(no subject)

[fpb]

Wow. My book meme entry has gone completely ballistic. Who would have said that to say which books I like or not would have caused so much reaction?

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

lol!

If you're going to ding popular books with NO WAY, of course you've got to expect a reaction! *g*

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, I had already dive-bombed both Dan Brown and Philip Pullman, though perhaps more long ago than you and I have been friends. As for Attwood, you did not seriously expect me to like that particular book, did you?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

No--and probably for a lot of the same reasons I can't stand it. (Same with Pullman and Brown.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=544

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have gone to see that on a bet.

But then I found the novel so awful I couldn't finish it. Not like there was anything new, or insightful in it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The weird thing is that two very fine people on my f-list placed it next to William Golding, which I frankly could not see. Lord of the Flies is a terrible story, but it is a terrible story about something true.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to argue about how people connect up books in their minds--waste of time. But I wouldn't have put those two together, one a didactic hammer, and the other a subtle, horrifying examination of just how far down the morality of civilization goes in (the education of) the young male.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Agreed, of course.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying it so much I posted it in my own LJ!

[darkthirty.livejournal.com]

I respect you more for the fact that you are sincere and take time to actually state an opinion on things that is not simply received and packaged, but is something you've thought about and indeed worked out for yourself, unlike some who really come across as if American sitcoms and the inane moral claptrap spewed by Hollywood were somehow the final statement of real actual god-given final truth. There are whole area's of the world, and the web, entirely coloured by the glib and the frankly banal, and yet they think of themselves as progressive and somehow gifted soothsayers.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I never realized that God Himself put out a book list that you must not only read in its entirety, but also LOVE in its entirety.

Also, I'm mildly offended that the DaVinci Code would be on the same book list as Les Miserables.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I'm mildly offended that the DaVinci Code would be on the same book list as Les Miserables.

You too, eh?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Nobody was ever going to make a list of currently available books that satisfied everyone else. I have to say that the inclusion of Alice Sebold, from all I have heard, strikes me as nearly as bad, as does the near total absence of classics - Homer and Virgil, let alone Kalidasa or Li Po, do not exist - and genre fiction of every kind - no Agatha Christie, HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov or ER Burroughs; not even Kipling, Poe or Jules Verne. And Verne reminds me that there is a grave shortage of European classics: where are Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Balzac, Goethe, or Dante? Where are CS Lewis and GK Chesterton? And if we are talking about books as such, how about history, biography, or science? Gibbon, Mommsen, Favre, Galileo, Feynman, Lingard, Dumezil, Braudel, or Michelet? and all the lives of great or little men and women from Thayer's Beethoven to St.Therese of Lisieux' Autobiography? How about philosophy? Is any person educated if they haven't read Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas? How about even the much-advertised Enlightenment? Whatever happened to Voltaire, Rousseau, Herder, Beccaria, Diderot (even the dirty bits)?

In short, this lists represents a narrow, ultimately rather undemanding pundit's view of reading from exactly the modern-lit point of view I do not approve of. It does little to broaden the mind or take it beyond one particular subject, namely highbrow modern fiction.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

How about picking a list of your own! Now that would be interesting.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I tried, but I gave up after #6, feeling a complete prat.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

Or, being pessimistic yet realistic, maybe we ought to rejoice if people have read any of these books at all? Many people would not consider a quick glimpse into any of these books while there are more amusing distractions to be had...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That's a good question. To be a good Jew or Christian, is it your duty not only to be familiar with the Bible (your community's version of, I mean), but also to love it and enjoy it in an aesthetic sense? On the one hand, that would put a bit of a strain on the people told to enjoy the lengthy lists of prescriptions on all sorts of petty matters in the first five books (for instance); on the other, unless you enjoy the writings in the first place, how can they affect you at all? And Psalm 119 tells us that some people actually enjoyed the study of the Jewish law for its own sake.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

Obviously I'm not opinionated enough because I had, like, one comment on mine. :(

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That surprises me.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

Nah, doesn't really surprise me. Very few people nowadays have me friended because I have opinions. :p Something like a fifth of my flist is from RL, after all and they don't comment much.

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

I actually meant to ask a little while ago if I could friend you? You seem interesting, and I like people with opinions :-)

[guarani]

Being who you are, it's no wonder that people in your f-list love books. As in any other love/hate relationship, if your likes are others' dislikes (and viceversa), there's going to be reaction.