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.

A couple friends of mine once had a website that let bookworms confess which classics they'd never been able to make it though, and why. Moby Dick was easily the most common book on that list, with the reason generally being something like "The catalogue of whales...the fucking catalogue of whales!"

I still flee screaming into the night from Faulkner,

Which is longer, a sentence or a page?

Try again, Mr. Faulkner.

Like in The Simpsons, and I'm not even remotely kidding this time. It can be a fucking BRILLIANT show.

They talk about that on the commentary tracks a lot -- how odd it is that their core audience (i.e., teenagers) is probably missing out on 90% of the jokes, and their core audience's parents (who would get the references) aren't watching because it's still percieved as a kids' show.

Hell, I consider myself decently educated, and I'll bet *I* miss about 50% of the cultural references that Groening et al. slip in.

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.

I love footnotes. Except in Shakespeare, because it muddles the flow for me. Okay, that's true of most poetry. Which is why I have both the annotated and the "clean" versions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. As does Zach. Our poetry shelf looks like a repetitive Greco-Roman orgy of poetry.

But for prose? I love footnotes.

I hate them, now. Cause I'm reading IJ for the fourth fricking time. And I'm a little clever. That guy's rep must be...beyond reproach. Beyond beyond. Because if I showed anybody anything like that, they'd be like "You wanna do what? Have you been drinking? bwah ha ha.Good one."

The version of Ivanhoe I'm reading has only the notes of Scott himself -- 2 versions. (First as "Laurence Templeton", from the 1/e, and 2nd from when he re-published an edition in 1830.) I do wish it had more notes, because a lot of the medieval terms are unfamiliar, and I have only the vaguest, most conspiracy-theory-laden idea of what the Knights Templar actually were.

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.

I wouldn't say this, exactly, because I do prefer to read Shakespeare. Or read, then hear, at any rate. But when I do, I often notice that I'm sort of reading-aloud-in-my-head, if that makes any sense.

Nutty, Knights Templar. It's a bit self-congratulatory, but ought to give you some idea.

Ivanhoe's an interesting example of the influence some of these works can have beyond the quality of the narrative. It isn't necessarily the greatest thing to come down the pike but, beyond the already mentioned effect on literature that followed, the wealthy ante-bellum South was apparently obsessed with it, and it's very interesting to look at the socioeconomic norms of that time/group through that lens.