Just read Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka. Metamorphosis was good, a nice short piece, which as they say, I found to be rather Kafkaesque. Good stuff. Then I move onto the next one: The Great Wall of China. I swear I was struggling to not put the book down. Really...really dull.
And that's a problem I seem to be having with a lot of old classics. I can rarely enjoy the language used, and only occasionally find myself enjoying the story of said classics. for example, Brave New World was listed as an example of a book to avoid. And while I don't really agree with that, I can still think of plenty of reasons why one -would- avoid it. One the primary one's be the language used. I mean...the way everyone talks, you assume everyone came from that era in American movie history where everyone talks ever so politely and dignified. And indeed, keeping in mind that the books are supposedly set in the future, which of course Huxley probably did envision as a future, of at least the one he occupied, as of course a lot of science fiction writers did, and still do today. It still left a weird, if not exactly awful taste on my mind.
The opposite problem occurs in other sci-fi, where the language is -too- different than what a modern audience would be used to, where the author has gone out of their way to put in made up words and slang to make things sound futuristic. And while, yes that does make some kind of sense, after all, will people really be saying sh** and f**k in 4000 years? Or call a piece of ground transportation a car? Or a spaceship a spaceship? But..I've yet to read anything that does this right. Some like Iain M. Banks does this a lot in his Culture and other Sci-Fi novels like the Algerbraist. Others, I think, like Gene Wolfe with The Book of the Long Sun series comes close to doing it well, but, as with a lot of Gene Wolfe stuff, the wierdness tends to overflow. Dune was another example where I thought in kinda worked, as for the most part, a lot of the terms were actually explained within the confines of the book.
