<p>lololu–absolutely! I got about 30 pages into Secret Life of Bees, just to the “house full of spiritually uplifting black ladies just waiting to save the oppressed white girl” and stopped. I thought of that book every time someone told me I should read the Help. </p>
<p>It’s a weird trend, for sure.</p>
<p>lol, there is something of a publishing franchise out there of white ladies getting a life via their friendships with black ladies. Have also noticed something of a flurry of novels wherein the “repressed white lady” finds herself through a gay relationship. It’s all fine and well-meaning and can certainly be fine literature but sometimes I feel as if the writer and the editor are instructing me. I don’t want to be instructed when I reach for fiction. I want to be transported and transfixed . . .</p>
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<p>My youngest daughter hates this book. She’s actually pretty funny though when you get her started about it: “Who names a main character ‘swimming pool’ - for goodness sake?” Most of her comments about the book fall into spoiler territory, so I won’t mention them.</p>
<p>She hated Catcher in the Rye and suffered through Edith Wharton’s Summer. </p>
<p>She came home from her SAT saying that she just knew one of the reading passages came from something by Zora Neale Hurston - and that distracted her. Zora Neale Hurston doesn’t fall in a favorites category. </p>
<p>She always makes us laugh when she bumps up against one of these type books because she has so little patience with them. (In Summer the girl’s hat blows off and then next thing you know girl’s pregnant. My daughter’s comment’s: “Well, missed that one completely. I didn’t know you can get pregnant if your hat blows off - good thing I don’t wear hats.”)</p>
<p>Truly though she loves to read - just particular about her books. Her older sister on the other hand loves the type of book the younger one verbally skewers. Makes for some interesting discussion.</p>
<p>OMG you are dissing some of my favorite authors!!! Faukner? Please - the Snopes trilogy is better than any tv sitcom. Edith Wharton? Custom of the Country is riveting… really! I won’t even talk about how hysterically funny my family finds Fielding and Richardson. And then there is poor misunderstood and unappreciated Marcel:</p>
<p>To all of you who gave up on Proust’s* In Search of Lost Time*: maybe you want to try again? IMHO the writing does get easier as you get used to his style. As you probably already know, it was rejected by a couple of publishers who also just couldn’t make it beyond the introductory passage. And you also know the very looong description of the child unable to sleep and longing for Mama (the one the publisher couldn’t get through) is one of the major themes of the whole book… the narrator has this experience over and over. This is one of my absolute favorite books of all time and I just finished reading it straight through for the third time, in translation since my French is, at best, adequate only for restaurants. I am definitely not a scholar and don’t grasp half of what Proust is up to. But here is the thing: once you finally get to the end, you immediately see all the patterns and think, “wow, I have to start over… now I get it. This is amazing.” And if you are anything like me, you weep and weep and then have certain scenes imprinted on your brain forever. It is frequently compared to a piece of music. I don’t understand anything about music but maybe someone on this board could explain how the book’s structure compares to a musical composition. It does seem to me a good way to approach reading it. There is an excellent, very short Cambridge guide to the book… sort of like grown-up Cliff Notes but with lots of excellent bibliography. </p>
<p>I understand Joyce’s importance, but don’t much care for him and can imagine a time when he isn’t read. Proust, however, I really believe has written a timeless masterpiece.</p>
<p>Franzen is overrated imho. Channeling Updike maybe? It’s been done and done better.</p>
<p>I went to college liking Faulkner and in my first conference with my English professor freshman year, he recommended that I read “Sanctuary” and use this as the subject for my first college paper. For those who don’t like the “standard” Faulkner, give that one a try.</p>
<p>“Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond. It seems like an interesting topic. But for me it’s one of those books that you just can’t pick up once you put it down. I think I’ve started again and read the first two or three chapters about three times now.</p>
<p>Nora Roberts - my friends’ “guilty pleasure”, but I’d rather read cereal boxes.</p>
<p>Great Expectations - how is it that I hated that and loved Tale of Two Cities?</p>
<p>Chicken Soup for the Soul - it sure didn’t help MY soul! Made me feel utterly inadequate and hopeless. Not to mention bored. </p>
<p>Lord of the Flies - I read it in middle school, and that book scared me more than anything by Stephen King. I guess you can tell there’s not much of the anarchist in me.</p>
<p>What a beautiful post about Proust, alh! Thanks for that. I’ve only read the easy introductory section, “Combray” – read it in French, for a college class. </p>
<p>Now I am considering taking a more ambitious Proust plunge one of these days…in English!</p>
<p>What I like best about this thread is people’s explanations of why they love literature that many find difficult.</p>
<p>“Lord of the Flies” is a book I liked much, much better when I reread it as an adult.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I liked “A High Wind in Jamaica” (also about children in extreme circumstances) as a young adult and didn’t like it one bit when I reread it after I became a mom.</p>
<p>Some books I loved as a child, and fondly remembered, didn’t stand up so well when I tried reading them to my kids. Little Women was not as good as I’d remembered. Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates was downright awful.</p>
<p>I loved Black Beauty and Secret Garden when I was young. When I reread them as an adult, I was amazed at how floridly emotional they are!</p>
<p>Not that I didn’t still like them…I was just surprised about the fact that I hadn’t been able to discern certain things about them when I was a child.</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM - Thanks! I hope you love it.</p>
<p>There are two books my friends are really tired of hearing about: Remembrance of Things Past and The Help. I want to say just one more thing about Proust and then I promise to shut up. :)</p>
<p>I think it was Edmund White who wrote in Proust that the writer uses a series of pictures (like those in the magic lantern of his childhood, described in the interminable opening “scene” that is so off-putting) to tell us about his characters. This is one of the reasons why the book is fascinating to me. And why it seems to me almost impossible to appreciate till you have already finished it. The more you “see” someone, the more you understand them. First impressions can be deceiving and usually are. A social climbing, middle-class barrister’s wife, vacationing at the seaside, mistakes a princess for a prostitute. A haughty member of the most exclusive society guards a series of secrets which gradually unfold through hundreds (thousands?) of pages. Of course, when you are describing people over the course of decades there is a change in not only their character but their social situation. It is a very sexy book. Everyone falls in love with someone “who is not their type” with tragic and/or comic results. Parts are laugh out loud funny. And parts are the saddest thing I have ever read. </p>
<p>The Help is about when and where I am from. It is an excellent description of that world from the perspective of a young middle class white woman. </p>
<p>[Book</a> Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett | California Literary Review](<a href=“http://calitreview.com/2526]Book”>http://calitreview.com/2526)</p>
<p><a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost;
<p>This pretty much sums up my thoughts, though I believe a lot more has been written about this issue of voice in the novel. </p>
<p>Mary13 hosted a thread about this book last year. Lots of people don’t see in it what I do.</p>
<p>Someone asked about the* Metamorphosis* and I kept thinking “Ovid?” but then guessed you must mean Kafka, who I, too, find rather impenetrable and really not worth the effort once I was over 30.</p>
<p>but if someone out there loves Kafka like I love Proust, I am definitely giving it another try. :)</p>
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<p>I read your post to my son who loves both Proust and classical music. He says he’d compare Proust to Wagner because there are lots of motifs in his music as opposed to a strict melody and that with both Wagner and Proust you have to wade through a lot to get through the moments of real beauty that glimmer – the little truths about how humans act, etc.</p>
<p>Disagree mimk6 - I for one feel that 100% of Wagner is all real beauty :)</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>Yeah, DS would agree with that I think. I think he meant that there are sections that are more of an “Ah” than others, which is how I experienced the Wagner operas I’ve attended. It is all beautiful, but then suddenly a certain strain would grab me.</p>
<p>I loved G,G and Steel. But then was disappointed in Collapse. Seemed more ideological and was very repetitive, using the same examples in multiple chapters.</p>
<p>Back in the 80’s I picked up Lake Wobegon Days because the reviewers were drooling over it. Ugh.</p>
<p>Lol not Ovid. I love his works. Especially with the absence of giant bugs. </p>
<p>Sent from my LG-P509 using CC App</p>
<p>Regarding Catcher in the Rye –</p>
<p>Yes, Holden is whiney and self-absorbed. But when the book came out, for him to say “outloud” (in the narrative) what people had been thinking and feeling but weren’t allowed to say was radical. Nowadays people think and say those things so it’s not so dramatic. So we don’t value the book as much as it was valued when it first came out.</p>
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<p>You were still better off than I. I tried to puddle through “Traveling with pomegranates”</p>
<p>VH–and the other thing overlooked about Holden, though someone mentioned it up-thread, is that he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress over the death of his little brother from leukemia.</p>
<p>that might make most young people sound a little “whiny.” Or maybe most of us were made of stronger stuff.</p>