Top Five Assigned Books (hated AND loved)

[The Ocean]

Fiction only.

Top Five Assigned Readings That You Hated:
5. Margaret Peterson Haddix - Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphy
4. Anonymous - Go Ask Alice
3. Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
1. JD Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye

Top Five Assigned Readings That You Loved:
5. Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
4. Scott O'Dell - The Island Of The Blue Dolphin
3. JRR Tolkein - The Hobbit
2. Ellen Raskin - The Westing Game
1. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

[Larry Flyntz]

Loved:

1. Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
2. The Clouds, by Aristophanes
3. A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift
4. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
5. TIE: The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver and Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck


Hated:

1. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
2. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
3. Billy Budd, by Herman Melville
4. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
5. Any number of Shakespeare plays (excluding Macbeth, that is), by William Shakespeare

[CadmiumYellow]

i loved white noise by don delilo and portrait of the artist as a young man by james joyce. i liked the great gatsby and i thought the catcher in the rye was kinda irresistible. the awakening wasn't all that bad, i mean it probably wasn't the best of the empowered-woman-questions-life-and-dies books (it has stuff like anna karenina to compete with) but it was alright, considering.

[Larry Flyntz]

Oh crap, I forgot to add "Portrait of the Artist..." and "Pride and Prejudice" to my most hated list. I really did hate those books. A lot.

[CadmiumYellow]

whaaaat
flyntz i will never understand why you hated stephen dedalus!

[oatmeal fetish....]

1. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
e

Ugh I came here to post this. Fuck that cunt.

Also I keep meaning to start Ulysses because I hear it is one of the best modern books ever written, but fucking portrait of an artist has me terrified.

[WWW.SETH.COM]

I heard the best way to read Ulysses is to read it with a group of people, meet and discuss it.

[The Ocean]

I heard the best way to read Ulysses is to read it with a group of people, meet and discuss it.

If there are special conditions that need to be met in order to read a book, it CAN'T be worth reading.

[oatmeal fetish....]

Anyone interested in doing a Space Pirate book club for Ulysses? Read say, 50 pages a week, and discuss it on the site here?

[CadmiumYellow]

i think this

If there are special conditions that need to be met in order to read a book, it CAN'T be worth reading.

is mostly a generalized view of the act of reading! there is more than one kind because there are many different kinds of books out there and loads of ways you can experience them!

portrait of the artist can be navigated somewhat by way of literary devices characteristic of joyce and modernism in general (in high school we spent the most time with epiphanies and leit motifs). the lack of chronology made things difficult but i loved it anyway. it forced me to be a more active reader and i thought that was awesome.
ethan i agree that ulysses is pretty intimidating but whatever who cares!  let's read it. i'd definitely be into talking about it weekly.

[The Ocean]

i think this

If there are special conditions that need to be met in order to read a book, it CAN'T be worth reading.

is mostly a generalized view of the act of reading! there is more than one kind because there are many different kinds of books out there and loads of ways you can experience them!

portrait of the artist can be navigated somewhat by way of literary devices characteristic of joyce and modernism in general (in high school we spent the most time with epiphanies and leit motifs). the lack of chronology made things difficult but i loved it anyway. it forced me to be a more active reader and i thought that was awesome.
ethan i agree that ulysses is pretty intimidating but whatever who cares!  let's read it. i'd definitely be into talking about it weekly.

You want intimidating, pick up a copy of Atlas Shrugged. 1060 pages, 50 lines per page... a fuckload of words. The only single volume I've seen that is bigger is Vinent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, which is 1600 pages long, NOT INCLUDING bibliography, all in small print. 1.6million+ words.

My personal opinion (and of course it is just an opniion, as this all is) is that a book should be enjoyable now matter how you read it. If you read it by yourself or with other people shouldn't matter. So if the book is just boring when you read it by yourself, then it is simply boring.

[CadmiumYellow]

i read atlas shrugged last summer. it was good.
i think what makes ulysses intimidating has more to do with content than length. joyce was a modernist writer that didn't always fit his stories into a chronological timeline, which can be hard to follow. but whatever.
myself, i just try to be open-minded about reading and realize that it can be many different things. people approach books with a purpose in mind, and approaching one intending to enjoy it is not in any way bad! i do this just as much as the next person. your choice of the word 'worth' was the thing that got to me and caused me to respond.

[Larry Flyntz]

in high school we spent the most time with epiphanies and leit motifs

This sounds strikingly familiar. And that's what I hated about it. It wasn't just a story. We didn't talk about what happened. We talked about what was a symbol for what, and how his use of language told the story, rather than, you know, what fucking happened!

[CadmiumYellow]

We didn't talk about what happened.

the format is just dynamic: instead of separating a) this is what happens in reality and b) this is what happens in the narrator's head, joyce allowed them to exist on the same plane (or an epiphany is just as real and material as other events; it is made of the same thing and processed in the same way.) you are following the stream of consciousness of stephen dedalus instead of being told a story.

anyway if you didn't like it whatever, that is ok, even i didn't necessarily have fun with portrait all the time? cause sometimes you were just like what. all i'm saying is that i'm glad that i read it.

[Shire Le Buff]

I am all for a Space Pirates book club.

[The Ocean]

I am all for a Space Pirates book club.

I'm in.

How do we decide which books to read? Should it be my majority consensus? two-thirds majority consensus?.... Do only the English majors get to decide?

[Larry Flyntz]

Do only the English majors get to decide?

Yes, for the rest of us are mere philistines.

[Shire Le Buff]

I have no real suggestions right now so I'm willing to go with the flow.

[The Ocean]

I have no real suggestions right now so I'm willing to go with the flow.

So in other words, you forfeit your right to make suggestions. Excellent... now I just have to trick everybody else into doing so, and I'll be good as gold.

[Larry Flyntz]

It seems they'll have to be relatively obscure books, since most of us will have already read the so-called "classics." Some suggestions, made only because they are already on my to-read list and I already own them: Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck; The Wanting Seed, by Anthony Burgess; Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut; Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell.