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Seven of the top ten books of all time are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard... who knew?
trif
EdinburghRegistered User regular
EdinburghRegistered User regular
modernlibrary.com's hundred best novels
I am referring to the readers' list, but I was still thoroughly depressed that this it has so obviously been subverted by Scientologists and Objectivists. For context:
Ayn Rand
L.Ron Hubbard
Now, I've read Battlefield Earth... and I enjoyed it, for the pulp sci-fi it is.... but it's NOT the 3rd best novel of all time.
Scientologists and Objectivists seem to be amoung the worst rabble rousers on the internet, and their vociferous minorities can often drown out the more meek and less extreme majorities. It saddens me to see an obvious perversion of a seemingly genuine website. Am I wrong? should I be more accepting of this?
I suppose it's not too different from the Dub the Dew competition and that doesn't annoy me... am I a hypocrite? Thoughts?
I am referring to the readers' list, but I was still thoroughly depressed that this it has so obviously been subverted by Scientologists and Objectivists. For context:
Ayn Rand
L.Ron Hubbard
Now, I've read Battlefield Earth... and I enjoyed it, for the pulp sci-fi it is.... but it's NOT the 3rd best novel of all time.
Scientologists and Objectivists seem to be amoung the worst rabble rousers on the internet, and their vociferous minorities can often drown out the more meek and less extreme majorities. It saddens me to see an obvious perversion of a seemingly genuine website. Am I wrong? should I be more accepting of this?
I suppose it's not too different from the Dub the Dew competition and that doesn't annoy me... am I a hypocrite? Thoughts?
Honk iff you love formal logic! - - There are only 10 types of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don't
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I heard similar ravings about Ulysses and it may have had potential, but I remember that one being difficult to stick to as well.
James Joyce is not so much read for enjoyment as for personal triumph.
Then do it again every year to bleed them as much as possible.
yes
or no, I guess
I'm not the boss of you
being personally unable to understand the book isn't really a strike against the book itself.
People jump on Faulkner's dick because his phonetic dialect is perfect, his ability to voice characters is perfect, and his complex stories are infinitely re-readable. They have true depth in their ability to show new things every time you go back to them.
The craft of Ulysses is undeniable, Joyce's intense genius makes it basically inaccessible. He's making allusion after allusion to all different sorts of things, sometimes in different languages, all in stream of consciousness, that pretty much no one is going to keep up with him. The only way to actually appreciate that book is to study it and have someone walk you through the narrative, slowly.
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@Langly
I really wish you could have taken that class on Joyce that we had the second semester of our first year.
You would have loved it.
Maybe The Sound and the Fury is great, all I was saying is I didn't get it. Realistically the only reason I had picked it up was because in 11th grade we had to read a book of choice and write a report about it. That year, I really liked the movie Orange County and Colin Hanks drops Faulkner's name when he's defending his choice to be a writer to his dad.
That scratches the itch perfectly, thankyou!
RE: All the Ulysses comments. It's amazing that something can be so universally acclaimed when only a small fraction of the people who attempt to read it can actually understand it properly. I'm not saying it's not good... just that I probably can't be trusted to judge it
If you enjoy that, move on to Ulysses.
I love The Sound and the Fury pretty friggin' hard.
Southern gothic lit 4 lyfe
and I think it's perfectly fine to judge Joyce on how inaccessible he is, in terms of how enjoyable Ulysses is. On that count, the book really is pretty forgettable to most audiences. It's not really a book you could even read through slowly solo, because at this point lots of the stuff he's referencing are so contemporary to him or so remote that you would absolutely need a teacher in order to get through it. When you're reading it for just yourself, by yourself, it's just not very good.
It is objectively a work of genius, but that doesn't mean it's altogether useful for any sort of reader other than a scholar. Its most important aspect to everyone is its impact on 20th century literature, and you don't need to read it to know that.
That book's fun as hell, and not nearly so difficult as its reputation would indicate.
Or House of Leaves, depending on how you want to categorize depth
I'd say the exact opposite of this, because finnegan's wake is out-and-out madness from page 1, whereas Ulysses has a vaguely followable narrative going the whole time (disregarding the 100-page tangents about mice bladders or whatever).
House of Leaves is a pretty standard horror story with some pretty daring formatting
Which ain't a knock against it at all, it's a really fun book
But I'm not sure I'd be comfortable calling it particularly deep
If it was just madness from the start you could just drop it there and then. "nope, not for me"
Something can be technically inaccessible and still read-able. I'm mostly thinking here of Infinite Jest, where DFW didn't subvert the form as much as Joyce did, but it still was dense as hell and something that you could study thoroughly to get more out of it. I feel like "being able to read it or not" is a decent way to judge a book. Being FORCED to study a book intellectually in order to be able to comprehend it at all kind of sucks IMO. That being said I haven't tried to read Joyce since college, when I was significantly less patient, so maybe I should go back and re-evaluate.
I really like House of Leaves but that guy is an insufferable jerk.
See that's why I'd put it that way. If one can handle and enjoy the out and out madness by itself, then their mind is probably ready for out and out madness with deep profundity.
I'm sometimes tempted to go re-reread them again and see if I can take the time to fully understand what's going on.
I wrote and highlighted and underlined all over Ulysses.
When I was in middle school there was this series of fad books that all had janky formatting to try and look cool, and like most "young adult" lit they were also utter trash
That's interesting; I got the first website from a discussion over on metafilter about The Great Gatsby. A lot of people there were quick to deride it for being vacuous and dull. It had plenty of supporters, too, but it certainly wasn't unanimous praise for being the Great American Novel
If you're going to tackle Ulysses on your own, I suggest you get this to read along with. It's a pretty solid reference, especially for all of the Irish political references. Sometimes there will be a question mark at the end of an annotation, but really with Joyce that's to be expected.