Books you don't "get"

[marwyn]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1527201' date='Sep 22 2008, 19.53']You’re kidding, right? [i]Atlas Shrugged[/i] is no more a classic than the [i]Da Vinci Code[/i] is. Ayn Rand is universally vilified both by the unwashed masses and academia. (And rightly so.) No mean feat, that! Only a small demographic of basement-dwelling masturbatory young neo-liberal males who can’t get laid have elevated it to their bible of wish-fulfilment, dreaming of a world in which (ironically) they’d be ripped in two by the next passing alpha male. (In fact, beta- and gamma-males will have Rand’s readers for lunch as well.) It fulfils the same urge away from complexity towards a simpler, better, cleaner place where [i]I[/i] am significant that makes adolescents love Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers.[/quote]

You totally forgot to mention that the Yeard is also a big fan of Ayn Rand.
Or did you?

Ontopic: I kind of can't get into Malazan as well even though I've had a lot of people recommend it to me. Doesnt really seem to be my thing, I guess.

[Vethnar]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1527201' date='Sep 22 2008, 19.53']You’re kidding, right? [i]Atlas Shrugged[/i] is no more a classic than the [i]Da Vinci Code[/i] is. Ayn Rand is universally vilified both by the unwashed masses and academia. (And rightly so.) No mean feat, that! Only a small demographic of basement-dwelling masturbatory young neo-liberal males who can’t get laid have elevated it to their bible of wish-fulfilment, dreaming of a world in which (ironically) they’d be ripped in two by the next passing alpha male. (In fact, beta- and gamma-males will have Rand’s readers for lunch as well.) It fulfils the same urge away from complexity towards a simpler, better, cleaner place where [i]I[/i] am significant that makes adolescents love Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers.[/quote]

Happy Ent,

That's the most hilarious (and true) thing I have read the whole day. Thanks for the laugh!

A few additions of my own to the thread:

[i]Consider Phlebas[/i] by Iain M Banks. A 500 page orgy of pointless and ridiculously over-the-top action scenes which do nothing whatsoever to advance the plot. Bonus points for including the silliest and most out of place cannibal scene ever.

[i]Tigana[/i] by Guy Gavriel Kay. A pompous, over-sentimental and poorly written story with a group of annoying and one-dimensional protagonists setting out to save a country which we are given no reason to care about. I can't believe this was written by the same Guy Gavriel Kay who wrote the excellent [i]Sarantine Mosaic[/i].

[i]Growth of the Soil[/i] by my compatriot Knut Hamsun. I generally like Hamsun, but [i]Growth of the Soil[/i], which is often considered his most important work, bored me so much that I was never able to complete it.

[add-on]

[quote name='Vrana' post='1527161' date='Sep 22 2008, 12.16']Only read [i]Oliver Twist[/i] so far but I couldn't get past half of it and even though I'm not a official Dickens-nay-sayer (Dostoyevsky aka God liked him so I cannot give up just yet), I hope he has something to show for being so unimaginably loved by every single person I've met.[/quote]
You'll fit in just fine around here. :) Lots of boarders find Dickens overrated (though I'm not one of them).

[quote name='Marwyn' post='1527504' date='Sep 22 2008, 14.50']You totally forgot to mention that the Yeard is also a big fan of Ayn Rand.
Or did you?[/quote]
Or maybe he just felt that not every post on this forum need contain a reference to Terry Goodkind. A strange and troubling idea, I know.

[urizen]

The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Horrible books. A couple of hundred pages in I started hoping for a suitable worldspanning calamity to vipe everyone out.

As I posted in an other thread. Fitz; Worst. Protagionist. Ever.

[williamjm]

[quote name='Vethnar' post='1527550' date='Sep 22 2008, 21.37'][i]Consider Phlebas[/i] by Iain M Banks. A 500 page orgy of pointless and ridiculously over-the-top action scenes which do nothing whatsoever to advance the plot. Bonus points for including the silliest and most out of place cannibal scene ever.[/quote]

I read this recently, and I agree the cannibal scene is extremely gratuitous (although I guess the cannibal's religious cult is meant to fit in with the novel's theme of faith vs atheism). I wasn't too keen on the first half of the book with its complete lack of plot advancement, although I did think the novel improved towards the end when the over-the-top action scenes at least started to have some plot relevance once they got to the Command System. It's still far inferior to most of Banks' other books that I've read.

[Eponine]

I just read Wicked a few weeks ago, and it was one of the most all around poorly written books I've ever read. A lot of people seem to like it though.

[Horza]

[quote name='williamjm' post='1527600' date='Sep 23 2008, 07.18']I read this recently, and I agree the cannibal scene is extremely gratuitous (although I guess the cannibal's religious cult is meant to fit in with the novel's theme of faith vs atheism). I wasn't too keen on the first half of the book with its complete lack of plot advancement, although I did think the novel improved towards the end when the over-the-top action scenes at least started to have some plot relevance once they got to the Command System. It's still far inferior to most of Banks' other books that I've read.[/quote]

I've gotten wary of Banks over the last few years but for me the gratuitious cannibal bit and over-the-top action scenes that may or may not propell the plot were great, what lets CP down for me is the fairly weak characterisation early in the piece - though this improves in the course of the novel, esp. viz. Horza - we see an fairly flat, unsympathetic character gradually become more complex and then watch as

SPOILER: Consider Phlebas

he and his lover( with unborn child) are killed by the same people on who's behalf he'd done all manner of cruelties

.

[williamjm]

[quote name='Horza' post='1527683' date='Sep 22 2008, 23.33']I've gotten wary of Banks over the last few years but for me the gratuitious cannibal bit and over-the-top action scenes that may or may not propell the plot were great, what lets CP down for me is the fairly weak characterisation early in the piece - though this improves in the course of the novel[/quote]

Yes, I did think the characterisation was weak at the start (but improved later on). It's particularly bad when Banks introduces all 30-odd members of the Free Company in a chapter but doesn't get round to giving them any proper characterisation until most of them are are dead when the survivors do finally get some half-decent characterisation.

[Ser Barry]

[quote name='Eponine R' post='1527625' date='Sep 22 2008, 22.40']I just read Wicked a few weeks ago, and it was one of the most all around poorly written books I've ever read. A lot of people seem to like it though.[/quote]

If you didn't like Wicked then run as far and as fast as you can from his other work. Remove all of Wicked's redeeming features and you are left with one smug tosser churning out shite.

The Name of the Rose, 50% of that book evaded me from the Latin passages to the biblical imagery. I thought it was good and enjoyed much of it out the feeling of so much meaning passing just over my head was off putting. Like having a picnic at the head of the runway at Heathrow. The breeze kept blowing my cup of lemonade over.

Anna Karenina I found solidly boring.

Malazan is ridiculous and poorly written.

Shogun was utter balls.

[lokisnow]

brave new world and 1984. two books I've surprisingly never finished. I read and liked animal farm but felt it was kinda shallow ala narnia.

never finished Great Gatsby either. I thought it was terrible.

I read and liked Catch 22 but didnt' really get it as one of the all time great books, then again I was fifteen, so I'd probably like it better now.

but number one has got to be: Catcher in the Rye. and the movie adaptation of it, American Beauty. :P

[Tears of Lys]

[quote name='cyrano' post='1423907' date='Jul 1 2008, 21.57']But I also feel I shouldnt [i]work[/i] to enjoy a book, know what I mean?[/quote]

Actually, I'm in a contrarian state right now that if I don't have to "work" at a book, I'm not satisfied. I wasn't sure I enjoyed the Prince of Nothing series when I first read it, but upon rereading, I love it. All the nuances I missed at first are there to be discovered once I know where they're going. If a story yields up all its secrets at once, I feel bored.


[quote name='Arwen' post='1425180' date='Jul 2 2008, 16.14'][b]The World According to Garp.[/b] I loved all John Irvings other books, but tried twice to read this one and just could not get interested.[/quote]

I remember reading this, but mostly I remember the scene where his wife chomps off some guy's penis in a driveway. :stunned: No movie could really surpass the book in this regard. :P

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1527201' date='Sep 22 2008, 13.53']You’re kidding, right? [i]Atlas Shrugged[/i] is no more a classic than the [i]Da Vinci Code[/i] is. Ayn Rand is universally vilified both by the unwashed masses and academia. (And rightly so.) No mean feat, that! Only a small demographic of basement-dwelling masturbatory young neo-liberal males who can’t get laid have elevated it to their bible of wish-fulfilment, dreaming of a world in which (ironically) they’d be ripped in two by the next passing alpha male. (In fact, beta- and gamma-males will have Rand’s readers for lunch as well.) It fulfils the same urge away from complexity towards a simpler, better, cleaner place where [i]I[/i] am significant that makes adolescents love Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers.[/quote]

My hopefully soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law was a devotee of Atlas Shrugged and your description fits him to a tee. If only he dropped in on this board occasionally to see how [i]wrong[/i] he is. :tantrum:

[Crazydog7]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1527201' date='Sep 22 2008, 13.53']You’re kidding, right? [i]Atlas Shrugged[/i] is no more a classic than the [i]Da Vinci Code[/i] is. Ayn Rand is universally vilified both by the unwashed masses and academia. (And rightly so.) No mean feat, that! Only a small demographic of basement-dwelling masturbatory young neo-liberal males who can’t get laid have elevated it to their bible of wish-fulfilment, dreaming of a world in which (ironically) they’d be ripped in two by the next passing alpha male. (In fact, beta- and gamma-males will have Rand’s readers for lunch as well.) It fulfils the same urge away from complexity towards a simpler, better, cleaner place where [i]I[/i] am significant that makes adolescents love Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers.[/quote]


Thanks Ent. Your posts can always cheer me up, i'm not crazy then.

[sologdin]

heh. i've had sloterdijk's [i]critique of cynical reason[/i] on my bookshelf for at least ten years. can't finish it.

ditto, vico's [i]new science[/i].

can't seem to slog through de sade's [i]justine[/i], which is odd, considering that i finished [i]120 days of sodom[/i] in short order and could've handled 120 days more.

braudel's more or less unread [i]civilization & capitalism[/i] is a constant reminder of my lectoral inadequacy.

half-read [i]summa theologica[/i] and [i]dead sea scrolls[/i] also mock my readerly stamina.

got exactly 25 pages into derrida's [i]glas[/i] before realizing that either he is or i am an idiot, in which cases there's no point in continuing (dig his pre-[i]glas[/i] work, though, and [i]spectres[/i], of course). kept the book as a trophy of post-structuralism, and enshrined it on my shelf next to a stuffed jackalope from dakota and a shrunken head from borneo.

[igoraki]

Umberto Eco Foucault's Pendulum,was struggling with first 150 pages for some month and the half but give up after that.

[A Time for Wolves]

Everything Ayn Rand. I cannot bear her at all. Really disliked The Fountainhead, tried to read Atlas Shrugged to see if it would change my mind, and gave up.

Edit: Oops, I see this was brought up already. Anyway,

[quote]Ayn Rand is universally vilified both by the unwashed masses and academia. (And rightly so.) No mean feat, that! Only a small demographic of basement-dwelling masturbatory young neo-liberal males who can’t get laid have elevated it to their bible of wish-fulfilment, dreaming of a world in which (ironically) they’d be ripped in two by the next passing alpha male.[/quote]

I wish you were right, but this isn't quite the case. There are a lot of women I know that love Ayn Rand, and she's apparently accepted as a real philosopher by many people, even if they disagree with her.

I don't really think of her as a philosopher so much as a deranged lunatic, but I've always felt that I'm in the minority on that.

[Monboddo]

Maybe 'Dhalgren' or books by Nick Cave or Murakami (sp?)

[Ser Barry]

[quote name='Monboddo' post='1528214' date='Sep 23 2008, 14.20']Maybe 'Dhalgren' or books by Nick Cave or [b]Murakami[/b] (sp?)[/quote]

:cry:

[aspasia]

[quote name='Brienne of Tarth' post='1528208' date='Sep 23 2008, 08.14']I wish you were right, but this isn't quite the case. There are a lot of women I know that love Ayn Rand, and she's apparently accepted as a real philosopher by many people, even if they disagree with her.[/quote]


I used to teach philosophy at university. No one in academic philosophy takes Rand seriously; she's bad rehash of misunderstood Nietzsche. There's one small organization, made up entirely of the sort of Rand fans earlier identified-- usually young men, but some older ones retaining their youthful resentments, sharing a fuming certainty that in a LOGICAL world THEY would be in charge-- that always leaves flyers on the table at American Philosophical Association conferences, alleging that Rand is a great philosopher and that the rest of the philosophical world is just cowardly or stupid or scared to admit how awesome Rand is. She isn't; just in case anyone's wondering whether a philosophically trained person might find something more worthwhile in her works that you did, one doesn't. A philosophically well-trained person-- and I passed for my doctorate under the *old* Jesuit PhD requirements, which have since been changed because the graduate program re-accreditation committees said they were too hard and demanded too much study, knowledge, and expertise-- can instead see what other philosophers Rand is painfully misconstruing, and how much of her ability to believe her writing to be philosophically valuable rested on intellectual isolation. It's tripe. It's always been tripe, and she couldn't improve it, ever, because she would expel anyone who questioned anything she said-- if they didn't worship her, they were found guilty of insufficient Objectivism and cast into the Outer Darkness. Really terrible intellectual practice; one can't construct theory in isolation from other minds, or you write theory comprehensible only to yourself. Dave Sim would seem another lesson in the same category.

I always found is amusing that the Rand fanboys could be counted on to claim, mouths tight with rage, that SHEER LOGIC and OBJECTIVITY were the only right criteria for belief-- a belief they held, not on the basis of argument, but out of emotional conviction. They invariably believed that whatever was wrong with the world that deprived them of recognition of their "superiority" was due to the unwashed masses' lack of logic and love of mediocrity; the triumph of "logic" always linked, in their minds, with their own true superiority to all the other students who scorned them as socially awkward or undesirable or ridiculous.

As a teacher of logic, I would usually point out that logic is a tool that can get you from some true premises to others, among other useful features.... but that *by itself*, logic cannot evaluate the truthfulness of all premises. Sound conclusions depend not only on valid argumentation but on true premises... and there are no soundness checkers for arguments, only validity checkers. I was usually wasting my breath, since Rand fanboys listen to no one; they are usually too enamored of their own particular opinions, and Rand is a convenient way for them to cloak their self-centeredness as heroic refusal to compromise. It's funny.. but also annoying, and tragic insofar as Randite belief stunted the intellectual growth of young men (and a few women) who were not outright stupid, even though they were rarely as brilliant as they wanted to believe themselves to be. Their feelings attached them to Rand, which stopped their intellectual progress right there until they learned to see past the fusion of Rand's arrogance and their own young amor-propre.

But the caricature of her fans in this thread was spot on. Sure, maybe one in 20 of them is identifiably a female, but once you see enough of them you can spot one a mile off. I could usually pick out the Randite in the first few days of a philosophy course. They walked in convinced they already had all the right answers, simmering with resentment kept in with a thin lid of self-complacency provided by Rand... and ready to explode with angry contempt if any of their pronouncements were brought into rational debate.

[TakLoufer]

[quote name='Monboddo' post='1528214' date='Sep 23 2008, 08.20']Maybe '[b]Dhalgren[/b]' or books by Nick Cave or Murakami (sp?)[/quote]

I have a theory that the main determining factor of whether you "get" [i]Dhalgren[/i] or not is the age when you first read it. I first read [i]Dhalgren[/i] when I was 14, and it had a deep impact on me as a person. I've re-read it a few times since then and, while I recognize it wonderfully complex and well-written, I also see it as pretentious and self-indulgent.

If I read it for the first time now (at age 27), I probably would hate it.

Just a thought, really. How old were you when you read it?

[aspasia]

Pardon me for the earlier tangential post-- reminiscing about students, I forgot that my original intent was to identify a disliked fantasy work.

The Lord of the Rings. Although I can to some extent forgive my own ten-year-old self along with other children for liking it, it's still bad; and worse than being bad literature, it's bad for developing ethical and epistemological abilities.

The ethics and aesthetics of the Tolkein epic are poisonous and narrow, selfish and ugly, and eventually, I think, *false*. All of ethics is reduced to easy rights and wrongs: shining goodness versus nasty evil, always easy to spot, always simple. The only problem between good and evil is that some people/races/beings are BAD, and lack the courage to be GOOD and resist ugly black badness. There is war because orcs are bad and hate goodness. Does no one else hear echoes of Tolkien when George W. Bush pontificates about how yucky bad terrorist Muslims live only to hate us because "we" are good and free and all they want is to bring us down because evil hates goodness? Does no one else roll their eyes at the "moral" the returning hobbits gravely come up with-- how they're little people and how grateful they are that they got a glimpse of the big important people who really run things? The wizards and elves and kings matter, they know what's really going on, and we little ant beings just have to trust the pretty tall powerful people and have the courage to do what they tell us, to defeat Evil!

Shudder.

Jacqueline Carey's "Sundering" books are a really quite good commentary on the Lord of the Rings and the epic style in general-- starting from much more plausible and humane assumptions about what living beings are like, she rewrites the LotR story in a way that *shows* the insufficiency of Tolkien's ethics and aesthetics. Elves are tall and pretty, yep, and think that being tall and pretty and shining, they are of course the best of all beings, and Men and all other mortals have that awful stench that they wrinkle their perfect noses at... Men variously look up to Elves and consider themelves therefore second-rate, or respond in other ways to the situation, all much more interesting than Tolkien's take. It's a very thought-provoking work, though less applauded than Carey's Kushiel books-- possibly because it *has* a philosophical import, a serious and weighty one, and less sheer entertainment and sex and fun than the later series. The heroes of the Sundering are the three characters who she develops to fill the narrative positions of Sauron, the leader of the Ringwraiths, and Gollum; they're all magnificently imagined, particularly the "Ushahin Dreamspinner" she creates as the most fearful enemy of Elves and (good) Men. Not only will I never forget that character, it was an education to read him.