Does anyone read classics anymore?

oneblindmouse

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Further to what Eyeblink says above, I've just finished Carson McCullers' "The heart is a lonely hunter", which is excellent. What amazes me is that she was just 20 when she wrote it!! Didn't know they'd made it into a film, but can see how it would lend itself to that media. Have already bought another book by her, but am currently reading "Mao: the unknown story" by Chang and Halliday, which is very long and detailed and will probably take me months!
 

eyeblink

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The film was made in 1968, with Alan Arkin in the lead role - he was Oscar-nominated.
It comes out on DVD (Region 1) in January, and I should be reviewing it, but I thought I'd read the novel first.

I've heard good things about that Mao biography, but like you it will probably take me months to read!
 

oneblindmouse

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I'd be interested to know what you think of McCuller's book, when you finish it. And the film!
 

J. R. Tomlin

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is an amazing novel--one of the few I can't read without crying and one of the few that the movie is truly worth seeing. Funny, but I don't read a lot of what most people consider classics any more. By the time I was 15, I head read more classics than many read in a lifetime. I wasn't forced. I just fell in love with the written word. Now I'm trying to manage to read some of the genre classics I didn't get around to back then.I can't believe that I didn't get around to LeGuin's Earthsea cycle until last year.
 
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blacbird

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The Member of the Wedding is nearly as good as Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers was a wonderful writer, though not prolific. She was careful, and devoted to her craft, and not interested in pouring out a novel a year on a contract demanded by a publisher. The first half of the twentieth century in the U.S. produced a number of writers of similar ability and low productivity: Katherine Anne Porter and Walter Van Tilburg Clark come to mind. Among the finest fiction writers ever, anywhere.

The current atmosphere of the publishing industry throws such writers in the landfill. Waddaya mean, you don't have a sequel? Not for us.

caw
 

oneblindmouse

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The name rings a bell. What did she write? (Forgive my ignorance.
 

shakeysix

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ship of fools

if you want to read porter start with her short stories. i am sure you will recognize some. they are in every high school textbook. the "jilting of granny weatherall" is really a good story even though it is taught to death. (i am guilty of this, too.) "flowering judas" is my favorite. porter was in mexico during the revolution and she has the flavor of the times nailed down in this story. nothing romanticized here.
her best known book, 'ship of fools", was incredibly dull and talky for me. maybe i was too young to see that it was supposed to be funny. it was made into a depressing black and white movie--at least i remember it as black and white. very brainy--very boooring.
on the other hand, her life was incredible. she was from texas. lived on the poverty line as a child. was never formally educated and survived a drunken husband who threw her down the stairs. --s6
 

oneblindmouse

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Thanks for the info. Have just Googled her and, Yes, she sure had an interesting, if tragic, life. Shall keep an eye out for her short stories.
 

Deleted member 42

New Zealand Classics such as Janet Frame's novels and The Bone People. hmmmm I don't read old classics much anymore. I finished my Masters 14 years ago.

What else would be New Zealand classics? Poets? Haven't read either of those you've mentioned, and am now very curious.
 
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oneblindmouse

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Janet Frame's works are interesting, as is her tragic lifestory, while Keri Hulme's "Bone people" is excellent though very disturbing, touching on quite taboo subjects. I've read it twice, as I found it a bit confusing the first time.
 

BarbaraKE

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I hated every book I was forced to read in school. I don't think it was my age, I think it was just the fact that it was an *assignment*. Ugh.

To this day, I hate being forced to read something. I'm taking a history course (world history prior to 1689). I'll procrastinate reading my assigned chapters but will cheerfully read other chapters (and enjoy them too).

I remember loving Les Misérables and Gulag Archapaelago (sp?).

And I just bought the complete works of both Dickens and Poe since it's been years since I've read them. (And because an agent that recently read the first 100 pages of my novel said that my 'building of tension' reminded him of Dickens and 'the feeling that a boogeyman was going to jump out and eat my characters' reminded him of Poe.)
 

Ilovewords

I'm about to try Tristram Shandy. I hope I find it as funny as I've heard it is.
You won't regret it. Have you seen 'Cock and Bull Story', the movie with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan that was very loosely based on the book? I went back to the book after watching it. I had read it awhile ago when studying Peter Carey's 'Tristan Smith' (Carey likes to do colonial rewrites of the 'canon'). Uncle Toby is my favourite literary character. It is achingly hilarious in this warm and timeless way.
 

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Tristram Shandy is the first truly absurdist fiction ever written. It is a linear descendant of Cervantes' Don Quixote, but carried to the extreme. Nobody since Sterne has ever done it better, though Richard Brautigan gave it a good go.

caw
 

oneblindmouse

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Ah! Richard Brautigan! Now there's an author! What memories! "Trout fishing in America", "In Watermelon Sugar", and so many more. Pity I have all his books in storage right now!!