flemmings | (no subject)

The usual annoyances of this book list, including the 'not if you ripped my fingernails out' entries (The Road, Atlas Shrugged, Twilight) and the 'why that one fer cryin' out loud' (The Colour of Magic is one of Pratchett's weakest, The Golden Bowl is James at his most obscure, and The Odyssey is five times better than the Idiocy sorry pardon the Iliad.) But I'm bemused by the fact that my reasonably respectable score owes much to my quarantined reading and rereading of the last year (Didion, Wilkie Collins, Sterne.) I still haven't read the two Dickens warhorses that are always listed, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and I doubt I ever shall.

Especially since I've been loose-ending these past few days, sleeping till 11 and wasting time online. Actually I do keep up my with bread and butter reading- ten pages a day of Montaigne, one Kipling in the evening, more of the tiny close-printed and stomach turning Pursuit of the Millennium (we're now at the Crusades and its attendant pogroms.) But bicycling and kanji are utterly neglected, and I must start them again because they're cumulative. At least I managed to vacuum the side bedroom today and sort a bag of laundry. Maybe I'll even wash the kitchen floor sometime. (It's not depression. It's that I * hurt* all the time, and feel it unfair to have to do housework when I hurt. I want to stay in my not-exactly-a-kotatsu (stretched out on the sideroom futon with a pillow on my lap and two of G's quilts covering my legs and the pillow) and read in the painfree warmth of same. Which is fine until I move, and then...

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That is a very weird booklist, even weirder than most of the challenge booklists, altho at least it isn't all white? Altho it's mostly white. I don't even know.

You are missing very little with David Copperfield, which I tried to read so many times I lost count and finally stubbornly slogged through, because I was in my 20s and had that kind of grit and time. There's a very cool Aunt but that's about it. Tale of Two Cities....ehhh. It was really pulpy, and also a yanker of heartstrings, and maybe I just wasn't in the right mood when I read it. The portraits of Mme Dufarge and the mob are quite grotesque.

I had David Copperfield in school (I think even before GCEs, i.e. not as exam set text, WTF: I don't think we had any Dickens at either O or A, wheee), and then as part of the Victorian Lit component of my uni degree course.

I had Great Expectations in year 4, for which I retain a definite fondness, possibly because it feels like Copperfield's unloved younger brother. It and Our Mutual Friend are the only Dickens I'd consider rereading for pleasure.

Great Expectations is my FAVE Dickens, except maybe for Bleak House. I don't think I ever read OMF tho....I chewed through a ton of Dickens when I was younger, but reread only a few books of his later on.

OMF is Dickens finally Getting It, or so I thought however many decades ago. I've probably glossed over several hard to swallow bits (Noddy Boffin the Golden Dustman goes down better when it's Pratchett doing him). I admire Bleak House but don't think I'd want to read it again, or at least not for pleasure.

For Great Books You Must Read Before You Die lists, it has more than the usual number of Writers of Colour. Which isn't saying much, but I didn't know there was a biography of Bass Reeves out and now I do.

I didn't get that far! I should try not looking at it in alphabetical order.

Given the mix of classics, obscure works by well-known authors, hot new titles with advertising oomph behind them, and the name of site and the scripts and cookies that run on it, my guess is that this list is weird because some unnamed entity is doing big-data driven market research on the best books to market to someone who's already read X, Y, and Z.

That said, it's still oddly compelling to see which ones I've ticked off the list, which also owes quite a bit to quarantine reading.

Sheesh, you can't go anywhere these days.

Actually I'd be glad to get some book ads. I bought lenses online two weeks ago and now all I see is ads for, what else, contact lenses.

I think the major irritation for me is that they collect all this data and then still serve me ads for the same teen paranormal romance potboilers I've consistently not expressed interest in reading for the last six, 12, 18 months...

At least Facebook has an 'I don't want to see this' button. On the other paw, if the algorithms are so useless at suggesting things you do want to buy, the advertisers are losing money, at least on us.

Haah, good point! (And wow, I see Bell Jar has been graced with yet another really terrible cover, that looks like the ones that were supposed to make WH and Jane Eyre appealing to the "tween paranormal romance" market)

I don't think The Bell Jar is something tweens should be reading at all, at all. It was pretty hard to swallow when I was 20 and I don't think I ever finished it.

....LOL I DEVOURED it when I was briefly at boarding school when I was....13? 14? which probably explains way too much about me. Then again, as a teen and even a child I delighted in reading stuff that was way beyond me at the time, which also explains way too much about me.

Which, I guess if it ends with someone clicking "purchase", has done its job. Hopefully not everyone is disappointed once they start reading.