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This is the place for posting weird things about classics. I have three that come to mind, so here goes.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (Bronte's e has an umlaut) has absolutely no redeeming features except for Bronte's exceptional way with words. Read it for ten minutes and you come away depressed and angry. It makes me want to shout "We need a birthday party here! Disney princesses! Just once! One birthday party! PLEASE!!!" Honestly, it is the darkest book I have ever read.
Robin Hood aparantly has no respect for geography, as in some of the stories he can teleport across the whole of England in the space of a few hours.
After King Arthur's death, a knight who had been there when he died got depressed, wandered off into the woods, found a hermit, and promptly became a hermit himself. Then Sir Laneclot comes home from France, finds the king dead, becomes depressed, wanders off into the woods, finds the same hermit, and promptly becomes a hermit along with said hermit and aforementioned knight. As if this weren't enough, six other knights find the king dead, get depressed, wander off into the woods, find the same tiny house, and all become hermits, one after the other. Poof. For goodness sake, these myths need a little work in the realm of believable plotlines....
-EH
submitted by Emily H. :), age 14, Sparks, NV
(October 6, 2009 - 8:40 pm)
(October 6, 2009 - 8:40 pm)
I'm reading Catcher in the Rye, and heck, it's just *irritating*. Not a difficult read, course, but that's mainly because /half the book/ is the guy /cursing/ for absolutely no reason... I mean, really. So even though I only read it while I'm waiting for my MSWord computer to load (and that thing is old, so it takes awhile), I'm pretty much flying through it...
On the other hand, I love Dracula and Phantom of the Opera, which would both be considered classics, and I'm soon going to read Frankenstein. Would you call Ray Bradbury's works "classics"? I really like him.
(October 7, 2009 - 3:24 pm)
*coaxes thread* Top!
(October 8, 2009 - 5:12 pm)
Oh, goodness, Catcher in the Rye. Arguably the stupidest book I have ever read, and the wierd manic-depressive thing whats-his-name had wasn't even done interestingly... angst and more angst and then... angst. And nothing actually happens. Grah.
Dracula and Phantom though, <3.
Bradbury, yes, is considered classic American literature. Somehow his jawbreaker sentences make me hate his guts but love him at the same time.
(October 9, 2009 - 11:01 am)
It's Holden Caulfield, I think, or something like that...
I've gotten to the point where he's cursing *big surprise* at the other guy whose name I don't remember in the dorm... my aunt said it turns out he's narrating from a mental hospital, though, so maybe it'll get better. I don't have an awful lot of hope, though.
And yes, angst would more or less sum it up... is there anything this kid doesn't hate?
...Jawbreaker?
(October 9, 2009 - 2:51 pm)
Jawbreaker... The incredibly long, unending, wordy, etc. etc. sentences that make English teachers cry and that Bradbury is at the very least semi-addicted to. It's his word, mind, not mine.
(October 10, 2009 - 9:22 pm)
I liked Wuthering Heights, although I didn't technically read it. My mom and I listened to it on her computer while she painted and I did stuff...It was depressing at most times, but it was such a great plot, and under the circumstances that she wrote it...I am reading Holmes right now... does that count as a classic? I want to get Dracula too.
(October 10, 2009 - 8:59 am)
Holmes is most definitely a classic. He rocks.
-EH
(October 10, 2009 - 2:17 pm)
Oh, aaaand, I am going to read Beowulf and The Greed Knight, translated, of course, which are probably the two most classic things ever, I believe.
(October 10, 2009 - 9:03 am)
@ TNO (umlaut): Oh. I see. (My English teachers are more inclined to cry when I hand in stories about aliens causing the apocalypse, but yes, I see what you mean.)
@ JFB: Most certainly. He is wonderful.
Ohh, and Edgar Allan Poe. Cannot forget EAP, he is definitely a classic... <3
(October 11, 2009 - 11:06 am)
So, on the topic of "jawbreaker" sentences... I'm reading A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde...
"From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerably cigarettes, Lord Henry Watton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a labernum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Chinese effect, and making him think of those palllid jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to covey the sense of siftness and motion."
I'm sorry, it's a fine book, but that simply is not a sentence. It's like a whole novel in and of itself...
(October 11, 2009 - 3:42 pm)
That, my dear friend, is an author after my own heart. Now you know how I write if I don't hold myself under lock and key... I think my record is in the sixties or seventies of words per sentence, but that's when I'm not even trying. Let's see, I'll try for something longer, based on the photo on the calender hanging by the computer. "A forest, yes, but an eerie, otherworldly forest with the bare, branchless wraiths of trees sweeping into menacing nothingness behind a curtain of opaque mist under which a plush carpet of ferns, the shade of an angry thought, played an ominous cacophony of whispers into his ears, still ringing with the sudden silence that had broken over him like an inverted howl, herding his mind, huddling, into a corner where it quivered, hunched, afraid to lift its head for fear of another blow that would send it tumbling into an oblivion worse than this one, an oblivion where the fear would stay and, reflecting off its own terror, magnify itself into a leviathan like the one that would, in seconds, come gliding out of this misty emptiness to destroy his soul." Eh - 131 words. Not bad. Then again, I would never in a million years put something as grossly bloated and overfrilled as that into a story. I don't even know why I wrote that, but hey, cut me a little slack. It's past ten here, so I'm allowed to ramble. *slightly sleepy smile*
-EH
(October 13, 2009 - 12:07 am)
Almost all of the characters in Little Women were almost-Sues and -Stus who kept trying to become even more Sue/Stu-like than they already were—a very Sue/Stu-like quality.
Don't even get me started on Great Illustrated Classics. They're the worst books ever written, practically.
(October 12, 2009 - 7:51 pm)
Lol. Very true, even about my beloved Little Women. *sniffles* Yeah, Sues and Stus are a touch too common in classics.
-EH
(October 13, 2009 - 2:41 pm)
Very nice, Emily... ;)
Re: GIC: I don't think it's fair to call them "books" because in all technicality they're not their own stories, they're watered-dow versions of real ones.
Never read Little Women... will eventually...
My music teacher and Kathy's elder sister both say Catcher in the Rye is a "GREAT" book...
(October 13, 2009 - 4:40 pm)
I agree about GIC, but when I was really little, they were some of my first fairy tales - not much else a really little kid who likes fantasy can handle. If I read one now, my ears would probably swell up to the size of bananas. I don't know what that would indicate, so I don't plan on re-reading any of them soon. :D
-EH
(October 13, 2009 - 7:40 pm)