Shakespeare Sucks... Joyce Swallows (Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books)

Member Name: jamesdean1981

Product:	Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books
Date:	02/11/01 (1395 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: All wrote one or two greats

Disadvantages: The rest were all terrible

This may not be quite the right category for this, but I’m justifying it by saying it’s a list of authors who’s books have all – except for one (or, at a push, two) classic(s) each – been completely unreadable/unfinishable. Beware, controversial op coming up…

10. JRR Tolkien – What, I hear you cry?!? The man’s a god! Didn’t you have Lord of the Rings in your ten best ever books? Well, yup, I sure did. And the Hobbit is an all time classic. But as for the other books… The Silmarillion is possibly the most unwieldy, horrible, hardest to read book in the entire English language. Those reviews I’ve read, written by people who’ve finished it – and obviously are harder working readers than I am – seem to agree that’s it’s worth ‘slogging through’ in order to bring the events of LotR into perspective. Sorry, but you shouldn’t HAVE to ‘slog through’ a book. Especially not one written by someone who could write the incredible prose of the aforementioned book. But this really is dreadful. As is the supposedly ‘quaint’ Farmer Giles of Ham, in which, as far as I can remember, Tolkien praises a farmer who sets out to slay a dragon and instead persuades it to share it’s treasures round. Sorta like his own version of ‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas’. Sweet. I don’t think.

9. Matthew/Mark/Luke/John/everyone else – Because, y’know, apart from the Bible, what else did they do? It obviously wasn’t good enough to survive as long as their main masterpiece.

8. Richard Llewellyn – This is kinda similar to most of the authors listed in my ‘Top Ten Books’, scarily. The thing is, Llewellyn wrote ‘How Green Was My Valley’, one of the most powerful, lyrical, stirring, evocative, (insert flattering adjectives here) books of all time. Definite
ly the best book ever written about Wales. And, then… he continued the story of Huw Morgan, but transported him to Patagonia, for ‘Up Into The Singing Mountain’. This, basically, was a bad idea. A spectacularly bad idea. An idea so bad that it makes much of Alex Ferguson’s team selection so far this season seem good. Despite the presence of Huw and the Reverend Gruffydd, another great character from the first book, this moved at a pace about as lively as that of Laurent Blanc. Not content with this, he spun the idea out to another two books. ‘Down Where The Moon Is Small’ confounded my expectations by being somehow even worse than ‘…Singing Mountain’. ‘Green Green My Valley Now’, I haven’t even dared to try. One of my friends was prudent enough to not read any of his others after ‘How Green Was My Valley’, because she wanted her memories of the book to remain unsullied. She had more sense than I did, obviously.

7. Alexander Cordell – Higher than the other Welsh novelist because his great work, ‘Rape of the Fair Country’, isn’t quite as good as ‘How Green…’ Nevertheless, ‘Rape…’ is another incredibly powerful piece of writing. The Mortimer family’s struggle against the English ironmasters, if a touch overpatriotic, is in parts wonderfully driven, and in other parts absolutely hilarious. Sadly, the second book in the trilogy, ‘Hosts Of Rebecca’, is plain boring. Not quite as bad as ‘… Singing Mountain’, but the above two authors make a compelling case for Welshmen being banned from writing sequels. I jest. I think.

6. Charles Dickens – ‘A Christmas Carol’ is wonderful. But he really should’ve stuck to that sort of length. Anything which goes on for longer than 100 or so pages (‘Hard Times’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby
’ spring to mind) tends to be self indulgent whining about the terrible lives of poor children, who really needed someone who could do something for them. Whereas they had Dickens, who screwed them over just as much as their employers, by callously exploiting their plight in order to sell books.

5. William Shakespeare – ‘Cause people will attack me for putting Dickens, so why not go the whole hog? In ‘Macbeth’, Shakespeare wrote one of the greatest ever plays. In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Twelfth Night’, and ‘Troillus and Cressida’, he wrote complete dross. I mean, Romeo and Juliet’s biggest tragedy is that they took so long to die, and the petty in-fighting carried off Mercutio and Tybalt, the only two decent characters in the entire play.

4. Rudyard Kipling – His masterpiece, of course, being the wonderful war poems ‘The Barrack Room Ballads’, best known of which was ‘Gunga Din’. With an honourable mention going to ‘If’. But the novels… what’s so great about the Jungle Book? Or the Just So Stories? Possibly the only writer in the entire universe to make me care less about animals than Colin Dann. (That’s ‘to make me care less about animals than Colin Dann makes me care about animals’, not ‘to care less about animals than I do about Colin Dann’. Just to clear up any confusion.)

3. James Joyce – I like ‘Ulysses’. Admittedly, the original story by Homer was so fantastic that it’s hard to go wrong, but the concept of adapting the Odyssey to early 20th century Ireland was a brave one, wonderfully realised. But as for the rest… ‘The Dubliners’ are 12 of the worst short stories in the history of the English language. And ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, someone on here said, has probably only ever been read by Joy
ce himself. I beg to differ. After reading three or four pages, I’m convinced that JOYCE probably couldn’t read the entire book – I’m guessing there’s about fifty blank pages in there which no one will ever get to because the opening is so hard to read.

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – As I’ve said elsewhere on the site, ‘Love In The Time of Cholera’ is comfortably one of the best books ever written. Which makes the rest of his back catalogue even more disappointing. I struggled through ‘100 Years of Solitude’ in about six months. I actually restarted it ELEVEN times, because I was determined to finish it, thinking that a Booker prize winner by Marquez MUST be amazing. Yup. It’s amazingly confusing. It’s amazingly dull. But that’s it. The different generations of the family get hard to follow. Admittedly, that doesn’t really matter, because none of them do anything remotely interesting anyway. Also, his ‘Autumn of the Patriarch’ has a start which makes ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ seem accessible.

1. Me – one good review, (it’s on top 10 authors, if you’re interested.) And everything else is terrible. Oh well. If anyone IS still reading this far, glad you made it. Thank you, and good night.

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