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<p>Two problems – the German doesn’t translate to English very well (at least I hope that’s why it doesn’t flow) and I felt like Hesse was using “theme” to beat me over the head. Theme and meaning are just fine, but it helps if they are wrapped in a story that the reader cares about. This is a bigger problem in movies than in novels, where a “theme” movie dies without an interesting story to tell, but even novels benefit from a plot.</p>
<p>WashDad doesn’t like Siddartha because it’s kind of a chick book. TOC (tongue in cheek).</p>
<p>And, seminal works may be hard to pinpoint. I mean, I’m no expert in India literature but would you say that the Ramayana is more seminal than R.K. Narayan for moden India?</p>
<p>I’ve made a lot of mostly lower income, underprepared, various nationality/ethncity college students read Siddhartha, and they almost all dislike it less than many other books I have made students read.;)</p>
<p>For what that’s worth…</p>
<p>I like House of the Spirits more than 100 Years, too. I think Allende is as entitled to write magic realism as is Garcia Marquez, and I think the political angle (and her close real-life relationship to it) adds another dimension.</p>
<p>Or maybe it’s also because it’s a chick book.</p>
<p>( my students, if they read it 
, often really, really like that book.)</p>
<p>A German friend of mine loves the Hesse’s prose style in Siddhartha so I’ve always meant to read it in German, but have yet to get around to it. I read *The Glass Bead Game <a href=“in%20translation”>/I</a> when I was 19 and loved it then, but wonder if I would like it as well now.</p>
<p>I don’t want to belabor the 100 Years vs. House of the Spirits lit-fight, but “magical realism” as we know it was essentially invented by Garcia Marquez. (The phrase actually dates back to an essay by Alejo Carpentier in 1949. But I don’t think what Carpentier meant by it, or what Carpentier himself did, is the same thing as what GGM did.) A few years ago, in the middle of a discussion about 100 Years, some students asked me to define “magical realism,” and my first cut at an answer was, in all semi-seriousness, “something that resembles 100 Years of Solitude.”</p>
<p>Also, there is a huge amount of political content to 100 Years of Solitude, and GGM was closely related to it, too. The character of Col. Aureliano Buendia bears a lot of similarity to his maternal grandfather, who raised GGM through the age of 8, and who was involved in numerous political controversies and civil wars along Colombia’s Caribbean coast. We just aren’t as familiar with that background as we are with the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.</p>
<p>You’re more well-versed on SA lit than I am, but I don’t think someone “owns” a technique even though they’re an early user of it.</p>
<p>The political becomes interesting to me on a different level in House of the Spirits because, in a way, it implicates me.</p>
<p>And, I just like the book an awful lot.</p>
<p>To be clear, I really like and admire both books; I just prefer Allende if I have to make a choice.</p>
<p>I am wondering whether a preference for Marquez or Allende could be gender-related. At the risk of being mislabeled, I can’t help but think that a male reader could better identify with a character who while facing the firing squad remembers his first signt of ice. I suspect this is the same reason why my D is less enthusastic about Bolano than me. Although a small sampling, my four female friends who had read Bolano thought he was good but would not have gone out their way to read more of him.</p>
<p>There’s no question that part of Allende’s popularity reflects a strong desire on the part of just about everyone interested in Latin American literature that there be some great female authors, and (unfortunately) they are a little hard to find. There are some candidates I’ve never gotten around to (Laura Restrepo, Diamela Eltit). But I haven’t found anyone I like more than Allende, nor have I found anyone I like anywhere near as much as the brand-name men. A number of excellent Chicana and Puerto Rican women authors live in the U.S. and write in English. (As does Allende, now, by the way.)</p>
<p>Padad: I guess that doesn’t surprise me. I fell in love with The Savage Detectives about four years ago, but it’s definitely a novel about boys, and the women in it are somewhat cartoonish and unsympathetic. (Actually, everyone in it is somewhat cartoonish and unsympathetic.)</p>
<p>Is well read synonymous with bored to tears? With the exception of WashDad’s list in post #17, and The Grapes of Wrath, I can not imagine reading hardly any of the books that have been mentioned. I’m not sure who has suffered more, the author and subject of many of the books, or the person who has to read them. </p>
<p>My compliments though to those of you who can read and appreciate these enlightening books. I wish I could enjoy them, but they just don’t work for me.</p>
<p>Tuition Dad. Do you like to talk about cellphone plans? Spend hours with your new iPhone? Thrill to read a command line? Heck, I work with guys who read BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance only - when they aren’t playing with tech gadgets. Gotta be room for all sorts.</p>
<p>Add Louise Erdrich, Beet Queen. I am sure you would hate that one:).</p>
<p>To Alumother and those who enjoy this stuff:</p>
<p>One of my favorite scenes in junk literature occurs in David Lodge’s first book, called (I think) Changing Places. It takes place at an English department dinner party at Berkeley in the early 70s. Everyone plays a game, in which you name a book you haven’t read, and you get points based on how many other people there HAVE read it. So, effectively, you win by admitting that you haven’t read something everyone has read, and you lose if you pick a book no one has really read. One of the characters – a hyper-competitive junior faculty member – wins by falsely claiming not to have read Hamlet, but of course he’s denied tenure the next day because no one can see recommending tenure for someone who never read Hamlet.</p>
<p>Alumother – Sorry I don’t have an iPhone or many other new tech gadgets, we are saving up our money for tuition! With one in college and another one going in another year, you know how it is.</p>
<p>Actually, I do get in a fair amount of reading but I suppose it is more for escape than for enlightenment. Mostly, I read a lot of mysteries these days, and I used to love Robert Ludlum type thrillers.</p>
<p>I do think that reading something is important. I feel like I have learned something from almost every book I have read, I’m just not sure that what I learned is always useful.</p>
<p>JHS – I love the term “junk literature”, that’s my kind of book!</p>
<p>I love David Lodge’s books, though I don’t suppose they figure high on a list of “must read in order to be considered well-read.”
Tuition Dad might enjoy the scene in Nice Work in which the feminist post modern English Lit prof is in a car together with a retrograde macho factory owner and they pass an ad for zippers. She proceeds to give her interpretation of the real meaning of zippers. It’s hilarious.</p>
<p>In the house of my family of origin, the one dominated by a Harvard-educated English professor at Stanford, we used to call that kind of book “trashy novels.” And my mother loved them. Does anyone remember Georgette Heyer Regency romances? My mother and sister and I would sit in the sun room (not kidding that is what we called it I promise we were pretty normal just lived in big houses…) and make up plot lines and goof around inventing heroine names. Aramantha anyone?</p>
<p>Now I love murder mysteries. The pub series by Martha Grimes has always been a favorite. My problem now with most trashy novels is that I’ve read so many of them that the template overshadows the content and I get too bored too fast. Of course that is also true of the “highbrow” stuff. Hmm. Maybe it’s a good thing my son has introduced me to the NBA. I don’t know enough about it to get bored…</p>
<p>I don’t think I’ve ever read David Lodge. If you can’t buy him in a supermarket he won’t qualify as trash. Perhaps junk is just one step up from trash. And then there is “commercial”. And then somewhere, in some way I really can’t define, there is art. Some books are art. </p>
<p>And then of course there is required reading which is an entirely different issue.</p>
<p>I confess I never joined a book club. I love to read as much as I love to drink water. If I had to choose between being able to sleep and being able to read I might choose reading. But I find it very very difficult to discuss.</p>
<p>I also adore David Lodge, and as I am off to the library, I will have to pick up some to reread. I really like novels with an academia setting, and at the risk of going tangential, to Nice Work I will add Moo, by Jane Smiley, and Straight Man, by Richard Russo. I have to run, but maybe that should be another thread?</p>
<p>David Lodge is definitely not trash.</p>
<p>Alumother–at 14, I think I read and reread every Georgette Heyer book, introduced by my mother. Thoroughly enjoyable, though not too highbrow! Actually, her best did a fairly good Austen imitation.</p>
<p>And if you liked Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett was intoxicating. </p>
<p>So Tuition Dad, I think there’s absolutely room, and a need for reading that’s just plain delicious.</p>
<p>I would add Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series to the group of “junk literature” that I thoroughly enjoy.</p>
<p>Oh yes! Master and Commander and all its little friends! I only got up to #17. I think I gotta go finish the series. </p>
<p>And I don’t know. To me that series, in total, got out of the junk category and at least into the good commercial. Like I think they are way better than Alice Hoffman and her ilk. Not to offend anyone, my tastes are kind of weird I admit.</p>