Unpopular Literary Opinions

[Deleted]

I didn't get why "The Secret Life of Bees" was such a best seller. I mean, it started out ok, but when she ran away and joined that honey-bee hive gathering family, it just lost its credibility and started to get weird.
I also thought "The Lovely Bones" and "Dogs of Babel" were way overrated. I don't know why, but I usually don't go for bestseller books. (Really, really didn't like "Da Vinci Code" though it'll probably make at least a decent movie).

[foxfair]

Word on 'The Catcher in the Rye' hate. I, too, am immediately put off by people who express admiration of/identifying with Holden. You might as well wear a sandwich board with "I am more unique and special than all of you phoney sheep" on it. Unless you are 13 years old, this is not an acceptable opinion of oneself.

[Deleted]

Yeah, by the time I got around to reading "Catcher in the Rye" at age 25 or so, I was so very unimpressed. And I can still at times identify with teen angst as expressed in a really good novel. Though not much comes to mind from anything I've read lately.

[polygal]

I couldn't even finish Catcher in the Rye. I finally got around to it my senior year in high school, since the AP/Honors classes weren't forced to read it, and I was so unimpressed with it.

While every other girl in my English Lit class thought The Red Tent was the greatest book ever, I got to the end (where they all said they'd bawled) and thought "that's it? Really?"

[monsterzero]

I just got Ulysses cheap online so I'll have to try it for myself to see if it's worthwhile. Odd, since I'm nearly done with my Bachelors in Literature.

That said, I cannot stand Dickens. Absolutely cannot STAND HIM. Or most fem literature. I'm sorry, but it just comes off as whiny and still subservient to men. Can someone steer me straight on this, I don't mean to knock an entire genre, but still....

[Deleted]

What feminist writing are you thinking of?

Wait... did you mean ALL writing by females?

[foxfair]

Yeah, Monster - did you mean feminist lit or just female lit in general? Cuz if it's the latter, I gotta disagree (I even disagree with the former, I think, although I am not clear on the definition). Not saying there isn't a lot of whiny shite out there written by females, but I am not sure thats a gender thing.

[Deleted]

Ok, this may be a very unpopular opinion, but...
Novels written by women tend to be far superior than those written by men. In my reading experience, men just usually don't write those kind of books very well. Obviously, there are exceptions, of course, but not that many.
For example: some books by Dickens I really do like. But that's as far as plot and the way he is able to make mostly stereotypical characters interesting. There's not much to the people in his books; they're basically two dimensional. Most books by males don't really shed insight into the people's lives as, say, Judith Guest or even Marion Keyes can.
On the other hand, I do think that male authors can do an exceptional job at writing non-fiction. Cornelious Ryan and Walter Lord come to mind.

[foxfair]

Stargirl - Just as an interesting aside, there is apparently a computer program that's been developed that can tell if a given passage was written by a male or a female writer with 80% accuracy - and it works for different kinds of writing.

Ohh, thank you Google. Here's a link to some info - to the original article (you need to subscribe to Nature), a quote from the original article and another link to try out a demo yourself.

[Deleted]

Thanks--that link looks neat. And I guess it reflects my point as well, it says men write about objects and women about relationships.
Maybe it's just that I'm a woman and I enjoy reading about relationships, and stuff, whereas a lot of men might find that boring.