Quote:
Originally Posted by Escort Rider
Just read all the way through this ancient thread and enjoyed it so much I decided to post, thereby reviving it. Pretty fascinating all the disagreement (which is to be expected). I was glad to get some validation about not liking "Ulysses" or "Moby Dick", neither of which I was able to finish. Used to think there was something wrong with me, but actually I have plenty of company here.
Some books seem polarizing in that they are either loved or hated, such as "Catcher in the Rye" (I liked it a lot) and "The Lord of the Rings" (loved it upon first reading at age 70 or 71).
Edited to add: A wonderful and remarkable thing about this long thread is that no one was insulting toward other posters whose opinions differed. If only such a thing could be generalized to the rest of City-Data!
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Moby Dick - A couple of attempts, never could stick with it. However, my Portuguese orthopedist mentioned once that as a college student he had fallen in love with various American classics, and he singled out
Moby Dick. I confessed my lack of success and inability to appreciate what little I did read of it. Since that day he has never failed on any visit to bring
Moby Dick into my consultation, and then smile very slyly.
Ulysses - couldn't hack it until I saw the movie back in the Sixties, early Seventies, and then I read it and enjoyed much of it, especially Molly's soliloquy.
Catcher - first read it when I was in my mid-twenties and thought it was enjoyable enough to send me off on a Salinger reading binge. Read it about twenty years later and wished someone had smothered Holden with a pillow by page five. I thought he was obnoxious.
Hemingway - He wore thin very rapidly.
Sartre - I have read his novels but stuck to them more out of a sense of has-to because existentialism was in vogue and I was teaching college level students. I finished all three volumes of
The Road to Freedom, and if there is a Purple Heart for Readers, I'm a candidate.
Camus - Aside from
The Plague, which is a masterpiece, the rest of his novels with the exception of
The Stranger were sleeping pills.
Faulkner - every novel I have ever tried, I have always put down unfinished and never picked it up again.
On the other hand, if I put down favorites I think the majority reaction would be, "Oh god, no" and "Never heard of it."
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Yes, I am reviving a very old thread.
