I agree about “The Grapes of Wrath.”

 Links, Writing  Add comments
Oct 242005
 

Time magazine recently released a list of the best 100 novels from 1923 to today. Matthew Baldwin of the Morning News went to Amazon.com and selected some 1-star reviews of those books. Here’s a sampling:

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Author: Virginia Woolf

“The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”

Lolita (1955)

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

“1) I’m bored. 2) He uses too many allusions to other novels, so that if you’re not well read, this book makes no sense. 3) Most American readers are not fluent in French, so to have conversations or interjections in French with no translation is plain dumb. 4) Did I mention I was bored? 5) As with another reviewer, I agree, he uses a lot of huge words that just slow a person down. And it’s not for theatrics either, it’s just huge words mid-sentence when describing something simple. Nothing in the sense of imagery is gained. 6) Also, to sum it up, it’s a story about a pedophile.”

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Author: William Faulkner

“This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.”

 Posted by JHW at 10:35 am
  • http://kht20.blogspot.com Kat

    on slaughterhouse:

    While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.

    relative to what, exactly? i’d hate to find out what this person’s idea out outright oddness would be…

    ugh, some of these reviews were like twisting a knife into my heart. having said that, i also agree about the grapes or wrath.

  • http://www.en-dash.com Jake

    Well, to be fair, the people who wrote the reviews are obviously suffering from some fairly serious mental defects. The Slaughterhouse review is probably my favorite, if only for “I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”

  • http://laustintexas.blogspot.com Fletch

    I’m actually a little disturbed by the fact that I have read only 26 of those books. Even if you discount 1. the books that I’ve looked at and decided not to read and 2. the books that I’ve never heard of and lead me to believe that this list is perhaps not the single best authority on the best 100 hundred english language books of the last century, there are still a good 40 books on there that I feel like I should have read and haven’t. This bothers me almost beyond words.

  • http://www.en-dash.com Jake

    I think 26 is a pretty good number–I think I’ve only read 27 of them, and I was an English major. There were a lot of books that I hadn’t read but whose authors’ works I had read (Hemingway and Atwood, for example), though, so I’m not sure I feel that worthless.

  • J.

    I clock in at about the same number as both of you, but there are also 10 books on that list that I’ve started and put down. Which isn’t to say they’re not among the top 100, but I can confidently say they didn’t hold my interest. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ian McEwan’s Atonement isn’t really that great of a book. Certainly not top 100. While we’re at it, Franzen is a dangerous choice as well. But this is a dangerous discussion to begin…

    J.

  • http://laustintexas.blogspot.com Fletch

    Heathen!!!!

   
© 2011 Hello World Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha