FalloutJack said:
Paradise Lost - John Milton, you asshole. They say you were blind while dictating this, and that someone transcribed this book for you. My question: WHY?! Let me explain. This book starts out...kind of interesting, insofar as Satan/Lucifer is concerned, but after that...we get down to Adam and Eve. And this is not a religious problem. I don't care about anything like that. It's just that...well...how is it that a critically-acclaimed writer could make sex SO GODDAMN BORING?! How is this possible?! At the time, the entire class' brains glazed over. Nobody wanted to read it. Nobody cared about the long-ass crap about Adam and Eve. We were tricked, lured in by the almost-Shakespearian fall and corruption of an angel to become the ruler of hell, and then set out to pasture to DIE OF BOREDOM. And we had to do WORK on this! Suffice to say, I'm glad I learned how to bullshit in my prose, because otherwise none of us would have made it, and there were adults in that class, people twice my age at the time!
Anybody else care to add their college list?
I'll pass on the easy targets (My Immortal, Twilight) in favor of backing you on paradise lost. It may have been because I was reading it on my phone, but it had these long, flowery metaphors that went on for PAGES and were so complex I completely forgot what the hell they were about by the time I hit the end.
On the subject of overwrought metaphors and glacial pacing, I also despise most of the work of Charles Dickens. He was paid by the
chapter because he wrote these stories in periodicals (magazines, essentially), and it SHOWS. Let's go with the classic quote, the one everyone knows:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Cool. Great quote. Good idea.
He then proceeds to vomit
exactly the same sentence in different forms for the next 2-3
pages, turning his witty phrase into a pulped scattering of horse giblets. It also sets the stage for the glacial pace of the rest of the book, with its shitty cliffhangers, unlikeable characters and neverending scene descriptions. He pads out his padding and then pads
that too.
A Christmas Carol is quite good, but that's what you get when he cuts out all the pagefilling fluff. It illustrates exactly how uneccessarily inflated the rest of his stories are. I seriously cannot understand how he's considered a master worthy of study, though.
I read Dante's Commedia. The only interesting bit is the first third concerning the Inferno. We move to Purgatory after that, and finally Paradise, which is ethereal and boring as hell. Interestingly enough I knew a lot of the people stuck in hell, but not one single person mentioned in either Purgatory or Paradise. And neither get the picturesque descriptions we get from hell. It's just air-walking and mentioning this and that saint.
I think it's mostly because Dante has a much shorter list of good people than bad people. And yeah, the move from concrete reality to abstraction makes each successive level incredibly boring. The narrative moves from description to laughable philosophizing. Best example: his "proof" that the moon is actually made of gas because reflected candles are equally visible at any distance. I am not making that up.
I charged through Inferno in 2 days, spent 4 on Purgatorio, and Paradiso was a two week long slog. Each section is the same length. That's just how much more boring and hard to swallow the Paradiso was.
Even translated he has a certain descriptive genius though. The tiny number of words he uses to achieve such extreme descriptive precision, both with very rigid structuring and clever metaphors, is actually pretty crazy to me.
I read it about 25 years ago and it still sticks in my mind as one of the most tedious reads ever. Maybe I had a bad translation???
