Lord of the flies - dont get me wrong I finished it ok but felt abit let down by it - I thought it was boring.

The gargoyle - that one divides people so have fun with that

I enjoyed 'The Hobbit' very much. Found Lord of the Rings too long for my taste.....I enjoyed the first book, then, fizzled out and wanted to read something else.

Lord of the Flies - was an excellent Radio Play - I enjoyed it that way, more than when I read the book and much more than when I saw the film.

I must admit that except for 'Emma' I don't care for Jane Austen as a 'sitting and reading for pleasure' exercise - but I love them as plays. I think I don't understand irony - because when I read them I miss all the humour. When an actor or actress portrays the character - then I can see what is meant to be funny. I guess I'm a bit dim that way.

Thomas Hardy novels too - make excellent films - it is the countryside which looms over all of his stories I suppose. I never feel as though I can get under the skin of his characters, it always feels that I am just watching them from a distance, even Tess.

I am reading 'Small Island' by Andrea Levy at the moment, which takes place in 1948. England. It is an absorbing read, lightly covering weighty subjects like empire, colour-prejudice, war and love.

It really is very good. Well it has won the Whitbread Book of the Year and also Orange Prize for Fiction - so I guess it will eventually become a classic.

The Old Man and the Sea can drown me in a sea of boredom. And anything by Dan Brown or Tankred Dorst as well, though I did find myself laughing at loud at Brown's Da Vinci Code.

I liked "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand; it made me a quasi-Objectivist. I dispised her "The Fountain Head", and stopped reading it after the first 50 pages, trite, and goofy (the old movie of it staring Gary Cooper confirmed my estimation.)

I could never understand the cult like attraction of "Catcher in the Rye." It actually irritated me. If I read the phrase: "Good old Phoebe." once, I read it 100 times.

Did not like Charles Dickens until much later in life. Now appreciatre his writing.

Read Slaughter House Five three times- love it. Then went on to read all Vonnegut.

Did not like Thoreau. Found him phony since he never fessed up to being supported financially by Emerson.

Enjoy well researched non-fiction. Just finished The Verneys. Author had tro sift through thousands of leters and I felt brought the reader right into the center of 17th century England. Like Pepys with more creative narrative, colorful characters.

I always thought I was alone in thinking The Catcher in the Rye overrated.
I've been trying to read this book called Three Cups of Tea but it just seems too unbelievable.
Another one that people look at me aghast is The Old Man and the Sea. Soooo boring! I tried.

Ernie said:

I always thought I was alone in thinking The Catcher in the Rye overrated.

So did I. In fact, I've kept my distain for "Catcher" a deep dark secret all these years, lest I be ostracized Nice to meet you!!!

I think that some writers make a name for themselves, and then tend to be treated with reverence, even though some of what they later produce can be mediocre. I believe Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Pierre Burton have sometimes fallen into this category.

etudiant wrote:I think that some writers make a name for themselves, and then tend to be treated with reverence, even though some of what they later produce can be mediocre.

I agree. Stephen King fell into that as well. Dean Koontz had a couple of good books, but most of it was the same thing with different titles and names. An author that impresses me is Elizabeth George. She isn't afraid to do possibly career ruining twists.

Bart, nice to meet you too!!

I dislike Ayn Rand's work intensely. I was introduced to her, as I suspect many people were, while in high school because the Ayn Rand Institute bribes its way into classroom curricula by offering some rather paltry scholarship prizes for essays based on her works. Because of that, I read Anthem in 10th grade (which was a pale rip-off of Evgeny Zamyatin's We) and The Fountainhead in 11th grade. Rand's prose always seems like a too-lengthy submission to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I would also really love to know what perverse part of her sexual history causes her to write scenes the women who are obviously her projections and who are raped by men with the initials H.R., after which the women invariably fade into the background.

To give Rand a fair shake, I made the fateful decision to read Atlas Shrugged over a three-day Model UN Conference in Costa Mesa, CA. Honestly, almost any long book would have been better, and this experience caused me to take multiple books with me on any future trip. I read it all, despite how desperately dull it was, because I needed some diversion from my fellow students droning on about international affairs. Most of them wouldn't have known Brasilia from Beijing, and yet they couldn't be shut up. They went on at such length and so unproductively that there was no time to negotiate over the resolution that was introduced on the first day of the conference. There was barely time for a reading. We had to vote on it in a way that could have been done within five minutes on the first day.

But I digress. Despite being the dullest thing I've ever had to sit through, I still put down Atlas Shrugged and listened to it or read from a nearby phone book. I damn near walked to the local Borders, and would have done it if I had any confidence that I would be able to find my way back. Later, I read some of Rand's 'philosophy', which is even worse than her prose. Her notions about causality are either nonsensical or tautological. John Hospers pointed this fact out to her, but she was apparently too dim to understand his objection. At least her novels, however didactic, give her philosophy some cloak to hide behind, but when they're out in the open, with nothing to hide behind, then they appear as the vacuous and muddled mess they are. Rand's philosophy is 'new' to the extent that she didn't understand anything about previous philosophical systems, so her works are difficult to fit in either as continuations or criticisms of prior trends of thought.

While Rand's works may represent the worst prose that has ever been styled as "classic American novels", Dan Brown's books are even worse, but at least there's no Dan Brown Institute insisting that we teach The Da Vinci Code in high schools. I read The Da Vinci Code and later Angels and Demons, borrowing both from my mother.

Everything I could possibly say about Dan Brown—and I certainly could go on!—has already been said by Geoffrey Pullum. It's just the sort of thing that makes you want to cringe in your seat.

Well, anyway, the other work I absolutely loathed from my time in high school was The Catcher in the Rye. I honestly have no idea why it's considered a classic, nor why it's inflicted on younger generations, except that this whiny emo angst about nothing is supposed to resonate with us. I think that if teachers want a classic American novel that should resonate with teenagers, then they could do worse than to assign Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. We're not all poor relations who luck into a privileged Old Money upbringing, but I think students would sympathize with Lily Bart's struggle to find a way to remain true to herself and live as she wishes.