So, what books did the teachers say you should read but you never have (yet)? Would you believe I never read 1984 but could tell you about it because of Ciff notes? I just couldn't get into it.
Payton Place, which I find somewhat ironic because I have been told, by some people who read some of the fanfics I wrote ages ago (before I tried legit writing) that what I had written was "basically Payton Place on Babylon 5". By that I assume, it was some kind of soap opera-y teen romance drama, minus the space fighters and cyberpunk dystopias.
no teacher told me about them really but i can't stand most classic novelists just because i hate reading novelists everyone else is already talking about since i am late to the party
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevky and about two thousand others.
Two which spring to mind which are really on my "must read" list are To Kill a Mockingbird Catcher in the Rye
The most egregious right now is Don Quixote that I was supposed to have read half of a dozen times for both school and work, but for some reason I've never gotten around to even opening.
eliade generally speaking preferred filosofia to literature but thought cervantes & dante beyond mere literature
I'd like to give Joyce a go...and also Samuel Beckett. On the radio this morning they were discussing Beckett's prose: 'Completely unfathomable, and if I might be so bold - angonising, tedious, a deconstruction of language...' 'Yes, but a smile every page and a half, or so?' 'Yet he hated words, the process of reading was to him the degenerate's indulgence...' etc...
I read Don Quixote many years ago in Spanish (third-year high school language class). I seem to remember liking it, but thinking about it now brought this to mind:
I read: The Red Pony (Steinbeck) The Pearl (Steinbeck) Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)) (Are you getting the AP English vibe? That's where I read all these.) And all of E.M. Forster's work. The only ones I enjoyed at all were Forster's works. Every other "classic" has - and certainly will - go unread by me.
Eh... You not read Charlotte's Web? Never studied any Shakespeare? Only read those little funny sci-fi comics? And your filthy porno stuff... I cannot believe that. That would be an alternate @Wreybies, a @Wreybies without learning and culture. @Wreybies with rabies, bearskinned version with club in his fist.
Okay, yes, I've read Shakespeare, of course. And is Charlotte's Web really a "classic"? Does that count? Perhaps my prior statement is more a description of what comes to my mind when I hear the word "classic". In Americaland, a "classic" - as sold to us in high school - is an intimidatingly stodgy tome printed on paper going brown with foxing (I believe is the term for paper discoloration due to age) nearly always set some time in the Great Depression or thereabouts when the whole world was painted in sepia tones. Desert wastes are everywhere. Men plow barren fields of dust. Women ponder lives made of dead children and dead corn. The evil (fat) banker comes to collect the long overdue mortgage. Someone gets shot.
Joyce: One page. Does philosophy count, or only literature? Thus Spoke Zarathrusta and Being and Nothingness. Not because they were boring, but (as a philosophy major friend of mine clued me in to) philosophers have different meanings for words than ordinary people do. They recommended buying a philosophy dictionary, I just gave up.
Two, maybe three pages of Joyce, you, and I don't like to use the word, wasteman. Nice word, Fox. I would include all that bloody Orwell. And hellish reads like Tender Is The Night and also Mark Twain?
@matwoolf, did I ever return your copy of this one? Don't think I finished it, but I may have lost it in the move, sorry.
There are many classics I haven't read, but two that come to mind that I actually plan on reading are Frankenstein & Moby Dick.
