Be Excellent To Each Other

The Times Online tells us "The Ten Books Not to read Before You Die

Here's their list:


10: Ulysses – James Joyce

There’s a brilliant scene in the much-underrated sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, when Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) snatches a book from Mr La-di-dah Gunner Graham and says:

‘What’s this you’re reading? Useless?’

‘Ulysses, Sergeant Major.’

At school I remember my English teacher saying that he knew no one who had managed to get to the end of it. It does sound rubbish, doesn’t it? I’d have thought it was the duty of a great book to drag you along to the last page. But in a way, that’s good to know: if it’s famously hard going you have the perfect excuse not to bother with it.

9: Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

8: For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

The Hemingway style is impressive at first. Simple sentences with few descriptions. They avoid adverbs and adjectives and, as a change from the over-elaborate works of Dickens and Austen, it’s OK for a while. Then you realise it’s a bit dry and boring and the more you find out about Hemingway, the more you realise he was a bore too: a terrible macho bore obsessed with bullfighting, guns, boxing and trying to catch big fish; really quite a tiresome bloke you wouldn’t want to spend time with.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

6: The Dice Man – Luke Reinhart

Basically, this fairly unpleasant bloke does whatever his dice tell him to do, which is often quite terrible. But there’s a flaw in the structure of this book. He writes down an option for each number of the dice and then lets the dice decide what he should do. ‘Throw a six and rape the woman upstairs’?! How did that get on his list of things to do? If he’d written down, ‘Throw a six and have three crispy pancakes for tea’ he wouldn’t have got into so much trouble.


5: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Dreary ramblings of an unreliable and workshy tosspot. Its sole distinction consists in the creation of ‘Gonzo journalism’, which made it OK for journalists, particularly rock journalists, to get shit-faced with whoever they happened to be writing about.

4: The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolff

I don’t know if Naomi is a genuine academic – I couldn’t be arsed to Google her – if she is, she is probably Emeritus Professor of the bleeding obvious. The Beauty Myth is about how women feel under pressure to look good and lose weight. There you go. That’s it. I could get a similarly sophisticated level of socio-political analysis from the fishwives on Loose Women.

3: War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Way, way too long.

2: The Iliad -- Homer

The very idea that you are somehow culturally incomplete without knowledge of Homer is ridiculous. The Iliad is one of the most boring books ever written and it’s not just a boring book, it’s a boring epic poem; all repetitive battle scenes with a lot of reproaching and challenging and utterances escaping the barrier of one’s teeth and nostrils filling with dirt and helmet plumes nodding menacingly. There’s a big fight between Achilles and Hector and that’s about it.

1: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

From what I can gather it’s Mills and Boon from the olden days, and really boring Mills and Boon at that. I did try reading a Jane Austen novel once, but it hadn’t got going by fifty pages so I guiltily gave up; the characters spoke in a very oblique way and it seemed to be all about hypocrisy and manners and convention; worse than that, it was really difficult to find the doing word in a sentence.

So, what books would be in your list of 'must reads' that you really shouldn't bother with?

Henry James, to me, is the most pedestrian author, slowly eeking out every conceivable bit of boredom from his three-page-long wandering sentences. Really can't stand his writing.

comments section:



WRONG!

Mr Wrong of wronginham, wronghamshire, United Wrongdom.

Pride and Prejudice is the only book that I can remember the opening line to off the top of my head.

Sounds quite a fun bloke to spend an afternoon with actually. I am sure a snifter of brandy and cigars would follow a hefty evening meal as well.

That Times writer is a clod.

Pride & Prejudice is great, Dune is great, The Illiad is technically great but the Odyssey is so, so, so much more fun to read. Lord of the Rings is great, Fear and Loathing is great and War and Peace is great.

Haven't read the others.

I shall come up with a list later.

One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with the line:



I love that book so much. How could you not like a book that starts like that?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is absolutely horrendous. It goes on forever, everyone has the same name, and it makes absolutely no sense.

At the risk of failing grade 11 English in high school (yes, folks - study English by reading a bunch of shite that's been TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH) I actually just stopped reading it and winged the rest of the section on it. I had the indirect support of my parents on this, who were not impressed with the course syllabus either.

I did not much like Pride and Prejudice, it's okay - of Austen's works I prefer Mansfield Park. I have read the Illiad, but like yourself prefer the Odyssey.

You take that back!

It's a beautiful magical book. I have read it many, many times.

I wish I had studied it, but I didn't discover it until I went to uni. I picked it up at a second hand bookstore. When I went to visit a friend at her parents house for a week my friend's mother saw the book in my bag and said it was 'too weird' and that when they lived in Spain people were almost scared of the book because it used to 'turn people crazy'.

One day, when hanging out the washing, she turned, without warning, into a cloud of yellow butterflies that drifted up into the sky.

Yes, it's lovely, and magical, and you are as wrong as the person who wrote that comment.

Writing over 400 pages of utter gibberish doesn't make you a great writer any more than chainsawing animals in half, painting parts of them gold and dumping them into brine makes you a great artist - that part is all down to artful imbeciles to declare you this year's great triumph.

He's right about Ulysses. It's an utterly terrible book. Lord of the Rings, too, but he gave wanky, childish reasons basically equating to "ho ho, nerds read it", when the far better one is its crushing dullness.

I've not read many of the others, although the Iliad wasn't that bad. I liked the style of the similes and a few of the lines (Hector's farewell to his son is the best bit of the story by far), at least.

Hemingway wrote the Old Man and the Sea, which I like at least partly for sentimental reasons. But he's kind of alright in smallish doses. Isn't the Bell Tolls quite short?

I've not read the dice man, but it seems pretty clear that he's totally missed the point of the book to me. The point, surely, is that doing terrible things is always an option for anyone should they choose to do them, and submitting to random dice throws isn't all that different from what people do in their minds anyway, living essentially on a whim. Right?

Oh no, that's not the same thing at all - it's beautifully written - the ideas are very well realised, but that it is magical happenings in a very mundane existence shouldn't be mistaken for 'nonsense'.

Every single event in that book would make the most beautiful piece of art - the events are like ancient Greek myths in their unlikeliness, yes, but that they happen to such ordinary people who then still maintain such an ordinary existence, and all is accepted as 'sometimes these things just happen' is quite wonderful. I always think it is like a grown up version of Alice in Wonderland.

Every single word written by Dan Cunting Brown. Entire pages of internal character monlogue written in italics? Just fuck off.

I wasn't put off by the setting - I've learned that dismissing something just because the subject matter might not be immediately appealing is a mistake - so much as the fact that it was utterly inpentetrable, with all the successive generations of the family, everyone re-using the same names so you're never sure who is being referred to, and a general lack of anything that really grabbed me.

And before you ask, it's not down to our being forced to read it in school - we read plenty of stuff for school that I really enjoyed. Cat's Cradle, for one.

I have read 'Ulysses'. I used to be such a pompus young fart - time-travellers are entitled to kick the shins of younger versions of me as he deserves it...

I remember reading some chapters and thinking that they were stylistically clever, which meant that I enjoyed the experience more than the content. Two that spring to mind are the one with the newspaper headlines echoing that chapter's events, and the one which starts off in early English and evolves into contemporary vernacular. I don't remember much else.

I've tried to read it again as I tend to do with books but have lacked the desire. I think I finished it more to say that I had read it, rather than because I enjoyed it.

(EDITED for paragraphing - but it's a post about Joyce's magnum opus so who really cares?)

I wasn't going to ask or suggest that - I read a number of books at school that I disliked but I number I thought were great, so I didn't think that was a factor, really.

I've never really found any problems with the names at all - the first time I started reading it I thought the names would make it complicated, but they didn't.

Hmmm...names.

I gave up on 'Crime and Punishment' as I lost track of who was who. Must try harder.

"8: For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway"

Oi!
FWTBT is a great book :/

Crime and Punishment does take a bit of getting into, I found. Not half as much as a War and Peace or Don Quixote, but it is a bit of a slow burner. Since I quite enjoyed it (Razumihin is my favourite), I generally try to be generous and put it down to translation issues.

I've read Ulysses, probably about half a dozen times. I really enjoyed it once I understood it beyond a certain level. There is a book called (I think) 'The Bloomsday Book' that walks you through it telling what exactly is happening, which can be quite useful.

However it is probably beyond most people's ability and patience, sadly.

Also, you shouldn't need a sodding manual to understand a book. James Joyce wanted his nose punched in.

Got to be Lord of the Rings. Awful book. I hate it.

I probably wouldn't hate it as much as I do if it wasn't the book that all people who like fantasy should read, and MUST enjoy.

If you tell someone that you like fantasy but dislike LOTR they always say 'but Tolkein INVENTED fantasy!' as if that makes anything better. Does it excuse the pages and pages of nothing but walking? does it excuse the stupid fucking songs? DOES IT EXCUSE TOM MOTHERFUCKING BOMBADIL? NO.

Its shit. It'd never get published today in a million years, and that is a good thing.

Henry Ford invented* the mass produced motor car, but I'd still rather drive an Aston Martin

* Yes I know.

"The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger

Essentially, it's a blog written by an emo.

"Ooooh, I hate everyone! Nobody understands me! I'm an angst-ridden teenager!"

Shut the fuck up! Maybe this was new and exciting at the time, but it has not aged well, and is not worth reading.

I love Lordy Lordy (apart from the stupid fucking Bombadil) but all Tolkien did was invent one narrow strain of fantasy that deriative, tedious idiots proceeded to slavishly copy and sell to stupid people for the next god knows how long. Pre-Lordy Lordy there's:

The Princess & The Goblin by George MacDonald
The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany
The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
The Worm Ourroboros by E R Eddison
The Rose and the Ring by William Thackery
Beowulf
The Odyssey

And a fuck load more. Tolkien did not invent fantasy. Clods.

It's not that bad. There were a handful of great lines in it, and the catcher in the rye line is excellent. But otherwise, yeah, that was a big disappointment to me. The Society of Others did it much, much better a few years back.

Also I still don't get what was "edgy" about his dialogue. He said 'damn' a lot. Who the fuck cares? There's more obscenity in your average Victorian novel. 'Damn' isn't even swearing.

See also: The Bell Jar. A mildly interesting book, but fucking hell, is it overrated.

Books are long forgotten relics of the last millennium, get with it guys. It's blogs now man, innit.

Kill him.

/librarian

Fuck me, this book is tedious shit.

I am upset/surprised that harry cunting fucking potter is not in this list. Wizards are fucking gay.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Fuck me, you need a PhD in Arthurian folklore to stand even a remote chance of understanding what's going on and even then it's incredibly fucking dull.

Of the original list, I've read quite a few and they're not all that bad. Fear and Loathing I found very funny, and it's very short.
LotR isn't great - it's needlessly long, but then it was written as a serial for his son who was serving in the war.

Hemingway is dull, trite and of the time. I prefer John Steinbeck greatly.

Cloud Atlas by whoever it was who wrote it. It's just a collection of short stories split in two and not very good ones.

Atomised by Michel Houillebecq or however you spell his name. Fucking shit with a capital S.

There are dozens and dozens of crap over-rated books out there.

And yeah, Meems, Henry James is dull. My father used to refer to that as Mandarin style - I was never quite sure what the reference was, but basically it seemed to translate to why use one sentence when a chapter will be better.

We have a Welsh one in our presence and his missus is both "hard" and probably taller than you, so be warned.

Also welcome back.

I liked the security laxness of Cern - I was tempted to make the crap Physics joke about losing electrons...

As Mark Twain put it, "Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."

Oh - if someone thought Catcher In The Rye was emo bullshit, try Camus' The Stranger. Jesus fuck. You can take the "enigmatic Frenchman who has come to fuck your wife" thing a bit far, you know.

I found Fear and Loathing really funny. Maybe that's because of the film.

Notice that all these book have no pictures.

Comics win!

Talk about missing the entire fucking point of the book.

I am certain you are onto a fair point here, but you are also on a "look at all these mp3 players that existed before the Ipod" or "Crikey, how many people did person-person communication before Alexander Graham Bell" type thing. It's all about whoever gets just the right combination of story/timing/packaging to make it popular, surely? That doesn't make them an inventor, it makes the thing the seminal moment. And much as that's stating the bleeding obvious, it can be good to return to the (sort of) original. Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, for instance - killer first line, killer ending, and, wow, *that's* where those lines come from. Though I bet someone else thought of them first.

I read this while in holiday in Barbados a couple of years ago. 'The Da Vinci Code' was big at the time, so I went for the 'intelligent' alternative to it.

Fuck me does he love lists. It pissed me off no end that he'd be halfway through a sentence and he'd say, "There were many who had believes this, such as the Goths, Visigoths, Romans..." and then, no joke, he'd list about 100 different names.

At times it was great. There were some beautifully written passages and Eco is clearly a talented writer... but he's also a pretentious bastard. And the plot was every bit as silly as said Da Vinci Code.

Haven't you just listed the chapters of LotR?

As JBR says, it is about getting the "magic" right. A book relies entirely upon personal perspective and insight, so no two people are going to imagine the content the same, even if it is described in great detail. Unless they make it into a film, and then all you can do is moan about how book != film and vice versa.

I quite enjoyed reading LotR. I must be some kind of freak who sits at home in a fake beard, pulling things out of my wizard's sleeve.

Heh I hadn't noticed Dice Man was in the list. It's hard-going in places (I don't read much) but I still enjoyed it. The 'rape the woman upstairs' thing was right at the start though so you wonder how much of the book was actually read.

The best thing ever with the name Dice Man was the 2000AD spin-off comic that contained "Fighty Fantasy" style games done as comics. The actual Dice Man ones were good and I remember an excellent Nemesis the Warlock one, too. Pity it only lasted a few issues.

This. This. This. This.

I was going to read The Da Vinci Code to find out what all the fuss was about, couldn't find it and went for Deception Point instead. It's the single worst book I've ever read, and that's a pretty impressive acheivement considering I've read the whole Jedi Academy trilogy, which amoung other crimes includes the stupidest "You Mean They're Using My Invention For Destruction? No! You Can't Let Them!" moment of all time. What did the scientest call the device that they couldn't possibly imagine being used for eeeeevil? The "Sun Crusher". But I digress.

Deception Point - the plot makes absolutely no sense, the dialogue is clunky, the author insists on basically quoting the entire technical specification of any piece of military hardware that happens to wander into view, the internal monologue stuff that Doc CheerfulTeak mentions is in full effect and more than that, it's just terribly, terribly written in the hammiest and most purple prose you can possibly imagine.

"His eyes were as rugged as the topography of the landscape upon which he was stationed."

Seriously.

Late era Michael Crichton books. The latest one about global warming was just him trying to debunk global warming with shit loads of random graphs, and the main character lecturing the others about global warming myths in the middle of gun fights. He's not even *trying* to hide the messages any more.

Probably not much at all. The bloke in the book is, frankly, a shit, but the concept is interesting. The fact the author of this '10 books' piece thought it was about deciding what you want to do via a throw of the dice is baffling. Dice Man is all about the protagonist absolving himself of responsibility. The point is he provides a couple of 'out there' options and some 'safer' ones, and if the dice chooses the nasty shit, he considers that it's not his fault. The only other option is that the writer was trying to be oh-so-clever and witty, but they come off looking like a twit.

Very much Yus.

I actually liked the way the story was heading, and the writing, but all that guff about the bloody masons just really got me down. Cut out 100 pages about rites and chapters and Rosi-bloody-crucian splinter groups and I might be able to finish it.

I read every single Umberto Eco novel (well...there are just 5 anyway), and every one is brilliant. I'm not going to try to be a smartass and say that i understood every single line on foucault's pendulum, but there are some brilliant passages that completely make up for some pretentious ones.

And i don't really understand people who don't like LOTR. I read it in my early teens and i don't remember any book giving me more enjoyment. Yes, if i read it now, and if i was in the mindset of over-analysing-it, i would probably find many faults, but i would probably find more in almost every other book.

I never read harry potter, but i've seen some of the movies and it has some of the most gay and irritating stuff and characters i've ever seen. Yes, it's probably directed and younger people, but it makes every other fantasy book seem like conan. And yes, people are so enthusiastic about every single stupid derivative stuff in harry potter, ignoring the fact that terry pratchett already had those ideas some time ago

I read Name Of The Rose and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't remember a bloody thing about Foucault's Pendulum other than it was too too long winded and tedious because of it. That, however, may well be to do with the translation.



I've read all the Harry Potter books and truth be told, after the third one it is clear to anybody with eyes that the publishing company is shit scared of the phenomenon that is Jo Rowling as they all need serious editing. And they got progressively worse culminating in the last book being a load of long winded boring crap - literally nothing happens except Harry sulks and hides in the woods for 400 pages.

x witty-Harry-Potteresque-spell.

I too found the first three to be quite tightly written, and despite being far too old for them rather enjoyed the romp.