I can understand the technicalities and the whys of their status in the canon of seminal artists & works, but I myself cannot enter the headspace that would allow me to comprehend and enjoy it.
t nods
What it comes down to for me is that life is to short to read books I don't enjoy. It doesn't matter if what turns me off is poorly written genre fic that gives all of us talented, hard-working romance/mystery/fantasy/etc. writers a bad name, or if it's an acknowledged Great Work of the English Canon that strikes me personally as boring or incomprehensible. I'll never have enough time to read everything I
want,
so I'm not going to read anything that feels like a punishment.
Well, if you're interested in academic literary criticism (and certainly no one says you have to be), it helps to have a common language and framework for discussion.
Oh, hell yes, I totally get that - sorry, as I said, I wasn't being snarky.
But I'm coming from the chair of the reader, and purely from the chair of the reader: the end user. So if I say, for instance, that I love both A Room of One's Own (oh, god, how I love it! Must reread soon) and The Dead, I want to be able to love them both the way I do - which is a pit of the tum love, not an intellectually-based love - without someone shaking a finger at me and telling me why I shouldn't.
Because I genuinely can't do crit - it has the same effect on me that deconstructing a mantra does. It loses its power to affect me. And in the instance of Joyce, or Woolf, I don't want my completely pit of tum reaction muddied up.
After IJ, may not have the energy anyway, Deb. (As it is, I've taken several cheap paperbacks as goomares...with IJ as "wife" get it? for the duration...I must be developing a crush on the friend that recommended that...a thousand pages could only be geek love.)
But I just a. Wouldn't want to miss anything. b. Wouldn't want anybody to think I said it to be impressive.
And the BBC chimes in with the Cheat's guide to Joyce's Ulysses.
life is to short to read books I don't enjoy.... an acknowledged Great Work of the English Canon that strikes me personally as boring or incomprehensible. I'll never have enough time to read everything I want, so I'm not going to read anything that feels like a punishment.
This is how I feel too. I'm not going to read a book because other people say I should, or to prove my intelligence to anyone. I'll read a book because I love it, it entertains, or it's the right time for me. If a book doesn't speak to me, "great work of literature" or not, I most likely won't be reading it anytime soon.
This is how I feel too. I'm not going to read a book because other people say I should, or to prove my intelligence to anyone. I'll read a book because I love it, it entertains, or it's the right time for me. If a book doesn't speak to me, "great work of literature" or not, I most likely won't be reading it anytime soon.
This is why I was the most-argued-with English Lit major of my college. I'd read 'em, because I had to, but I wouldn't bow down to them because they were 'canon'. I actually hated the idea of any canon at all, and I wanted to write a thesis on how, in the right hands,
Valley of the Dolls
could be as valuable a piece of literature as
Heart of Darkness.
Edited because I still can't spell. Maybe those professors were on to something. Dang.
I read Ulysses in graduate school in a modern Irish literature course. I enjoyed it, but it's hard to know if I would have read it on my own. It did leave me with one of my philosophies of life: "Sufficient onto the day is the newspaper thereof." The course mainly made me a huge fan of Yeats and John Millington Synge.
The course mainly made me a huge fan of Yeats and John Millington Synge.
For me, J.M. Synge, NSM, but Yeats, hell yes.
