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Man...you must be as old as dirt to bring those old groaners up...
















We must be about the same age...............grins

best,
bhtr

Michener I find offensive... His diverse writing style occasioned by having a staff of writers compiling while he edited and linked sections I find weak, uneven and flat irritating. I would rather get bamboo shoots under the fingernails than ever consider suffering through another page of his drivel... Literally took Cheasapeake to the bandsaw and turned it into something worthwhile... landfill!
art

Bible is a tough read, course I'm not much on fiction.......

PRICELESS!!

I take it you'd rather write fiction than read it?

James Joyce's Ulysses.....rather eat a bullet.

"Give me a good book of French poetry"
=================================================================

I didn't have to think too long and hard for an answer....Ms. Penny did it for me!!

It's a real easy read, if you're acquainted with the author.

Finnegan's Wake, too abstract
That Dark and Bloody River, too sad and depressing

Is that your unreadable book? I could teach you to appreciate it. But first I have to work on Steelhead and the Bible...

Penny

Anything by Tolkien or Hubbard, and of course"Ulysses", but the worst by FAR is "Warrior" by Capstick (he took an excellent biography of a fascinating WWI/Africa character and made it so boring that I'd rather memorize the log tables than try to read it again.

Black Women's Lives: Stories of Pain and Power by Kristal Brent Zook

I heard a movie review by the author while listening to NPR. She *sounded* like she had her head screwed on straight. I bought the book. I think it was February (African-American History month) and I don't TRY to be a Neanderthal.

The Intro was OK.

The first chapter was about an African-American woman who was a big shot in the TV industry. Bill Cosby had personally pulled her wagon and shilled her to the major studios after she graduated. She produced/directed several "edgy" shows that were artistic successes. Edgy, "artistic successes" are adjectives used to describe commercial flops. She had a huge entitlement complex and is very angry that studios cancel shows that do not make money. It is all a conspiracy to keep black women repressed.

The second chapter was about a lesbian in a big city who went out and antagonized drug dealers when she got bored. She is dead now. KBZ writes her up as some kind of martyred saint. I guess that is Big City Liberal PCness.

And the book goes on, and on, and on with all of these kinds of fabricated heros. I stalled out two thirds the way through it.

There were a couple of good chapters. One was on a union organizer in a fish packing plant in Mississippi. The other was a school principal that banned sugar in her school because the students (and teachers) were obese and could not sit still. The book would have been more readable by a wider audience if she had started with these people.

Another thing that made me want to puke was the number of gross techical errors. The author presented as a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. Maybe I am naive to assume that research is a component of journalism. Example, the child of one of the sketches died in Iraq when hit by a "toe missile". Maybe I should cross-post this to Big Bores....apparently it is possible to get a projectile that is large enough to make solid toe hits lethal. I could go back to the book and sift out about three similar errors per chapter, but I just don't have the energy to open that book back up.

-Joe

PS: Senate was going to make March Hispanic History month, but a lobby of Big City mayors insisted that March would have to be shorted to 28 days before it was done.

I've found a few simple standards that seem to work for me.
If the pointed headed perfessors think it's great, it's going to be tedious.
If the women folk think it's 'wonderful' it's going to be incomprehensible.
If the twirps in Hollywood think it's a whole new way of looking at something, it's going to be silly.
If it's on the NY Times best selller list chances are it's compost.
Jim

Anything on Oprah's list is a must advoid.

I can say that Handloading for Competition is hard to read - not content but style.

The only "classic" I ever found ritveting was Moby Dick - the rest rubbish. I believe most HS students would do better to read Sherlock Holmes with an eye toward the social and behavorial tendencies in that book than say Walden or Beowolf.

Moby Dick.

One of the classics. A great book but not for me. I just could not wade through it. Well, take that back, I did read through it all the way but it took me three years.

BCR

Ben Hur, by Lewis Wallace. Wallace had the habit of over describing stuff. He would litally go on for 2 pages about the flowers on a hillside. If you left out the padding, the book was 50 pages long.

Dick

Rich Media, Poor Democracy
The Fourth Turning

Both have interesting information but are written flat as a board.

I may still have the first edition of an obscure book that was very readable but so shot-through with all kinds of errors that after a while, disgust gave way to hilarity. For years, my son and I used that book as a game. We'd open it at random with eyes closed, "stab" a finger onto a page, then look to see whether the fingered paragraph was free from errors.

Never found one that had no error � no stupid mistake � no wrong word (like lay for lie, healthy for healthful, incredulous for incredible, or centurion for centenarian, for example), no misspelling, no grossly bad sentence structure, no wrong punctuation, etc.

Too bad. Its contents were worthy. The author knew his subject well and in the main presented it well. He should've been able, as a high-school teacher, to do a better job, and the publisher should've had the draft edited before he published it. I think that later editions were done better.

The Last Of The Mohicians.

I had to force myself to finish it and did so because I wanted to know the story.

James Fenmore Cooper had to have the worst writing style I've ever tried to read.

It is a great story, too bad Louis La'more didn't write it. ;-)

You're superbly qualified to thoroughly enjoy what Mark Twain wrote about Cooper's writing. It's been published (often) as two essays:

� "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
and
� "Cooper's Further Literary Offenses"

The first is easier to find and more enjoyable for readers. Any good librarian should be able to get it for you. It has been anthologized much more often than the second.
The second is more interesting for writers.

I wish I knew where to lay my hands on my copies. I'd get a kick out of reading 'em again.