Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week to pay for his mother's funeal expenses. Fortunately, his reputation rests not on his fiction, but on his nonfiction, particularly The Lives of the Poets and the dictionary. I don't think of Rasselas as a particularly successful book, but Johnson's essays can be brilliant.

I had a totally different view of Wuthering Heights when I read it in college, versus when I read it in high school.

I thought Heathcliff/Cathy was this amazing, romantic ideal when I was in high school.

In college, I thought it was fucked up and overblown and unhealthy as hell (the Heathcliff/Cathy saga).

I hated The Flounder by Gunter Grass. I have blocked a lot of the "why" out of my brain, since it was taking up too much space, but I almost stopped talking to the friend that had recommended it. Unpleasant throughout. Don't like reading through gritted teeth.

Cereal.

Do you like reading things through a rather unreliable narrator and having to take PoV considerations into your reading as you go along, P-C? WH is great for that.

Also great for that (and possibly mentioned recently, I can't be sure) is The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. This is when narrator POV really began to intrigue me.

Nutty, I called the plot twist of the most recent movie after the first fifteen minutes. It was a neat twist, though, and worked with the story as presented. It just wasn't "The Count of Monte Cristo". Which is exactly the complaint many folks had about "Troy." I need to work on my "this is a movie, that's a book" separation issues.

Anyway--

"Otherwise, I think it could have been a fascinating study of what revenge -- and expiation -- does to the soul"

I think we saw elements of the Count realizing he was overreacting in places, and I think at the very, very end he confesses to being weary of revenge. Would such a book as you're proposing have been written in that day and age? Honor was all, and I'm not sure that any audience of the time would put up with the Count suddenly going "My quest is wrong!" and still be able to have any respect for him.

Hmmm. The only book that I can remember having a huge hate-on for was Great Expectations, but damned if I can remember why past my annoyance at the prose. Anyone else? Help?

Now, there are some plays that I've only read that I can expound on my hatred for, but that's not the gist of this. Damn it.

I've still not read Wuthering Heights. I disliked all the other Bronte people I've been exposed to, so WH went down on the list behind people who don't make me crazy.

I read The Mayor of Casterbridge, and could sort of dig what Hardy was saying in it -- how Elizabeth-Jane, at the end, tries to find "happiness" by being ecstatic about, like, a patch of sunshine, or finding a penny in the street. But the plotting was so manipulative and the pessimistic message so heavy-handed that I ultimately came away thinking, "Tom, have some Prozac."

Which is not to say that, sometimes, the characters don't haunt me, a little -- I think to myself, I will not become Elizabeth-Jane, because that would Extremely Bad. But most of the time, Hardy pushes his thesis too hard, and it can sometimes be easy to dismiss him.

I'm told his poetry is both more subtle and less depressing, but I've not gotten around to it yet.

And I hate to go back and drag up old stuff, but this keeps niggling at me and I can't let it alone: Deb, I do still feel that you're conflating different kinds of criticism and different approaches to a text. When I talked about not knowing exactly what I thought about a given book until after I'd been in a class full of people hashing it out, I absolutely didn't mean that they were all telling me what to think about it; I absolutely meant that we were all working it out for ourselves, helping each other work it out, illuminating it for one another and sharing our love exactly the way the Buffistas do with episodes of Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Wonderfalls. The same thing Plei was doing when she talked your ear off for two hours about Bats and you loved it. It's not telling someone else how a text must be read, it's loving it out loud, and learning more about that love in the act of articulating it.

And (I think this gets a bit at what Michele was talking about) I do indeed need and value that. Like you, I don't feel a burning need to share my response to a work of literature with everyone around me. I'm usually pretty happy with my own response. However, if I have a big love for something, I'm also hypocritically happy as hell to soak up other people's love of it to see if I can find new ways of loving it myself. I'm bright enough for all everyday purposes, but I'm not brilliant enough to pick up any text and give it an immediately complete reading, responding heart and soul to everything the author poured into it. I haven't the brains or the experience or the range of knowledge to do so. And in college it mattered to me, to all of us, to be able to, as Plei said, riff off each other. Almost all of us had some bit of perspective, some obscure historical fact, some love of a particular myth or poem or folktale in common with the author, some little piece of information that none of the rest of us had. And the sharing of that enlarged the love for all of us.

And in other news, apparently I am Ginger and I also, perversely, want to marry her post about ice cream and broccoli and have its little posty babies.

Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week to pay for his mother's funeal expenses. Fortunately, his reputation rests not on his fiction, but on his nonfiction, particularly The Lives of the Poets and the dictionary.

Oh, I'll give him his props for the whole dictionary thing. But we were innundated with the whole "Johnson: Lion of English Literature!" mistique when I was studying his period, and Rasselas was pointed to as a fine example of the period's fiction. Which it so isn't. If he'd been taught as a non-fiction writer along the lines of Addison and Steele I might have less of a hate on for him.

I had the exact same WH experience, Steph.

I'm also a fan of Anne Bronte, esp. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which is mysterious and eerie, and deals with subject that I was shocked to see treated seriously in the time period. Aside from being a great read, it really made me rethink some of my preconceptions about the period and how people lived and thought.