post your unpopular literature opinions?

@greengreengrass25 - DB and SIL gave me this for Christmas after I’d done the A level with Gatsby. I attempted it to be nice but it went off to the charity shop.

@MerryChristmasToYou if you mean after Gatsby gets murdered, well “Gatsby’s dad turns up for the funeral and decides that the others were Midwesterners unsuited to eastern life. Nick meets Tom but refuses to shake his hand, Tom admits he was the one who told George that Gatsby owned the car which killed Myrtle.” There’s then a scene where Nick looks out on the bay to view G’s mansion.

The above is taken from the Wiki plot summary.

To be honest I recall most about it from the film, not the book. I found the book incredibly hard and boring to read, the way the characters (especially Daisy) were portrayed made it hard to like much about them and empathise with them and therefore to read the book.

Tender is the Night by SF was even more tedious, another A level text

@GonnaGetGoingReturns , what happens in the last quarter of the (short) book?

I appreciate that. Imitating the style of Norse mythology and indeed Wagner’s Ring Cycle although deliberate, I personally find irritating and plagiaristic. Cannot be compared to The Iliad or indeed Virgil’s Aeneid in any shape or form.
Posted as I realise this might be an unpopular opinion, each to their own!

As I recall, all of those happen as incidental background things in the boring conversations he has endlessly trotting round from one boring place to another.

The plot was - he arrives at college as a boring blank canvas person from a small town. He observes things while he walks from one part of campus to another. He hears about things that happen to other people which he has boring long debates about with other boring characters. I think he shags a boring girl and she gets bored of him. Then he drives home.

I did Gatsby for an A level evening class. I didn’t like him or the other characters at all, the film wasn’t much better. Distinctly underwhelmed by it.

In tandem with some other posts -

that 'easy reading' books are disposable, worthless and 'easy writing'. Including Mills & Boon and chick lit books in that.

It takes just as long to write an 'easy to read' book as it does to write a Booker prize winner. It just gets less recognition.

I’m not sure if these count but I borrowed DM’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales (brothers Grimm), dear god, some of those are graphic and dark. Wouldn’t read those to a child! I read about 10 of them and then returned it to DM.

The Great Gatsby was brilliant but I reached a point when I couldn't be arsed reading it so I never finished it.

Maybe…. But Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a bloody brilliant book

How is it pish? Or self-indulgent?

Of course, that's right. I'd forgotten about Adele.

@Brefugee and anyone else in need of a wonderful fairy tale listen this autumn/winter - very much loved this audio book, free on BBC Sounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p07lby38

They also have Mill on the Floss but could not get on with that.

David Lodge is either an underrated genuis at articulating mid 20th century sexism and misogyny via his characters, or is a sexist misogynist who can't write past his own opinions. I come down on the former side, just about, but it doesn't take much to make me take the latter view.

Although I’m firmly of the belief that a good slap would have done wonders for all of the characters, given that there were bacchanalian orgies, a murder and a suicide, not to mention incest and drugs (and aerobics), I would disagree that nothing happens in ‘The Secret History’.

‘The Secret History’ an entire novel which describes the geographical movements of a boring man around a boring college campus and the various boring laboured conversations he has with other boring people. Nothing happens and there is no plot. And yet people swoon and rave about it.

Did I miss the day at school they taught you to appreciate the literary equivalent of watching paint dry?

But the style is deliberate. People dislike LOTRs because they judge it as they would judge Henry James or Jane Austen. Tolkien wasn't writing a conventional novel. He was imitating the style of Beowulf or the Viking sagas. It isn't a conventional 20th-century novel. It's an epic, or heroic saga, written in a deliberately archaic manner. Instead of comparing it to his contemporaries (like, say, Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh) we should compare it to The Illiad.

• Hemingway wrote books for overgrown adolescent boys. Good stylist, yes, but Cormac McCarty does pared down prose better. As for war, Hemingway was never a real soldier. He was a bully, a liar and a show-off. If you want to know what war is really like, read Robert Graves' masterpiece Goodbye to all That. Graves was an actual infantry officer who led men in battle.
• Joyce's Ulysses is boring. Also, I'm not sure it is a realistic depiction of a man's subconscious thoughts, which are generally weirder and nastier than "hmm, be a warm day I fancy."
• The TV adaptation of I Claudius is better than the novel.
• A Clockwork Orange is not Anthony Burgess' best novel. It's a minor work. The Enderby novels and Nothing Like the Sun are better. (Harold Bloom thought Burgess the most underrated English-language novelist of the 20th-century).
• George Orwell was a mediocre novelist. A Clergyman's Daughter, for example, is unreadable. Superb essayist though.
• Brave New World is not Aldous Huxley's best novel. Point Counter Point and Crome Yellow are better.
• Shakespeare is painfully unfunny. And the plays are better read than watched.
• Brideshead Revisited is good but not as good as the Sword of Honour trilogy.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover is dreary and depressing. Women in Love is Lawrence's masterpiece.
• Oscar Wilde writes superb dialogue, but his descriptive prose (of the moon or of a sunset, for example) is sickly and over-written.
• Philip Larkin was a better poet than Seamus Heaney.
• Shelley was better than Keats.
• P. G. Wodehouse was a better stylist than Thomas Hardy or Virginia Woolf.

@Tadpolle totally agree regarding The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in general. Silly little stories written in such a grandiose style

Though I did feel Rochester had some good in him; Bertha's condition was concealed from him before the marriage, the book also tells us that he could have rid himself of her much sooner by housing her somewhere less habitable, but he couldn't quite do that. He also returned to save her from the fire

He could have shoved Adele into an orphanage like the one child Jane was in, as well, and not bothered with her again. Although it's a bit ironic he ends up at the remote manor where his conscience wouldn't allow him to house Bertha.

I always thought it started really well. Like it was going to be good.

Long ago far far away…..

And then it’s shit

I think as an adult, I prefer to read the LOTR than Hobbit. Though I loved the Hobbit when I was a child, it was intended as a children's book after all, and reread it many times.

The Hobbit film adaptation (loosely based) was dire, in my opinion.

I also loved Jane Eyre more as a child (though also still love), but I didn't consider the difficulties faced by people like Blanche then, agreeing with @SerafinasGoose there.

Though I did feel Rochester had some good in him; Bertha's condition was concealed from him before the marriage, the book also tells us that he could have rid himself of her much sooner by housing her somewhere less habitable, but he couldn't quite do that. He also returned to save her from the fire.

Whoever said The Hobbit was unreadable. I was bored and ran out of things to read, and started it again. Skim read it, am up to Gollum and it’ll go back on the shelf!

It's been a while since I read it, but from what I remember, Jane Eyre is quite a manipulative character in her unassuming way, and she plays Rochester like a tiny violin ... by the end she's got him right where she wants him. (In fact it would have been more satisfying if the book had ended with her cackling victoriously while he grovelled before her - but I digress)