At 11:51 AM +0200 6/15/10, Eugen Leitl wrote: >On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 01:00:39PM +0530, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: >> At 2010-06-15 12:38:37 +0530, [email protected] wrote: >> > >> > I certainly agree with _Foucault's Pendulum_. I've bounced off it >> > several times over the years. >> >> I read it once, a very long time ago, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Then I >> kept hearing people say it was so long and boring that they couldn't get >> through it, and I began to wonder if I had really managed to read all of >> it. So I read it again a few years ago, and enjoyed it again. > >Ditto. I've also recently started reading Gene Wolfe in anger.
The Shadow of the Torturer made a deep impression on me when I read it in my early 20s. I re-read it in my 40s, was again entranced, and then started on the sequels, which failed to maintain the spell for me. I've loved everything of Umberto Eco's that I've read. I find James Joyce rich and dense but deliciously readable. Faulkner's prose is no more dense than that of many other writers of his time. (As an example, Louisa May Alcott's sentences are every bit as long and convoluted and yet we expect 10-year-old girls to read and love her books.) Melville ditto. When embarking on authors of this period, know that you're traveling by packet boat and that you'll get there when you get there. In the meantime, enjoy the scenery. Russian authors are like this to an even greater extent, with the addition of a bleaker world view. And yet they open the doors to a world that most of us have never seen and will never experience. They're rich and alien and keep me in a sort of suspended unreality. The Scarlet Letter, c'mon. It's not a difficult read at all. The Waste Land is a poem, not a novel. There are many poems that are unreadable by modern standards, mostly because we no longer know how to read long poems. We've lost the connection to the use of poetry to help people remember oral histories, and we have forgotten how to digest them. I only find Ayn Rand palatable at a gallop. My favourite game when reading her books is to follow her logic just to the point where she makes a hard right turn and runs off the rails. Most of these authors could have used a good editor. The books I have a hard time getting through are not the big dense ones but rather the ones where the author's viewpoint repels me. Hemingway. Joseph Conrad. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kipling. Marquesa. Some modern authors who think it's fun to jerk their reader's sensibilities around and leave them disturbed in mind for no great purpose. Sleeper authors I love include Katherine Neville (easier and more fun to read than Eco, but with many similarities), Harriette Arnow (The Dollmaker might just be the most intense book I've ever read), and Thomas Hardy (Return of the Native). -- Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.madrone.com http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
