post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

What do you all mean by a book is 'derivative'?

@AutumnComfort , not original

@DuesToTheDirt yup. It's nasty. A nasty book.

Someone mentioned Kakuza Ishiguro. I actually enjoy his books especially The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go but I was disappointed with Klara And The Sun. It surprised me by not living up to my expectations.

I didn't enjoy Gone Girl at all. The Girl on The Train I did enjoy.

Catcher in the Rye might be transformative if you are a teenage boy.

As a teenage girl, if I wanted to hear more about the inner life of a self-absorbed and self-important, deluded teenage boy who hated everything around him, there were queues of them trying to get into my pants. I didn’t need to trawl through a novel to experience that in more detail.

Thanks - I kept getting maths definitions.

I love rereading the Lord of the Rings and Jilly Cooper, but skip the poetry in the former and the sex scenes in the latter. Pure escapist fantasy without the boring bits!

I like Wolf Hall etc but wish she hadn’t done that “he” thing, it took me a good two books to work out it was always Cromwell and I wasted so much energy trying to work out which of the other 726163 characters it was.

As a very isolated mildly autistic person I found Elinor Oliphant very, very unrealistic and bordering on patronising at times.

The Great Gatsby is an over-extended short story.

@SunlightOverBamburgh I enjoyed reading the Children Act, or would have if he hadn’t basically novelised several very well-known family law cases of which I’d read the judgment in full for my degree the year before. Not an original idea or plot point in it. Given ten minutes with my notes I could give you five or so cases where he’s just changed the names or genders around. About the only thing he added was the personal life of the judge, and I’ve seen that done better elsewhere.

Interesting to read the various views on The Bell Jar. I think it is very good indeed but so, so rawly autobiographical that it is almost impossible to react to it as you would to any other novel.
I felt almost as if Plath was self-harming in front of me. I was angry at the intense demands it made on me, almost like I was being emotionally blackmailed by someone in my real life who was too unhappy to survive without making unreasonable requirments of other people.
She pulls it off, but if almost any other writer attempted something so naked (as many first-time writers feel inclined to do) it would be disasterously self-indulgent, unboundaried, selfish and uncreative.
It is probably Creative Writing Rule Number One - forget about The Bell Jar.

My overriding memory of reading The Bell Jar as a teenager is If that’s being a grown up you can keep it.

Wickham sounded like more of a laugh than Darcy or Bingley in Pride and Prejudice

I remember an old Sebastian Faulks essay where he says he sees Darcy as a depressive personality type who always needs someone bouyant around and, seeing his existing anti-depressant Bingley is about to leave him, flails around for the first person who looks cheerful enough to replace him. Slightly ruined the romance of it all for me.

@TheHorneSection - I quite liked Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair as well

@CeciledeVolangesdeNouveau That's interesting, there was some controversy over the nursing section of Atonement for the same reason. Accusations of him copying parts of a memoir published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews.

I love Becky Sharp. One of my favourite characters ever. In a modern novel she would absolutely be the plucky heroine.

I listened to the audio book of The Goldfinch and thought it was great. Not a fan of the Secret History though.

Nana Coupeau in Emile Zola's "Nana"

The golden blowfly

@murasaki - Amis was good until London Fields. I enjoyed Money, Other People and the Rachel Papers

Time's Arrow did it for me. After that I didn't bother and the reviews seemed to get worse.

Anna Karenina
Madame Bovary

Any 'classic' book written by a man who dooms his heroine for having the audacity to fall in love with something other than her dreary life.

Poison, train tracks, whatever.

I cannae be doin' with that.

Anna Karenina is a much more sympathetic character than Emma Bovary and Vronsky does actually run off with her. The issues she has come from society after they return to Russia

@Alltheyearround , but those books were beautifully written and drew me in.
AK especially and it was about a lot more than AK's love affair.

Thomas Hardy is just depressing. No wonder we have so many miserable teens if they're forced to read such dreary stuff.

Again, beautifully written if a bit depressing.

I read Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Thérèse Raquin in that order and each seemed like a drearier punishment of adulterous women than the last. AK is grand and has some nobility and joy of her affair. The mediocre Madame Bovary has less fun and a more horrible death. Then poor old Thérèse whose life and love is pinched and trivial and ends in utter misery. Tolstoy is the most judgemental, but Flaubert and Zola are crueler.

Ages since I read Therese Raquin but seem to remember her marriage was forced on her she ended up killing her husband with the help of her lover