Now I have a cure. Here is a site that lets you instantly feel superior and recognize what a waste of time it would be to read the greats. Instead, you can read a quick review of one literary great by another literary great, realize what a waste of time reading the former would be, and maybe start to question whether it would be a similar waste of time to read the "great works" of the latter. Examples?
William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)There. You can now thank me. You can now refuse to read any more of the "classic literature" because even the classic authors agree it is just a big waste of your time!
“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad
“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)
“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)
“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger
“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
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