post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

Can't stand Kate Atkinson
Can't stand Sebastian Faulks especially Birdsong
Can't bear Hardy

But love Dickens and Shakespeare.

Totally agree about Not So Quiet - amazing read @SerafinasGoose

Try again in a few years @toffee1000 ?

LOVE The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Bronte's>Austen.

All that drama with Marianne and Willoughby and then it was like ‘oh yeah she married Brandon and learned to love him’.

It would have been more realistic if JA had written that Marianne married Brandon on the rebound.

Don't don't like Dickens either. Find him unbearable to read. I also hate poetry.

Love reading in general though.

I thought she basically did. She was too knackered from the whole Willoughby thing and then ill and then clearly went "fuck it" and married Brandon.

Read this first when I was a teenager (a couple of years younger than Marianne in the book) and was SO ANGRY when Jane married her off to the (IMO at the time) elderly perv Brandon. I think Brandon is late thirties? Well I'm late thirties now and it is still gross, but I can understand better now why Marianne in her situation might have just been too exhausted to do anything other than the easy, secure option.

James Joyce isn't really that good a writer.

Poetry is amazing and magical.

Oh glad to see someone else couldn’t get on with the Cazalet Chronicles.

The main character (can’t remember name) is basically Lord Flashhard.

I thought she basically did. She was too knackered from the whole Willoughby thing and then ill and then clearly went "fuck it" and married Brandon.

Yes that’s true. If I was any good at computers I’d hack the publishers and insert ‘Marianne said ‘fuck it’’into the text of the next print run.

*Flashheart, but Flashhard suits too.

Heathcliffe is a violent, wife beater. Nothing romantic about that. Also, I firmly believe that Heathcliffe and Catherine were actually half brother and sister.

I would love this. Do it.

One of the best books I have ever read was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Simply could not put it down and cancelled a date with a friend to finish it.

And, I speak as an English Literature graduate who has read an awful lot of 'good' literature.

I agree with all this …. However I still love reading it! But yes it gives me the rage 😂

Yeah maybe people don’t care about the age difference since the film came out. I would have been straight in there with Alan Rickman 👌

Shakespeare really isn't all that.

Thomas hardy however....😍😍

But in Georgian times it would have been considered perfectly acceptable, and even aspirational, for a girl in her late teens to marry a wealthy older man in his thirties. Or forties. Or even fifties.

No sorry, I don’t mean like, it’s not high brow or not fancy writing or anything. I mean the way he writes, with 95 words in every sentence, is just really hard to read!

I’m feeling very basic because I love both Shakespeare and Dickens 😂

I'm sure it would, but still IMO gross. Actually to me as an adult the thing that grosses me out even more is how he has this real thing for young women who've been through a hard time. I know a guy like that - it's ... not great in terms of a power dynamic.

Emma and Mr Knightley have a similar age gap which is grosser in some ways (e.g. that he's known her since she was a baby!) but the power dynamic thing is much more even.

Ha maybe the Rickman issue is blurring things! I think he was about 50 in that too which makes it weirder.

Yes, its an advantageous match for a well-born but genteelly-impoverished girl, and one who, let’s not forget, has pretty much tarnished her own reputation irreparably by rocketing around publicly with Willoughby (even leaving aside the double standards that mean he’s a notorious rake who nonetheless bags a rich wife).

I think modern readers tend to forget, because Marianne means well, and is innocently romantic and heartbroken after Willoughby, that her behaviour, though she falls short of actually eloping with W and sleeping with him without being married, isn’t actually that un-Lydia-like.

She is seriously damaged goods on the Regency marriage market.

Yes, there’s an odd tone to some elements of this thread, basically sneering at anything which is classic literature in such a way that it suggests that the literature is somehow badly written and anyone who likes it is too stupid to realise that, rather than it just being something that that particular poster doesn’t get along with for whatever reason.

I love Shakespeare but am not so fond of the history plays, love Wodehouse, love a lot of Ishiguro but didn’t finish The Buried Giant, love Austen but especially Emma. But I’m not going to dismiss an entire genre of literature just because there’s some of it I don’t like 🤷🏼‍♀️

Ha maybe the Rickman issue is blurring things! I think he was about 50 in that too which makes it weirder.

I haven’t seen the film but Alan Rickman is not my idea of Col. Brandon!

My unpopular literary opinion is that we should stop trying to get children to appreciate Dickens, Shakespeare, Hardy et al. They don't have the life experience to understand, let alone appreciate. Do in depth examination and analyses of books actually written for teenagers, and teach them to appreciate literature, description and characterisation from things they can identify with.

Then hopefully they will make good reading decisions in their adult lives.