What's good about these books?

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Following on from the overrated books thread, I realised there are some books that I really want to like, but can't help thinking they are a bit shite really. Am I being fick? If you like them please help me see the light.

Explanations of why I am spectacularly missing the point, or contributions of other seemingly shite books welcome.

So...

Villette - seems to be about a woman dripping around in France, pointlessly.

Metamorphosis - man turns into a beetle and gets pissed off then dies.

What am I missing?

I loved Life of Pi; it was just so utterly silly.

Have to stick up for EM Forster (except The Longest Journey - more like The Longest Week of My Life). Howards End is fabulous.

E M Forster is fabulous, CJC. Really shocked to see Middlemarch on this list - it's a wonderfully humane treatment of the limits on people's lives at that time - long but almost the opposite of an epic as it's examining such a tiny corner of provincial, mostly bourgeois life and expectations.

I know Wuthering Heights really divides people but it is wonderful: this tiny, claustrophobic, untamed group of people going beserk with love and rage. It's hard not to get carried along by their obsessiveness, their passion, their nastiness. I do love its lack of restraint, its madness - it's kind of like several years of being a teenager distilled into 200 pages .

lalalonglegs I loathed Wuthering Heights when I was forced to read it. But your description is so fantastic I feel a strange compulsion to give it another try!

Owen Meany - I would rather exfoliate with a cheese grater than read that again.

Mansfield Park - hated the lead character whatever her bloody name was (not very good on remembering detail - a useful trait if you want to read the same book over and over again). Hated the whole thing, found it to be a drip fest. Shared this feeling with my tutor who was irate and told us that Mansfield Park was her favourite book and she related very strongly to the lead character as she had also been a victim of bullying. Oh dear. I felt very guilty and didn't ever quite recover in her class. Remember getting very average marks from her!

Middlemarch - my favourite book, it is wonderful. YY to the poster who couldn't stand it when Dorothea marries Casaubon. Noooooo don't do it woman!!!!

Awww, yeah, give it another go Fanjo. If you don't enjoy it, you can start a thread for all the WH-haters . (I hated Mansfield Park as well but, distressingly, Fanny Price was said to be Jane Austen's favourite heroine.)

I liked Villette, but mostly because I used to live in Brussels so I like the setting. If you think it's about a woman dripping around in France you may not have been reading that carefully. But I hate the ending - oh she's going to live happily ever after oh, no she's not because I will kill bloke off pointlessly, or will I?

And the whole set up is insane, woman has tiff with relatives and decides to get on random boat to foreign parts despite having no money, no plan and not speaking any French.

I don't think you get it about Fanny Price (heroine of Mansfield Park, cue smug grin), Fanjo. She's not a wimp or a victim; she the only one who gets what she wants in the whole book.

Howards End, by contrast: just so effing snobbish. Leonard Bast - let's drop a bookcase on his head for Not Knowing His Place.

Life of Pi
We need to talk about Kevin

Oh and The little Stranger most recently

But, sieglinde, she's so bloody virtuous and ghastly compared to Lizzie Bennett or Emma or any of the others. And the man she eventually marries (Edgar? Edwin?) is such a prig. I can see why she might have been considered a wonderful woman when the book was published but the past 200 years have not been kind to her.

I think Howards end is all about snobbery rather than being snobbish, per se.

Oh good, I thought I was the only one bemused by animals eating each other in a boat.

I will defend Need To Talk About Kevin. Was totally riverted by it, that was pre DC though. Captures the ambivalence of motherhood from a position of ignorance, that's how I read it then. Now I suspect I'd just just snap the book shut and tell her He's Just a Baby.

Balloon slayer - Frankenstein is way cool. All that brooding Gothic stuff, philosophical discussion about the nature of God and hubris, the limitations of science...and she was only 10 when she first wrote the story. Fab.

The Little Stranger was v dull really.

I like Frankenstein; I like EM Forster. Couldn't get on with Life Of Pi at all.

Mansfield Park - I do like it BUT I find myself liking the Crawfords more and more with every re-reading.

Just spotted error in my post yesterday.Shelley was only 19 when she 1st wrote Frankenstein.

I loved Mansfield Park but know a lot of people don't 'get' it, even if they like Jane Austen's other work. I didn't think the point of it was that Austen thought women should be like Fanny Price, she was pointing out that that was how women had to be to avoid the sort of punishment meted out to women like Maria who transgressed traditional boundaries. That as a woman you were not 'allowed' to have a strong personality or behave as you wished, it's grimly realistic rather than the nice fantasy of women like Elizabeth Bennett or Emma living as they choose. I feel it's Austen really stripped back to the scathing social commentary and satire. There's a lot of stuff in there on class and motherhood and family relationships as well.

And very vivid imagery as well, like Maria 'escaping' from the park grounds after the men, and her dress tearing and ruined on the (phallic) iron spikes of the fence while Fanny watches horrified but half wishing she could follow, which is not the sort of thing you saw in earlier Austen.

MP is amazig for its use of metaphor to make social comments. I love the way she uses the game of Speculation to imply comment on character.

Yes metaphor is the word I was looking for :) All the scenes when they're 'rehearsing' the play as well.

I like this thread. Frankenstein is a great collection of ideas and explorations and its impact is huge but I don't think it's a great novel.

I LOVED Villette but everyone in it is annoying. It is very funny though especially when she talks about the paintings.

I would add The Old Man and The Sea. Love some Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls mainly as I am a Spanish Civil War geek). My friend and I were once discussing TOMATS and she said:
"So is it about a bloke trying to catch a fish OR WHAT?"

I think that it is the problem with a lot of these books here - the symbolism is just either crude or badly communicated or totally irrelevant (same with that sodding balloon in Enduring Love or the animals in Life of Pi)

That said, I will defend Kafka and Metamorphosis with my life. I cry every time I read it. Poor Gregor Samsa.

Life of Pi = quite entertaining until the end where you just go WTF? Confusing and unsatisfying.

I loved Thomas Hardy as a teen, couldn't read them now. Was never able to read Middlemarch.

EM Forster = well I loved a room with a view as a teen, but with an adult eye, Lucy seems like a bit of a twat. A passage to India has a little bit more to say about racism and...panic attacks? who knows. It's still pretty plodding and dull.

I love Jane austen but found Persuasion to be quite dull

OMG - how old are you, Eric? Persuasion gets better and better the older you get! :)

30, is it time I read it again perhaps?

What about Madame Bovary? That one did my head in!

Persuasion is the most enjoyable Austen, but I agree that MP is the most sophisticated of her novels. Hated studying it at a-level - fanny and Edmund (Edgar?) really are prigs, the crawfords really are much more attractive characters, but one seminar on it at uni turned my ideas on their head. The crawfords have to be attractive - that's what makes them so dangerous, and that's why it makes their danger so difficult to perceive.
Persuasion is so satisfying - what's not to like?!
And am very surprised that Owen meany is so unpopular. I thought he was a great character and could have read more about him.
As for life of pi. I heard the author on r4 a couple of weeks ago and it seems I interpreted the text far too literally. Like, whatever.

Persuasion is wonderful - Anne Eliot is destined to a life of being the gofer for her appalling family, she realises she has played her hand badly and she does something about it. I think, in the context of her character, she behaves with real courage and it pays off for her - she has a much greater chance of happiness with Captain Wentworth than being at the beck and call of her ghastly sisters and father.

Madame Bovary is also a fantastically nuanced study of the ennui of frustrated middle-class women. It's so funny and scathing. Even the end is completely out of all proportion to what has actually happened - a result of Emma's need to have a passionate life.

I also hated the Magus, especially after french Leuitenants woman being such a fab book. I thought perhaps they were all on drugs?

Madame Bovary - dull.
Time Travellers Wife - irritating.

Loved Villette. In fact all of Charlotte Bronte but struggled with Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Wuthering heights a bit meh but I think perhaps it strikes more chords as a teenager when you beleive life should be dramatic and wild