@Dr. Toxicophilous

Yeah, I remember that story. I had to read the whole Bible as part of a university course that was being taught by a Christian fundamentalist professor who spent the better part of his lectures explaining how stories like the one with the bear killing the children appeared to be cruel on the surface but were actually proof of the boundless love of God and his prophets for the human race. It was an excruciating course.

Do you remember what book it's from? That would help when I mention it to people.

A Clockwork Orange. It's unreadable without a glossary.

http://www.gradesaver.com/a-clockwork-o ... -of-terms/

lol

@Dr Toxicophilous

The whole incident is told in 2 Kings 2:23-25.

You don't want to read Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk, droog. I get used to weird slang pretty quickly. I thought it was pretty horrorshow.


Thanks

so many bad ones i couldn't finish. i hate anything by ayn rand and chuck palanuik. worse than the bible are those christian books about what the bible really meant. the da vinci code sucked as did that god awful pride prejudice and zombies. the da vinci code came highly recommended, while i read a few excerpts from pride & zombies aloud in the grocery store for a laugh with the husband.

Lord of the Flies. I don't care how much that book is praised if I'm forced to read that book one more time I am going to drop a boulder on someones head.

Lawlz, Lord of the Flies.

I remember when we had to read it in school, the teacher told us Piggy dies before we got to that part and some girl burst out crying.

"A Room of One's Own" (1929), by Virginia Woolf.
I hate stream-of-consciousness only slightly less than I hate feminism.

Also, "The Eye of Argon" (1970), by Jim Theis



BUT, that's so bad, its good. A work of art, even. In fact, I've read it at least five times.
Go read it. I'm serious. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/s ... eargon.htm

I used to read alot of trashy Sword & Sorcery fiction when I was a kid. I probably enjoyed alot of stuff which would make me roll my eyes now (For example, see Senmee's post... god whoever wrote that wished they had Robert Howard's talent). But, I couldn't finish any Micheal Moorcock novel I tried; R. A. Salvatore had the same effect on me, the characters seem lifeless and the writing didn't stimulate my imagination. The heroes are always beyond peerless in those novels too, which strikes me as slightly pointless. By the last page they haven't developed at all. Enemies were conquered, but that was a foregone event from the very start, the character doesn't learn anything, better themself, or gain any new perspective.

Edit: Oh, I looked up Jim Theis and apparently he was 16 at the time.

In an interview with Theis on 8 March 1984 on Hour 25, a talk show on KPFK, the presenters of which would periodically stage a reading of The Eye of Argon, Theis stated that he was hurt that his story was being mocked and said he would never write anything again.[9] In a later interview he complains about being mocked for something he had written thirty years ago, at age sixteen. (Wikipedia)

I feel a little bad now, but its still funny.

Yeah I read about that interview. Poor guy -- it's so sad it's even funnier. Apparently he's dead now. Mankind has lost a true artist. RIP

I enjoyed the symbolism in that book, and liked studying it, but I didn't like reading it. It wasn't written in a style that I would enjoy.

I forgot about the Chronicles of Gor!!!!!!!!

Whooo man, it's like if you took Ayn Rand, added in gobs of repressed male homosexuality and a healthy dose of misogyny, and then wrapped all of it up into a crappy 70's science fiction/fantasy exterior , this is what you'd get. It's soooo bad. I totally get BDSM, I get the desire to be submissive or dominant, and that's fine. What I don't get is the need to write TWENTY-EIGHT books about how every woman has this inner desire to completely relinquish any claim she might have had to herself both physically and emotionally and submit herself fully to a man, to be dragged around on a leash and patted on the head like a dog, and forced to kneel for hours on end in stupid positions(the air must reek of vag cheese on Gor...), while her sexed up and greasey masters prance around in loinclothes and wallow in their epic manhood. And it's not just pretend fantasy fluff, no. On every other page you have to wade through oceans of dense, ENTIRELY SERIOUS 'philosophical' ass chili about how this is really the way things are meant to be and Earth's permissive gender roles are the source of all our misery.

People actually read this shit and enjoy it. There's a fairly large fanbase, at least large enough to warrant re-publishing the novels, and people continue to buy it. I'm utterly astounded by this fact. Surely there are better ways to get your rocks off, and I know damn well there's much better fantasy for you to read. I just find it mind numbing that anyone over the age of 14 would read this for any reason other than to see how terrible it is.

This is the general caliber of the fanbase, though.

Your description makes me really curious about it.

A Clockwork Orange. It may be a good book, but the slang threw me off too much so I did not finish the first chapter.

My father had something 'of Gor' which I remember reading. Your summation seems accurate. It was full of witch-doctoring, beheadings and sexual subjugation. I can't say I hated it but I can't recall it very well. I'm not sure what that says about me, maybe being around 14 at the time I read it helps my defence.

Just due to curiosity, why you went and bought twilight in the first place? wanted to see if it was as bad as they said?



I also heard from some people in the cult that pygmy was downright impossible for them to read, if it is how it appears in the short stories in the cult (the ones written by Mr. Palahniuk himself) i can definitively see why (i think it may also be quite hard for me as well). But i kinda wanna read A Clockwork Orange, looks interesting (i also wished they would have included the real ending in the movie, the actual one is very good, but i believe the ending the writer intended would be much better and appropiate.)



, just out of curiosity and interest, why you hate chuck palahniuk's writings? to be honest, i believe his novels are very good and original, and i learned a lot of things about writing from him, not to sound like a fanboy, but his novels made literature seem interesting to me again.



Although i haven't read Lord of the flies and i know what it is about and agree that it seems quite a hard read, i think that's a bit of an exaggerate reaction, and because of that, a hilarious one .



If i may ask, what is stream-of-consciousness, and why you hate feminism?

In my case, although i don't find it bad at all (quite the contrary) it was very hard for me to read Rene Descartes's Meditations.

sorry dude but the last guy isn't active here any longer. stream of consciousness is a style of writing where you just write your thoughts as they come to you, just they way you think them with no editing outside of perhaps a spell check. a lot of people find this irritating because the thoughts are more important to pay attention to than the plot or characters.

i dislike palahnuik's works because of the same reasons i dislike most things and that is that they don't speak to me, like in the Smiths song Panic the lyric "the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life". it's me not the books or movies or television.

So basically you don't like them because you cannot identify yourself with any of the messages the characters and the book conveys? That is quite interesting, and i guess i can see how one can not like a book if one does not identify something of oneself in it (not sure if that's my case, but it probably can be).

Not to be mean at all but i find it curious you didn't felt some of the things in his novels to speak out to you, but i think i can see why.

I somehow managed to get through one of Christopher Gillberg's AS books. It wasn't boring but I was so provoked by the way he described AS and aspies. It was one of the most condescending reads I ever did.

Back when I was 12-13 I started looking for answers and I tried to get through the bible several times as a teenager. Its contents and 'moral' was part of what made me turn my back on religion for ever.

In junior high I tried to read Shakespeare. I tried both "The Tempest" and "Romeo and Juliet", and had to give up on both of them. They were both terribly boring and the old fashioned language was nearly impossible for me to read.
Also in junior high, I was forced to read Knut Hamsun's "Victoria", and it was dreadfully boring. In addition it was written in 1898, and the language had not been updated, so it was a drag to get through.

The Day my Butt Went Psycho

It exists.

Actully, it's a style of writing rather than a method. Kerouac claimed to write the first draft of On the Road in the way you described, but it's not considered to be stream of consciousness. I like Joyce and Faulkner, so I guess I like the style. In fact, the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury is one of the most amazing things I've seen on paper.

EDIT: well, wikipedia says On the Road is stream of consciousness, so what do i know. It's certainly not as and extreme example as some other books, though.

And to answer the question: probably something in one of the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, or My Teacher is an Alien series, but I don't remember any of them well enough to say.