The Ten Most Harmful Novels wow gold po c3

The Ten Most Harmful NovelsTheir harmful effects tended to be immediate, and then to fade out as other bad novels emerged. My list is both entirely subjective (I am a scarred victim of several of them) and in no particular order.Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. This at least has the virtue of being so widely read and discussed that we don't really need to read it ourselves. I tried a couple of times and bogged down badly. Salinger. Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and 60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper as we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway. As a kid I knew a few veterans of the International Brigades who'd actually fought in Spain instead of reporting on it, as Hemingway had. They called this novel "For Whom the Bull Throws." But Hemingway's style was fatally imitable, and I dropped my plagiarism of Salinger to plagiarize Hemingway instead. Politically, Hemingway didn't know what he was talking about, but it sounded cool to spend your days blowing up fascists and your nights cuddling in a sleeping bag with a Spanish babe.The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Then Chandler came along with his poached detective Philip Marlow, who took so many conks on the head that he wrote entirely too well, stacking up bizarre metaphors like so many poker chips in a high-stakes game of roulette in some lost casino of the soul. So to speak. Not until Elmore Leonard would crime fiction finally free itself of the creative-writing workshops.Love Story wow po, by Erich Segal. This one took me only 45 minutes to read, and half a second to fling across the room. Its sentimentality addled the wits of a whole generation in the early 1970s.USA, by John Dos Passos. I thought he was tough and gritty, but when I revisited this endless trilogy a few years ago, I found the narrative unreadable no matter how it was broken up. Once again, we learned that babble is good, and we ignored Truman Capote's dismissal: "That's not writing, that's typing." I didn't really recover until 1965, when I wrote my first novel. I was in the army, and the discipline must have made a difference: the novel was bad, but bad on its own terms and not on Kerouac's.Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. This hand-embroidered depiction of rape and slaughter is all too typical of current "literature." The more metaphors and similes you can throw in, the more the critics praise you. The effect is like a nice firm dog turd garnished with whipped cream and a cherry on top, and served on a fine porcelain plate with a silver spoon wow gold po.Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Nasty schoolboys are still a dismal metaphor for civilization, even if it's clangingly obvious to an audience genuinely scared of nuclear war. Sucks to your pretensions, Willy.The good but dangerous books are a different matter. They have a powerful effect on us, but only gross incompetents will be dumb enough to try to imitate them.Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre launched countless romance novels and family sagas, but the Brontës were at an extreme of talent; their successors have regressed to the mean, and then some. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings, which has spawned half a century's worth of tedious fantasy epics.Some novels are good but dangerous because they leave us dumbfounded gw2 gold. After Ulysses, what more can we say about the mythic echoes in modern life? Even Scott Fitzgerald couldn't come up with a novel that could match The Great Gatsby, so how could we? I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude every few years. Every time I find that the Maestro has broken still more of the rules we ordinary mortals must obey if we want to tell a story.The bad novels give us at least this consolation: If those nincompoops could break into print, and even sell millions of copies, then we nincompoops ought to be able to do at least as well.I can agree more about the ayn rand especially. I despise her work. The only people I ever met who enjoy her novels are neo-cons and arch invididualist libertarians. I read some of it and, like Norman Mailer, got bored with it.Reading something by Jerzy Kosinski, however, I quit when I realized it was quite possible to have my imagination poisoned. The same with John Irving; after reading his early novels with some interest, I got halfway through Garp and then Acheter Des PO, um, threw Garp across the room. I don like being manipulated.I not read Atlas Shrugged, but over the years I run into more than a few people who become absolutely sold on Rand and her worldview. These folks go through a phase where they seem to see everything from a Randian perspective and it very depressing. In terms of influence on writing, I can speak to that. People want positive reinforcement for being selfish and becoming more selfish and they get it with Rand.Regarding Kerouac and Salinger, and maybe Hemingway wow gold kopen, I don think as much of these books now (at age 41) as I did 20-25 years ago, but I not sure I call the books dangerous just because I have a more complicated and less celebratory view of them. a major substance abuser better known for his image than for his art?People need to know that Kerouac was about a lot more than OTR. He helped me care more about writing than most artists have, because he truly gave his life to it. If these books get young people excited about reading and writing, as they did me, I say that a positive thing.
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