I've heard about how great something is from people I respect, generally I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

See, if this REALLY worked, I'd have a lot more of my friends coming to krav.

Nah, I'm good with the idea that people I respect really like things I dislike, and vice versa. My life, as of last count, is still too short.

Maybe I'd have read it and enjoyed it. I'll read something else and enjoy it, though. I'll be good.

And what's with the anti-intellectual bent in this thread? This is the second time in less than a month that I've found people complaining about great literature because it's hard.

I think that's more than a bit of an overstatement. I've heard people singling out individual works or authors they don't care for, sure. And for a variety of reasons - but when I say something bores me or doesn't seem worth it or I don't like the style, please don't equate that with it's too hard.

Just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean it's good. Politicians and preachers have been using that fallacy for years.

One is, of course, to dislike novels. The other is to read Melville. If you want to yearn for the days of pre-literacy, read Faulkner.

That's great. Really, really great.

No other reason, and usually no ulterior motives.

You might try telling that the entire generation of college students who believed, and insisted, and i>made my life fucking miserable, that if you didn't "appreciate" their literate choice of authors - in the late sixties, that was Heinlein, Hesse, Tolkein and Gibran - that you were an ignoramus.

Um, wrong, boyos. I am, trust me, not even remotely an ignoramus. I'm not a lit snob, either, and I read, and look at art, and listen to music, from a specific place.

I'm not dissing crit; I'm saying I don't live there, is all. I am, however, dissing the critics who try to destroy my pleasure in it, and who try to demean the way I absorb it, by deconstructing it to me when I ask them not to.

In short? I don't give a shit whether the perspective of da Vinci's "La Vierge de la Roche" is why my toes melt whenever I walk into the Louvre. I don't care if the cunning use of the occasional tritone is why early plainsongs make my spine tighten up.

I just know I love them, I'd like to be given the same room to love them without being sneered at by those who can't or won't feel it the way I do, and, well, that's all, really.

Art is sometimes unamusing, too, and some music is kind of off-putting. I guess that means we should just give up and only surround ourselves with things that comfort us.

Unamusing art and off-putting music. Why, exactly, should I subject myself to these things, when there is beautiful art and music that slips straight into my soul? Life is too short to waste my time on unappealing art of any type just because there seems to be some virtue in reading something you can't stand.

Now. I do think that people should challenge their taste, push their familiar boundaries, when it comes to art, literature, music.

But it's not an intellectual failure to read all of Moby Dick and not like it. It's personal taste. It's not intellectually weak to cringe at fusion jazz. It's personal taste.

I'll try them, you betcha. If I eschew them, it's not because they're too hard for my poor widdle brain, you DAMN betcha.

My dislike for Shakespere is NOT because it's "hard"; I can get it, I did get it when I had to read it (and in my humanities class of 200+, I got the highest mark on the term paper for "Hamlet"). I just don't like it and there is plenty out there that I do like that I won't be able to read in my lifetime so I don't see the need to be well versed in what other people say is "lit-ra-chure" if I don't enjoy it. (other people being professors and whatnot - not Buffistas)

Life is too short to read shit ya don't enjoy.

Now a lot of people enjoy the cerebral tickle, they enjoy putting a book down and saying "Hmmm..." and then going into a deep think about something. Sometimes, I do too. But mostly, I like reading for the enjoyment of reading and being someone else in another world. I love the soul tickling and being able to think, "Yeah! That's how I felt/did that/effed that up". I can't relate to Shakespere. So why should I read it if I don't enjoy it? I certainly don't think Ole Willie is gonna be offended.

I've heard about how great something is from people I respect, generally I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

And this thread is dominated by people saying "Gee, I tried Madame Bovary because it was supposed to be so great, but I hate it."

It's not "I can't be bothered reading classics", it's "I tried reading this classic, and I didn't like it." People have been happily popping in with classics they loved as well. (Note the My Àntonia digression.)

I have never once curled up at someone's knee, having been drawn there by "Once upon a time..." and tried comparing the story to someone else's, or tried to wrap my intellect around it.

Oh, I have. I recently read a version of Beauty and the Beast, and suddenly recognized that I was reading a story of Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, it made my enjoyment go down to ZERO, but I was glad that the story hadn't managed to pull the wool over my eyes. Alternately, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is sort of WTF and pointless unless you know it's based on a ballad of the same name. (Which is reprinted at the end.)

Anyway, canon exists because literate people generally agree that those particular works represent the best of literature.

I don't agree. There are works that are called canon, about which people cannot agree (especially as to quality) that are in canon anyway, because they matter, because they influenced other things. I'll cry if I have to read The Jungle again, because it was AWFUL prose and stupid plotting, but even being awful, it managed to completely change public opinion and revolutionize a mode of writing (also, politics) in the US.

I do agree that canon is primarily useful for people to speak a common cultural language, but I don't agree it's based primarily on quality.

Also, I read hard books because they're rewarding; but I sometimes put down hard books because they're not. I've been 200 pages into Middlemarch for years, and despite reading Daniel Deronda, I can't sit myself down to finish Eliot's most famous novel. Maybe someday.

I love Willa Cather. And Melville for that matter.

Hec (and Lilty), I'm sorry, but My Antonia was, for me, the dumbest dumb that ever dumbed. All summary, no scene, not compelling at all. I was expecting so much more.

Moby Dick, however, has its moments. "The Whiteness of the Whale" is an absolutely fascinating look at the way symbolism works in literature. I'd rather read Moby Dick again than read My Antonia.

I'm also a big Faulkner fan. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! rock. If you can't deal with his run-ons, okay, but I think they're brilliant. Quentin Compson is my homeboy.

Ole Willie is gonna be offended.

Given Ole Willie's times and main audience, he'll just be grateful if you don't fling rotten produce at him.