Let’s see… I’ve read and enjoyed so many of the books that others have listed, so that doesn’t surprise me much. (I agree that the writing in Atlas Shrugged is pretty awful, but the ideas it presents make it worth reading over and over – three times so far for me. Hemingway I read – have read – as a product of his often awful times – and consider the depression, guilt or whatever caused him to take his own life – but I don’t read him much. Heinlein will always hold a special place for me; I think I first started to realize what it meant to be human after reading him. And Dickens: I’ve never read anything by Dickens that I didn’t adore, simply for his use of language.)
But I also never managed to make it through 100 Years of Solitude. I think I’d have to “give that” more pages than are in it; I know that I slogged more than halfway through, still have it stuck on a bookshelf somewhere with a bookmark mouldering away in it, where it’ll no doubt stay.
I gave up on Moby Dick when Melville started going on at interminable length about his description of “the fish”. Maybe I should give him a pass on his misunderstanding of biology and try again.
I used to like Robert Ludlum (the “Bourne” series of books and others like them) and Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October and others), but something happened to them and it seems like they get paid by the word now. Their writing has just become so damn tedious. (Stephen King often suffers the same turgid wordiness , but for some reason I can put up with a lot more of his stream-of-consciousness-and-memory stuff, maybe because it resonates more with me.)
No, what gets me is what passes for most “popular” novels these days, Tami Hoag, Philip Margolin, Lawrence Sanders, John Saul and others that I see on “bestseller” racks everywhere and think, “WTF?! How can people stand to read those people even once, all the way through? And then they continue to pursue them?” How is it possible, I wonder. Pure trash.
Maybe I’ll have to find a copy of Dune…