Synchronicity

[wombat_socho]

I set off a bit of a kerfluffle the other night at the PRSFS meeting by opining that most "classics" aren't worth the time wasted on reading them, and trotted out Trollope, Hemingway and Stendhal as examples. Apparently I'm not the only guy that feels that way. Correia also has an amusing post in which he fisks an e-mail from an annoyed leftist.

Comments

[harvey_rrit]

Let us consider two "mainstream" "classics":
1 ) Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea;
2 ) Melville's Moby Dick.

1 ) A man spends the entire story obsessed with catching a big fish, and catches it, and dies.
2 ) A man spends the entire story obsessed with catching a big fish, and doesn't catch it, and dies.

So much more EDIFYING* than, say, a tale of a vengeance-bound sociopath in a society of teleports.

*EDIFYING (adj.): Understandable to union teachers.

[wombat_socho]

I gave up on Hemingway after Death In The Afternoon, supposedly one of the great books on bullfighting, turned out to have more mierda than toros in it.