Calculus. I liked my instructor though, so it was bearable.
I was so disdainful of my World History class (teacher was football coach) I kept in earplugs during the class. Not sure how I got through high school without my ass beaten at some point.
Algebra.
Murder-as-a-social-problem mysteries. Your alcoholic detectives are predictable and tiresome, Scandinavia and Germany!
Kids love disaster stories. No one has to go to school the day after a tsunami.
Intro Drawing. I wanted to learn how to fucking draw shit that looked like the thing I was trying to draw. Instead I got a bunch of bullshit about process and similar crap. The class was required for art majors but since anybody majoring in art already knows how to draw pretty damn well it was full of seniors who'd put it off to the last semester when they needed to work on their thesis.
The class was about 10 art majors phoning it in and three non majors just hating every minute of the tedious bullshit. Why can't you give feedback like "if this line were thicker and you shaded more over here it would improve the illusion of depth?" Instead I got stupid bollox about context, for example. Having an art history take on my scribbles was not even close to what I was looking for, I just wanted to be able to draw fucking pictures, which is what the damn catalog said was the content of the course. It still pisses me off all these years later and has left me with kind of a bitterness towards art history.
1) Drafting. I was forced to take it because a scheduling conflict meant that my preferred class wasn't available. I was (and am) terrible at it, and it was incredibly painful.
GCSE English, definitely. I will always remember the horror I felt when the teacher announced at the end of the year "and if you carry on English to A-level, we'll do the other ten books of Paradise Lost!"
That was the instant at which I decided to drop English forever. The set texts just seemed to have been picked for minimum interest. Paradise Lost, a couple of minor Shakespeare comedies, endless amounts of Ted Hughes...
Biology. I could never get the experiments to work and the science, to the extent we were taught it at GCSE, was all too messy compared to physics and chemistry. It would be art, because I have zero coordination, but I barely did that so it wasn't salient enough to really dislike.
Ironically, kind of, I spend more time dilletanting about biology than physics, because the maths is too hard in the latter.
Paradise Lost is amazing you heathen.
What was called IIRC 'design and technology'. Which was in fact a mixture of technical drawing, random content knowledge of which I remember nothing, and random stupid handicraft projects like making chairs out of drinking straws. Most classes were allotted to working on projects which of course I just guiltily procrastinated on until the last second, when I turned in something even shittier than my native manual ineptitude made inevitable. Years later I realized that the mark distribution was such that I could have just not done the projects and passed by just practicing the drawing more for tests. I'm still filled with self-loathing for that last part.
1)This fucking expository writing course with an awful professor who a) was too old to give a shit and b) sliding into opinionated senility. Not in an absent-minded way, but a aggravating, Dunning-Krueger way.
2)Shakespeare in general. Or maybe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Evolution's just another word for nothing left to lose.
Art! Good lord I was terrible at art. However this was compensated for by the classroom, which was huge and spacious and remote, permitting the wasting of time in transit; and the teacher, who was an acerbic Englishman eventually fired for blatant alcoholism.
If you can't keep it hidden, you've gone too far in your alcoholism.
What books are most overrated?
The Koran. I can't answer for its quality in Arabic, but in translation it's just this rambling mess. The Bible is a bit of an anthology, but at least each particular book tends to have a decent structure, and some actually work as a single story (the Gospels, Jonah, Job, Exodus). The Koran is all over the place.
The most overrated book is The Kite Runner.
Paradise Lost is amazing you heathen.
Biology is terrific you clod.
Maybe I'll read the wikipedia plot summary of "Paradise Lost" to see who is right here.
The most over-rated book in my opinion is The Great Gatsby. Holy hell do I hate that book. And I had to read it like ten thousand times, starting in high school and continuing on through graduate school. Three separate times in graduate school!
I broke up with a professor in graduate school who really liked me over that book.
But Paradise Lost rocks, yeah.
(The Great Gatsby would have been much better if Fitzgerald had just admitted he was gay and written the book he wanted to write, which was how much Nick loved Tom.)
It seems interesting enough, but maybe you have to read the actual thing to see why people still read it after 350 years.
20: Thanks. Now I feel better about never bothering to read it.
Besides, if you want to write great American literature where everybody dies at the end, you need to use a sled crash instead of a car wreck.
16: After hearing some scholar of Islam or other rambling about how the Koran was the apotheosis of Arabic poetry and prose I picked up a copy and... Holy shit! It's no wonder Imams can't agree on anything. I gather it was assembled after the fact from people writing down what they remembered the prophet to have said, but still, you'd think God could have run the thing past an editor.
(The Great Gatsby would have been much better if Fitzgerald had just admitted he was gay and written the book he wanted to write, which was how much Nick loved Tom.)
You know I wish that I was Jesse's Tom's girl! I play along with the charade.
Was Tom or Nick the one played by DiCaprio?
Gatsby seconded. I don't think it's bad, just vastly overrated. And I love Shakespeare, but think the huge majority of his plays are shit.
27: yeah; ISTR noting that most people who say "well, it's hardly Shakespeare is it?" about some piece of contemporary culture probably haven't read or seen a lot of Shakespeare. Yes, "A Game of Thrones" is nowhere near the level of "Henry V" or "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar"; but on the other hand, have you ever seen "Pericles, Prince of Tyre"?
I'm waiting for Kenneth Branagh to make it a movie.
I hated nearly all of my math classes from elementary school through late H.S., even though I now use a fair bit of physics-y math in my research. I suspect it's because the classes were mostly taught by football coaches who didn't really understand the material themselves.
Yes the Koran is the most boring thing ever. It was also a lot more explicitly anti-Jewish than I was expecting. (Well, not so different from Old Testament prophecy, except that there aren't any Ammonites anymore.)
Gatsby is the greatest and you can all go to hell.
Prolific artists who mostly make crap but occasionally make Macbeth are a-OK with me. Do people really overrate bad Shakespeare plays? I've never heard anyone talk up "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." (That said, I do have a soft spot in my heart for "The Winter's Tale.")
Is that the one with Fievel the mouse?
32.3: Right. Shakespeare wouldn't be Shakespeare if "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" had been the top of his game.
not so different from Old Testament prophecy, except that there aren't any Ammonites anymore.)
Nor, alas, Trilobites.
The Great Gatsby, like Hamlet, Casablanca, and the first act of The Princess Bride, always surprised me by the sheer density of memorable quotes. It gets me every time when I watch Casablanca and consecutive lines are "Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life" followed by "We'll always have Paris." I was just looking through quotes from Gatsby to remind myself of how wrong you all are, and discovered that the following two of my favorite lines are immediately back-to-back:
"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."
I was just complaining at how annoying philosophy 'problems' are. They're difficult questions set in a fake, but horrifying, framework that somehow have a correct answer that changes depending on the norms of the times. And then your prof gets mad when you argue the assumptions of the questions. Anyway, I was always too annoyed by philosophy to take a course in it.
Parasitology was my least favourite class. I loved the gross pictures and the weirdness, and I was fine with all the life cycle memorization. But the prof took off marks for spelling - like marking the whole essay question wrong if you spelled the Latin name of the parasite wrong. I have never been able to spell or remember how to spell even if I study (and if I could never hear the 'but you read so much!' again that'd be great - reading and writing are totally different skills and I have no idea how/why people think they're connected). There was a strike at the end of the year so I postponed the parasitology exam, studied the spellings for an extra month with no other classes, and barely passed. She couldn't even have had a list of all the parasites for me to pick from? AAARgh. Still mad.
Overrated books - Outlander and Wicked. Horrible, both of them. And, because I am a horrible person, my opinion of my friends who like either goes way down when I find out.
Come to think, Game of Thrones isn't that far off Titus Andronicus.
Come to think of it, you all probably think Casablanca is overrated too, because you're heartless cynics who can't love.
I kind of liked Outlander (I mean, trash, but sort of fun trash) until I hit the point where the writer was enjoying the extended rape/torture scene too much.
Moby, get the Anton Lesser audiobook version of Paradise Lost. Full, not abridged.
I've never liked a language class. Learning languages is tedious and boring and makes me feel like a stupid person -- all sorts of people learn additional languages, so I have no excuse for being monolingual.
I took Latin in college, because medieval studies major, cut a lot of classes, and barely passed.
I was just complaining at how annoying philosophy 'problems' are. They're difficult questions set in a fake, but horrifying, framework that somehow have a correct answer that changes depending on the norms of the times. And then your prof gets mad when you argue the assumptions of the questions. Anyway, I was always too annoyed by philosophy to take a course in it.
AIKIHSB, I was really, really irritated by my intro to philosophy course, so the point that I'm still angry 20+ years later about it. It was so pointless and so self-indulgent and SO full of blind spots, both in the content of the readings we had to do and in the class discussion about them.
I remain perplexed that so many people (including close friends) who I love and respect found philosophy to be so stimulating and inspiring. I just found it infuriatingly sexist and wildly, wildly impractical.
What was your least favorite class (due to content, not instructor)
I can't be the first person to note that disaggregating perception like this is not possible. I might be able to guess which classes I'd have liked better if I had a better teacher, or which might have seemed uninteresting if not for a good teacher. But it would be a guess at best.
Casablanca sucks.
32.3: Nobody talks up Pericles, but plenty talk up eg. Twelfth Night, which I think also sucks.
45: Heretic. Casablanca and Twelfth Night are both awesome.
I'll allow that Gatsby is probably overrated, but it's still good.
Nor, alas, Trilobites.
Because they're unclean, obvs.
Casablanca is great. But it probably is overrated too. Or at least was when I was growing up. It was pretty universally in critics' top 10 lists, and at or near the top of them, and I'm not sure I'd go that far (especially not now with 25 intervening years' worth of movies.
37.2 makes me very sad because parasitology fascinated me and I was lucky enough to have some really good teachers, so I feel hydro really missed out.
I think Nineteen Eighty-Four is overrated. The good bits are a rehash of "Darkness at Noon", though both, of course, massively underestimate the horror of living under Stalinism, and for every memorable bit of actual invention (the Thought Police, Newspeak) there is something that is just plain silly or embarrassing (the Floating Fortresses, the helicopters used to peek in through people's windows, the Anti-Sex League, the specially built rat-torture apparatus, "the proles").
43 reminds me of a thread at Crooked Timber a long time ago about trolley car problems. I was struck by how the pro-trolley car set got really upset when people started criticizing them as not-all-that-clever-really.
I hadn't realized that there were people who identified that strongly with hypothetical problems about trolley's running over fat men.
I can't be the first person to note that disaggregating perception like this is not possible.
At school you can, surely, because you get taught the same subject year after year, but with different teachers. So I disliked history classes aged 13, but I liked them age 14, because I had a terrible history teacher one year and a good one the next.
50 is very true. I intrinsically detest accounting, but enjoyed it quite a lot due to a very good teacher. Who also read from Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, and gave us an introductory class on classical music.
50: that is just you guessing about a counterfactual scenario.
Worst class ever was US Foreign policy which I took at the university while I was still in HS. The instructor and his pet spent the whole damn quarter making tedious Kissinger jokes.
This makes me grumpy enough that I'm going to say that nearly all literature is overrated, because people tend to make inflated claims about its aesthetic and pedagogical virtues. Near-universal inflation. It's part of how we talk about books. There is a very, very short list of books where I think "if you don't like this, it's your problem," and also a short list for which I think "I don't like this, but that's my problem."
53 is hilarious. "So Kissinger went to clown college..."
48: I think Nineteen Eighty-Four is overrated.
I think it really shouldn't be taught in American schools the way it is -- completely devoid of historical context. It's a high school standard book, and it was taught to me and then to my kids as a political horror story without any connection to specific politics of the time or the circumstances of life in the UK in WW II.
At which point it's kind of scary, but most of what's going on is incomprehensible.
I kind of like trolley car problems for probing people's moral intuitions, just like any other fakey-ass scenarios where lots of important variables are controlled in order to get at the variables of interest. It's obsessing over them that gets a little silly.
I would have taken philosophy courses for my distribution requirements except I was lucky enough to discover before I signed up for anything that every fucking phil seminar always has a shouty prick whose only interest is in waving his giant metaphorical penis around. This depressed me. Since then I've seen the shouty pricks all go on to become professors of philosophy. I don't know if my experience generalizes, but the shouty prick problem seemed pretty robust at Re/ed.
it's kind of scary, but most of what's going on is incomprehensible.
Sort of like 2016.
24. One problem the Koran has is that the chapters are arranged in size order, because no one could agree on when the Prophet said this or that. Size of chapters was at least something utterly objective.
The Great Gatsby is great! Maybe even yuge! A lot of Russian novels are overrated, Anna Karenina being exhibit A.
I hated statistics, because the professor was just going through the motions. I also hated HS World History, which I had to take due to a scheduling conflict. I and a friend made life hell for the teacher, because we already knew everything in the course, and could correct her when she got it wrong (as she often did). I'm surprised she didn't kill us or at least flunk us. (Teenage boys, are they monsters? Why, yes!)
One problem the Koran has is that the chapters are arranged in size order
A good R.S.M. solution. "Right, fall in the suras! Tallest on the right, shortest on the left!"
The way to learn statistics is to have somebody pay you to do statistics until you get reasonably good at it and then take classes.
AIHMB, War and Peace is shit.
56. I think "Brave New World" is overrated. I rather like "1984." If you can stomach Alan Moore, you could read his third(?) "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" graphic novel, which is a mashup of "1984," the James Bond novels, and various other Brit pop culture from the 50's and 60's. It's also pretty NSFW, as I recall. (In HS we had to get parental permission to read "1984" and "Brave New World.")
War and a Bit More War is too repetitive.
I will admit BNW is funnier than 1984.
A lot of Russian novels are overrated, Anna Karenina being exhibit A.
Oh wait, yep, that's the most overrated book. For me. But what is the book that disappoints the largest number of readers, who expected more out of it? Or -- a book which is perhaps not so widely read (not e.g. assigned in every high school in the Anglophone world), but whose readers are most disappointed on average?
I'm not sure Shakespeare's collected works are the right answer to the first question, but they are probably at the right scale. Both J Franzen and Toni Morrison seem to have unusually vocal haters, but that's just in the U.S.
I also dislike 1984. Road to Wigan Pier is great, if you stop halfway through it.
That's true of most of Orwell, though.
Also most of Tolstoy. Jesus, did he need an editor.
68 is probably wrong, but nobody is going to watch Carrot Top to check.
But what is the book that disappoints the largest number of readers, who expected more out of it?
This seems like something you could probably deduce from the stocks of second-hand bookshops. I am guessing "A Brief History of Time" - a huge number of copies were bought, and virtually none of them finished, because I suppose their readers expected something more, or at least more easy to understand.
71:
Although I would have thought that the sort of person who would buy A Brief History of Time and fail to get through it would nevertheless put it on their bookshelves. Either to look smart to visitors or to fool themselves into thinking that they would eventually get back to it.
That's what I did with War and Peace.
Yes, true. But even if it doesn't show up in bookshops I bet it is still the most disappointing book of recent history.
I don't remember where I saw it, but there's also the interesting challenge of naming the most accurately rated cultural artifacts: works whose generally accepted stature is exactly what it deserves to be. I wish I could remember the example... a Monkees album?
It is impossible to overrate Anna Karenina
1) Not a class but a subject. Trig. I could factor and integrate and differentiate and do proofs but always had brainlock on the transcendentals
2) Overated. Solzhenitsyn (huh, sp right on first try) after Ivan Denisovich. Capital is like Wealth of Nations, there are hundreds of more recent books that are more useful in the field. Dreams of My Father. BNW better than 1984 or AF. Genealogy of Morals. Bell Jar.
3) NA
75: The Monkees reunion album, probably.
High school English lit was pretty miserable--enough that I avoiding AP English, which I otherwise tracked for. I suspect the big problem was that most books were read once, when the chapter was assigned. It would have been better to have people read/skim the book, then go through the book in detail, but teachers never suggested it. Which led to trying to talk about reincorporation or "developing themes" when you're 25% of the way through and don't know where it's going.
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was the only assigned book where I just skipped 60 or 80 pages in the middle. Nothing was going on; normally I'd just skim, but I couldn't bring myself to do even that.
75: I think the example was the Beatles -- that they are exactly neither over or underrated.
Society at large or something. I just remember reading the same thing Lurid is talking about.
I also find it pretty hard to judge a class on content independent of the instructor. If I think through every class I ever hated, it was almost never because of the subject matter. I'm not sure I can even imagine an inherently hatable subject. Statistics comes pretty close as a subject for a class; once you get past the basics of distributions and descriptive statistics, the rest is deathly boring... until you have some problem that can actually be addressed by inferential statistics at which point it becomes super interesting. I didn't exactly hate algebra, but I often found it hard, and on those occasions when I had a breakthrough and something felt easy, the gratification of solving the problems still didn't seem commensurate with the effort.
Seeing 1984 on somebody's overrated list makes me a little sad as it was not only a favourite of mine but led me to read a ton of Orwell's non-fiction which in turn prompted a general interest in pre-war European history and culture that made me a more well-read and cultured person than I probably ever would have gotten to be on my own.
I know it's easy pickin's in this crowd, but some people really do think highly of the Tolkien books which are obviously rubbish as literature but to my eye over-rated even as yarns. I tried, at three different points in my life, to make it through the LOTR trilogy and each time gave up at some point in the middle one when I realised I simply didn't care what happened to any of the characters. For real literature, I guess I could go with The Magic Mountain, which I also gave up on halfway through. A Separate Peace was one from school days that I remember everyone but me seemed to like but I can't remember it well enough to declare it overrated versus just not my cuppa tea. Same with Gatsby. Steinbeck I find not overrated but so depressing I'd never willingly read any again.
Heh, I recall two very popular books -- The Bridges of Madison County and The Celestine Prophecy -- that I read on recommendation of people I respected and found so awful that it changed my relationships with the recommenders. The Madison County person went on to become an English teacher, ffs.
In one of his essays about teaching Robt. Frost suggests that there's never time nor the right frame of mind to actually read books for class. He called it scansion, marking out for yourself the books you's like to come back and read sometime.
He was talking about college, Dartmouth was where he taught, but it applies even more to HS. I know I never finished a book for class in HS, usually did in College and certainly didn't in Grad School. But I have often gone back and read them at some other time, so it's working for me.
The Bridges of Madison County was sort of the 50 Shades of Grey of the 90s. Except without all the sex (maybe there was some. I never read it).
True story: A woman I went to high school with say the Bridges movie and complained that the tractor in the movie was a model from after the time when the movie was set.
I guess I could go with The Magic Mountain
My other choice! Although amazingly, I think it's better than Anna Karenina. I'm not sure if this can be justified by anything but the comparison of my desire to punch Tolstoy in the face for most of AK, vs. pure tedium and mild pervasive disgust throughout MM. Reading Anna Karenina made me a worse human being.
85:
That's great. Sort of thing that ruins it for you if nothing else does is seeing anachronisms like that. Because they're trying to put something over on you as if you wouldn't notice.
85: So comparing Bridges with 50 Shades we've got 1) less sex and 2) more tractors.
My least favorite class was AI Programming, because the Prolog language was so different from anything else I'd learned, and I never got my tic-tac-toe project to consistently work right.
I don't know if it had less sex, but certainly less of the kind of sex that requires restraints and tools.
83: When I went to college, I AP'd out of my intro lit requirements and ended up never having to read a single novel for class after high school (even though, just as you say, I often didn't complete much less enjoy the assigned reading in HS). Yet, especially in my freshman and sophomore college years, I read literature so voraciously that I commonly skipped my actual classes to sit in my dorm and read the kind of stuff that my friends were being forced to read. I still remember that time with a golden haze; I've never enjoyed reading fiction so much ever since.
85 is a winning story. There are also hooded crows in Cold Mountain, because they shot it in Romania or something. (I don't think anyone rates that film highly, but I don't remember why the hell I went to see it -- it was completely insufferable.)
One of the best things about getting old is forgetting all the books and classes that didn't measure up.
I did just actually write in an email to a friend that I could 'honestly say that I hate [particular bureaucrat] more than any living human.' Fire's not completely out.
What was your least favorite class (due to content, not instructor)
I don't really know whether the classes I hated were awful because of their content or their instructor. I hated chemistry for example, and if you asked me at the time I would have said I liked the teacher but loathed the subject matter. But surely I would have enjoyed chemistry more had it made more sense, and surely it would have made more sense if my instructor, who was personally likable and very sweet, wasn't also a crazy person who would regularly spend half the class period weeping over her deceased pets or gossiping about her former students.
I hated early Modern English literature. Reading The Faerie Queen was such a terrible experience that I can't depersonalize it enough to judge whether it was overrated or not. God I loathed that book.
I enjoyed reading Anna Karenina and War and Peace but for sure Tolstoy is way overrated. Maybe there's something magical about his use of language in the original Russian, but in English, like delagar says above, some heavy editing would have been welcome.
95: For me it's really the bloodcurdling misanthropy and self-aggrandizement. Tolstoy makes Bataille seem huggable and (literally) makes Nietzsche seem modest.
It's possible that 50 Shades of Grey is also magical when translated into Russian. This is the A Fish Called Wanda theory of literature.
I will admit, as my top embarrassed-to-like-book, Madison County would qualify.
Is there a category for over-underrated? I mean romance novels as a genre have to be the most consistently underrated. And yet they are among the top selling books (and of course I have a fondness for at least some of them).
War and Peace is fucking amazing, you monsters. You're the reason Trump won.
I was OK with War and Peace until the last 50 pages or so, when Tolstoy went into a rambling lecture about his personal philosophy of this, that, and everything else.
I liked War and Peace a great deal when I read it, but after recent Tolstoy experiences I'm afraid to revisit it and find that it was equally irritating. I remain sentimentally fond of Ivan Illyich... wait, no, I haven't revisited that one recently either.
There's not a significant chance that the new regime will be handing out oodles of money to study Russian literature and culture, is there? Sigh. Poison gifts if any, but I can dream.
There's an episode of Cheers where Sam makes a heroic effort to read War and Peace in order to impress Diane.
When he finally finishes the book, he brings it up in conversation with Diane and Frasier and they immediately dismiss it as one of the most overrated books in history, and change the subject.
I liked the one where Frasier read A Tale of Two Cities to the bar.
I got tricked into seeing The Bridges Of Madison County when I was in my I'll-watch-pretty-much-anything-Eastwood-directs phase, by the ridiculously overpositive reviews. But I knew going into the movie that the book wasn't particularly rated.
I'm very fond of War and Peace because it got me through one a terrible breakup. But for the same reason I can't pretend to have a valid objective opinion about it.
I've had a broken heart, but never a Russian novel-grade broken heart.
102: I remember that episode. "There's a movie?"
Q1: Statistics. Because I'm not mathy and I'm not Moby.
Q2: The US Constitution. Turns out it's not worth the parchment it was written on.
I first read War and Peace when I was 13 and we were studying Russia, and I was too young and didn't really love it or hate it. The printing I read then came in 4 volumes (one for each book). When I read it again with the broken heart I was 22, and I was expecting 4 volumes again. But that printing only had two volumes (which I didn't notice because they had more than one copy in the library). I think this probably makes me the unique person in history to be surprised and disappointed that War and Peace was so short.
"It's possible that 50 Shades of Grey is also magical when translated into Russian. This is the A Fish Called Wanda theory of literature."
Apparently Edgar Allan Poe's poetry is more highly regarded in French translation than in English because in English his poems have a sing-song-y rhythm that is removed when translated into French.
"There's an episode of Cheers where Sam makes a heroic effort to read War and Peace in order to impress Diane.
When he finally finishes the book, he brings it up in conversation with Diane and Frasier and they immediately dismiss it as one of the most overrated books in history, and change the subject."
they said Anna Karenina was better.
I don't know if it had less sex, but certainly less of the kind of sex that requires restraints and tools.
I think you missed the part about the tractors. You have to make do for your bondage equipment in the Upper Midwest.
Reading The Faerie Queen was such a terrible experience
100% with you. You know who's a big fan of it? O/r/s/o/n S/c/o/t/t C/a/r/d, which I find hilarious.
they said Anna Karenina was better.
They'll have to take it up with lurid keyaki in 86.
The first and last books of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" are pretty good but the middle books are bad.
The Koran is quite beautiful and powerful in Arabic and I've even found it compelling in English translation. I recommend Arberry's translation. Its scattered form is part of its charm though that also only really applies to the longer suras.
One problem the Koran has is that the chapters are arranged in size order, because no one could agree on when the Prophet said this or that. Size of chapters was at least something utterly objective.
There's actually a pretty extensive literature on the order and the occasion of each verse.
The Koran is quite beautiful and powerful in Arabic and I've even found it compelling in English translation. I recommend Arberry's translation. Its scattered form is part of its charm though that also only really applies to the longer suras.
One problem the Koran has is that the chapters are arranged in size order, because no one could agree on when the Prophet said this or that. Size of chapters was at least something utterly objective.
There's actually a pretty extensive literature on the order and the occasion of each verse.
Secondary school history was utterly dreadful. The first year of school, we covered the Norman invasion to the Wars of the Roses with a very young and well-intentioned teacher who had just come back from a VSO placement and could reliably be distracted 10 minutes into every lesson with a question about Zambia. I remember nothing at all about that period.
The second year we covered the Tudors with an elderly, jaundiced man who couldn't wait to retire. He spent every lesson sat hunched over his desk, reading the textbook verbatim in an almost inaudable drone. I remember nothing from that period, either.
The final year before I was blessedly allowed to give up history in order to take science and Latin O levels, we were taught by the rugby teacher as a temporary stand-in to cover the Stuarts. He dwelt repeatedly and with lasciviousness on the fondness of James I for his male courtiers, the sole historical fact I can remember from those three years' teaching. I think we may have got as far as the Restoration by the end of the year, but it's a very faint blur.
All the historical knowledge I possess thus comes entirely from fiction.
The second year we covered the Tudors with an elderly, jaundiced man who couldn't wait to retire.
I didn't take shop, but I think they just used things like shingles and paint.
1. Freshman year Chem Lab - bleggh. Making pipettes out of glass tube. Titrating. Carefully recording almost-random results in our lab books, which we had to initial in case someone questioned how inept we really were. Instruction by barely-competent TAs. Please.
2. Overrated when I read it in high school: The Sound and the Fury. Underrated when I read it at age 45: The Sound and the Fury.
3. Yes.
Sophomore year English in high school they made us read:
McTeague
Billy Budd
Turn of the Screw
and Flannery O'Conner short stories
They were all pretty trippy. McTeague is just brutal.
I didn't take shop
I did, and it's proven extremely useful. Especially metal, where I learned things I use weekly. My son learned those things in art; shop is seldom available now.
I'd never heard of McTeague before, but I just read the wikipedia summary. Harsh.
McTeague is just brutal.
Yes. When we visited Death Valley, Chuck Frank Norris fan ms bill recounted some of McTeague for me.
"Making pipettes out of glass tube"
What? Melting glass is awesome.
You're supposed to melt it? We had to sand it down.
I've been tempted to read McTeague just because I'm fascinated that Stroheim made a now-lost 8 hour movie out of it.
|| So, the Orange One has picked our congressman for Interior. He'll be bad, but probably not as bad as several other choices would have been. Once the seat becomes vacant, the state Republican central committee will give the Democratic governor 3 names, and he picks one to fill the seat until the special election, something like 90 days after Zinke resigns. I imagine there will be some pretty furious politicking over the next two months. |>
|| I'm hoping for our newly elected state auditor. |>
129: I was meaning to ask what you thought of that pick. Seems like a "bad but could've been much worse" choice to me, similar to Chao for DOT.
116
Thanks for the recommendation of a good translation! It can't be worse than AK...
I pretty much hate all self-consciously literary fiction. Especially, 'Great American Novels' which can universally* fuck the fuck off. And the obsession with sex and baseball is beyond tedious.
I liked most subjects as a student, though. First year Maths at university (the first time I went, before I dropped out) was taught by an arsehole, and was really much harder than I was expecting. So I didn't enjoy that.
But generally, I liked and was pretty good at most things. The being pretty good being often the result of the liking, rather than the other way round.
With philosophy, I liked that enough to get all the way to teaching it. The shouty dick wavers, though, definitely real.*** I used to enjoy publicly crushing those fuckers.**
* exception granted for a couple of Thomas Pynchon's.
** which looks like evidence I might have been one of those shouty dick wavers, but I genuinely don't think I was 99% of the time.
*** far less of them than stereotype would sometimes have, though.
Over-rated stuff:
The Rolling Stones, and Keith Richards in particular.
Beethoven.
I've tried to like Beethoven so many times. I own a ton, including celebrated editions of the string quartets, piano works, etc. I still think most of it sounds plodding and portentous in the worst way, and people who wank on about him as some kind of Romantic epitome of creative genius: Arrgh.
Do you not like the Romantics in general, or just Beethoven? To be frank, I prefer him to any of the others usually identified as Romantics.
133: "all self-consciously literary fiction" is a prejudicial enough formulation that I'm not quite sure what you mean: that is, "self-consciously" usually signals ineptitude or campiness or both. So of course that stuff is all bad. If you mean all non-genre fiction (and some genre fiction is pretty "self-consciously literary"), excluding only writers with sense and dry humor -- that's a pretty common palate among people I've known.
134: I used to be right there with you on Beethoven, but I've come around. Not on everything, but more than I used to be able to stand. "Plodding" does maybe imply that the performances aren't all there, though.
Beethoven? I don't like much of anything between Haydn and Debussy. Yeah, that's right Mozart sucks. Okay, to be honest, Grieg makes me laugh, so he stays.
Cherubini, Albinoni, Boccherini ...now that's music. Also, Xenakis, Ligeti, Bartok
2) I was going to list Magic Mountain as overrated, but only in comparison to the other Mann works.
Doktor Faustus would be a good read now. Along with Lafferty's "Three Armageddons of Ennisworthy...Ennisworthy...Sweeney"
s/b Enniscorthy...it's been more than thirty years
"The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney" follows the life of the great impresario, Enniscorthy Sweeney, and the change in history of the 20th Century. The 20th Century had been the Golden Century, the century in which humanity realized war was no longer possible and universal prosperity and well being were not only possible but imperative. It started with the inauguration of Harold Standpipe, the tall, thoughtful black statesman and humanitarian from Chicago as President of the United States in 1901. Then in 1917, Enniscorthy Sweeney produced his first Armageddon opera about a tremendous world war, and soon history adjusts to make it have been real. Then he produced his second Armageddon opera about an even more horrific world war, and history adjusts itself again. They are preparing to produce his third Armageddon opera--as one historian notes, "The situation worsens." The whole novella is written as the material for a documentary-like study of Sweeney's life. It is told through small narrative segments of his life, reviews of his operas, interviews with various people involved in his life, excerpts of his letters, etc. There is no section of straightforward narrative more than a page or two long, and the narrative voices change out frequently.
Lafferty was a fucking genius, this is a pastiche of Mann, and is not only absurd and hilarious, but serious as death.
The Great Gatsby is one of the rare books that is as good as they tell you it is in school but they shouldn't let you read it in school, they should just tell you how good it is and that when you are older you will understand so that when you are indeed older you will seek it out yourself or maybe you will catch its baleful yellow eyes in the corner of some bookstore and it will draw you in so that you discover its life and strength. The Sound and the Fury is also this good. So are the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, although the novels are not.
I recall The Sun Also Rises was pretty bad.
As to classes I didn't like, the only class I can remember disliking with a passion due to content was a graduate school class in 16th Century English Prose Writing. We read a lot of "Euphues" style prose, which if you never had to read that shit, count yourself blessed.
I can't remember if we read Utopia. Probably not, because that was written in Latin originally. Sweet Jesus, the prose writing in the 16th century in English is a nightmare. I mean that literally. I still have nightmares.
Naw, Sun Also Rises is a very great novel on so many levels it is ridiculous. Stand it next to Ulysses or Stein, H's neighbors and friends, to understand the radical style. Better than Faulkner or Fitzgerald. It is the affective fascist novel, earliest?, comparable to Sailor Who Fell From the Sea or other Mishima works. Although not sure Hemingway knew what it was, but that's also part of the point. He just put his life and friend on paper, with such art as to make them symbols. Maeterlinck.
Euphues and not Nashe's Unfortunate Traveler? Not Arcadia? What in the actual.
(This is lourdes kayak posting on lurid's uncooperative phone)
Obsession with sex, and baseball, and death are all dealbreakers for me. I'm sorry, but I don't really care how worried you are about the loss of your virility and your worries about how you're going to die some day and how an interminably boring game best used as an excuse to get drunk outside in the middle of the day is an extended metaphor for America. See "White Noise", John Updike, Saul Bellow.
But Gatsby is good.
The Beatles are vastly overrated. They were innovative for their time, but that time has past.
The Beatles are vastly overrated. They were innovative for their time, but that time has past.
Amen to that.
Obsession with sex, and baseball, and death are all dealbreakers for me.
Two out of three?
I mean, sex is good! I enjoy reading about it. Unless it's about how some middle aged guy still has a raging sex drive but 20 year old no longer wish to have sex with him. What irony! What pathos!
Baseball is a little on the dull side.
Okay, let me try again.
In the Age of Spengler and Revolution, so many writers were showing the reality became culture/symbol through addition, the accretion of detail and history. Joyce, Mann, Proust, even Pound almost everybody wrote long complex allusive tomes. This is kinda the geist of socialism.
Hemingway showed that symbol was accessible through the subtraction, elision, destruction of history and culture. Fascism.
Everytime the manuscript was available, he cut even more. Not saying Hemingway was fascist, but maybe despite himself he caught the pre-fascist sensibility. Also showed that fascism wasn't about anti-semitism or racism in his violent Jewish character.
For a long while feminists didn't like Brett, but we are gaining a smarter tougher more generous feminist generation that are now more appreciative.
Do I get a 'B?"
Did Bellow ever write about baseball? Mindboggling. I have a soft spot for Bellow -- Augie March is entertaining and I'm probably a bad person for liking it more than any single Austen novel. Jane Austen is at the top of the "I don't like it but that's my problem" list.
I remember loving Herzog beyond measure but I don't remember the book or why I liked it and I was fucking 14 or something so I couldn't have understood much. I guess, I don't remember the guy who read it either. There was a vicious divorce goin on in my life.
Ajay's (and then LB's) comments on Ninety Eighty-Four make me think of books that I read and loved in my teens and early twenties, but which I would probably now find overrated, if I took the trouble to reread them (which I probably will not). The Catcher in the Rye, no doubt, and maybe also Salinger's Nine Stories.
I recently reread Jane Eyre (which I first read as an angsty teen girl whom nobody understood!), and it really did not improve upon this second, and much later, reading. It's a culturally significant text, though, which deserves its place in the Brit. lit. canon. (Also: Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele is weird and wonderful and loads of fun, and at least as good as the original).
I'm not going to reread The Bell Jar, but for the first time in a long time, I heartily agree with mcmanus: overrated.
I also recently reread Pride and Prejudice, which I first read as a clueless 16-year old who didn't know the first thing about the subtle gradations of the English class system in the Regency era (they were all just rich people with nice clothes and archaic, but seemingly correct, diction, the first time around!). This book only improves upon subsequent readings: the irony is so rich and multi-layered, but you still get a fairy-tale ending.
I hate all the big deal 20th century American novelists so much. Bellow, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Fitzgerald. We could have been reading Joyce and Woolf and Kafka. I never read Faulkner, though. Maybe I should try.
I read a book of Hemingway short stories and only liked the one that got made into two movies, one for film and the other for tv. Reagan was in the latter.
Wait, I think I liked the gambler/nun/radio one too. I read that book about what the sun has in common with the moon and it was awful.
I hate all the big deal 20th century American novelists so much. Bellow, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Fitzgerald.
The quest for the Great American Novel strikes me as an exercise in machismo. Those dudes might be bull-fighting, or slinging guns at the O.K. Corral, or maybe trapped in the belly of a whale, or whatever. It's all very thrilling and exciting, of course; but I expect more of a novel.
My favourite novelists tend to be British, or Brit-Empire, authors who quietly explore the quotidian detail of everyday life in order to then hit you with a devastating insight into the human experience (which is mostly not bull-fighting, after all) before breaking for up for afternoon tea.
How could I forget? Hemingway can go suck on a lemon. So tedious.
re: 145.1
This. That's exactly what I was getting at in 133.1.
re: 136
I think literature that sets out to be literature. Which I think a fair bit does. Much of what annoys me is the Great American Novel tropes, rather than serious literature per se. I studied lit as an undergrad, and read a lot of serious fiction I enjoyed and admired.
But I also have very little time for the 'tediously imagined interior life of the middle classes' genre unless the writer is truly brilliant as a prose stylist, and insightful. Which most ... aren't.
The Beatles are vastly overrated. They were innovative for their time, but that time has past.
So was Stravinsky. Doesn't mean he's not worth listening to. Firebird may sound like a movie score these days, but it's a damn good movie score. Equally, Rubber Soul and Revolver repay playing every year or so.
118. Ume, I'm sorry your teacher spoiled the Tudors for you. A more vicious, brutal and unprincipled crowd never walked the earth. Taught right they're immense fun, with a distinct frisson for younger kids.
I hated all my history classes. I'm not sure why--I think because timelines and maps are both hard for me and I don't like things I'm bad at. I could have been simple bad at them but I was resentful so I was compound bad at them instead. Now I don't know a lot of very basic history and it makes me feel dumb, so I thrice hate history. Gym was also not beloved.
I guess I'll be an asshole and say Infinite Jest is overrated? I did start The Goldfinch not that long ago and found it terrible...
I really like The Grapes of Wrath!
I never read it. I liked the one where the big guy who pets dead mice accidentally kills the lady. It helped me have a deeper understanding various cartoons I'd watched as a child.
But I feel like conversations about The Old Academy are just designed to produce the reaction "no YOU'RE overrated." I had this response first in this thread to whoever first said Casablanca sucks.
I like the one where you think it's a mouse, but every time no one's around, the kangaroo comes out and beats up the cat.
I enjoyed Grapes of Wrath a lot when I read it. But I've never felt the call to revisit it.
169: Steinbeck really was magical at times.
Oh I missed the classical music part of the thread. Beethoven, sure, but Schumann, oy. Elsewhere: Ligeti.
Oh, yes, that reminds me. Beethoven is the greatest genius ever to grace this fallen world, and damned be you heathens who dwell stubbornly in the darkness.
Was he the "dum-dum-dum" guy or was that Bach?
re: 173
That's precisely what 134.last was targeted at.
re: 174
Bach is the unfurling heavenly perfection guy, the literal 'music as heard in the mind of God' dude.*
* which is the flip-side of the Beethoven, Romantic genius cliché coin. But, nonetheless, basically true.
I guess it's more "dum-dum-de-dum". That's Bach?
Aargh to you to, nattarGcM! In total agreement about Bach.
"dum-dum-dum-de-dum-de-dum" is, of course, "Disturbia".
re: 176
You know fine-well* that's Beethoven.
* Scottish / Irish English usage, not American?**
** 'ken fine well' the literal Scots.
173 speaks truth. Fucking savages. I had a great conversation about Beethoven on OKCupid with a lady who was a sub-30% match. Almost asked her out except she thought the 5th was better than the 9th, which is heresy.
180: Of course a 5th is better. Do they even sell a 9th?
Fave Mahler symphony comparisons were my preferred method of romantic self-destruction at some point. Go Eight or Go Home.
Especially, 'Great American Novels' which can universally* fuck the fuck off. And the obsession with sex and baseball is beyond tedious.
I find the concept makes more sense if you s/great/big. "Big American Novel". The Thickburger of books. Also, yes, shut up about fucking baseball.
she thought the 5th was better than the 9th, which is heresy.
Indeed, Mahler Ninth is best ever.
Grieg makes me laugh. I have the Mahler Ninth in rotation, and the more I hear it, the more it scares me.
Are there any English novels that go on and on about cricket? I just remembered there's actually an American novel that goes on and on about cricket.
185: Well, the author is Irish, but it's still an American novel.
re: 185
The odd one or two, I guess, although I can't think of any offhand. It's not an insanely ever-present trope, though. Football and rugby crop up now and again, but sports and especially sports as tedious metaphor for the human condition / coming of age ritual / bullshit metaphor for whatever the fuck else, just isn't a theme in British fiction.
Cricket is obviously not a metaphor for the human condition. Nobody is spitting.
There is a pretty good Cricket-as-metaphor Bollywood movie, Lagaan.
Bach in life was apparently power-mad and vengeful, also a father of 20. I like the French Suites and his double violin concerto a great deal, but if there is a god, I seriously hope that's not the sound of god's thoughts.
Beethoven is a little bombastic, but I like him a lot as a tonic after listening to mostly Mozart or Haydn, and there a re few pieces of his that I like unreservedly.
I feel that even misguided or questionable cultural production is something to cherish in these times of howling madness. That said, I'm not crazy about rapidfire clever but nothing more writing that's overambitious, for instance Michael Lewis. Shooting fast is fine, it has a useful place, but it's not the same thing as thinking a topic through.
189 typo, "are a few pieces of Beethoven.."-- Fur Elise, partly because my son likes playing it, the 9th, Waldstein and a few more middle sonatas, but only by some pianists.
1) I had a problem with economics, which is that I thought it was low-rent math.
2) I had intended to title a review of a particular author's book of essays "A Supposedly Good Author I Will Never Read Again," but realized that, in proper Onion style, the headline rendered the article superfluous.
I was going to live blog a kiddie Christmas concert, but my wife is looking at me funny.
* Scottish / Irish English usage, not American?**
American is "you know full well".
189: Yes to Lagan and the Bach double! Today I read a decidedly minor Dodie Smith, which still had good parts, and I'm trying to talk myself into the rest of the night. I never did find my copy of Dhalgren and maybe that's why everything has been off-kilter.
American is "you know full well".
Or, you know good well.
Have never heard 195; 193 is what I'm used to.
'Know full well' would be perfectly standard British English. It's the 'fine well' that's Scots and/or Irish.
especially sports as tedious metaphor for the human condition / coming of age ritual / bullshit metaphor for whatever the fuck else
Sporting Life, Loneliness of Long Distance Runner
185. "Murder Must Advertise," one of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels, has a whole lot of cricket in it. I'm not sure it exactly "goes on and on," though. To paraphrase the book's discussion of truth in advertising, it is "made with cricket," rather then "of cricket."
Cricket is an almost tediously recurring theme in Wodehouse's Psmith books.
For the record, I do not know the difference between Bach and Beethoven either full or well.
Any Brahms fans? I assume skeptics (like me) are plentiful... on the other hand, when a friend asked me whether she should learn a Brahms or Elgar piece next on the violin, I said Brahms hands down (right?). I also boast this one badge of exquisitely bad taste: I enjoyed the hell out of Anne-Sophie Mutter's all-Brahms recital. Really, it was super metal. Also her Gubaidulina premiere in the city.
The Rolling Stones are one of life's great enigmas.
194: It's been a while since I read Dhalgren, but as I remember, if you can't find your copy then you might be inside it. Have you noticed any kind of surprise sociopolitical breakdown lately?
The Rolling Stones are one of life's great enigmas.
Their version of "Love in Vain" is great.
I may have gone slightly overboard hating on Tolstoy, I realize now. I wonder what got into me.
Overly ambitious youth orchestra conductor had us play Brahms 4 and I was traumatized and wrote Brahms off. (I was a terrible violist. Even for a violist.) Now I am very fond of a few pieces, including the symphonies for sure, and kind of mean to explore more. I guess for years there was a question of why I would ever listen to him when he didn't write an opera.
No opera, but he wrote a ton of lovely vocal music. As a bass in high school choir I was surely worse than you as a violist (it was a very inclusive choir), but "Der Gang zum Liebchen" was fine enough to survive even our wobbly interpretation. (Fewer independent parts than the 4th.)
Cricket is part of the background to E.W.Hornung's Raffles stories, because the principle character, the burglar A.J.Raffles, is also an amateur first class cricketer. But it doesn't dominate the stories and there's a lot more to them than that. If you like c.19 crime stories, they're pretty good.
"Flashman's Lady" also has a fair amount of cricket, including detailed descriptions of how to cheat, and a comment on the unmanliness of wearing pads to bat, rather than simply an old tin soup bowl covering your essentials.
Really? Pads were SOP by the 1840s - the MCC had to invent the LBW law in 1774 because people were regularly padding the ball off their stumps.
Or poor memory by me; it's been a while since I read it.
Most everything I know about cricket I owe to reading "Flashman's Lady."
This reminds me that I meant to suggest Raffles to LB last time she was soliciting suggestions for crime fic. It's of its time, obviously, but the characters are fairly interesting. Hornung was Conan Doyle's BiL, and he conceived of Raffles and his sidekick Bunny as "anti-Holmes-and-Watson". Conan Doyle disapproved of the anti-hero idea, but tough shit. There's a fairly clear gay undercurrent, but it's never made explicit.
Specifically Raffles and Bunny in this case. I'm not sure about Holmes and Watson, though I'm inclined to think not.
Love both Brahms and Elgar, some more than others of course.