What would qualify as Jeanette Winterson's "wilder experiments"? I have to disagree with you completely on that, I thought Art and Lies, and The Powerbook were absolutely fantastic. It surprises me actually that somebody who likes the beat writers doesn't like her style too.
I noticed someone recommended the Fountainhead, and I would like to hear your thoughts on it if you read it. I hated it more than I have hated any book I've ever read. I thought it was a truly abhorrent book and I threw it across the room at one point because I found it so repulsive.
It wouldn't let me post the poll, but I've read 6 of the authors on your list... I printed out your list because I consider this reccommended reading! I am always looking for suggestions of what to read, although I don't have time now because of too many classes. I hate it when the only thing you have time to read is what's assigned! Oh, and Alice Walker is my favorite author, so I'm glad you had her on your list!
It wouldn't let me post, but Ive read stuff by Toni Morrison Julia Alvarez Maya Angelou Alice Walker Sylvia Plath William Shakespeare Allen Ginsberg George Bernard Shaw
I really liked all of them, except maybe Maya Angelou, I can't take too much of her all at once for some reason. I recommend any of Pablo Neruda's poetry. He wrote in a lot of differend styles throughout his career, it's fun to read them all and figure out your favorite.
oh, and read a good translator -- Robert Bly is terrible, stay away from him if you can. Sayers Peden is excellent, the best I've seen. If you can read it in the original Spanish, even better
Pretty much everything she's written since Oranges, really. But I haven't read The Powerbook yet. It's sitting here on the floor at my feet waiting to be read.
I don't exactly hate the books, but she sprinkles individual phrases throughout them that just make me absolutely cringe. I think she tries so hard to be "literary" that it just comes out ridiculously forced a lot of the time.
Well, I was forced to read The Grapes of Wrath in 8th grade and abhorred it, and forced to read several Jane Austen books in 11th grade and hated them. Stephen King I was okay with for a while but then that story "Apt Pupil" with the former Nazi and the teenage boy, the boy has this incredibly sexist rape fantasy that's just written in a way to make readers go, "Oh look, rape, how sexy!!!" and that caused me to throw the book across the room and vow never to read another Stephen King book ever again, which indeed I haven't.
I've read The Writing Life already actually, and yes, it was absolutely beautiful. Worthy of being included on my list above, really, if only I'd remembered it.
Which Toni Morrison did you read? I've been pretty nonplussed by some of hers. I read Beloved in an 11th grade class and loved it, but I'm not sure I would have if I hadn't had the teacher to put things together and make them look cool to me. I also love her book Sula which I read on my own, but most of her others don't impress me as much.
Also, I've read various bits and pieces of
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Which Toni Morrison did you read? I've been pretty nonplussed by some of hers. I read <i>Beloved</i> in an 11th grade class and loved it, but I'm not sure I would have if I hadn't had the teacher to put things together and make them look cool to me. I also love her book <i>Sula</i> which I read on my own, but most of her others don't impress me as much.
Also, I've read various bits and pieces of <i.Diving into the Wreck</i> (including the title poem) and liked them. I haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing yet, though.
I have read books by: Douglas Adams,Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amy Bloom, Quentin Crisp, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Høeg, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Norman Mailer, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Salman Rushdie, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker
Mailer's writing often tends to be to impressed with itself. I read six books by him for a term paper in 11th grade and started liking him less.
I want to recommend about fifty things to you, but I'll narrow it down to things that I think will really get your interest.
Try things by Colm Tóibín and everything else Peter Høeg has written if you haven't yet (ditto for Nabokov-- especially Pale Fire). I know you said you were reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but if you haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude, you must, because it is possibly the greatest book ever written.
Of course there's Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Trial by Kafka, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (you'll probably hate it, though; everyone else seems to), Night and The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel, The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins.
Oh--The Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco! You must read this!! It's incredibly relevant now. Read the rest of Ionesco while you're at it. You list Caryl Churchill as an interest, so you may have read Mad Forest... if not, read that, too.
Well, if you didn't like The Grapes of Wrath (and who really likes anything they are forced to read in 8th grade?), Steinbeck's shorter novels are, imo, much more enjoyable. As far as Jane Austen and Stephen King go...they are certainly not for everyone. (Although I wouldn't think the sort of people that they appeal to would overlap with each other much, yet somehow they are my two favorite authors.) I think Austen is incredibly witty and fun, but you really have to be into the whole british-women-looking-for-husbands-several-centuries-ago theme. As for Stephen King, I don't remember having at all the same impression of Apt Pupil, but it's been a while since I've read it, and I don't care nearly as much for his novellas and short stories (although I don't tend to like novellas and short stories in general) as I do for his novels.
She definitely seems to be someone who people either love or hate. I haven't read anything of hers other than The Fountainhead, but it was horrible and after I read it, I read what I could about Rand to try to gain some insight on why some people love her so much, but that only made me dislike her more. When I hear people talking about how much they loved the Fountainhead (which a lot of people seem to), I am always thinking "what?! did we read the same book?", because I thought it was truly awful.
I love Oranges. I'm very fond of The Passion too, as it's the first one of hers I read, and I'm a sucker for all the pseudo-historical stuff. Venetian fishermen should walk on water with webbed feet, dammit.
Even though Jeanette Winterson now dislikes it it, I think Boating For Beginners is wonderful and very, very funny. Sexing The Cherry has ... problems, but I mostly love it, and Written on the Body has too many resonances with people around me for me not to like it. My mother died shortly before I read Art and Lies, and I found some of the Handel chapters fascinating as a result, but most of the rest of it went way over my head, if I'm being honest about it.
I love Boating for Beginners and Oranges too. The rest, well, not so much. The first two I read by her were for a class on Lesbian Literature, and they were Oranges and Written on the Body. The highly intelligent (and, er, awfully sexy) woman who sat behind me argued in great detail about why Written on the Body was infereior to Oranges (even though Jeanette Winterson herself thinks the exact opposite) and, well, she persuaded me so thoroughly that I haven't liked any other Winterson book anywhere near as well as Oranges except for Boating for Beginners. Naturally I think I'd have held this opinion even if hadn't been articulately presented to me by an extremely sexy woman, but, well, one never knows for sure . . .
I've already read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I didn't hate it, and it's actually extremely rare for me to hate books; but I didn't find it to be very special to me in particular . . . this is, quite unfashionably, my opinion about everything I've ever read by James Joyce, including, shockingly, Ulysses). I've also read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (and also her novel Herland - but again they were just okay, I didn't really fall in love with them).
I've read Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack or the Submission, and The Chairs, but not The Rhinoceros. The others were interesting though, so I may look for The Rhinoceros now.
The only thing I've read by Caryl Churchill so far is Top Girls, but I loved it (well, more specifically I loved certain scenes from it) so I'll definitely look for Mad Forest.
I'd love to hear the rest of your recommendations someday too.
gosh, you know, i was so unimpressed i don't remember even what it was called. i'd probably recognize it if i saw it. it was assigned for some theory class, for the bit on feminist theory i think.
I read the original spanish too, but it's fun to see how the poem has been translated into English, if the edition you're reading has english/spanish facing pages.
Mike Huben says this about her: Ayn Rand was a truculent, domineering cult-leader, whose Objectivist pseudo-philosophy attempts to ensnare adolescents with heroic fiction about righteous capitalists.
You might appreciate his page on Objectivism: Critiques of Objectivism (http://world.std.com/~mhuben/critobj.html)
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queerbychoice) wrote2002-04-14 12:10 am
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_Imp
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Oh, and Alice Walker is my favorite author, so I'm glad you had her on your list!
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here are my recommendations, at least.
philip gourevitch - "we wish to inform you..."
rick moody - "demonology"
lorrie moore - "birds of america"
annie dillard - "the writing life"
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but i've read books by:
douglas adams
maya angelou
allen ginsberg
toni morrison
vladimir nabokov
sylvia plath
arundhati roy
william shakespeare
leo tolstoy
banana yoshimoto
i've read bits and pieces
by many of the others,
but not whole books, yet.
i was really not too fond of
toni morrison or maya angelou,
though i didn't dislike them,
per se. just not my favorites.
i recommend "blu's hanging"
by lois-ann yamanaka
and "perv: a love story"
by jerry stahl
also "diving into the wreck"
by adrienne rich
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Toni Morrison
Julia Alvarez
Maya Angelou
Alice Walker
Sylvia Plath
William Shakespeare
Allen Ginsberg
George Bernard Shaw
I really liked all of them, except maybe Maya Angelou, I can't take too much of her all at once for some reason.
I recommend any of Pablo Neruda's poetry. He wrote in a lot of differend styles throughout his career, it's fun to read them all and figure out your favorite.
oh, and read a good translator -- Robert Bly is terrible, stay away from him if you can. Sayers Peden is excellent, the best I've seen.
If you can read it in the original Spanish, even better
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I don't exactly hate the books, but she sprinkles individual phrases throughout them that just make me absolutely cringe. I think she tries so hard to be "literary" that it just comes out ridiculously forced a lot of the time.
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Also, I've read various bits and pieces of
Also, I've read various bits and pieces of <i.Diving into the Wreck</i> (including the title poem) and liked them. I haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing yet, though.
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I cna't take too much of Maya Angelou's poems at once either, but I liked her novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings a whole lot.
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I have read books by: Douglas Adams,Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amy Bloom, Quentin Crisp, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Høeg, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Norman Mailer, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Salman Rushdie, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker
Mailer's writing often tends to be to impressed with itself. I read six books by him for a term paper in 11th grade and started liking him less.
I want to recommend about fifty things to you, but I'll narrow it down to things that I think will really get your interest.
Try things by Colm Tóibín and everything else Peter Høeg has written if you haven't yet (ditto for Nabokov-- especially Pale Fire). I know you said you were reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but if you haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude, you must, because it is possibly the greatest book ever written.
Of course there's Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Trial by Kafka, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (you'll probably hate it, though; everyone else seems to), Night and The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel, The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins.
Oh--The Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco! You must read this!! It's incredibly relevant now. Read the rest of Ionesco while you're at it. You list Caryl Churchill as an interest, so you may have read Mad Forest... if not, read that, too.
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Even though Jeanette Winterson now dislikes it it, I think Boating For Beginners is wonderful and very, very funny. Sexing The Cherry has ... problems, but I mostly love it, and Written on the Body has too many resonances with people around me for me not to like it. My mother died shortly before I read Art and Lies, and I found some of the Handel chapters fascinating as a result, but most of the rest of it went way over my head, if I'm being honest about it.
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I've read Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack or the Submission, and The Chairs, but not The Rhinoceros. The others were interesting though, so I may look for The Rhinoceros now.
The only thing I've read by Caryl Churchill so far is Top Girls, but I loved it (well, more specifically I loved certain scenes from it) so I'll definitely look for Mad Forest.
I'd love to hear the rest of your recommendations someday too.
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i don't remember even what it was called.
i'd probably recognize it if i saw it.
it was assigned for some theory class,
for the bit on feminist theory i think.
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You might appreciate his page on Objectivism: Critiques of Objectivism (http://world.std.com/~mhuben/critobj.html)