Do You Love Literature?

I'm rather eclectic in my taste for literature. I've read James Clavell and enjoyed his narrative skills but also have read Proust and now can try to claim I know people a great deal better than I did before. "The Red and the Black" is one of my favorite reads as well as "Crime and Punishment" but I also still loved reading "The Lord of the Rings." Gore Vidal is one of my favorite writers although he never wrote anything better than "Burr." I usually can't read most best sellers as I find most of them exploitive and stylistically contrived. Okay, so throw a Ludlum spy thriller in my lap and I will read it although I don't think he's written anything better than "The Bourne Identity."

You don't have to read exclusively highbrow books to qualify as a lover of literature. But it helps to read some classics and some literary fiction, if only to get a sense of what writing can be at its best.

I'm glad this thread is back to discussing literature and off bashing me!

I'm eclectic, too, and have even developed a taste for children's literature, over the past 9 years because I read to my daughter most nights. Of course my kid insisited we do of the Harry Potters, but we've also read some great literature out there that I was never exposed to as a child, like the Oz series, the fairy stories by Edward Eager and E Nesbitt. Right now we"re reading a great book called Caddy Woodlawn, whose author I can't remember right now, but I'm surprised it isn't more well-loved.

I also read 3 mysteries for every one 'highbrow' book. Right now I'm, reading one by George Pallister.

Dream, when you read a mystery novel do you try to solve it as you go along? Or do you just read it for the narrative and wait for the solution to be unveiled?

Mystery novels are something of a ritual for me - sort of soothing like Tai Chi - I do not try to solve them, generally, but read them knowing that there will be a certain pattern of unfolding, and some degree of fitting together of pieces at the end.

They are an antidote to the demandingness and messiness of work...

I have not read "The Dwarf", Dys - I shall look out for it.

Evidently some people find mystery novels soothing. Why this should be so is itself something of a mystery, considering the overt subject of mystery novels is murder and mayhem. They must be an acquired taste, like anchovies.

hee heee! 'Tis contained murder and mayhem...

LOL it is an aquired taste, paradoxically, there is something soothing about murder and mayhem for me. Odd, considering how high-strung I am. For example, I'm now reading a mystery by George Palliser (this one takes place around a cathedral with a scholar doing research on a murder that occurred there 200 years ago), last night I got to a part where one old fellow was found axed to death and another 200-year-old body was found walled up in the cathedral. Put me right to sleep.

Hmmm - interesting, that - some say it is the ritualized and, in the end, re-balanced and harmonised world of the mystery which has this effect - rather like the cathartic end of a classic tragedy, where the bodies are cleared away, and with them the evil, and a fresh new regime, or whatever, takes over and eulogizes or catharts or puts things in order again.

Or, perhaps it is just that big issues - life and death and sin and such are being dealt with - but in a non-demanding way. Or perhaps 'tis simply the comfort of good old Schadenfreude - like going to a good hanging, or bear-baiting, or arena!

I had a period of such books - but I seem to have "gone off" them again.

I remember a critic, apropos of this, whose theory was that one of the attractions of Dickens was the deaths in his books - always full of meaning, and symbol, and very cathartic....nothing like a good death.

We're all trying to get used to the idea that none of us get out of this mortal coil alive. Confronting death in real fact can be very scary, and send us scurrying for the nearest distraction.

Of all the deaths in literature, to me the most terrible is Anna Karenina's suicide. Tolstoy, great artist that he is, makes you feel the mounting despair that is driving Anna, moment by moment, culminating in her rash decision to throw herself under a train.

Mustery novels don't really deal with death, or if they do they formalize it and distance it so conventionally that it becomes banal. That's my experience of them anyway.

It's the distancing, and the mystery format, that makes it readable. On the other hand, it's just another form of distraction, no better than doing a crossword puzzle. I like to figure out whodunit before the end of the book. I can't figure it out with the good ones like Ruth Rendell, or if I do, I enjoy the way the plot works to trick the reader.

Hmmm, maybe it is when you get more used to that idea, that you quit reading mysteries? At least with me, I read mysteries a lot and then quit quite suddenly, I think with P.D. James. I still like to watch murder mysteries on PBS though... a guilty secret! I'm fond of Inspector Morse and Hercule Poirot.

Has anyone read Inspector Maigret, the great French detective? I don't know why, but I always liked those. Dorothy Sayers was the best I thought, at least who I most enjoyed. Lord Peter was such a character, so quirky -- his butler, so heroic.

I don't read old literature anymore. The last may have been... The Trumpet Major, I think. I have turned to other books. I like to pick up and read a bit of Shakespeare, and I'm otherwise involved with my little bits of reading time, with poetry, history, memoirs and old translations.

Piffka, what do you mean by "old literature"???

I meant novels that are not modern. I suppose there are better terms. The Trumpet Major was written after 1850, before 1900. I liked it. I thought the story itself, a love story, had interesting twists and the characters seemed real. Nothing deep or particularly transcendent, except for the ability to create another time & place.

I just read "Nicholas Nickleby" and though I enjoyed it, I couldn't get too worked up over the death of Smike. Now, Little Nell's demise was a different story, Oscar Wilde's snide comment notwithstanding...

Hmm - I must confess I greeted the death of Nell with weary relief - but not the death of Joe, the crossing sweeper - (WAS his name Joe?)

I have very mixed feelings about Dickens. One of my projects this year is to read more of him--specifically OUR MUTUAL FRIEND and PICWICK PAPERS--so that I can have a better idea of his abilities. The only Dickens novel I admire is GREAT EXPECTATIONS, supposedly the one that people who don't really like Dickens all prefer.