Anybody up for a game of stock SE4 at PBW?

[Possum]

capnq said:There are too many "classics" to read more than a fraction of them. I've been buying omnibuses from the Science Fiction Book Club faster than I can read them.

That's a big, big 10-4, good buddy.

And some of that so-called classic stuff is trash, too.

I plowed through all 1300+ pages of War & Peace, thinking "We must be getting to the good part soon, the part that made Tolstoy famous, right?"

Nope, the whole book was utter crap. Nothing but the clumsy machinations of a bunch of arrogant, selfish, small-minded aristocrats, and Tolstoy raving on about his laughably ridiculous theories of socio-military dynamics.

I think part of what made it so awful was the utter dearth of any sympathetic characters. My profoundly egalitarian sensibilities made the main characters all objects of scorn for me. Frankly, I felt they deserved the misfortunes that befell them.

OTOH, Silas Marner (of all unlikely things!), which we read in high school, was an absolute gem. Obscure as it may be among those books reckoned "classics", I enjoyed it enormously.

Almost anything by Charles Dickens is well worth the reader's time.