ran over them or the dome impoded and they all died. I Just. Didn't. Care.

So . . . . no more King for me -- though I have a lot in my Amazon library because my brother shares my account and he LOVES it.


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## Guest (Oct 20, 2016)

What Writes at Midnight said:


> What are now "classics" were genre books (with popular appeal) when they were written.


No, at least not in the sense that we understand genre today. The further back you go in the literary history, the more specific the work genre was. And no, a great many classics did not have "popular" appeal. A great many were not commercial successes, nor were they ever read by the general masses. Don't forget that the idea of universal literacy is a relatively new thing in civilization.



> If we say it's okay for a reader to have to work harder/be more expert to appreciate the classics, we should apply the same brush to stuff written today. We'd then blame the reader's lack of culture for any book not being appreciated.
> 
> When our genre books don't sell, we could say it's because the modern readers don't have the right cultural attitude/experience/knowledge. Like, if I don't like a gritty slave trade story, it's my fault because I haven't properly educated myself in the world. Which is a valid perspective, but doesn't really capture the basic idea that fiction is there to please the reader, not make the reader work harder. And it doesn't help identify what makes something good.


Entertainment is only one purpose for literature. It is not the sole purpose. The art of storytelling originated as a way to share knowledge and build community. To assume it was always simply about "entertainment" is simply silly.

Schindler's List was not an "entertaining" movie. Avengers was entertaining. Schindler's List was difficult, forced the viewer to confront horrible realities, and, ultimately, provided a cathartic experience beyond mere entertainment.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was never meant to be an "entertaining" story, but it pulled me out of a deep depression when I was in college.

The world, in my never humble opinion, needs both escapist books to entertain and "classics" or literary books to force us to think. Like a health diet requires a variety of foods, a healthy mind needs both to be challenged (in the way the classics challenge us) and entertained (like much popular fiction. But to claim that a classic should require no effort and merely entertain diminishes what literature actually can and should do. It's like arguing all food should taste like pizza.


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## Lummox JR (Jul 1, 2012)

lauramg_1406 said:


> 3. Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein) - honestly I found this one boring, and I really shouldn't have because high fantasy is a genre I love


The Lord of the Rings is a point of difficulty for some people. The main things that seem to cause trouble for readers that I've heard are the copious scenery porn--which personally I love, because it makes the world seem incredibly real--and the unprecedented (and arguably unmatched since) depth of lore. Hardly a page goes by at times without a reference to ages past.

The same readers who struggle with that book might do just fine with another that has intricate interwoven plots and a sprawling cast. My wife is a big high fantasy reader, and she's never made it through the book herself.


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## SerenityEditing (May 3, 2016)

_Pre-emptive edit to say, sorry for babbling. _



Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:


> Try re-reading some books that you read and enjoyed as a teenager or young adult. You'll more likely find that you can't read them - and can't understand what you saw in them previously.


I might be the exception to this rule. (c: There were a handful of books that blew me away as a kid/teen. Because my father was military and we were always moving, I was never allowed to keep more than a handful of books - everything else had to go to yard sales. (Probably why I have books stacked to the ceilings now.) If I read a book and liked it, I'd go back and re-read it over and over and over, as many times as I could before it had to go back to the library or until we moved, in the hopes of memorizing it.

The Vision of Stephen - I spent years pre-internet trying to track this one down, because I was utterly certain it was titled "Stephen: A Eulogy." The Forgotten Door. The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, a book I'm pretty sure was just called "Bedevere" but I can't find any links for it. A book of Shirley Jackson stories, which my mother confiscated after she came around the corner and saw that seven-year-old me was reading a story called "The Daemon Lover." I can re-read them over and over and over and never get tired of them, still feel the magic.



Ann in Arlington said:


> I agree with you 100% about King!
> 
> In the first place, I'm not a huge fan of horror but had always heard how wonderful a writer he is. So I tried a couple books that were supposed to not be 'horror' per se, but more psychological freak out. I couldn't finish any of them . . . . . I found the writing to be pedestrian and even when the story was moderately interesting, the people were so NOT anyone I wanted to have anything to do with that I didn't much care if monsters got them or cars ran over them or the dome impoded and they all died. I Just. Didn't. Care.


Make room on this wagon for me too! I liked _Misery_, but everything else of his I read just left me cold. 
UNTIL. 
I read _Black House_, a collaboration with Peter Straub.

I kept seeing the book in stores, picking it up, then going, "Oh. Meh. Stephen King," and putting it back. Finally one day I decided to just go for it... and regretted it almost immediately. I couldn't get past the first maybe 10-15 pages.

I read those first 10-15 pages at least six times and was just about ready to give the book away, then one day somehow it clicked and I just slipped away into that world, and could not get back. Spent like four days being terrified of everything and trying to gobble up sentences everywhere I could.

There's a scene where one of the characters does a sort of teleportation thing from inside a closed bathroom stall. Well, I had just finished reading that when my son, then about 4, announced that he was ready for bed. I said I'd be in there in a moment, but slipped under into the book again, and it was probably 20 minutes before I came in to tuck him in and tell him good night. When I came in, it looked like he'd already fallen asleep - a still child-sized and -shaped lump under the covers up against the wall. I nudged the bed a few times to see if he was still awake, then leaned over to give him a kiss...

_...and heard the closet door slide open behind me. _

People say their knees give out; I'd always thought it was hyperbole, but no. It really does happen. I was mid-spin when my knees just said, "NOPE. WE'RE DONE, SEE YA" so I collapsed into a more or less sitting position on the edge of my son's bed. I nearly passed out but the sudden plummet seemed to help a bit.

It was my son in the closet, of course, playing a hiding game, with pillows/stuffed animals under the covers, but I swear I thought I was finished. I made my son come sleep with me that night, then spent the next week sleeping with the lights on.

So I will say that when King hits the sweet spot (which might be sweetest when writing with a co-author) he really really nails it, but between the lasting terror of that night and the struggle I had getting into the book (or any of his books) to ever get that far, it's just not worth it.

The only other thing of his I've ever picked up was _Dolores Claiborne_ and I made my mom read it first to tell me if it was scary. (c:


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Lummox JR said:


> The Lord of the Rings is a point of difficulty for some people. The main things that seem to cause trouble for readers that I've heard are the copious scenery porn--which personally I love, because it makes the world seem incredibly real--and the unprecedented (and arguably unmatched since) depth of lore. Hardly a page goes by at times without a reference to ages past.
> 
> The same readers who struggle with that book might do just fine with another that has intricate interwoven plots and a sprawling cast. My wife is a big high fantasy reader, and she's never made it through the book herself.


My husband didn't mind the scenery or general pace -- but he did tend to skip the pages and pages of Elven poems.


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## lauramg_1406 (Oct 15, 2016)

Lummox JR said:


> The Lord of the Rings is a point of difficulty for some people. The main things that seem to cause trouble for readers that I've heard are the copious scenery porn--which personally I love, because it makes the world seem incredibly real--and the unprecedented (and arguably unmatched since) depth of lore. Hardly a page goes by at times without a reference to ages past.
> 
> The same readers who struggle with that book might do just fine with another that has intricate interwoven plots and a sprawling cast. My wife is a big high fantasy reader, and she's never made it through the book herself.


I think the scenery was part of my problem. I don't mind a good description *but* I'm a character driven reader and so for me it didn't work. I can't remember if I actually wrote a review for Fellowship of the Ring, but if I did then I would have said it was well written but not my kind of read.

The other one I really struggled with is Les Misèrables. I got 3/4 of the way through before giving up. Hugo just included so much background in it and I think my problem there was that I've studied the French Revolutions so didn't need to be told some of it. Then again if a reader hadn't studied them then I can understand how some nuances could have been lost.

Sent from my SM-G800F using Tapatalk


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

I know many people love Dickens, but I struggle to read him. As my background is law, I wanted very much to read _Bleak House_ and have tried - oh, I've tried - numerous times but give up through sheer tedium. Same with _War and Peace_, which is much loved by many.

Yet I enjoyed books like _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_, which aren't my normal sort of fare. There's no accounting for what we enjoy, and what we can't take to.


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## LGOULD (Jul 5, 2011)

SerenityEditing said:


> This is spot-on.
> A friend of mine who knows of my love for sci-fi insisted I read some of Heinlein's work. I was bored out of my skull and thought it was ridiculous, oversimplified, and trite. (I think it was _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ but I don't remember - I bought three or four all at once, read one of them, skimmed through the others, wrote them all off.) When I told her I had not been impressed, she thought for a while, then said the difference was probably that when she'd read them, they were new releases. The ideas were mind-blowing and completely shook up everything she'd been raised to believe and accept as a given. I tried re-reading the book I'd finished with that in mind, and she re-read it with an eye to seeing how it holds up by comparison to today's works. She had more success seeing my angle than I had seeing hers, but not by much.


Funny you should mention _Stranger in a Strange Land_. It was a popular favorite when I was in high school. Many of its themes resonated with the late 1960s-early 1970s youth culture. I was "blown away" at the time. Many years later, on rereading it, I was much less impressed. I guess its time had passed.


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## Lummox JR (Jul 1, 2012)

SerenityEditing said:


> A friend of mine who knows of my love for sci-fi insisted I read some of Heinlein's work. I was bored out of my skull and thought it was ridiculous, oversimplified, and trite. (I think it was _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ but I don't remember - I bought three or four all at once, read one of them, skimmed through the others, wrote them all off.) When I told her I had not been impressed, she thought for a while, then said the difference was probably that when she'd read them, they were new releases. The ideas were mind-blowing and completely shook up everything she'd been raised to believe and accept as a given. I tried re-reading the book I'd finished with that in mind, and she re-read it with an eye to seeing how it holds up by comparison to today's works. She had more success seeing my angle than I had seeing hers, but not by much.


I don't know if the new-release factor plays into it. I adore Heinlein, at least his earlier work, and I didn't discover it till well after his death. However I will say that _Stranger in a Strange Land_ was never one of my favorites, because frankly it felt too full of itself, almost preachy on free love and making the most of one's own agency ("thou art God"). To be honest I haven't read very much of Heinlein's later fiction, because that one scared me off of it. But I've read many books of his that fared a lot better over the years than that one. Even the ones that are highly dated still have stories that work decently, whereas in _Stranger_ I think the plot centered so much around the subversiveness of its concepts that when removed from its time, it loses a lot.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

lauramg_1406 said:


> The other one I really struggled with is Les Misèrables. I got 3/4 of the way through before giving up. Hugo just included so much background in it and I think my problem there was that I've studied the French Revolutions so didn't need to be told some of it. Then again if a reader hadn't studied them then I can understand how some nuances could have been lost.


In my experience, with novels one reads in translation, a LOT depends on the translators. Some abridge the book -- for better or worse, depending on the original; some 'clean up' the books which can be problematic because not everyone has the same idea of 'naughty'; some are too literal to where things that are perfectly idiomatic and clear in the original language sound really strange in the translation.



Sam Kates said:


> I know many people love Dickens, but I struggle to read him. As my background is law, I wanted very much to read _Bleak House_ and have tried - oh, I've tried - numerous times but give up through sheer tedium. Same with _War and Peace_, which is much loved by many.


Some Dickens is a Real Slog . . . . I got through _Bleak House_ but it was a real chore. On the other hand, I enjoyed _Great Expectations_, _Oliver Twist_, _A Tale of Two Cities_. An neither _A Christmas Carol_ nor _The Cricket on the Hearth_ are difficult reads at all.

Others on the 'slog' end of the scale were _Pickwick Papers_, _Hard Times_, and _Nicholas Nickleby_


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

Lummox JR said:


> I don't know if the new-release factor plays into it. I adore Heinlein, at least his earlier work, and I didn't discover it till well after his death. However I will say that _Stranger in a Strange Land_ was never one of my favorites, because frankly it felt too full of itself, almost preachy on free love and making the most of one's own agency ("thou art God"). To be honest I haven't read very much of Heinlein's later fiction, because that one scared me off of it. But I've read many books of his that fared a lot better over the years than that one. Even the ones that are highly dated still have stories that work decently, whereas in _Stranger_ I think the plot centered so much around the subversiveness of its concepts that when removed from its time, it loses a lot.


It always vaguely amuses me (in a good way) how we all read such different things into the same works. I really enjoyed _Stranger_ and every one of his that I've read, and feel that they've fully stood the test of time.

Well, perhaps not fully - some of the attitudes towards women in many of the classic works (not just picking on Heinlein here) are offensive to modern sensibilities, but I can overlook that as being products of their times.


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## Dragon (May 9, 2016)

There are classics I've read and loved, and others made me wonder why they were considered classics. For example, a classic adventure novel is 'Call of the Wild'. I've read it once and never again. I didn't enjoy it. 'War and Peace', oh my God, what a great sleep-aid. 'Gone with The Wind', same thing. We know the writing style was different in times past, we know that sometimes serialization and payment per word affected the author's wordiness. None of those classics made a positive impression on me. You know what did though?
Sherlock Holmes, Anne of Green Gables, The Outsiders, Catcher In The Rye, Watership Down, Robin Hood, Stephen King's 'IT', Anne McCaffery's 'Pern' series, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Twelve Labors of Hercules, Animal Farm, Day of The Triffids, Forty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

Who can say why some become classics and some become sleep-aids? I think some of it is style, some is the environment the book is published in (socially, I mean) and some is where the reader is at in their own life.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

SerenityEditing said:


> The Forgotten Door.


I loved Alexander Key's _The Forgotten Door_. It wouldn't be until I was an adult when I would discover that he also wrote _Escape to Witch Mountain_, another favorite of mine when I was a child.


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## Shanna Moncuse (Jan 26, 2016)

I'm not really into classics. At least not the ones assigned in school. Because of that, I'm hesitant to try other classics.


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## Joseph M. Erhardt (Oct 31, 2016)

SerenityEditing said:


> This is spot-on.
> A friend of mine who knows of my love for sci-fi insisted I read some of Heinlein's work. I was bored out of my skull and thought it was ridiculous, oversimplified, and trite. (I think it was _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ but I don't remember - I bought three or four all at once, read one of them, skimmed through the others, wrote them all off.) When I told her I had not been impressed, she thought for a while, then said the difference was probably that when she'd read them, they were new releases. The ideas were mind-blowing and completely shook up everything she'd been raised to believe and accept as a given. I tried re-reading the book I'd finished with that in mind, and she re-read it with an eye to seeing how it holds up by comparison to today's works. She had more success seeing my angle than I had seeing hers, but not by much.


_Stranger in a Strange Land_ I couldn't finish. It starts off gangbusters with concepts like the Martians and grokking this and that, but by the time I got to the middle of the novel, I found I had no reason or inclination to finish it. For me, it had lost its life. And I was, I think, 16 at the time--in the middle of the "Golden Age of SF": 13-20.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Joseph M. Erhardt said:


> SerenityEditing said:
> 
> 
> > This is spot-on.
> ...


Heinlein had two major phases in his writing career: his adventure series works and then his social progressive work. In his early career, he mainly wrote hard science fiction adventure stories that would appeal to adolescent boys. His publishers back then refused to allow him to write some of his social-based ideas because they didn't fit with what they wanted to sell. From this grouping came _Starship Troopers, Citizen of the Galaxy_, and _Have Spacesuit Will Travel_.

In the '60s, Heinlein left his publishers and signed on with a new publisher who was more open to change. This allowed Heinlein to explore the societal changes in the future via stories such as _Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday_, and _Number of the Beast_.

I preferred Heinlein's more adventurous stories to his social science stories. A friend of mine had completely the opposite preference. Yet, we are both Heinlein fans. So, you will get people who rave about Heinlein and those who dismiss him, based on which of his books they read.

For those of you who are Heinlein fans, I would highly recommend reading his first novel, _For Us the Living_. It was never published, and with good reason. It is really terrible! What makes it interesting is that you can see the seeds and concepts for just about every single one of his biggest hits in that story. He had all those ideas in the beginning, and tried to use them all at the same time and failed. Yet, when he took each idea individually and used it to set the theme of a later novel, he created a fantastic stories that went on to become a bestsellers. There is a very powerful lesson in this for anyone who is or aspires to be a writer. Because of this, I would nominate _For Us the Living_ as a classic. Not for its qualitative values, but for it being an excellent example to be used for teaching writing.


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## Joseph M. Erhardt (Oct 31, 2016)

WDR said:


> For those of you who are Heinlein fans, I would highly recommend reading his first novel, _For Us the Living_. It was never published, and with good reason. It is really terrible!


Er, if it was never published, then how, er, did you, um, read it? 

One novel that was really terrible that _was_ published (by Ace, no less), was John Brunner's _The Atlantic Abomination_. I had to finish reading that in the same way you can't look away from a train wreck.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Joseph M. Erhardt said:


> Er, if it was never published, then how, er, did you, um, read it?
> 
> One novel that was really terrible that _was_ published (by Ace, no less), was John Brunner's _The Atlantic Abomination_. I had to finish reading that in the same way you can't look away from a train wreck.


LOL!

A few years after Heinlein passed away, they pulled the manuscript from whatever pit they had it buried in and published it as a memorial to him. It was not a good read, but I loved how I was able to pick out all the elements that would become his later successes. Academically, it is an outstanding example where you can see the early development of someone would later become a great writer.


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