April 5, 2008
Discuss.
Most of the novels I’ve truly hated—hated enough to fling the book down in the middle of reading it, never to pick it up again—have been books where I couldn’t stand the main character. There’s plenty of books I love with flawed main characters, but this is an entirely different feeling than thinking the main character is a schmuck who probably deserves more than what’s likely to come to him.
—”The Magnificent Ambersons: The Unheralded Pleasures of Smugness” by Diablevert at We Came Along with a Hammer: Classic Books, Modern Take, No Surrender.
(Via Cozy Lummox)
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I feel that most of the novels I’ve hated enough to fling across the room, never to be picked up again, have been books where I couldn’t stand the author. But maybe that’s just me.
me too.
atlas shrugged.
Deron: goodness, yes. I hate that book.
For me, however, I find that the books I hate are those that use language poorly. Context dictates whatever that means but the characters can be flawed, even sloppy, and I can track with the book if it is well written.
I think my hatred of many novels stems from my general hatred of the 19th century. Stupid fucking 1800s.
almost the only thing I care about is the aesthetics of the language. whatever that means.
It’s heresy, I know, but I intensely disliked the characters of Sun Also Rises, though I find it very well-written.
And Cindy and I of course disagree on the 1800s. I have enjoyed almost all of the Hardy fiction I have read and think Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are pretty dang good too. Right now I’m reading A Laodicean.
I tend not to like the late 1800s, but the first half is okay.
The two books I can recall literally flinging across the room are If the River Was Whiskey by T. Coraghessan Boyle and the novel ——— by ———, a close friend of my friend ———.
I’ve never met Boyle, so I can’t say whether I’d hate the real him if I met him in real life, but I certainly hated the character who wrote those repellent stories.
I have met the other writer many times, unfortunately, and his book—the three chapters I forced myself to read, anyway—perfectly expressed that quality in his personality which makes me want to smack him on the head with a cast-iron frying pan.
In both cases, I pitied the characters for having such shitheads as their authors.
‘In both cases, I pitied the characters for having such shitheads as their authors.’
India, that concluding observation is a doozy. It is worth more than many a portfolio of littery crittery holdings.
Oh, look! Deron likes it, too.
I find I have trouble finishing books where the author appears to be reaching to be what I call “literary”. Using very large words for the sake of using them.
Call me anti-elitist, but a book that comes to mind is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Frazen. While there are some odd things going on in that book that I’m normally intrigued in following ( like Chuck Palahniuk odd ), but the language chosen is so long worded and overly “high brow”, that I find it’s like trying to swim through syrup to read it. I put it down about halfway through 3 years ago and I haven’t picked it up since, even though I really want to know how it ends.
I also found it very hard to read The Lord of the Rings. I ended up having to finish those via audiobooks as it was killing me to finish it. Some of that had to do with everyone’s name being almost exactly the same.
I guess I’m just built for more “popular” styles.
I couldn’t finish Rabbit, Run for the reasons stated in the quote, despite the fact that it was required reading. But then again, I just don’t like Updike: that bloodless Northeastern manner of his just doesn’t grab my imagination by the throat.
I did finish Across the River and Into the Trees (Hemingway) precisely because I hated Robert Cantwell–well, “hate” isn’t fair, actually. He’d just made the very bad choice of having wandered into a bad Hemingway novel, and I wanted to see him–THE cliched wounded Hemingwayan protagonist–pay the price for having done so.
I couldn’t resist chiming in, here — Because Rabbit, Run was one of the novels I was thinking of. Although come to think of it I might have finished that one…A Prayer for Owen Meany though, I don’t know how it ends and am pleased to think I shall never know…
I read every Rabbit novel desperately hoping for Rabbit Angstrom to get his comeuppance. I was so angry at that character that my husband kept asking me to stop reading them so that I would cheer up in general. But I just kept plowing through, waiting for Angstrom to bite the big one.
In a related experience, I also recall watching the movie Vanilla Sky with a friend who laughed in glee when Tom Cruise’s character gets into a disfiguring car wreck. That’s probably more actor hate than character hate, though.