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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Books You Couldn't Get Through
 
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gfarrell80
Aug 31, 2006

Magic Hate Ball posted:

Catch 22 - I liked it the first time, but not the second time and certainly not the third time. And then I realised I was only a third of the way through the book.

Heheh, I liked Catch 22 and I'm sorry you didn't make it through, that is a pretty amusing and true criticism though.

Hobo Camp posted:

The Brothers Karamazov. I tried, I really did.

I'd say at least try to read "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter, and "Pro and Contra", if you didn't make it to those.

Add me to the people who couldn't finish Ulysses, Dune, and LOTR.

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gfarrell80
Aug 31, 2006

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:

As much as I want to finish it, I can't make it through Heart of Darkness. As soon as it starts to promise to pick up, I peter out. I also failed to finish Nostromo but I only wanted to read that to get the "joke" about the ship in Alien, So I was pretty doomed from the start.

I managed to finish Nostromo, but I have never suffered so hard finishing a book as I did that one. Uuuugughgh. I loved Heart of Darkness, but Nostromo I only didn't put down for reasons of just 'sticking with it'.

* # ¿ Jun 12, 2008 17:25
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gfarrell80
Aug 31, 2006

Sr. Dumont posted:

Don't bother. Anyone who claims to have enjoyed that book is a liar.

qpzil posted:

I'm a Russian lit scholar and I even think it's overhyped.

Aaargh, fake posts, I hope. I feel like everybody is entitled to an opinion, but if there are writers that you just don't say stuff like that about, Dostoyevsky is one of them. Einstein said something like "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss."

And selectively quoting from Wikipedia:

quote:

Dostoevsky's influence has been acclaimed by a wide variety of writers, including Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Orhan Pamuk and Joseph Heller. American novelist Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoevsky as a major influence on his work in his autobiographical novella A Moveable Feast.

In a book of interviews with Arthur Power (Conversations with James Joyce), James Joyce praised Dostoevsky's influence:

...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.

...

With the publication of Crime and Punishment in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky became one of Russia's most prominent authors in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky has also been called one of the founding fathers of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. In particular, his Notes from Underground, first published in 1864, has been depicted as a founding work of existentialism.

Nietzsche referred to Dostoevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that Notes from the Underground "cried truth from the blood." According to Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The great catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian neo-Idealism", Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoevsky in his notes and drafts through out the winter of 1886-1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoevsky's works.

Freud wrote an article entitled Dostoevsky and Parricide that asserts that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide (though he is critical of Dostoevsky's work overall, the inclusion of The Brothers Karamazov in a set of the three greatest works of literature is remarkable).

Clearly though it is overhyped and unenjoyable. I would recommend again though at the very least that people having a hard time with it skip to the Grand Inquisitor and Pro and Contra chapters and at least read them.

(F.D. fanboy)

* # ¿ Jun 12, 2008 21:50
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Books You Couldn't Get Through