If you didn’t like The Old Man and the Sea, there is no hope for you.
Sorry.
Maybe reading it all at once was not a good idea? On the bright side it put me in the mood for Monster Hunter, but I died. Coincidence?
It’s short enough that you could read it on setting. First time I read it, it was in three nights (the story divides nicely into three equal parts, I think). Force English class reading does suck the fun out of books though, especially when you don’t read them until absolutely necessary. Only English class books I enjoyed were Ender’s Game, The Grapes of Wrath, and some of the American plays we read.
The rest of the class has 2 more days to finish it. What is there to like about the book? It’s a downer. It was a fine story, I just didn’t like it. It’s kind of like 1984, I’m glad I read it, but I fucking hated it. 1984 was painful to read, and so was The Old Man and The Sea.
A downer? I think you missed the entire point of the story then. It’s a story about the indomitable human spirit, the resolve of man to continue trying in the face of adversity. That’s what makes us people: the refusal to give in. Sure, the marlin was devoured by the sharks, but Santiago went to bed and dreamt of lions, just as he did before the adventure. I have no doubt that, after resting, he would be back out on the ocean in his boat, fishing. Thinking about Joe DiMaggio. Doing what he always did. All because of human resolve. For fuck’s sake, it was like the central quote of the book. “But a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” You can’t have an author slapping you in the face with his message any more clearly than that. There’s no downer to that.
That, or Hemmingway was just giving a big fuck you to all his critics. That’s another literary theory.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH… Now I understand. But I still don’t like it.
I wonder how many other books have gone right over my head…
The difference is that 1984 is a really, really bad book. Yeah, George Orwell, totalitarianism is bayud (mmkay?). It was bad a couple hundred pages of you being a pedantic douche ago, too, and we knew it then. Now, we just also know that your writing is bad. It’s like he took a novel-writing class, got to the part where they talked about “themes” went “OMIGAWD THAT IS SO COOL YOU CAN PUT IDEAS IN BOOKS HOLY SHIT!!!” and left to make a career of that before they got to the parts about “characterization,” “composition,” or “subtlety.”
A really, really bad book? What do you call Grisham/Crighton knock-offs then? I also wonder why you call him a pendant.
I just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I thought it had a weak ending until I saw an article in the Globe and Mail that had an excerpt from the next book in the series. Apparently it’s a trilogy and people are salivating over it.
I’m part way into A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, , The Year Of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and plan to start This is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams.
The first part was hyperbole spawned from the bitterness of having to read 1984 several times too many in my academic career, the latter I assume was a typo, and that I meant “pedant.”
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Ever since I learned it was the spiritual prequel to Anansi Boys, I’ve wanted to check it out.
American Gods is ten billion times better than Anansi Boys. You will not be disappointed.
The Big Book of Weapons Throughout the Ages (ok, that’s not what it’s really called, but that is what it’s about)
Also, I’m reading this forum. That has to count for something.
No, that was my typo: you actually wrote “pedantic”. But why is he a pedant? An Orwell pendant would be nice though.
What is wrong with the book 1984? I rather like the story. I always enjoyed those books in school in which the government was controlling everyone. Stuff like Fahrenheit 451.
There wasn’t anything wrong with 1984, but I liked the animal version better. Its shorter.
I feel he writes in a condescending tone, as though he’s educating you from his vast banks of knowledge with all the ostentatious arrogance they warrant. Animal Farm takes this far enough that it can survive as a very-young adult/older children’s book, but 1984 just made me feel like a little kid who needed two hundred pages of flat characters, uninteresting dialogue, and a plot with little to it besides the overarching theme to understand that a totalitarian government might not be ideal, all things considered. I guess sort of in line with Nabokov and Kundera’s criticism, if you’re familiar.
His essays are fine. It’s just that he doesn’t know novels are supposed to be different from them that is the problem.
Characters aren’t his strong point and I’d be lying if I claimed to remember any of the dialogue. I think the plot served its purpose, however, and he didn’t come through as condescending to me when I read it a couple of years ago for the first time. As for Animal Farm, I found it very uneven because after the mid-point the book went on to its predestined conclusion by going through the motions, its charm depleted and without much to keep the reader’s interest.
I know right.
Shh keep my ironies subtle boy