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December 04, 2007
Top Ten Bad Books Everybody Reads
I'm following up on a suggestion from a previous post. Again, this is not a list of the ten worst books ever. It's a list of the ten books that are most undeservedly popular. Will I indulge some of my idiosyncrasies here? Who else will indulge them, if I don't? So here goes:
10. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Not for the moral, which is actually more conservative than her husband Percy might have preferred, but for the clunky and confused writing.
9. James Joyce, Ulysses. Yes, I know, it's a work of genius. Doesn't he say so on every other page?
8. James Heller, Catch-22. Cute and clever. Yossarian naked up a tree. Now I understand Vietnam.
7. Voltaire, Candide. French stylishness be damned. Ecrasez l'infame!
6. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. All the length and ponderousness of a Russian novel; all the theological and intellectual depth of a Russian tart.
5. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions. I loved this book -- when I was thirteen. So it goes.
4. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale. What happens when you smoke that scurf on the tundra instead of eating it.
3. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye. I met a lot of preppies at Princeton. Never saw a single one of them in a field of rye. I must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
2. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. I've had to re-read it in the last few weeks. It makes up for bad economics, bad history, and bad anthropology with prudishness and sheer nastiness.
1. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. If you see yourself at the top of a mountain, know that it was meant to be, and that it was not meant to be.
Posted by Anthony Esolen at 10:41 AM | Permalink
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Comments
"Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. All the length and ponderousness of a Russian novel; all the theological and intellectual depth of a Russian tart."
Thank you, Tony! There is nothing like starting the day with a good, hearty laugh.
As to #4, even when I was a rabid Egalitarian, I knew it for the dreck it was. I really don't know how people can continue to read Atwood. I'd rather have a root canal.
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | Dec 4, 2007 11:05:33 AM
Frankenstein - Hey, for a young woman who was only 19 when she wrote it, I'd say Mary Shelley did pretty well. Not the most elegant prose in the world, but there's some evocative power in her descriptive passages.
Posted by: D. Ian Dalrymple | Dec 4, 2007 11:15:10 AM
I'm going to throw in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I made exactly one attempt to read it a few years ago and couldn't make it through. Sold it on Amazon as "nearly new, read once". I think I really wanted to like it, too.
Posted by: James Quinby | Dec 4, 2007 11:33:48 AM
Ulysses, Catcher, and Breakfast definitely belong on that list! (Each author was quite skilled, but abominably self-absorbed.)
Mary Shelley was not so skilled. I agree with Ian that she should be given a pass. She wasn't intending to write classic literature; she was letting her imagination loose on paper. It's not gloriously lucid prose, but then again, neither is MacDonald.
Posted by: Daniel Propson | Dec 4, 2007 12:04:32 PM
"It's not gloriously lucid prose"
Isn't that part of the lesson of Frankenstein? Isn't this what happens when your lover passes you around to his friends?
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | Dec 4, 2007 12:14:24 PM
Anything by Ayn Rand.
Posted by: Thomas | Dec 4, 2007 12:16:51 PM
"I loved this book -- when I was thirteen. So it goes."
Vonnegut always seemed perplexed that his fans at his appearances were almost all teenagers and college students. "Where are the old people?" I saw him ask on C-Span once.
Posted by: Kevin Jones | Dec 4, 2007 12:17:23 PM
Gee, Tony, if I'd had you for my English prof in college, I doubt I'd be practicing law now. But I'd be having a lot more fun!
Posted by: Bill R | Dec 4, 2007 1:08:06 PM
>>>J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.<<<
Good new, all! I don't know a single teenage boy who wants to be, or even empathizes, with Holden Caufield. I don't know a single teenage girl who considers Holden attractive, or would ever consider going on a date with him. Most consider him a pathetic whiner. Of course, most of the kids with whom I associate are overachieving nerds.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Dec 4, 2007 1:12:29 PM
Hey, lay off the Hoosiers (Dreiser and Vonnegut). I suppose Lew Wallace (Ben Hur) and Booth Tarkington are next? VBG
Posted by: The Recusant | Dec 4, 2007 1:38:25 PM
Hey, east coast guy, lay off the Hoosiers (Theodore Dreiser & Kurt Vonnegut). What, is Booth Tarkington and Lew Wallace (Ben Hur) next on your hit list? VBG
Posted by: The Recusant | Dec 4, 2007 1:42:11 PM
Any votes for Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse"? This is one 'classic' I found unbearably awful and tedious.
Posted by: Rob G | Dec 4, 2007 1:43:28 PM
Oops...sorry for the double post...my computer apparently doesn't prefer Hoosiers either :-0
Posted by: The Recusant | Dec 4, 2007 1:44:27 PM
No problem with Hoosiers from this quarter, Recusant. I believe every man ought to read Tarkington's "Penrod" at least once in his lifetime (thanks to Fr. Reardon for the recommendation some years ago!)
Posted by: Rob G | Dec 4, 2007 1:49:15 PM
Rob,
I was thinking of another of hers, "Orlando".
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | Dec 4, 2007 1:54:08 PM
Kamilla -- after I read 'Lighthouse' I never ventured to try another of hers. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
Posted by: Rob G | Dec 4, 2007 1:57:31 PM
The thing about Handmaid is that you just know Atwood was desperately passionate about it, speaking some big-time truth to power, and praying to the goddess that she would finish it before they came for her. And all this terror because of...Jerry Falwell? Ronald Reagan? the pro-life movement? This kind of left-wing wallowing in imagined political terror always seems like some weird form of masturbation to me.
I read it on the recommendation of a feminist co-worker whom I liked and didn't want to offend by admitting how bad I thought it was, so I confined myself to suggesting that maybe the paranoia was a bit much. She got a bit huffy.
I confess to having loved Catcher when I was fifteen or so. Haven't read it since but suspect I would still like it. I'll plead guilty to whatever character flaw this reveals. But ok, over-rated.
I forced myself all the way through Gravity's Rainbow after really enjoying The Crying of Lot 49. I remember asking around among friends for someone else who'd read it and could compare notes with me. When I found one, her opinion was "I thought it was a total waste of my time." I couldn't really argue with her, yet I found it intriguing and may read it again someday. But if I die first the omission won't be high on my list of regrets.
I have to put in two good words for Vonnegut: "Harrison Bergeron."
I'm trying to think of a book that should be on the list but can't come up with anything. Something by Saul Bellow, maybe? I don't see what the fuss is all about there. Philip Roth? I read a big chunk of Portnoy's Complaint in a magazine when it came out and couldn't believe the praise it was getting.
Posted by: Maclin Horton | Dec 4, 2007 1:59:05 PM
This list is certainly easier to populate than was the previous one. We all know there are plenty of books that are undeservedly popular. I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Esolen's choice of Catch-22. Had it been a quarter its length, it could have been a great little novella; as it is, it's a tedious mess.
It occurs to me that the LibraryThing Most Popular Book List might be a good place to hunt for undeservedly popular titles. The list is not based on sales, but on what people -- rather bookish people in this case -- actually have on their shelves at home. The community is by now large enough (over 20 million books catalogued) that it probably gives a fairly good idea of how popular these books actually are (again, in a fairly bookish population).
Looking at the Top 20 on that list, I would immediately identify The Great Gatsby, which I found an incredible let-down, and Life of Pi, for which I just don't understand what the fuss is all about.
Posted by: cnb | Dec 4, 2007 2:10:32 PM
Do you people still read Gibran's The Prophet? On the rare occasions that I see it mentioned, it is usually with a gloss along the lines of "a badly-written book popular in the 1920s." I would think probably more people read (or at least are aware of) The Faerie Queene, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Martin Chuzzlewit, and The Idiot.
Posted by: James Kabala | Dec 4, 2007 2:13:27 PM
Anything by Ayn Rand.
I despise everything this woman stood for, but was attracted to her world view as a teenager and young adult. Fortunately, I grew up; many of those influenced by her writing have not.
Posted by: GL | Dec 4, 2007 2:23:07 PM
On a somewhat different tack, I'd nominate The Celestine Prophecy, which somehow sold MILLIONS of copies. I read that book when it first came out in order to discuss it with a New Age acquaintance of mine, and could not help but think Irenaeus of Lyon would have quickly given The Celestine Prophecy its just desserts.
Posted by: Will | Dec 4, 2007 2:45:19 PM
Anything at all by Thomas Mann, one of the most boring writers I have ever inflicted upon myself. (What idiot decides on the list of "great writers," anyway?) I waded through his Joseph trilogy, and it cured me forever of finishing a book just because I had started it.
Anything by Ayn Rand (truly evil worldview), or Virginia Woolf.
For sci-fi, anything by Arthur Clarke, Frank Herbert, and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land deserves special mention both for a really silly view of reality, and for its incredibly puerile lewdness.
Posted by: Antonia | Dec 4, 2007 4:10:55 PM
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises anyone?
Regarding Catch-22, I read this book when I was about 20, and loved it. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of renting and watching the movie as soon as I finished the book. Ruined the whole thing. I'll never do that again!
Posted by: Kirk | Dec 4, 2007 4:29:24 PM
Ah, I've read-or tried to read--nearly everything on this list. Dr. Esolen is, as usual, basically right about most of them. Some do deserve a bit more commentary, though.
10. Frankenstein certainly could have used some editing (if only the second-wave Romantic ethos had allowed such a thing), but, as others have said, I think it draws out the dark side of Percy Shelly's ideology better than he--or, it seems, his wife--realized. I find it one of the best examples of horror as a proper but attenuated moral reaction to evil. I wrote a term paper on this once, in which I wasted about ten pages clumsily trying to write that last sentence.
9. I have not read, and never intend to read, Ulysses. Lit professors like it because it keeps them in business.
8./5. I think both Catch-22 and Breakfast of Champions appeal mostly to the male adolescent mind. I'm sure that most of those who hold them in high regard do so out of fond memory. I have those memories too, but they don't give me any inclination to go back and reread them, nor to consider them "great".
7. I didn't finish Candide. Pangloss is a good character/idea, but he's about the only thing I find memorable. The plot is nothing to speak of. It would have been a much better satire if it had been a murder mystery. Maybe someone should rewrite it that way.
6. Sister Carrie is an unreadable brick. I got through about chapter three. The only thing that baffles me more than why Theodore Dreiser is still considered important is how anyone could have liked his books in the first place.
4. I've not read The Handmaid's Tale, but I rather liked Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a post-apocalyptic about the perfection of bio-engineering. It seems to generally avoid overt ideology, mostly by being mercilessly pessimistic.
3. I first read Catcher in the Rye about two years ago, around age 21. I liked it a lot, but I didn't like Holden. I felt sorry for him. I read it as an excellent satirical portrait of a very immature fellow. Some people seem to think Holden is some kind of hero, a view which I cannot understand for the life of me how one would extract from the book.
2. The Communist Manifesto has great first and last sentences. The middle bits are forgettable.
1. Thanks to Dr. Esolen, Alan Jacobs, and Anthony Daniels over at The New Criterion, I believe I've been thoroughly inoculated against Gibran.
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Dec 4, 2007 4:37:52 PM
Another truly nauseating book: Lady Chatterley's Lover. It seems to be popular among literati, librarians, and members of the ACLU, as it is always raised as an example of a "great" book being banned.
Posted by: Antonia | Dec 4, 2007 5:01:44 PM
Guys,
OK, now I will make a confession. I too dislike Virginia Woolf and won't read another novel after having to put up with Lighthouse. Nor was I all that fond of The Sun Also Rises. In both cases, I still have my doubts -- maybe there's something there that I'm not sensitive to.
All right, now that I am in confessional mode:
Top ten books that I know I should like but don't (ranked according to the gap between how much I should like them and how much they leave me cold). Sometimes I like other works by the same author (Goethe, Pirandello, Hemingway)...
10. Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author.
9. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.
8. Walker Percy, Lancelot.
7. Goethe, Faust. (My bad, my bad, my most grievoulsy bad!!)
6. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
5. Conrad, Nostromo.
4. Hardy, The Return of the Native.
3. Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
2. James, Portrait of a Lady.
1. Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Dec 4, 2007 5:20:46 PM
Antonia wrote:
"Anything at all by Thomas Mann..."
I am tempted to pronounce an anathema, but instead let me encourage you to try again. The Joseph tetralogy is not the place to begin. His novels The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus are incredibly good: intellectual weight, moral seriousness, and literary grace. I also recommend The Holy Sinner, a witty re-telling of a medieval legend. He wrote a number of excellent short stories as well; everyone reads "Death in Venice", but I would suggest "A Man and his Dog" (if you like dogs) and, especially, "Tonio Kruger".
Posted by: cnb | Dec 4, 2007 5:21:25 PM
In the "undeservedly" popular category:
Romeo and Juliet.
Huckleberry Finn.
Posted by: Clifford Simon | Dec 4, 2007 5:23:07 PM
Re Thomas Mann
CNB wrote: "I am tempted to pronounce an anathema, but instead let me encourage you to try again."
Like everybody, I have read Death in Venice. I didn't like that either. Holy Sinners sounds like it might be interesting, but then again, so did Joseph. But since you say that it is witty, which would definitely make it NOT like Joseph, I might try it. Thanks.
Posted by: Antonia | Dec 4, 2007 5:39:55 PM
As a teenager, I loathed "Catcher in the Rye" and "Portrait of the Arist" with a passion I can scarcely describe. (One high school Enlgish teacher told me that Joyce was the greatest influence on English literature in the 20th c. I mentioned that to another Enlgish teacher, who grimaced and said, "Oh, dear God, I hope not.")
As for Ayn Rand, I will never forget when I once glanced through the weekly movies section of a TV guide in the Chicago Tribune during the early 1980s, which offered one-sentence descriptions of the films. I practically split my gut when the reviewer noted with devastatingly dry irony of the movie version of "The Fountainhead" with Gary Cooper that it "has a certain sincerity and conviction decidedly lacking in the original."
Clifford, you're 100% wrong about "Huckleberry Finn." It truly deserves its status as the greatest American novel.
I tried but never made any headway with Thomas Mann, or German literature in general (unlike German classical music).
For overrated, how about that affliction in high school literature courses, "Silas Marner" by George Elliot?
Posted by: James A. Altena | Dec 4, 2007 5:58:59 PM
>>>For overrated, how about that affliction in high school literature courses, "Silas Marner" by George Elliot?<<<
Eppy in de toal hole!
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Dec 4, 2007 6:07:21 PM
Thanks for the Anthony Daniels link, Ethan. It is very satisfying to read such a thorough debunking of a writer I detest. Just a couple of slivers:
I quote at random:Dip your oar, my beloved,
And let me touch my strings.It is impossible to plumb the shallows of this.
And --
Let me leave you with a typical Gibran aphorism:The flowers of spring are winter’s dreams related at the breakfast table of the angels.
If that doesn’t nauseate you, you must subsist on a diet of marrons glacés: though there is, in fact, a big difference between Kahlil Gibran and marrons glacés. It is that the first mouthful of marrons glacés is delicious.
As for Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain is excellent and I've never read anything else by him, so he remains high in my estimation. I agree with James about Huckleberry Finn -- great. I am glad Tony mentioned Candide, which I read in high school and detested. I didn't really understand what it was satirizing, but Voltaire seemed too pleased with himself and the book seemed silly.
I never could read anything else by Joyce, but I quite enjoyed Dubliners when I read it in freshman English.
I'll also agree with James about Silas Marner, but everything else by Eliot is a delight. I've always found Henry James more trouble than he's worth.
Posted by: Judy Warner | Dec 4, 2007 6:16:37 PM
“One high school Enlgish teacher told me that Joyce was the greatest influence on English literature in the 20th c.” James Altena
Alas, James, I fear this English teacher was right. Unfortunately. When I tried to read a few pages of Joyce, I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was putting me on. I think I was right.
Ayn Rand—the Philip Pullman of her day. “Science fiction” for radical libertarians. She could write, but you felt vaguely unclean after you read her.
“For overrated, how about that affliction in high school literature courses, "Silas Marner" by George Elliot?”
Right up there with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for mawkish sentimentality.
Posted by: Bill R | Dec 4, 2007 6:18:03 PM
"1. Flaubert, Madame Bovary."
Satan recast as a small-town Frenchwoman.
Posted by: Bill R | Dec 4, 2007 6:24:35 PM
6. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. All the length and ponderousness of a Russian novel; all the theological and intellectual depth of a Russian tart.
Reminds me of this passage from P. G. Wodehouse, "The Clicking of Cuthbert":
Vladimir specialized in grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. It was tough going for a man whose deepest reading hitherto had been Vardon on the Push-Shot
Posted by: bonobo | Dec 4, 2007 7:15:28 PM
Ayn Rand (probably Atlas Shrugged) might fit on this list - though I'm not sure it qualifies since she's not often lauded in the academy.
DH Lawrence also definitely belongs on this list. I'm surprised you didn't include Women in Love or , Mr Esolen.
Antonia - Please reconsider Mann. is just a middling book in my opinion, but The Magic Mountain is wonderful.
Huck Finn is a masterpiece. I can agree with you that far, Mr Altena. But my vote for the greatest American novel is Moby Dick.
Posted by: D. Ian Dalrymple | Dec 4, 2007 7:20:34 PM
Apologies for my bad comment editing....
The other discreditable Lawrence book I intended to mention was Lady Chatterly's Lover.
The middling Mann was The Holy Sinner.
Posted by: D. Ian Dalrymple | Dec 4, 2007 7:23:05 PM
Tony,
I heartily agree as to Lancelot. I read it at the inisistence of a friend who was a Percy fan. I think it was meant to be therapy of some sort for me - could never figure out the attraction or why he wanted so badly for me to read that paricular one.
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | Dec 4, 2007 7:24:07 PM
How could you omit Jonathan Livingston Seagull?
Posted by: Neil Gussman | Dec 4, 2007 7:49:01 PM
>>For sci-fi, anything by Arthur Clarke, Frank Herbert, and Robert Heinlein.
Hey! I liked *Dune.*
>>On a somewhat different tack, I'd nominate The Celestine Prophecy, which somehow sold MILLIONS of copies.
Well, if you're going by sheer numbers, there are a lot of others -- *Da Vinci Code* springs to mind. But I think the term "popular" here was meant to include the impression that the book has literary merit. No one seems to think that of DVC or *Celestine Prophecy.*
Posted by: DGP | Dec 4, 2007 8:25:56 PM
Nobody's brought up the completely egregious Last of the Mohicans.
Even the horribly disappointing Daniel Day Lewisifcation of this novel is actually better than the book.
Mark Twain's essay "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper" is all that you really need read.
Posted by: Rhill | Dec 4, 2007 8:28:10 PM
Adding enthusiastic support to the condemnation of Women in Love, The Prophet and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
The Sun Also Rises has the distinction of being the only book I've ever thrown to the ground in disgust, never to pick up again. It happened when Brett says she's leaving for a very long time, much to my exhausted relief, only to return on the next page. That was the end of that.
Others to contend with...
Samuel Richardson, Pamela. A long-winded, awkward, boring, preposterous piece of tripe. But it occasioned Henry Fielding's Shamela, so it can't be all bad.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. Is there some secret American reason why this is held to be so good? For my own part I simply can't understand it. (I do not use "American" as a pejorative thing, here, but rather to indicate the awareness that there might be something in the work that doesn't especially make sense to a Canadian in particular or non-Americans in general)
John Ball, In the Heat of the Night. Heavy-handed and tiresome. If it isn't being taught anymore, never mind, but still...
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman. The sort of playfulness Fowles engages in is excellent in and of itself, but not when he's doing it.
Most (but not all) poetry that could be described as originating from the Imagist movement.
Maya Angelou.
And Ulysses does not belong on this list.
And (finally), Dr. Esolen, I'd very much like to hear your complaints against Madame Bovary.
Posted by: Nick Milne | Dec 4, 2007 9:23:43 PM
I like The Sun Also Rises; I don't think Hemingway is the great writer he was once thought to be, but I think this is solid work, albeit with a sort of sentimentality, American tough-guy style, about it. Next to The Old Man and the Sea, the best of Hemingway, in my opinion. But then Old Man is probably as much as you really need. All of what's good in Hemingway is there, and none of what's bad.
I am a big Walker Percy admirer but would have to agree that Lancelot is less than most of his other novels. It's uncharacteristically dark, as was apparently the case with Percy himself at the time.
And I did like Ulysses the one time I read it, in grad school, with the help of a guidebook called The Bloomsday Book. I think it's a genuinely great achievement. But I'm not sure I'll ever go to the trouble of reading it again.
Posted by: Maclin Horton | Dec 4, 2007 9:43:51 PM
Mr. Milne, I actually do think there's a uniquely American reason Death of a Salesman is well-regarded. To me, it seems to be about quintessentially American themes: excessive competitiveness, the hatred of ordinariness, the anxiety of feeling that one's identity is dependent on what one does rather than who one is. I'm not surprised to hear that such things might not resonate as much with other national cultures, even our close northern neighbors.
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Dec 4, 2007 10:26:00 PM
Mr. Horton, as to Ulysses, I have a rather strong aversion to reading any book that requires a companion guide. Maybe that's why I'm a Protestant :-) (This is only a joke, not an invitation to thread hijacking! Please no one follow up on this!)
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Dec 4, 2007 10:36:20 PM
"Mr. Horton, as to Ulysses, I have a rather strong aversion to reading any book that requires a companion guide. Maybe that's why I'm a Protestant :-)"
Such as a study Bible, Ethan? ;-)
Posted by: Bill R | Dec 4, 2007 10:49:45 PM
>>For sci-fi, anything by Arthur Clarke, Frank Herbert, and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land deserves special mention both for a really silly view of reality, and for its incredibly puerile lewdness.<<
Antonia, I've actually enjoyed works by all three of those authors, though the vast majority of Clarke and Herbert do match your evaluation.
For Clarke, I liked 2001 but not really any of its sequels, and Childhood's End is an incredibly contrived exercise in anti-humanism.
For Herbert, I greatly enjoyed Dune, and then I made it about half a chapter into the first sequel before I gave up, realizing that he had apparently decided to abandon the idea of creating sympathetic characters.
As to Heinlein: he varies greatly from book to book. Starship Troopers is a bona fide classic that should be taught in schools. Stranger in a Strange Land is male sexual fantasy transmuted into cheesy utopianism (rather like Percy Shelly's ideas, actually). The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about half and half of each. Citizen of the Galaxy is also very good, as is The Puppet Masters and several of his juvenile novels. In general, earlier Heinlein is less flaky than later Heinlein.
It would be nice to have a dedicated Sci-Fi thread. Given how much Science Fiction proceeds from materialism or attacks Christianity, it would be fun to have a list of works that come from a Christian foundation, or at least take it seriously.
Posted by: Ethan Cordray | Dec 4, 2007 10:50:53 PM
The SF thread idea sounds wonderful; could we wait until after finals week, please? Mere Comments is tempting enough as it is...
Posted by: Peter Gardner | Dec 4, 2007 10:55:18 PM
A sci-fi thread would be great. And while we're at it might I suggest as a further list: Guilty Pleasures, or Pure Trash That I Have Loved. It gives away my age but I would admit Mika Waltari's The Egyptian into that particular Hall of Shame.
Posted by: David Pence | Dec 5, 2007 3:13:08 AM
I agree with Mr. Horton and Ethan re: "The Sun Also Rises" and "Death of a Salesman" (though for the latter I prefer "The Crucible," perhaps because of the Pulitzer Prize winning opera made of it by composer Robert Ward; I saw a superb staging of the latter by the Chicago Opera Theatre, the local "second string" opera company behind Lyric Opera of Chicago, some 20 years ago). [There is also Carlisle Floyd's fine operatic adaptation of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", though Floyd's opera "Susannah", for which he wrote his own libretto, remains *the* great American opera.]
I've never read "Moby Dick", probably becasue I'm waiting for a translation from sailorese to English. :-)
I actually used "Candide" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as supplemental textbooks in freshman history survey courses I taught. Neither is great literature, but both make very good windows into their times and milieus. (I also used Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" -- I was greatly surprised at the enthusiastic response to that work -- "The Federalist Papers", and Jane Addams' "Twenty Years at Hull House". Had a class not been cancelled due to lack of enrollment, Machiavelli's "The Prince" would have joined that list.)
I'm afraid I'll leave the sci-fi thread to others. The genre has always bored me almost to tears.
Here'a another candidate for overrated, one that will get me into trouble -- anything by William Faulkner.
Posted by: James A. Altena | Dec 5, 2007 3:58:09 AM
