I still flee screaming into the night from Faulkner,

As do I. But yes, there were things that were shoved down my throat in high school that I really didn't like. Around my junior year in college my tastes had changed a lot, and there was canon, listing a whole bunch of things that I found myself liking the second time around. Faulkner managed to bore and irritate me both times and I haven't tried him since.

I love Willa Cather.

I remember disliking A Lost Lady so much that I've never approached Cather again.

And Melville for that matter.

Two words that drove me away from Melville forever: Moby. Dick. I understand intellectually what he was doing with it, style-wise and theme-wise, but DAMN.

This time? Or the four other times in the past two months, Juliana?(This time about 800 and something... this is it, though. If the big "reveal" doesn't just knock my socks off, Wallace's troubles may be over soon. Nobody makes me do that for no reason. Nobody. And he'll be expecting a wheelchair to be an agent of death, anyway, creating paralyzed assasin squads.) Ha. Now, I'm Inigo Montoya. "You wasted my summer. Prepare to die."

I remember disliking A Lost Lady so much that I've never approached Cather again.

That's it? You didn't even try My Antonia?

Two words that drove me away from Melville forever: Moby. Dick. I understand intellectually what he was doing with it, style-wise and theme-wise, but DAMN.

Moby Dick rocks! Whole sections of it are like an episode of Justice League. Look at all the harpooners as super heroes. Look at the HoYay with Ishamel and Queequeeg. Consider the wildass funkiness of the Church of the Whale (that early scene before they set sail). It's got a one-act play in the middle. Ahab is a bad mammajamma, who sets his will against the world. Think of it as a wicked exercise in gnostic theology (Melville did - at least in part).

Two words that drove me away from Melville forever: Moby. Dick.

I hated Moby Dick, too. And I'm still not likely to go back and reread it. But my bookgroup read some book based on MD from the perspective of Ahab's wife, so one of the group members brought MD and read the chapter titled, "The Squeezing of the Sperm" to us. It's about the whaling ship rendering down a sperm whale -- supposedly. Hoyay everywhere! Good lord. We were giggling like a room full of 12 year olds before she'd read more than three paragraphs.

If the big "reveal" doesn't just knock my socks off, Wallace's troubles may be over soon. Nobody makes me do that for no reason. Nobody. And he'll be expecting a wheelchair to be an agent of death, anyway, creating paralyzed assasin squads.) Ha. Now, I'm Inigo Montoya. "You wasted my summer. Prepare to die."

Heh.

I heart My Antonia.

That's it? You didn't even try My Antonia?

Nope. I made a snap judgment and moved on.

Moby Dick rocks!

::shudder::

Granted, I'm a totally different human being, twice over, than the one who had to read those in college, and maybe I would like them, or at least not wish to be stricken with illiteracy. But there's so much else out there that I *want* to read, I just can't see going back to them.

If professors who I happened to like hadn't kept telling me that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the best thing since bottled gin, I wouldn't have given The Great Gatsby a second try. And I'm very glad I did.

I've tried it three times because I kept hearing it was THE Great American Novel. Each time I was hopelessly bored by the end of the second chapter.

But I'm glad the Master and Commander movie inspired me to give the Aubrey/Maturin books a second try, because I haven't been so pleasurably hooked by a book or series in ages. Though they do make me feel woefully inadequate as a writer, and especially as a historical writer.

Not really supposed to be on b.org during the day, but am trying to tell myself this thread counts as "work", sorta, since I'm an aspiring writer and all. Love Shakespeare. Never read Madame Bovary. I've picked and chosen such parts of the canon as actually interest me, but that's enough to give me a decent cultural context, particularly for matters pre-20th century.

I'm one who has to listen to Shakespeare to "get it" properly. This is true 80% of the time with any poetry, and about 40% of the time where prose involves complex sentence structures.

In other words (and yes, I'm being partially flippant again), canon exists to make the nerds giddy when they make those connections.

Or, to make the connections at all. Reagan's speech about "being a city upon a hill"? It was one kind of speech if you didn't know that phrase came from the Puritans, and another if you did.

Same again, Dante's defensive cry in the Inferno: "I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul!" If you don't know that Aeneas and Paul both had a nice long anthropological look at Hell, then you are less in the way of understanding what the narrator in the Inferno is about to do. In fact, the narrator is visiting Hell because Aeneas and Paul have come before him -- he is their spiritual child in his crisis. (And guided by a parent-like Virgil.)

(Actually, Dante was such an incredible Western Canon name-dropper that he's really incomprehensible today without lots and lots of footnotes, and a passing knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.)