post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

Jane Eyre was a doormat and Rochester was a wanker

Yep. Harry Potter, Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, The English Patient, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, A Pale Blue Eye..

The film of Corelli's mandolin was utter shite compared to the book!!!!

Greygardenz
Charlotte Brontë's Villette is the dullest book ever

Noooo!!! It's my favourite Charlotte Brontë book especially when you discover that it's semi-autobiographical

Oh yes. The bleakness and despair stayed with me, it was so well done. Marvellous book.

I disagree. By the end of the book the power imbalance in that relationship has done a massive shift - Jane is able bodied, has money and family. Rochester is nearly blind, has lost his lovely home and everyone knows there was a madwoman in the attic - plus he's wholly dependent on her emotionally and physically.

Not sure about the wanker bit. Entitled rich bloke used to getting what he wants around women acts like entitled rich bloke used to getting what he wants around women.

Totally agree. The whole plot is ludicrous, she is an idiot - she makes herself destitute by not taking the money she earned then finds herself on her cousin’s doorstep (or something similar, I have not subjected myself to this book for years). Would have been an entirely better book if she had caught consumption in the first chapter and died so she didn’t get 300 pages of mimsy moral superiority.

The Catcher in the Rye is self indulgent pish.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is sooo tedious he is unreadable. See also JRR Tolkien - yawn…

This is a book review I completely agree with 🤣

Yes. Lord of the Rings being a case in point.

I find Villette a far superior book to Jane Eyre.

As for Rochester - where do you even start with Rochester? He takes up with one mistress after another and casts them aside as soon as they start to 'disgust' him, which they pretty soon do, as women are not supposed to be 'sexual'. He uses the words 'unchaste' and 'disgusting' about his first wife so this is a safe assumption. Wife 1 is both passionate and tempestuous: her fiery nature and sexuality are the only symptoms which enable him (a doctor?) to diagnose her as mad, one of a family of 'idiots and maniacs', and shove her under lock and key into his attic. He's horrible to his daughter and blames her for her mother's flightiness. In short, he takes up with exactly the sort of women who sexually attract him and then blames them for their sexiness.

Then there's the callous treatment of Blanche Ingram, courting her to make Jane jealous and then telling her he's really poor, so she'll change her mind about marrying him (women of her background didn't really have much option than to survive economically through marriage). Even Jane strongly admonishes him for his treatment of all these women, yet ends up marrying him anyway.

But yeah. Wanker.

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)

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!

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.

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

Long ago far far away…..

And then it’s shit

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.

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

• 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.

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.

‘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?

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’.

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.

@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.

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

How is it pish? Or self-indulgent?

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