Just read an article about the list of books you'll never finish reading. While I'm a big reader, I have found that I am not a big reader of "great" literature. Ya know, all those books that are always name dropped and just about everyone has read; or are on school reading lists. But there are some bad books out there and I'm glad someone finally agrees with me. Others though on the list, though few, I did actually enjoy. So, the first one is The Bible, and it coming in at number one made me LAUGH! People always say that they've read the entire bible and continue to read it, sometimes saying every night they'll read in it. I've never really believed these people. Perhaps some of them do, but damn that book is boring! I'm not even of the mind-set that it is The holy book; I never did. Once in confirmation class (that last year of Sunday School for Catholics before they are actually allowed to join the church) we were tasked with finding things in the the bible. The teacher would say part of a passage and we were supposed to find it. Oh man, the looks I got in that class that day, like I was some heathen eating the head of a baby! Everyone was dutifully flipping through the pages and landing right where they should. Perhaps someone was in the correct chapter, but needed to find the right passage. And I was sitting there, exclaiming aloud every single time one of the following. "Y'all are making this up, I've never heard that story." "That's the one with the short guy up a tree right?" "She said it's in Luke. My book doesn't even have Luke!" I'm also the kid that when we were told to make glitter banners that said peace, I made one that said Shalom, much to the chargin of the teacher. I'm also the kid that in my first Sunday School class, when I was five, coloured an angel green and my mother had to be brought in because the teacher thought I was in league with devils. Nah, lady, it's called Science Fiction. So, no. To answer the question, I have never read the bible. I did try a project once, to flip through my Jerusalem Bible (which is read right to left with Hebrew on the right page and English on the left) and compare it with a Catholic Bible and a King James Bible, but I didn't get very far. I mean I knew I wouldn't be getting out of the Old Testament, but it was at least some project to do that I thought would be fun. There was a lot of begetting and people living to about a thousand and I got bored. It wasn't for religious purposes, it was for the weird stories the bible supposedly contains and plus just for Science purposes to see at which point these veer off from each other and come back again. The Canterbury Tales. I read this in senior English. I don't remember hating it, but it also wasn't worth remembering either. After we read it we had to do a project and were assigned a character in the story and had to write the book from their point of view. I had the nun. She might have been slightly slutty. It was more fun writing her POV and collaging a person together to represent her for the front cover, than the actual reading of the real story. Wuthering Heights. Oh, god. I tried reading this in high school and I think I only made it to the second or third chapter. I figured I should read it since it seemed everyone had and, ya know, is "great" literature. Hell, even my dad read it like three times when he was in school... just for fun. I figured, "How bad could it be?" Very, very bad, was the answer. I'd already seen the black and white film when I was growing up and I hated the "love" story between Heathcliff and Catherine. Catherine was a bitch and Heathcliff was a glutton for punishment. It's not like I was overly thrilled to be reading the book anyways, so it shouldn't come as a shock that I abandoned it. The Iliad. This book, I've never actually picked up and tried to read, though I know all about it and portions of it we learned in school. When people talk about the story it seems interesting, but just trying to read the excepts in the textbook were boring me to tears, so I never struck out to read this, in its entirety, on my own. I will say that my dad read this one about fifteen times growing up. Obviously he loved it. The Odyssey isn't on this list, but it was the same deal. Portions printed up in the textbook, boring as fuck, but interesting when people tell you about it. Dad loved this one too and read it a lot growing up as well. Les Misérables. Did read this one, en Française, in third year French class in high school. The teacher printed chapters out and we'd go through each chapter before moving on to the next. I remember colouring the pictures at the beginning of the chapter and struggling through some of the French because I was bored with the story. It's exciting to state that I read a French novel in French, but really for all I remember I could have been looking at a piece of wood and trying to decipher words from it. The only thing that actually stands out in my mind to this day was the chapter title Marius et Cosette. So, really it's not that exciting at all. I've seen various film versions and it's not a bad story, I just couldn't get on board with it in written form apparently. Jane Eyre. This one wasn't bad actually. It wasn't terrifically fantastic, but it wasn't bad. The film version with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles is much, MUCH better. Which, I don't know, is that saying a lot? But I didn't struggle to push through this one like with some books, but I'd rather just watch the 1943 film adaptation instead of re-reading this. And there have been a lot of film and telly adaptations of this book and while the newer one with Michael Fassbender was far better than a lot of them (*cough* Timothy Dalton *cough*), it's OK if I never watch even that one again. The Good Earth. Thank the gods that someone else found this book as abysmal as I did. I'll say that it was terrible or I hated it and people just shrug because they either haven't read it, read a book they also hated, or it didn't bother them. Are they crazy? It was probably THE worst book I have ever read. It actually fills me with seething rage to think that I wasted time on that drivel. It's not that it was poorly written, it's just the story that sends me into fits. The story, those lives, all of it was such a waste. I liked other of her books, but not that one. Never will that be on a list of books that I even remotely liked. The Scarlet Letter. Did have to read this in school. First of all, I'm not going to be onboard with any Puritan BS, so while I'm sure the story is written well, I'm not going to cotton to the idea of a woman being shamed publicly for things that are waved away for a man. But also it was boring as fuck. Not even the Daniel Day Lewis (whom I had a major crush on at the time) could not even hope to save the film adaptation for me. I greatly dislike this story. The Last of the Mohicans. So this is the book that is on the list. I have not read this one. I decided to start the Leatherstocking Tales in order of age for Natty. So, I started with The Deerslayer. It took me a month to get about a day into their journey, which was about three chapters. Fenmore Cooper is a talker, I tell ya! He just talks and talks and talks and the story really goes nowhere. It'd be like being a fly on the wall of the house lived in by the most boring of people. He talks about the meat cooking over the fire and Natty's boring conversation with his traveling companion. Does she like me? I don't know. The tree's have thinned. Yes, I think so. Then they make it to some cabin on the lake. No one is there and they look around the house in what took them about five minutes, I felt like it took five years of my life. That's about where I stopped. I mean, I read on for another three chapters, but they'd just walked out of the house and gotten into a boat. Three chapters! It's like those jokes about soap opera's where a woman hasn't watched the show in fifteen years and her friend says that it's "later the same day". I had high hopes for the excitement of those books. I just about cried from the boredom and lack of coherence in those, what five chapters I read? Lord of the Flies. This was required reading in one of my high school English classes. I like the idea of a dystopian world with teenagers where society as one knows it breaks down, because they're teenagers. It's why I liked the Gone series so much. It's an interesting concept and idea. The Lord of the Flies (which Gone was said to copy) was just boring drivel and I felt like the teenage boys would pee on everything, marking out their territory, against all the other teen boys. I hated it. It was written so terribly in my opinion, that I abandoned the book a quarter way through and took a bath on the grade. The was the best earned F of my high school career right there. It was a terrible book. The Silmarillion. Oy-vey! This book, man! I'd read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit twice by the time I picked up this book. I was beyond excited. And within the first few pages I was beyond confused. It was about the Elves and read like those first bits of the bible. It was like someone speaking Klingon to you and you didn't even know what Star Trek was. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it and abandoned it pretty quickly to say the least. The Lord of the Rings. Yes, I skipped a lot of books down the list. You know why? I haven't read 'em! I'm terrible at reading the "appropriate" books. Anyways. This one I liked. It is slow and takes them a million years to walk anywhere, but I like the world, so it doesn't bother me. I don't know why I like the world, seeing as it's filled with Orcs and giant spiders and such; and there's all this evil that I wouldn't want to meet on a bright, sunny day popping out of everywhere, but nevertheless, I like the world. I had borrowed the books in high school and read it and enjoyed it. Then after the first film came out, I purchased a copy with all the books included, plus extra bits, and read that (not the extra bits though). While reading that time I had several people tell they didn't know how I could get through it and two of them said they bombed out during The Battle of Helms Deep, which I enjoyed in the book. So, this, apparently, is my weird one. The books a lot of people couldn't get through, yet I thoroughly enjoyed. I tried giving it a third go a few years ago. I think they made it on the road out of Bree before I semi abandoned it. It is a long read and I don't have teenage nights with no where to go or a coffee house where I'm waiting for customers, so it's not been a steady read this go around, but I'll finish it again. The Bell Jar. Hardly remember it, couldn't get through it. The Life of Pi. Got through, probably two chapters, before abandoning. Didn't much care for the film either. The Return of the King. Lists like this bother me when they group books together and then also single them out. Pick one of the other people! Mein Kampf. This was difficult to get through because it was so terrible on so many levels. It was my maternal grandfathers copy, which was required reading for him while he was in university in the 1920s. I wouldn't have bothered reading it except for the fact that we just owned it (having inherited it along with all the other books in my grandmothers house) and that it baffled me to no end that it was required reading... in the US... before WWII. What the fuck?! The Giver. Oh, I actually enjoyed this book a lot. Read it when it first came out, as required reading in middle school. I've probably read it six times in the past twenty-five years. Last year was my sixth time reading it and I read her follow up books in the series because I didn't even know there were other books until last year. I've gotten a lot of flack for liking this book. Don't care. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. How exactly is this on the list? Is it because it's too simple? Is it because it's too baby-ish? Because I couldn't imagine it being that difficult to get through. Sure it isn't as exciting as the later ones that contain billions of pages and have Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, but I like when Harry discovers the world of magic, bringing me, the reader, along with him. It's comforting to start out rather small and cozy and quaint before landing into that hurricane of drama later on (don't get me wrong, I enjoy the entire series; books and films, and have read the books probably seven times now, but still The Philosophers Stone and The Deathly Hallows are two completely different books for a myriad of reasons).
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AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
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