I didn't like [Brave New World] because of the setting. I didn't like that the world ended up in such as way, and John the Savage ended up killing himself at the end. I wasn't big into politics at all . . ., and just the condition of the world, with the hierarchies, and people just walking zombies, all addicted to the Soma-drug, and their only activity was mindless sex orgies. How the government ran everything. It made my stomach sick. So, it wasn't that it was poorly written, it was a total turn-off for the story and setting itself. That, and I hate to read it for High School Junior-Grade English 3, who I had a TOTAL BITCH for a teacher.
Huxley isn't the world's greatest science-fiction writer. Au contraire. He was using the story as a vehicle for a message about social and political phenomena as he saw them in his day rather than just trying to write excellent fiction, with results pretty much as you describe: a mixed bag of ideas that didn't quite come off, and would have been better presented in a non-fiction essay or monograph. And having a bad teacher assigning it would definitely have been a turn-off -- I had experiences like that, though with other types of things; I started reading at age 3 and was a nonstop reader by the time I was 8 or so, and the bad teachers tried to hold me back, but couldn't kill my love of reading.
I didn't like SH5, because once again as with BNW, I just found the entire storyline stupid, with the pseudo-time travel, and the Aliens knew the day the world would end, but did nothing to try and stop it, I don't remember much about the book itself, just my disdain for it.
That was another example of a Message, i.e., a piece of fiction written to shove a message at people rather than for its own sake. Some of Vonnegut's work is very, very good, though generally not my thing, but this one was another mixed bag the quality of which got lost somewhere in all the flotsam he tried to pack into the book. However, I feel for the guy, because he fought in WW2, and actually saw some of what he describes in that novel (the war, not the aliens), and it left him seriously wounded in mind and spirit. Writing that novel was an attempt at self-administered therapy, though give what his own son said about him ("living with my dad would drive anybody nuts"), it didn't work very well.
I hated Catcher because of the main character. Everyone in the class spoke of him like he was some great intellectual. He was a fucking spoiled little brat. I hated his character so much. I had to read this in my Sophomore year.
Holden Caulfield is a spoiled brat, but apparently that combined with very bad experiences (the novel hints at early sexual abuse, way before the action of the novel) to harm him -- it certainly didn't help him, and he did have a real nervous breakdown. That said, he was also a royal pain in the ass, in spite of the insights he had. The thing is, those "insights" were the ones which psychotherapists and psychoanalysts believed one "ought" to have, according to their theories, rather than the result of hands-on experience with life, and looking back from the 1980s or later they look exactly like what they are: quips from much older textbooks that really don't have much application to real life. But teachers keep assigning the book because their teachers did and because their school committees in charge of determining the curriculum mandate it -- apparently all of them have the originality and common sense of a boiled clam. If that.
So I certainly can see why you didn't like those books. Me, I loved science fiction, MAD Magazine, and rock-and-roll, so that's where I'm coming from. :-)
Huxley isn't the world's greatest science-fiction writer. Au contraire. He was using the story as a vehicle for a message about social and political phenomena as he saw them in his day rather than just trying to write excellent fiction, with results pretty much as you describe: a mixed bag of ideas that didn't quite come off, and would have been better presented in a non-fiction essay or monograph. And having a bad teacher assigning it would definitely have been a turn-off -- I had experiences like that, though with other types of things; I started reading at age 3 and was a nonstop reader by the time I was 8 or so, and the bad teachers tried to hold me back, but couldn't kill my love of reading.
I didn't like SH5, because once again as with BNW, I just found the entire storyline stupid, with the pseudo-time travel, and the Aliens knew the day the world would end, but did nothing to try and stop it, I don't remember much about the book itself, just my disdain for it.
That was another example of a Message, i.e., a piece of fiction written to shove a message at people rather than for its own sake. Some of Vonnegut's work is very, very good, though generally not my thing, but this one was another mixed bag the quality of which got lost somewhere in all the flotsam he tried to pack into the book. However, I feel for the guy, because he fought in WW2, and actually saw some of what he describes in that novel (the war, not the aliens), and it left him seriously wounded in mind and spirit. Writing that novel was an attempt at self-administered therapy, though give what his own son said about him ("living with my dad would drive anybody nuts"), it didn't work very well.
I hated Catcher because of the main character. Everyone in the class spoke of him like he was some great intellectual. He was a fucking spoiled little brat. I hated his character so much. I had to read this in my Sophomore year.
Holden Caulfield is a spoiled brat, but apparently that combined with very bad experiences (the novel hints at early sexual abuse, way before the action of the novel) to harm him -- it certainly didn't help him, and he did have a real nervous breakdown. That said, he was also a royal pain in the ass, in spite of the insights he had. The thing is, those "insights" were the ones which psychotherapists and psychoanalysts believed one "ought" to have, according to their theories, rather than the result of hands-on experience with life, and looking back from the 1980s or later they look exactly like what they are: quips from much older textbooks that really don't have much application to real life. But teachers keep assigning the book because their teachers did and because their school committees in charge of determining the curriculum mandate it -- apparently all of them have the originality and common sense of a boiled clam. If that.
So I certainly can see why you didn't like those books. Me, I loved science fiction, MAD Magazine, and rock-and-roll, so that's where I'm coming from. :-)
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