Books we have hurled across the room with great force
“This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It must be thrown across the room with great force.” That was in a book review by Dorothy Parker. Throughout our lives as readers, we have been taking Ms Parker’s advice and hurling book across the room with great force.
Some of them were terrible books (or as Ms Parker also said, “This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”). Some were clearly published to help us develop our throwing arm (Hello, Twilight).
But many were acknowledged classics of literature, part of the so-called canon. They were tedious, tendentious, infuriating; we were convinced that they had been written specifically to torture us; we wanted to hunt down the author and force-feed him his book page by page. Sometimes we picked them up off the floor and continued reading them. Sometimes we finished the books and even grew to admire them. And some of them are still on our shelves, mocking us silently.
Books we have thrown: a partial list
– Lots of Joseph Conrad. Aaargh, Nostromo. Sometimes we tell the unsuspecting: “You know, Alien by Ridley Scott is an adaptation of Nostromo.” You’d be surprised how many people believe that. It’s all in the delivery.
– Anything by Henry James longer than The Portrait of A Lady
– Most of Honore De Balzac
– George Eliot, especially that !@#$%^& Silas Marner, which is short.
– Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We finally got through it, but only because it was read to us by Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch etc. Now we admire the hell out of it. It’s So Weird! It makes other books sound stuffy.
– Almost forgot/have blocked out the memory of two things we had to read for Medieval English lit: Piers Plowman and Layamon’s Brut. Aaaaaaaaaa. And we actually enjoy medieval epics, especially the Arthurian tales—Chretien de Troyes, Malory, Wolfram von Eschenbach, bring them on.
Still, we count ourselves fortunate that we didn’t have to read Pilgrim’s Progress or the works of the American colonists—Jonathan Edwards, etc. Which reminds us of these lyrics by Dave’s True Story:
I’ll read Kafka’s tale about that lonely vermin
I’ll read every Jonathan Edwards sermon
Hell, I’ll read Emmanuel Kant in German
But I’ll never read Trollope again
Your turn to confess.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
June 11th, 2013 at 07:52
madame bovary.
June 11th, 2013 at 09:14
“The Taking” by Dean Koontz.
It starts out fine, almost like an X-Files episode but then the last few pages and the conclusion/explanation of the story suddenly transforms it into one of the Left Behind books. Aargh!!! Throws the book and cracked the cheap spine.
It’s the main reason why I am not so keen on picking-up the Odd Thomas series.
If you liked and are inspired by the Left Behind series (i.e. a psychopathic Jebus freak!) you would definitely enjoy this book.
Current location of the book: Unknown, I let it get lost in the book-lending network. But I would like to imagine that it’s happily sitting side by side with Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” on a shelf of some cheerfully vapid Southern-Baptist. :D
June 11th, 2013 at 09:24
I slogged through Queequeg’s tattoos and his coffin when I was in college. I also the works of Dostoevsky, Hugo, Tolstoy, and other great authors and their “must read” master works.
But what I could not absolutely finish, no matter how many times I tried, was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The other one was Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.
I would hurl these books, yes, but I would not use my arm.
I would use a trebuchet.
June 11th, 2013 at 10:23
Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses. I managed to finish the former (and I still didn’t like it). The latter, I am still not sure if I’d want to return to it.
June 11th, 2013 at 11:44
Henry James – What Maisie Knew, but looking forward to the Julianne Moore/Alexander Skarsgard-starring adaptation :D
Henri Pierre Roche – Jules et Jim
June 11th, 2013 at 11:56
This isn’t in any canon, but Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I enjoyed his The Name of the Rose thoroughly, so I thought I should breeze through Foucault’s Pendulum as well. Wrong.
June 11th, 2013 at 13:21
A novel by Philip Roth and the critically-acclaimed A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I enjoyed the Stanley Kubrick film, though.
June 11th, 2013 at 13:32
!@#$%^&*()_ Hawthorne! Dreiser!
+_)(*&^%$ Flaubert!
But we love Henry Miller!
And Ulysses. We enjoy mocking people who don’t get Ulysses. Nyeeeeeeeeeh. Slow reader.
June 11th, 2013 at 16:01
The Voyage Out
June 11th, 2013 at 16:04
Now that you mentioned it, I have considered such a felony towards one book in particular. It’s got scalping, an evil Judge, genocide, and a complimentary mental picture of babies on a tree. It’s a moving picture of indelible wickedness in your head. That’s what this Blood Meridian book is.
June 11th, 2013 at 17:45
some self-help and leadership books a la og mandino given to me as gifts. i received 3 one christmas (2009 or 2010) i remember one was by bo sanchez.
would love to get a copy of the fireless inferno by arnel salgado more than their lines of self-helps (a road less travelled is the only legit, good book ive read in this ‘genre’). speaking of arnel salgado, is he the same cabuyao university dean who made sex tapes?
June 11th, 2013 at 18:21
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – masyadong mahaba at ma-drama in a teleserye kind of way (for me). I only read this because of Catcher in the Rye (‘David Copperfield kind of crap’). Aba, crap nga (for me ulit). Ka-throw-throw ito kasi cheap ko lang nabili hehe.
My Hollywood by Mona Simpson – I hate how her Pinoy and minority characters speak. Haven’t finished it yet but I have yet to encounter a ‘minority’ in that novel who can speak decent English.
Light in August by William Faulkner – na-chakahan lang ako. :(
On the Road by Jack Kerouac – ka-throw-throw on first reading, but on second reading, pwede na.
June 11th, 2013 at 18:48
Crime and Punishment by F. Dostoevsky. Started reading it in 1997 and finished in 2011.
June 11th, 2013 at 20:10
All of these are HS reading requirements (raise your hand if you recognize this reading list)
1. Le Morte D’Arthur
Nagjoust na naman? Wala na ba kayong ibang hobbies? Tapos matutulog magkatabi hindi naman magchuchuvahan! Paasa!*Kablam!*
2. How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife
(technically not a book. I hurled the photocopied sheets as far as my untoned arms could)
3. Moby Dick
Call me Ishmael…zzzzzzzz *drops book on the floor* Thank you Illustrated Classics
4. Grapes of Wrath
“Ayoko na magD-Diablo 2 nalang ako” thank you Cliff’s notes for letting me pass my English finals
5. Book of Job
“ANOOOOBAAA JOB GIVE IT UP!!!” *kablam*
June 11th, 2013 at 20:55
The Corrections
June 11th, 2013 at 21:39
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – I was halfway through this when my brother told me that this was Bill O’Reilly’s favorite author. Instant turn-off.
G.R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords – When I got to the Red Wedding I threw this book on the floor of the bus I was on. Read it again after 2 days. Felt bad the whole week.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion – As much as I love Lord of the Rings, I just can’t read this from cover to cover. I treat this as an encyclopedia.
All of Jane Austen – I promise myself I would read these someday, but I never do. I never saw myself as a Jane Austen reader: it’s as if it requires me to be prim, proper, and in need of a husband while reading it… while I read books sprawled on the floor first thing in the morning, wearing something with last night’s dinner on it. (I love Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, though. I see myself in the Colonel.)
June 11th, 2013 at 23:35
Let me qualify this by saying that I majored in English Lit in college, so I was able to tolerate a lot in the name of literature. I’ve been meh for the most part on Ulysses and Moby Dick, and I got over my super-pretentious phase when I thought that On the Road, Catcher in the Rye, and As I Lay Dying were the greatest pieces of literature ever written.
That said, I have major regrets about picking up Lolita in the first place.
Not exactly a piece of classic literature, but The Witch of Portobello was so pretentious that I stopped taking Paulo Coelho seriously. And that was way before I found his Twitter account.
June 11th, 2013 at 23:37
Also: The Pearl, by John Steinbeck. Hello, I get it, avarice sucks, but I could not care less about fricking Coyotito if I even tried. (Should’ve read Call of The Wild instead.)
June 12th, 2013 at 00:13
Hmmm…here it goes
1) IBON Yearbooks;
2) Various pamphlets of Globalization, AnakBayan, Gabriela and other “social-oriented” groups. The first two items are bought for doing a chapter for a research paper. So one-sided and predictable in their so-called analyses;
3) Majority of elementary and high school textbooks (except the excellent English textbooks written by the Jesuits; still surpass most of the primary English textbooks around). Why relive the horrors anyway! And finally,
4) Some hardbound and hardcover graphic novels (i.e. X-men: Mutant Genesis). I gave these excesses to friends and others who like comics.
June 12th, 2013 at 03:43
The Diary of Edgar Sawtelle. So. Effing. Depressing.
June 12th, 2013 at 06:56
Having it foisted upon me as required reading made me hate Oliver Twist, but Great Expectations is hilarious.
Mansfield Park. Give me any other Austen, please! Perhaps Pride and Prejudice, which celebrates its 200th birthday this year. Emma has its 200th in 2015, which is also perfect for a Clueless 20th anniversary reunion.
Also, Wuthering Heights. Where everyone is a dick, save for Ellen Dean (and I’m not sure about her, either). I’ much preferred Jane Eyre. I like how she has enough self-respect not to shack up with Edward, but I also hate that she has too much self-respect and it gets in the way of her happiness.
June 12th, 2013 at 07:13
The Enchantress of Florence by Rushdie… I can’t finish it.
I hurled the unabridged version of Les Miserable across the room couple of time but picked it up and finished reading it. I’m glad I did, it was tedious but enjoyable read.
June 12th, 2013 at 13:35
Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery: That’s 600 bucks of pure regret.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: Except for this quote – “The only people for me are the mad ones …” – I couldn’t find it in me to care for the characters.
Both unfinished,. Not exactly hurled across the room, but buried discreetly somewhere – like dead bodies. Might resuscitate in the far future.
June 12th, 2013 at 17:05
Ejia: Jane Eyre! We’d been trying to read that since we were 11 but could never get past the first few chapters. Finally finished it after we saw the Cary Fukunaga adaptation starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender as Rochester. Which was the only time we could understand why Jane would go for…that.
Then again, we’ll read any book that gets adapted into a film starring Michael Fassbender.
June 12th, 2013 at 17:16
Tuesdays with Freaking Morrie. Cant believe a guy, a sports guy, a football guy wrote this book. Maybe even the droves of telenovela fans will find this too cheesy for their liking. What kind of person likes Tuesdays with Morrie?
Hardy Boys series. The original Dumb and Dumber. I dont know why but reading this way back in high school made me hate Americans.
L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. I picked up a copy from UPD’s Eng bldg comfort room with a note scribbled on the cover “emergency tissue paper”. Bad karma for me.
Lord of the Flies and Helter Skelter. I read these books when I was in high school and ready to save the world.
June 12th, 2013 at 21:36
Speaking of Salman Rushdie, I did throw The Ground Beneath Her Feet across the room. Pretentious, self-referential tripe from an author who’s not as clever as he thinks he is. (Didn’t we have an entire Salman Rushdie hatefest thread on this blog not too long ago? Good times.)
June 13th, 2013 at 00:07
stellalehua: Aha, the beginning of the end of my U2 fandom. They actually wrote a song based on that.
June 13th, 2013 at 09:38
Don Quixote. Had enough sense to quit after part 1.
June 13th, 2013 at 17:23
Middlemarch. I didn’t have have the heart to hurl it across the room, but perhaps I should have, after a sentence such as this:
“…I have your guardian’s permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I have an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I have preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred.” (Chapter 5)
June 18th, 2013 at 14:55
I can’t get past the first chapter of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. I keep on trying to restart, but can’t keep awake once I start.
June 18th, 2013 at 15:04
Re: Jane Eyre, I’ve never tried to read it, but I understood much of the plot (I think) from reading Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. The only classics I’ve read is Wuthering Heights and The Taming of the Shrew, which is the equivalent, for me, of watching black & white tagalog movies. You know, the one where people hold hands under the mango tree, look besotted by shaking their heads from side to side while uttering “ikaw ay aking minahal mula noong una pa man!” whilst their eyebrows are in an inverted V formation, then suddenly lunging toward each other only to bump cheeks.
June 19th, 2013 at 13:14
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times –after two or three attempts in ten years, I finally gave up. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man —picked it up twice and never went beyond a hundred pages.