GR Overrated?

[Henry M]

Best, most thoughtful of the lot:

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
"Like many people, I enjoy learning which canonical books are
unbeloved by which contemporary writers. However, I don't think
participants in such surveys ought to blame either themselves ("I'm so
lazy/uneducated") or the canonical books ("Ulysses is so overrated").
My view is that the right book has to reach you at the right time, and
no person can be reached by every book. Literature is supposed to be
beautiful and/or necessary—so if at a given time you don't either
enjoy or need a certain book, then you should read something else, and
not feel guilty about it.
Canonical books I did not enjoy include The Iliad and The Sound and
the Fury, and, although I did read Ulysses with some degree of
technical interest, it wasn't fun for me. I maintain that this doesn't
reflect badly on Homer, Faulkner, Joyce, or me."

The people who didn't read much of a book, but still feel that they
can call it overrated are the worst, and a number of them felt that
way about GR.

AsB4,
٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
Henry Mu
http://www.urdomain.us/kcuf.htm



On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hilarious!
>
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Henry M <scuffling at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Authors, critics, and editors on 'great books' that (they say [hm])
>> aren't all that great"
>> http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/
>> .
>> .
>> .
>> Amy Bloom, author most recently of Where the God of Love Hangs Out:
>>
>> Gravity's Rainbow
>> Critics and regular (and erudite) people and the three members of the
>> 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction admire the hell out of this book.
>> (The other 11 members of the board disagreed violently and no fiction
>> prize was given that year.)* Gravity's Rainbow did win a National Book
>> Award and it did make Time magazine's list of the All-Time 100
>> greatest novels.
>>
>> If you like it, you say: This all fits together like the cleverest and
>> most tessellated of rainbows. You love the circular plot and the way
>> its structure echoes the rainbow-shaped trajectory of a V-2 rocket,
>> and the recurring motifs of those same rockets, plus dense dialogue
>> broken up by bits of silly poetry and chunks of Tarot, a rash of
>> paranoia and, of course, a lot of kazoos. I myself admire the 400
>> characters and the numerous special effects. The riffs on behavioral
>> psychology and sexual slavery almost did me in.
>>
>> For people who like this sort of thing, as Muriel Spark wrote, this is
>> the sort of thing they like. I prefer Muriel Spark.
>> .
>> .
>> .
>>
>> AsB4,
>> ٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
>> Henry Mu
>> http://www.urdomain.us/kcuf.htm
>
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