Big Read Poll

[altariel]

In a variation on the Big Read meme that's been going round, I thought I would do a poll. I've listed all the books which I have not read/completed, but which I have around the house. Your task is to indicate which one I should try to read/complete. Please tell me why in comments!

Obviously if you pick The Complete Works of Shakespeare I'll have to hunt you down.

[Poll #1215792]

Comments

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

*runs and hides*

[altariel.livejournal.com]

LOL!

THERE'S NOWHERE TO RUN!

[megthelegend.livejournal.com]

Dear God, woman, read something FUN instead!

::stares, horrified::

::goes back to rereading Trek: Catalyst of Sorrows::

[altariel.livejournal.com]

LOL! I love that answer! (Although all I ever do is read things that are fun!)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I went for The Color Purple because I remember enjoying it and suspect you might too, but also because if you don't it's not horrendously long and guilt inducing, and you won't have wasted too much of your life. Also, as far as I remember it has a happy endi--- but I must say no more!

I was tempted to say Cloud Atlas in the hope that you might tell me whether it was worth my reading it, but that would be an abuse.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Those are really thoughtful reasons for picking it, thank you! I have it collected with her short stories in a single volume.

communicator, who is a good judge of these things, loves Cloud Atlas. I think it looks brilliant, but I've put off reading it because I'm afraid it's so technically brilliant I'll end up thinking, "Oh, there's just no point even trying..."

[the-wild-iris.livejournal.com]

Catch-22, just because I grew up with Milo Minderbinder, Major ___ de Coverley, ex-PFC Wintergreen et al as an indelible part of my mental furniture. Also it's a lot funnier than The Grapes of Wrath.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The poll definitely seems to be swinging its way...

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

It's owering how many of these I haven't read.

It's even more lowering how many I know I've read but can't recall a word of.

OTOH, I did rather enjoy Vanity Fair :)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of them! Vanity Fair is doing pretty well.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

These are all on my 'not read' list too (except Shakespeare - and I'm working through the BBC collection in lieu of reading plays (if Shakespeare why not Wilde, Shaw, Pinter (now there's a quick read!) or Stoppard?). And most of them are on my 'never intend to read' list as well! If you must, I'd go for 'short' and 'funny' - hence Vanity Fair.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, I definitely get more from listening or seeing than reading the plays. When reading, I have my finger stuck in the notes; hearing the lines done well conveys the sense of anything I don't follow.

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

I recommend Gone With the Wind, but if you don't have time to read the whole think, I can summarise it neatly for you:

Scarlett: I'm so popular and pretty!
Ashley: I'm so full of man-pain!
Rhett: I'm a rake!
*Everything gets blown up by WAR*
Scarlett: I'm so poor and hungry!
Ashley: I'm still full of man-pain, and now war-trauma also.
Rhett: I'm still a rake!
*Scarlett has two bad marriages
Scarlett: Shit! I love Rhett!
Ashley: Shit! My man-pain has robbed me of a happy life!
Rhett: Fuck this, I'm going back to Charleston.
Scarlett: Oh well, tomorrow is another day!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Fabulous! (I feel as if can strike that one now!) I have seen the film, and I wonder, given the way I skim-read, whether I should challenge myself to get through the book in less time than it takes to watch the film.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I've read some Shakespeare at school, but other than that of the books on your list I've only read "Moby Dick" and "Vanity Fair", in both cases when I was a child and I suspect much too young to appreciate them. I suspect that I might like "Grapes of Wrath", but that's only a guess.

I support the person who suggested that you should read something that's fun rather than something that's worthy.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking I deserve fun too. Crime and Punishment it is then!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I've read, or tried to read, most of these. I'd go with Gone With the Wind. I found it enjoyable, though the dialect-ridden dialogue of the black characters made me grit my teeth.

Of the others:

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

I've read it. It bored me. It's a satire, but I didn't find it funny, nor was it startling that the army had all kinds of contradictory and ridiculous regulations. I'd give it a C. It's not bad, it's just not fun reading.

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Shakespeare is enjoyable (especially if you have a version with a lot of footnotese to translate what he's saying), but a little goes a long way. Don't try reading all of him at once. Read a play here, a few sonnets there. Grade: A.

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I got to the end of Book 2)

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

I never got deeply into either one, and I've tried multiple times. Go with his short stories. They're enjoyable and the stories are shorter.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I like Dostoyevsky. However, you get SERIOUSLY emo characters with him. And his atheists are the ones who are the most obsessed with morality and Christianity. I don't know if you like that or not.

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Let's put it this way. I picked up the book, read a page, and went to sleep. I got up the next morning, read the first page over again plus a second page, and put it down. I picked it up again at lunch time and still couldn't remember what I'd written. The whole book is like that. After trying seven or eight times, I gave up.

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

The writer seems very proud of his knowledge of 1950s slang (which was current when he wrote this) as well as his drug use. He mentions drugs and uses slang on all occasions possible. As I'm not impressed by drug use and didn't speak the slanguage he was using, I quickly came to the conclusion that the book was overrated.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

If you want to read this, go here: the_white_whale. The whole book is posted in little manageable bites, along with discussion from the readers.

Ulysses - James Joyce (I read exactly one-seventh of this last year)

I had to read bits of this for an Irish Literature class. (We also had to read stories from Dubliners and all of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) The class was as good as an inoculation against James Joyce.

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Try reading it here:

ftp://opensource.nchc.org.tw/gutenberg/etext96/vfair12.txt

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I just got this one out of the library. I'm not sure yet.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

Watch the movie first, then read the book. You'll have a better sense of the story.

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Good. Slow-paced at the beginning but it picks up. You won't like the eponymous Emma Bovary but you'll certainly understand why she cheats on her husband. However, it's really not light summer reading.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Wow, great set of notes, thank you! I have this feeling that once I start Dostoyevsky I'll get hooked and I'll want to tear through them, so I've been holding off reading any. The thought of Kerouac makes me yawn slightly.

Portrait of the Artist was the first novel I read with an adult sensibility and I thought it was amazing (sixteen years ago now). I think the final paragraph of 'The Dead' is one of the most exquisite pieces of prose I have ever read. I just nipped over to the shelf and reread it and it made me tingle all over.

I think the cadences of my Irish grandparents' speech were passed down to my parents, particularly to my mother. The rhythms of Ulysses seemed very natural to me, but I put it down before heading off to the US last year and haven't picked it up again since.

[kerravonsen]

Not the complete works, but reading some of the Bard's works would be good.
And if you hunt me down, that means you have to visit me first! 8-)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I've read some, and seen film versions of several others. I get much more from them seeing or hearing them performed.

And if you hunt me down, that means you have to visit me first! 8-)

Aw! :-D

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Catch 22 because it's so blackly and surreally funny and I've read it three times since I bought it at 15.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I saw on your Big Read post that you'd read War and Peace twice too!

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Catch-22 is the perfect mix of funny and sad, a savage joke that builds and builds until it is quite heartbreaking.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

This is what I'm afraid of, and partly why I've put off reading it.

[gfk88.livejournal.com]

Grapes of Wrath (though I think East of Eden is better).

Or maybe Vanity Fair.

Cloud Atlas is kind of interesting but too modern - it's not a proper story like they wrote in the olden times.

Don't bother with War & Peace - it's as dull as ditchwater IMO

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The print in my copy of War and Peace is really tiny, and I have less patience for that these days.

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare is totally worth the time. :) I read Hamlet or Lear or the Scottish Play whenever I'm depressed.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I suppose when you're feeling down it's worth being reminded how much worse it can get!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Catch-22, because it's funny, true and sad. And because I to a disturbingly large degree was ex-PFC Wintergreen while I did my military service.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

That's a good rec. It seems to have clinched it at the last minute.

[edge-of-ruin.livejournal.com]

I've gone for Moby Dick because I haven't read it either and we could push each other along ...

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yay! We could have NaNoWhaleMo!

[telperion1.livejournal.com]

I voted for Gone With the Wind, as that was one of my absolute favorite books growing up. Escapist literature before I knew about fanfic, I guess! But it really was a very engrossing read. However, fair warning, in my experience people either love it (like I did) or find it boring, and that's usually clear within the first 50-100 pages which way you're going to go. So if it's not working, don't be afraid to set it aside.

On the Bard, I get you on that one. I can't read it silently, but I did learn to do dramatic readings to myself. Sounds weird, I know, but it got me through high school literature.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I suspect that if she pushes the story through and makes it rollicking, then I'll enjoy it. It does look dauntingly big, though.

Very sensible way to approach the Bard, I think. My high school managed to put exactly one of his plays in front of me (The Merchant of Venice), although we did go and see a great production of Macbeth).

[manna]

Catch-22. Although I read it a long time ago, so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. But I remember it as pretty funny, and also full of not very likeable characters, so while I felt a little bit bad for them in places, I didn't *really* care how miserable they were.

Vanity Fair, on the other hand, is only good for lighting fires.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I think you may have just swung the vote...

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of those except for Cloud Atlas, and I think it's massively overrated. If you want to read a David Mitchell, read Number9dream. I liked that one, it did what it did very well. I think the thing about Cloud Atlas is that it's the first one of his that a lot of people have read, and it's sci-fi without being on the sci-fi shelves, like Atwood. It's been very well marketed.

Books like that really annoy me; he hasn't done anything that sci-fi writers haven't done a hundred times and better, it just so happens that the audience he's been marketed to haven't read anything like that before and are all, 'OMG! this is not White Teeth or Atonement! How exciting!'

Anyway, in conclusion, I got completely bored while reading Cloud Atlas. It's not a classic. Read something else.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Although, having said that, I realize that a lot of people who DO read a lot of sci-fi liked it too, thus nullifying my argument, so I shall also say that the characters and story totally failed to suck me in, nor did I feel the issues he was supposed to be tackling.

[uitlander]

Vanity Fair, without doubt. One of my set texts for A-Level, I approached it with the sort of dread that can only fall upon you after fighting through Hamlet (Shakespeare's longest play) and ODing on Hopkins and concluding that sprung rhythm is an abomination and its no wonder no-one else in their right mind uses it. Then they gave me a book that was three inches thick with the words 'classic' written on the side and cover art that could have made Bleak House look like a night out on the town.

Then you start reading it, and discover that Thackeray had pretty much the same view of all those dreadful, waspish heroines who deserved drowning at birth as you do. And lo, you are in Becky Sharpe's world and in for one hell of a romp. That book restored my faith in humanity, and made me laugh, no mean feat on an A-Level English syllabus.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I have to say that "So Good Not Even Studying it for A-Level Could Ruin It" is the most convincing argument for a book thus far! The print is tiny in my edition.

My mother had to read Thackeray's Henry Esmond for her A-level (actually, Higher School Cert) and is still bitter about it. I got her a copy a few years back to see if she felt differently about it sixty years on, but she's not got back to me on that one.

[mikekellner.livejournal.com]

I voted for Moby Dick, especially if you don't have some English Lit teacher demanding papers on meaning and symbolism, so you can just enjoy a trip into an alternate universe.

It is about 150 scenes, ranging from 100 words to 25 pages. I'd read a small bit each day and savor the slow unfolding of a major story. It does a very good job of teaching you everything you need to know about whale hunting so when they find the White Whale, he doesn't need to clutter the action with explanations of what is happening. You are already an old salt of many lowerings.

I loved Catch 22 when I was a lad. A prehistoric Dilbert and crew in the Air Force.

Gone With the Wind (GWTW) is the great mother of all Southern Costume Soapers. As was said above, you'll either love it or hate it. The perfect pair is to read GWTW, and then follow it up with Uncle Tom's Cabin for the view from the other end of the Plantation.

I am enamored with Lonesome Dove, and its sequel, Streets of Laredo. If you like tough guys and characters with personality, read Lonesome Dove.

mk

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I wisely dropped English Lit at sixteen, so I never had reading spoiled for me. edge_of_ruin hasn't Moby-Dick either and thinks we should read it together.

I read Uncle Tom's Cabin early last year: I'd been reading slave narratives and that seemed a natural progression.

[mikekellner.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Grapes of Wrath is horridly depressing. Noble hardworking honest Proles get horribly used, abused, and exploited.

You'll never enjoy eating fruit again.

mk

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I read a longer version of that earlier in the year (Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists).

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

The Colour Purple FTW! I have read some of the others on your list, but I tend to get a classic canon DWEM reaction to most of them.

Much more fun to watch Shakespeare, methinks.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I have read half of The Color Purple while this poll was reading ;-) It is definitely FTW! (I have it bundled with her collected short stories in a book club edition from "Quality Paperbacks Direct". Classy.)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I'm with the Read Something More Fun crowd. I recall enjoying several of these as a child/student, Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair stick in my mind most, but they're mostly long, energy-sucking books that need a better reason to put the effort into reading them than that they're someone else's choice of classics.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

mraltariel wants me to read Anna Karenina because he slogged through it, and has had nobody to talk to about it. I'm thinking it probably doesn't fall into the category "Fun".

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I recommend Moby-Dick. It's got so much stuff in it — a little drama in blank verse, an explanation of how to flense a whale, a Polynesian prince, a Quaker who lent his name to a chain of coffee shops, a disquisition on the uses of sperm oil — the world in miniature aboard a whaling ship, much of it in a style inspired by the King James Bible. Plus homoerotic imagery by the gallon ("I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me").

It has no female characters, though, which might be a bit of a downer. And if you don't find whaling endlessly fascinating you might not enjoy it as much as I did.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

how to flense a whale: You know, they should market it under this title. Between this and sperm by the gallon I think you have definitely made the most eloquent case so far!