Raymond Chandler can be just as sexist as Hemingway...I'm not sure why I like him better...Maybe because Philip Marlowe doesn't take himself very seriously. Also, I never had to take a test on "The Long Goodbye" or "The Lady in The Lake"(Which is just as well...I read someplace that, Chandler, in alcohol's grip pretty much full-time by then, forgot to reveal who killed the Lady in the first place.)

I totally don't fault anyone for trying and not liking it. It's literary cilantro -- either you utterly groove on it, or it's soap, and there's not much in between.

And now I'm wondering what else is literary cilantro. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, probably. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, possibly. Some Virginia Woolf. All the stuff with an incredibly distinct flavor to it, that's going to be right from the first paragraph either entrancing or gag-worthy, and once that first reaction hits there isn't much that's going to make the reader change hir mind.

Erika, I think the not taking it too seriously is a big part. And another things is that it is one thing to have the prejudices of your day. Another for them to be fundamental to your world view. If Chandler had learned not be a sexist he could have written essentially the same books - with significant tweaks, but completely recognizable. If Hemingway had stopped being a sexist, he would have had to change his books fundamentally. His view of what a woman was and what a man was were fundamental to his writing and world view. My 2 cents.

And now I'm wondering what else is literary cilantro.

Unless it's just me - Thomas Pyncheon. I read The Crying of Lot 49 after we name-checked it here. I read the whole thing, but it was mostly Not Enough Huh? In the World for me.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

That's a good example, although it wasn't quite cilantro for me -- there was definitely a lot of excellent writing and story in there, but after a while the extraneous stuff made me feel like he was jerking off in front of me, and laughing about it. I never did finish it.

Brilliant title, though.

The title is one of my favorite things about it. But I'm really fond of that one, if not wowed like the first time.(Bloggers kind of...write like that) TB, interesting thoughts.

I think all of Vonnegut is cilantro. At least, everybody seems to love him, and I find him unbearable. Slaughterhouse, Galapogos, that one with the weird Ice, the one where every male character has a parenthetical penis size... disliked them all. Weird that I finished them all, I know, but I liked the stories! Great ideas, painful-to-me execution. I felt much the same about Catch-22, only that one I never bothered to finish.

I think if you like Ulysses, you will also like Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

I have a love of Thomas Hardy, and I seem to remember everyone else hates him. I can barely abide Hemingway (The Old an and the Sea alomost killed me. See also The Big Two Hearted River) and Steinbeck (that darned The Pearl). Of course, those were also books I had to read in school, where I think they mistook terse and short for easy to read and therefore OK for 7th graders.

Thomas Hardy! t hisssss

Actually, come to think of it, I hated many books we read in school-- I think I only liked The Great Gatsby, Silas Marner, and The Diary of Anne Frank. I have no idea what lead me to be an English Lit major after all those terribly boring books, and it was a little frustrating in high school that I was such a big reader and didn't like anything.