ITT: The most disappointing work from the classics that you have read

ITT: The most disappointing work from the classics that you have read.

For me: Everything by Shakespeare

I just thought about this today. I wouldn't dare say that Shakespeare is overrated but I don't really see the big significance a modern reader is supposed to get from his plays and sonnets. Perhaps it's the antiquated language or that they are plays that should be performed and give further meaning and nuances to what he wrote about, but it's just not for me. Maybe I'm just a brainlet but reading Shakespeare is like torture to me.

>Maybe I'm just a brainlet
Yes, you are. I'm not going to write a whole thing about why he's good. Here's a start: he has the most profound character psychology of any writer, even Dostoevsky. Nobody has ever understood people better than Shakespeare

Shakespeare's work must be understood in its time. He created many tropes that, since we are used to see them everywhere, we disregard them as new or works of geniality, since we are too used to see them everywhere. What we have to understand is that Shakespeare created those tropes, and they didn't existed before.

Think about this way: the creation of a rock band is attributed to the Beatles, but since we see the same formation everywhere, we don't regard that as noteworthy.

Phaedo

Is...
Is that a reference to dr. Bubo?

The Illiad
>the pill Veeky Forums refuses to swallow

Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
The Stranger by Albert Camus.
Some Balzac novels.

I know what he accomplished, doesn't make me appreciate his writing style any more though. Its just not really captivating to me and doesn't make me wanna come back for more.

Shakespeare's sonnets. I love his other works, but every other sonnet feels the same. So many people regard them as "hidden gems", but I really don't see that.

A tip for Shakespeare: read and REread...the first time you read, and you aren't familiar with the early modern grammar and freer word order etc, youre just going to be trying to 'make sense' of every line. You wouldn't expect to get much from a piece of music after one listen. Just take say, Hamlet, read it 5 times, read a babbies version, watch 5 performances. It will be a revelation, I promise you.

>For me: Everything by Shakespeare

>Its just not really captivating to me and doesn't make me wanna come back for more.
That's your own fault

if you wrote a whole thing about why he's good i'd love to read it. i want to get into shakespeare but have a hard time reading plays.

the sonnets are gold, even a brainlet could see that however.

dudw really? 400 years of scholarship isnt enough for you?

Last year I decided to read Homer in the original Greek and I felt as frustrated at times as some of you guys...you just feel youre constantly 'translating' into your own idiom. Eventually though you really do start to read and 'think' in the original language. The best pleasures are hard won. Luckily Elizabethan English is far easier, you just need to be willing to try. In an age of drip feeding electronic stimulation this is a difficult thing for many, but its also correspondingly rewarding. Making your brain work for pleasure will literally make you a better and smarter person.

Dracula.
Man, after Lucy gets killed the book turns into a fucking bore.
Also Hopscotch (Rayuela) is fucking unbearable, Cortázar is great writing short stories but that novel was the bad kind of weird

I think Lovecraft is absolute garbage, if that counts as classics. I also couldn't finish Wuthering Heights.

Reading Ulysses, or the portrait of Mr. W.H by Oscar Wilde or some criticism like Bloom's invention of the Human would show you some of the influence he had.

Try Dr Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

Shakespeare, his sonnets are dreadful. Hamlet was very good.
Dostoevsky — his filler is more enjoyable than the actual story. His novellas are excellent; man of brevity, no doubt.

Hemingway, Camus, Kafka. Trite, overly simplistic and their prose is dull.

Hesse: a man too busy spouting his sophistry instead of writing.

The Ballsack. I didn't like him.

Andrić, Ivo — a good novel and a good novella. Rest are circural drivel.

Very few writers are actually good: Rimbaud, Pynchon, Pavlović. Most are filler and Canon fodder.

You have to say a bit more than 'his sonnets are dreadful' - I know where on a mongol basket weaving board but come on, make a sentence long case at least. And show me a better picture of the turbulent agony of love than:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Pride and prejudice
The great Gatsby

>the great Gatsby
this. although I'm very prejudiced against books where I hate every character personally
Catcher in the Rye is another example