That isn’t an opinion, that’s just a troll.
That’s the point of these unpopular threads, you know…
Moby Dick is rather long.
And very boring.
David Foster Wallace (R.I.P) is impenetrable rubbish and so is Thomas Pynchon.
Douglas Coupland thinks he far cleverer than he actually is and his books suffer from that same smug generational hipsterism.
Cory Doctorow isn’t that great a writer.
I hope ebooks don’t destroy the production of real paperbacks and books. I still love the look of a well organized book shelf and the ability to just pick a book at random and thumb through the ideas. Something an ebook archive will never allow.
Robert E Howard was a much better writer than Lovecraft.
signed!
Neil Gaiman is getting worse and worse… Sandman was fantastic, Neverwhere was great, American gods was good, Anansi boys was okay… half of his short stories in the collections are unreadable. Hey Neil, turn your crap filter back on please
Heh, some of this is as trolltastic as the music thread.
Glen Cook’s Black Company series can hold it’s own against The Lord of The Rings.
Garth Nix is underrated.
Unfortunately, it’s likely impossible to prove one way or another. But it is certain that he wrote Starship Troopers during his John Birch Society lite phase. I would argue it’s fair to say that while he may not have wanted those precise ideas put in place in a practical sense, he hoped to unite people against a common enemy with what has proved a disturbingly persuasive vision to many of his fans (especially the sometimes overlooked parts dealing with crime and punishment). I believe he acted out of fear of nuclear war more than malice or the assorted derangements of an actual Bircher, but the book is no less problematic as an ethical vision than, say, E.L. Modesitt’s rationalizations of genocide.
I’m just not a fan of his writing overall, so I haven’t been able to get through any of his other books. The movie, though, is fantastic. While I have no problem believing that Verhoeven did not have him originally in mind, the finished product all the way to Doogie Houser, SS, is a science fiction classic on the order of a cinematic Modest Proposal. Plus, according to a qt3 film fan whose name escapes me it is one of the last places you can enjoy real blanks being fired in a film on a grand scale as opposed pure special effects.
Anyway:
Bulgakov wrote one book (Master and Margarita) that is sublime and didn’t come close to that in the other 4 recommended works that I tried before giving up. The book within a book has been done to death, but the two very different writers that inhabited his mind while writing this book are distinct in mind-bending ways. And it’s one of my favorite renditions of Pontius Pilate, as well as one of my favorite adaptations of Faust.
Anne Rice has probably only written one good book, and it’s in the Vampire series but blissfully unrelated to anything but her desire to frame her apologia for satan within a character she handled comfortably. Memnoch the Devil. Pretty good.
Harry Potter is not good. I’m glad kids are reading, but it does for fantasy what the Hardy Boys did for mysteries. They do have good production values, though.
The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon’s best and shortest book (or one of them, he may have other short ones I haven’t read). These two factors are not unrelated.
David Sedaris is only funny in person or in taped performances, and then only sometimes.
This is a good one. I was delighted by Master and Margarita, his treatment of the Devil and Pontius Pilate are terrific. And of course, “manuscripts don’t burn.”
Damn it, I looked up the last ST flamewar only to discover that it was you mentioning the blank rounds, but in reference to some even one.
…
I haven’t really liked any of John Le Carre’s stuff since the Tailor of Panama. It always seems to review well, but…
Totally agreed. I’m tired of reviews that say “LeCarre is finally back up to form.”
I’ll only disagree in that I couldn’t even finish Tailor of Panama.
Many people pan Stephen King, and while I understand a lot of the criticism, I do think he has a real gift for character. This is especially evident in his short stories, where he can create people that genuinely feel real in only a few short pages.
Oscar Wilde’s mark on world litterature could be summarized in a few aphorisms.
Pale Fire is more pedantic than actually brilliant.
George RR Martin’s style is terrible.
George Orwell isn’t a very good novellist. He’s brilliant as an essayist, though.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is boring trite.
Bulgakov wrote one book (Master and Margarita) that is sublime and didn’t come close to that in the other 4 recommended works that I tried before giving up. The book within a book has been done to death, but the two very different writers that inhabited his mind while writing this book are distinct in mind-bending ways. And it’s one of my favorite renditions of Pontius Pilate, as well as one of my favorite adaptations of Faust.
I tried to read Master and Margarita, but didn’t get where he was getting at. The devil ? Get serious ! I love his book about Molière, though, but don’t know how it’s called in english.
Pedantic about what? Pale Fire is play from start to finish.
It’s metapedantic. It’s the kind of book written for structuralist critics of the sixties. The joke isn’t that great anymore, it felt like an exercise in style more than a genuine novel with a acute grasp on reality. I don’t mind a little bit of formalism, I love Perec for exemple, but his books use formalism to express reality playfully.
I really liked Lolita, mind.
I liked Tailor of Panama both as novel and movie, and I also liked another book of his I read recently, umm, Our Kind of Traitor. Weak ending, but I suppose it was inevitable.
I can’t address your main point (don’t like Hardy) but what I can tell you (though you probably already know) is that Hardy’s books weren’t originally published as single novels. They were originally serialised in a magazine, which is why each chapter generally ends in “and then this awful thing happened!”. I mean, at least he has an excuse, unlike Dan Brown.
On which note: I know Dan Brown’s novels are shite and I know that the act of reading them actively destroys brain cells but I sort of enjoyed Angels & Demons.
I didn’t know that, but, in any case, the same is true of Dickens, whom I like a lot.
I don’t like the Great Gatsby. It’s boring. I don’t understand why everyone loves it.