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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
The long LONG descriptions in older novels date back to the time when there was no photography, no Google, no Wikipedia. If you wanted to know what a whale was like, Herman Melville had to describe it for you because there was no other way for you to know.

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Originally posted by Tubbs:
Emma by Jane Austen.

By the time I'd finished it, I wanted to reach into the Kindle and punch her in the face. OTH, Austen did say she was going to write a book with a heroine that no one would like!

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I just happen to think long descriptive passages fell out of vogue because they're startling tedious. And yes, Thomas Hardy, I'm looking at you...

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Careful, now. No dissing the greatest novelist in the English language!

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I try to be self-deprecating; I'm just not very good at it.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheAlethiophile

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I've developed almost an aversion to Booker Prize winners and others shortlisted for it.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:


I just happen to think long descriptive passages fell out of vogue because they're startling tedious. And yes, Thomas Hardy, I'm looking at you...

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Originally posted by Tubbs:
Emma by Jane Austen.

By the time I'd finished it, I wanted to reach into the Kindle and punch her in the face. OTH, Austen did say she was going to write a book with a heroine that no one would like!

Tubbs

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I couldn't finish Emma so I watched Clueless instead.

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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I'd rather pluck my eyes out than read Hardy again. Curiously, the adaptations on R4 are decent fare, probably because he's decent at dialogue.

I do enjoy some books from the period (Wilkie Collins especially, and The Woman in White is massive), but not Hardy, I'm afraid...

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Originally posted by Sipech:

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I just happen to think long descriptive passages fell out of vogue because they're startling tedious. And yes, Thomas Hardy, I'm looking at you...

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Careful, now. No dissing the greatest novelist in the English language!

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Making someone read something for GCSE is a great way to spoil it for them for life.

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Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
This weekend I was commiserating with a poor unfortunate teenager who is undergoing the cruel and unusual punishment of being forced to read Madame Bovary at school.

For some reason, this tome is considered one of the great masterpieces of the French canon. Neither he nor I can understand why, because it Sucks™.

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Originally posted by Sipech:


The one that bucks the trend is To Kill A Mockingbird which just about everyone has had to study at somepoint, though I've yet to find anyone who resents it.

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I had to study it. I loathe it. It's just so smarmy. Atticus Finch is less believable than a Frank Capra hero, and the whole Boo Radley thing is simply stupid. But the bit I resented most was being very clearly ordered (with the author's least subtle signposting, and, as she is not an expert in the use of the English language, that is very unsubtle indeed) to revere that foul snurge of an elder brother who is clearly meant to be some kind of White Trash Messiah in the making, but awoke in me a desire only to get my kicking boots out.

To continue, I think the book I hate most in the whole wide world (yes, even more than moron-fodder like Twilight, 50 Shades and The Hunger Games) is Tess of the d'Urbevilles. I kept myself going through the second half of that by composing hymns of hate to Angel Clare and, in the latter stages, developing a scenario for a Dadaist take on the whole thing, which involved a lot of scenes of him being attacked by Lancaster Bombers. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

As far as inability to finish goes, I have been reading Hard Times since 1983, and still have about 200 pages to go.

But Fanny Price is ace. If I met her I would quite happily commit adultery till the cows came home if she signified a desire to do so...

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Originally posted by Ariel:
Jane Austen, Trollope, and Russian authors in translation, also anything by Terry Pratchett. There are more, but those are first to come to mind.

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1. The hate because you think the writing is in some ways bad e.g. overly descriptive, poor characterisation.
2. The hate because the book creates an emotional response so strong you throw it across the room despite being able to see the writing is decent.
3. the hate in the "love to hate" sense, when there is something about the plot you dislike yet for that reason it grips you.

• Any Bertie Wooster and Jeeves book comes into this category. No, I do not find them funny and do not see why anyone else would.
• Wuthering Heights falls into this group. I have officially read it from cover to cover, but I kept having to have breaks from it. I simply loathed it. The week before I had read Jane Eyre in a single evening.
• I honestly cannot think of one for this, but have it a bit with horror stories

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

Now Austen I discovered for myself when I was twenty. Nobody had ever told me she was funny.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:


(re Madame Bovary) Oh, it's far worse than that. Every word drips with despair and ennui (enfin ils arrivèrent, ces fameux comices!*). The cumulative effect is enough to make you want to throw yourself into the Seine, preferably from a bridge in Rouen.

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*"At long last the day of the legendary provincial agricultural show dawned"

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Oh, and if Trollope frosts you? Pick up Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton. It won the World Fantasy Award. You will never see Trollope in the same way again.

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Originally posted by HCH:
Why has no one mentioned Dickens?

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I started, but fell

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I try to be self-deprecating; I'm just not very good at it.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheAlethiophile

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
And the despisers of Fanny Price should have a look at Murder in Mansfield Park, one of the surpassingly few Austen sequels which is worth the trees that died to print them. You knew that Fanny actually was the passive-aggressive source of all the trouble in the house, didn't you? And that somebody would take a brick to her one day.

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Originally posted by Sipech:
The one that bucks the trend is To Kill A Mockingbird which just about everyone has had to study at somepoint, though I've yet to find anyone who resents it.

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Originally posted by Scots lass:

Wuthering Heights I loved when I was 16. I tried re-reading it in my mid-20s and couldn't get more than a third of the way through, awful. I liked Jane Eyre much more, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is good. [/QB]

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Originally posted by Badger Lady:

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Originally posted by Scots lass:

Wuthering Heights I loved when I was 16. I tried re-reading it in my mid-20s and couldn't get more than a third of the way through, awful. I liked Jane Eyre much more, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is good.

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I had a very similar experience with Anna Karenina. I loved it when I read it in my late teens and thought it all terribly romantic. I re-read it a few years ago and got very frustrated with Anna's selfishness and failure to consider the devastating impact of her actions on her son.

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Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy — at times from the society — of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

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