post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

Lessons In Chemistry is good, but nothing amazing, and is also far too long.

I agree about Lessons in Chemistry. It’s all fairly predictable too.

Another point to make re the alleged 'taming' of Darcy is that he is actually totally well-functioning, emotionally intelligent, non-arrogant on his home turf. The awkwardness (experienced by many in the novel as pride) is mostly just shyness coupled with the difficulty of interacting with the freakshow set of personalities that he has around himwhen he is in EB's territory - his own awful relatives and the mostly awful Bennets. And Wickham of course.

EB was much more in need of 'taming' (well, not taming but serious work on her own personality) than Darcy. She was scathing about all her neighbours, playing everything for lols and irony - beause that was how her dad taught her to be. All of the Bennet daughters have personalities that are precisely calibrated to the degree of disillusion their father had at the birth of another daughter. As the second daughter to come along, she couldn't win his affection by modelling the feminine ideal but he was very very open to loving her when she caught on to the flavour of his own rather bankrupt sarcasm in relation to neighbours. She cures herself of that by transferring her affection to the much more dutiful, serious and compassionate Darcy.

Yes, possibly. I know Tolkien read it out loud to the Inklings (his little group of drinking pals, which included C. S. Lewis). A good narrator can do wonders. The Tom Bombadil chapter, for example, is wonderful read out loud (by a good reader). Same goes for the Treebeard chapter.

Certain writers come alive when read aloud. Dickens, for example, P. G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh seem very different if you sit in a room with a gifted reader.

But lots of excellent writers who produce beautiful work are total wankers. The list of ‘good novels by writers who come across likeably in interviews’ would be very short.

One of my favourite contemporary novelists is a colleague of a friend of mine in a university creative writing department, and is the colleague from hell — arrogant, uncollegial, prickly. Still a genius.

I get tired of the expectation that women authors in particular are expected to perform niceness and relatability, and that their appearance and public persona are often read alongside their work — Lily King has a good bit on the differences between male and female author photographs in Writers and Lovers.

I like that Sally Rooney doesn’t play that game, and comes across as stone-faced and aloof. Whatever I think of her novels.

And I hate to tell you, but the ‘literary establishment’ generally has minimal impact on an author’s sales. A prize will give a bump, sure. But no one has ever written a review of anything Dan Brown has ever written that said anything other than ‘hilariously awful’, but he sells. Marian Keyes and Cecilia Ahern are seldom reviewed, ditto celebrity memoirs.

Yes, possibly. I know Tolkien read it out loud to the Inklings (his little group of drinking pals, which included C. S. Lewis.

Didn’t one of the Inklings say during one such reading “not another fucking elf”?

Hugo Dyson, supposedly!

haha...yes. I am reading LOTRs for the first time at the moment, and can sympathize. Parts of it are very impressive. It fact, at moments he touches genius (the Treebeard and Shelob chapters, for example), but I've had enough now and want it to finish.

The Inklings were an interesting bunch though. Tolkien could read 20 odd languages, and C. S. Lewis seemed to carry the whole of western literature and philosophy in his head (he knew Plato, Aristotle and Homer inside out in the original Greek, Virgil inside out in Latin, Dante in Italian, not to mention Chaucer, Spenser, John Donne, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth...you name it). Yet they never lost a simple love of story. It's sweet to think of these professors sat in a pub listening to Tolkien read about Hobbits. Lewis even read the Narnia books out loud to them!

Today, people treat literature like a flippin extension of politics. It's as if Jane Austen and Henry James are 'the enemy', there to be dissected by Feminists and Marxists and Structuralists and various other groups with an axe to grind. And they do it in such a miserable, joyless way. Literature is meant to be beautiful and entertaining. People who want to 'cancel' certain authors ought to read 1984 – but then some of them probably want that 'cancelled' as well (oh, the irony).

Certain writers come alive when read aloud. Dickens, for example, P. G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh seem very different if you sit in a room with a gifted reader.

Absolutely! A reading of Pickwick Papers, some years ago, comes to mind.

Some of Dickens novels - and The Pickwick Papers was one - were written in installments for a periodical. I'm guessing this makes them easier for reading aloud