HOMER - THE ODYSSEY
"Now, obviously, The Odyssey was not nearly as good as Rick Riordan's stuff, but it was still pretty good."
SHAKESPEARE - HAMLET
"Had to read for English Honors (yes, I am in 8th grade and taking 10th grade English, GET OVER IT) it was confusing and weird, Shakespeare, how you confuse me is beyond words, I bet if Yoda read this book he could decipher it, or better yet if Yoda wrote a book I would understand it better than this.... Oh well... I couldn't really understand the plot, but hey I got an A- and passed the class so IM SO DONE WITH THIS"
"Is it bad that I'm reading the No Fear version? Sounds like a cop-out, being an English teacher and all, but I just want to sit and read the story and enjoy it over the weekend without having to 'study' every speech for ten minutes like when I teach Macbeth or R & J. Oh well, sue me."
MACHIAVELLI - THE PRINCE
"Cheat to win is a philosophy that at times delegates how I play ultimate, teach, and get through the day."
"If we consider amoral politics to be the Hunger Games, Machiavelli has written a How-To manual for winning the game, desperately hoping that a Katniss will read his book and win on behalf of his district (Italy). Ultimately, his project is as objectionable as hers."
WOOLF - A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
"Woolf's discussion about Aphra Behn, the fictional Shakesphere's sister is excellent."
MILTON - PARADISE LOST
"We had some fantastic discussion about Satan's character in Paradise Lost during my English class. I now only have a vision of him as this emo 15-year-old wearing a black t-shirt that says 'Humans = Death' (he, of course, rotates this shirt with his 'Satan is our king' hoodie)."
JOYCE - A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
"Very soon, the book becomes a vehicle for astonishingly long-winded discourses on various issues better dealt with in a monograph; and midway then, Portrait ceases to be a novel or even a work of fiction really; as a diehard fan of literary fiction, having admired so many non-traditional novels, I have to say that this is an ugly book, with nary a human connection or relationship of warmth ... I'm a PhD candidate in English, and I'm deeply saddened by reading this. Portrait is an insult to the scores of wonderful novels from this past century that don't get the same recognition because they are not by James Joyce. Avoid if you can help it."
FREUD - THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
"Dreams cannot be interpreted, they're random imagery. And Freudianism most definitely doesn't qualify as science. Anyone thinking otherwise is an utter idiot. And I absolutely hate it how every second film director has to put 'Freudian symbolism' in their works. I AM NOT INTERESTED IN LEARNING THEM GODDAMMIT. If your movie cannot be understood without knowing 'Freudian symbolism' then it's garbage, period."
KAFKA - THE CASTLE
"Okay, let me get my two cents in. As a lover of surrealism, a huge Kafka fan, and above all as a writer, I can vouch for this book. Was it bland? Yes. Was it dull and repetitive and even poorly written? I'd say so. Truth is, I didn't even read beyond Chapter 3. But this isn't a bad novel. We have to remember that this is a rough draft, a sketch if you will, of a novel left on the writer's desk. Hell, the draft wasn't even finished. Of course it's going to suck! Because it is unfinished. It is not published as the writer even intended it to be. Hell, Kafka didn't even want the bulk of his writing's to be published. I decided to stop reading this because to do so is disrespectful to the author."
NIETZSCHE - BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
"His cause is further damaged by paragraphs containing no topic sentence and no resolution. Some paragraphs ramble on so long that even if there were a topic sentence, one would be hard pressed to remember it by the end."
SUETONIUS - THE TWELVE CAESARS
"A collection of the biographies of the twelve emperors of Ancient Greece from Julius Caesar to Domitian.
I found out that not all of emperors are great leaders. One of them is Caligula, a mentally deranged man. What he did is unbelievable. If he does not like his constituent is doing he want that person to suffer like being burned or tortured. He even engage in same sex relationship which is really shocking. I never thought homosexuality existed then already."
"I find it amazing that these alleged geniuses never seem to consider that perhaps Rome fell because the Romans were idiots who no longer took responsibility for their own actions. Accountability is something that isn't a foreign concept to the academics; it's something that is an alien thought process. And when I say alien, I don't mean a passive alien like ET."
SALINGER - THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
"I should not be rating this. It is my unrelieved pride in life that I have not read this book, that I will not read this book, that I, alone, utterly condemn this book as well as its author. Nor do I, have I ever, or will ever drive a car. I am unlicensed."
MELVILLE - MOBY-DICK
"HATED IT SO MUCH. As a person with a degree in literature, I feel quite guilty about this. Maybe need to try again. It did not help when the professor asked a question during our discussion of it and no one answered, so I offered my answer. Big mistake. For some reason that brought on ridicule and eventually the statement that 'ANY answer besides mine would be correct.' Which wasn't even true and quite harsh. I'd say not so conducive to the liberal arts learning method. Given how much we were paying, I should have told him what was what. But I was not nearly assertive enough in those days."
"HOW DARE YOU TELL ME I'M WRONG? DON'T YOU KNOW MY PARENTS ARE PAYING FOR THIS EDUCATION?" ~ TERRIBLE ENGLISH MAJOR #85002
SAPPHO - POEMS/FRAGMENTS
"It’s hard to like Sappho. I know, I know, I’m being horrible. She’s an early feminist icon and she was a great poet and all of that sort of thing, but we have only one poem of hers in complete form, and the rest of the fragments have been so deeply mined by other poets that its hard to see where she’s being original. Sure, the first time someone said that moonlight was like silver that was mindblowing stuff…and it may well have been her, but her metaphors are tired now, and her work is so fragmentary that I can’t see it as more than the leftover choppings of the Romantic poets."
HAWTHORNE - THE SCARLET LETTER
"It was very hard to read. I did enjoy the idea of being ostracized for the bad you did (is that wrong of me?)"
"I had to focus immensely on every detail ... ruining the fluidity of my mind slowly absorbing all the print.
Then class discussions were always about the symbolism within, why couldn't the letter be red because that's the fabric they had? Why is there symbolism with a meteor shower? Sounds like an asteroid belt got too close and the earth pulled in some stellar rocks- that's not too out of the normal.
I think teachers ruined this book by making my mind try to see things that it saw as mere coincidences or straight facts instead of hidden meanings."
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn IV
"The only bummer is that he's sort of a follower to Tom Sawyer. It's like c'mon Huckleberry, you're bigger and stronger. Step up and lead bro."
"Meh... Cloudsplitter is still better..."
"I have made it a life goal to never read this book. That's how much I loathe its existence.
The end."
"I might not recommend it to others since I disagree with Twain’s display of Huck’s rejection of God by adding to the story that he chose to 'go to hell' instead of praying to God and doing the right thing. Twain’s humorous account of incidents kept me reading, but I was overall dissatisfied with Huck’s moral standards. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn encourages rebellion and godlessness."
"Before Twain there were some great American writers, but none of them wrote fiction. No work of American literature during that time really captured what the American spirit was, so Twain wrote a book about freedom and independence. He wrote the novel during the Guilded Age, when America was getting its first taste of materialism"
"I think learning about how twain would write a book every time he started to lose profits so he could stay afloat in society kinda made me lose interest in his novels."
"This book caused me to realize I can't stand a book that is written entirely in poor grammar. I did not find this book to be the comical novel of hyperbole that my classmates did; instead, I found it utterly annoying. I will not be reading any other books by Twain anytime soon."
"I believe reading is about relaxing and not straining your mind to understand what's going on."
"Okay, I get how Mark Twain was a visionary, he was the first to write the way how people talked in real life and henceforth he forever changed the way literature was written. Now having said this, (on a personal view) l find it incredibly annoying to read words that are misspelled or grammatically incorrect. I found myself unable to get into a proper rhythm with the book because I was reading and re-reading the characters incomprehensible Southern dialect."
"Supposedly a satire, though probably pegged as such due to a general refusal of fact that Samuel Clements actually took the time to write a book about nothing."
"I am too much of a grammar freak to enjoy this book"
"Sentences such as 'You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge;dah's whah dey is. I's seed 'm befo'; I don't k'yre to see'em no mo'' (Twain, 110-111) might have reflected the speaking style of the time period, frankly, times have changed ... shackled by the utterly outdated writing style employed by this book. This is one book that has definitely not passed the test of time"
"Meh... Cloudsplitter is still better..."
"I have made it a life goal to never read this book. That's how much I loathe its existence.
The end."
"I might not recommend it to others since I disagree with Twain’s display of Huck’s rejection of God by adding to the story that he chose to 'go to hell' instead of praying to God and doing the right thing. Twain’s humorous account of incidents kept me reading, but I was overall dissatisfied with Huck’s moral standards. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn encourages rebellion and godlessness."
"Before Twain there were some great American writers, but none of them wrote fiction. No work of American literature during that time really captured what the American spirit was, so Twain wrote a book about freedom and independence. He wrote the novel during the Guilded Age, when America was getting its first taste of materialism"
"I think learning about how twain would write a book every time he started to lose profits so he could stay afloat in society kinda made me lose interest in his novels."
"This book caused me to realize I can't stand a book that is written entirely in poor grammar. I did not find this book to be the comical novel of hyperbole that my classmates did; instead, I found it utterly annoying. I will not be reading any other books by Twain anytime soon."
"I believe reading is about relaxing and not straining your mind to understand what's going on."
"Okay, I get how Mark Twain was a visionary, he was the first to write the way how people talked in real life and henceforth he forever changed the way literature was written. Now having said this, (on a personal view) l find it incredibly annoying to read words that are misspelled or grammatically incorrect. I found myself unable to get into a proper rhythm with the book because I was reading and re-reading the characters incomprehensible Southern dialect."
"Supposedly a satire, though probably pegged as such due to a general refusal of fact that Samuel Clements actually took the time to write a book about nothing."
"I am too much of a grammar freak to enjoy this book"
"Sentences such as 'You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge;dah's whah dey is. I's seed 'm befo'; I don't k'yre to see'em no mo'' (Twain, 110-111) might have reflected the speaking style of the time period, frankly, times have changed ... shackled by the utterly outdated writing style employed by this book. This is one book that has definitely not passed the test of time"
Thursday, October 24, 2013
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four IV
"height and my sensitivity to the misuse of language more than anything else I've ever read in my life."
"This is literally one of the best books mankind will ever produce. George Orwell achieves a formidable task by creating a world that is far-fetced and simultaneously real and feesible to exist. This is way the book is relevant nowadays as much as it was back then. It rings us a bell that this dystopian world may not be as imaginery as we may think."
"the entire book quickly degenerated into soft porn."
"This book was a waste. I tried to read it before I just quit. I logged onto my laptop, clicked the link of shame and fell in love with Sparknotes. I studied the summary, devoted myself to character lists and looked at each chapter break down. And yet, all I could see was nothing but sexual meanings, double meanings that made no sense, and the glorious WTF ending that left me screaming at my laptop."
"1. It's EXTREMELY long. There are paragraphs that last for almost two pages, which really bores me because there's nothing much going on but description after description after description. Oh, I know. Imagery. While I don't mind imagery, 1984 was simply too much for me to handle.
2. Awkwardness. I don't know why an adult novel is required reading for high school students in the first place, aside from the fact we're more mature. Still, it's awkward."
"This book is terrible. I do not understand why it is always rated so high, especially now that communism has collapsed."
"I am only 143 pages in (and have had to bare the fairly unpleasant sex scenes) but the concept of totalitarian dictatorship in literature, if written well, is always fascinating. In one section, the language of newspeak is addressed. Orwell predicted a form of language that was based off of english, but substantially reduced to the point where one does not have to think about vocabulary, but can simply say words, and everyone understands. It made me think about texting lingo, with such abbreviations such as: lol, ftw, brb, ttyl. Everyone knows the meanings of these terms, one does not have to think."
"This is dated. My students could read The Hunger Games trilogy or Harry Potter and grasp some of the same concepts about totalitarian regimes."
"I like reading Science Fiction books, but not to this extent."
"It's amazing that he's British and the book was written 60 years ago, but the book still reads clearly."
"I am still puzzling as to why any educator would wish to subject a teenager to this torture. The horror of a socialist society that was involved in literally every aspect of life was shocking, thus serving its purpose. However, the in-depth detail of the totalitarian society and one man (and woman) who decide to rebel was just that: a little too in-depth. Were detailed descriptions of their sensuality all that necessary?"
"This is literally one of the best books mankind will ever produce. George Orwell achieves a formidable task by creating a world that is far-fetced and simultaneously real and feesible to exist. This is way the book is relevant nowadays as much as it was back then. It rings us a bell that this dystopian world may not be as imaginery as we may think."
"the entire book quickly degenerated into soft porn."
"This book was a waste. I tried to read it before I just quit. I logged onto my laptop, clicked the link of shame and fell in love with Sparknotes. I studied the summary, devoted myself to character lists and looked at each chapter break down. And yet, all I could see was nothing but sexual meanings, double meanings that made no sense, and the glorious WTF ending that left me screaming at my laptop."
"1. It's EXTREMELY long. There are paragraphs that last for almost two pages, which really bores me because there's nothing much going on but description after description after description. Oh, I know. Imagery. While I don't mind imagery, 1984 was simply too much for me to handle.
2. Awkwardness. I don't know why an adult novel is required reading for high school students in the first place, aside from the fact we're more mature. Still, it's awkward."
"This book is terrible. I do not understand why it is always rated so high, especially now that communism has collapsed."
"I am only 143 pages in (and have had to bare the fairly unpleasant sex scenes) but the concept of totalitarian dictatorship in literature, if written well, is always fascinating. In one section, the language of newspeak is addressed. Orwell predicted a form of language that was based off of english, but substantially reduced to the point where one does not have to think about vocabulary, but can simply say words, and everyone understands. It made me think about texting lingo, with such abbreviations such as: lol, ftw, brb, ttyl. Everyone knows the meanings of these terms, one does not have to think."
"This is dated. My students could read The Hunger Games trilogy or Harry Potter and grasp some of the same concepts about totalitarian regimes."
"I like reading Science Fiction books, but not to this extent."
"It's amazing that he's British and the book was written 60 years ago, but the book still reads clearly."
"I am still puzzling as to why any educator would wish to subject a teenager to this torture. The horror of a socialist society that was involved in literally every aspect of life was shocking, thus serving its purpose. However, the in-depth detail of the totalitarian society and one man (and woman) who decide to rebel was just that: a little too in-depth. Were detailed descriptions of their sensuality all that necessary?"
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