THE BEST OF JUNE

THOMAS MANN - DEATH IN VENICE

"The boy represents 'ideal beauty', but why? I know that may seem like a dumb question to some, but, I never quite got it. Why did HE have to represent it?"


EMILY BRONTE - WUTHERING HEIGHTS

"I would never really reccomend this book to anyone, except for Osama Bin Laden. He can read this book."


"When I first picked up Wuthering Heights, my English teacher warned me that frame tale, the literary style of a story within a story, is the most complicated style there is. I shrugged my shoulders and turned the page. After all, I’ve done it before.

But, man, Wuthering Heights is difficult with a capital DIFFICULT. And I’m still not quite sure I understand because, as painful as this is to admit, I didn’t know the housekeeper was narrating until I looked it up on SparkNotes. I tried to get into this 'classic' but by the time I reached the halfway point, I was frustrated beyond belief ... And this book is told in the most boring way ever, all from the point of view of one servant woman. She just drones on and on and on ... I expected a lot from Wuthering Heights, especially after it was referenced in Twilight, but I was sorely disappointed."


"The lack of plausable discription takes its toll on this could be great story. At one point in the book while discribing a trellus of flowers it was depicted as follows: 'I noticed that there were flowers surrounding the barn.'. Not to be rude... but... What kind of barn was it? was it old, or new, or red, or green? Flowers? What kind? What color? This very bland discription of what MAY be a older barn that MAY have help horses, and that MAY have had flowers the MAY have been yellow creats no mental image of the area that MAY exist. Wuthering Heights was once descibed as a gloomy building. I mean, excuse me? A gloomy building? Is it 2 stories high, or maby 3? What color is it? Surroundings?"


NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE - THE SCARLET LETTER

"Most of the 'alliteration' in this book don't really mean anything further than what was said. On the count of it, many of the characters just seem like shallow pools ... The writing style, yes, while appropriate for the times, was highly boring to follow. There was little to actually make the book interesting, and the storyline felt altogether wanting, and lacking."


TOLSTOY - WAR AND PEACE

"I will always hate tolstoy for ruining War & Peace for me."


HENRIK IBSEN - A DOLL'S HOUSE

"What the hell?? I could of wrote this book. And I'm not a writer."


SAPPHO - POEMS AND FRAGMENTS

"Lyric poetry is dead. Why?

Because if poetry is nothing more than communication, we can do a hell of a lot better describing something with a picture or a song or a youtube video. In fact, it would be so hard to make our descriptions more beautiful and important than a mere daugerrotype that we should stop trying ... lyric poetry is fucking useless.

Unless your entire life is based on being some pathetic emo kid, the lyric won't get you far (and even Keats wrote narratives, y'all). Sappho sucks, the reason we have western culture is named Homer, and we poets better wake up to that fact or we will be about as relevant as Jazz."


SHAKESPEARE - MEASURE FOR MEASURE

"The fact that I don't know anyone who's read this speaks to the plain and simple fact that it sucks."


OVID - METAMORPHOSES

"The use of the gods names in Roman, not Greek. I realize Ovid was writing as a Roman, but I mostly know my Greek mythology with Greek names. I found it hard to equate the Roman name with the Greek name. Add to that the difficultly of using multiple names or odd descriptors for someone and the task of figuring out who is being talked about can be rough (son of _____ was very common, actually there's an appendix in the front of the book for all of these, it's a few pages long)."


ST AUGUSTINE - CONFESSIONS

"If there is a hell lets hope this bastard is there."