ponyyy

The following is strictly my opinion and not necessarily a verifiable fact. I therefore can not claim that it is or even should be true for everyone.

 

Death of a Salesman is the kind of boring and depressing drivel that literary critics seem to love to praise.  I hated that piece of shit back in the 1960s when I had to read it for high school and I still hated it when I had to read it for a college class in the 70s.  It was almost as bad as having to read The Pearl by John Steinbeck, another depressing story with a tragic ending.  Personally, if I want to feel miserable, I'd rather suffer through a hangover after a three day drinking binge.

 

I would much rather read something a bit more exciting, which is why I will stick with horror, scifi, mystery and adventure stories.  But that is my own taste in reading.  And while I firmly believe that literary critics hate most people so much that they want to inflict misery on them by foisting Mr. Miller's crap on them by convincing them that it actually holds some real social value, I must also recognize that there may be some people out there who will truthfully enjoy that type of story.  And those people would probably consider the books that I prefer to read to be utter and complete crap.  Luckily, I don't mind people who think differently than me when it comes to personal taste.  I feel that it makes the world a much more interesting place.

 

So now I will be shortly starting on volume 3 of the Vampire Hunter D series.

 

And Primo, I sincerely hope that you are one of those people who will enjoy Mr. Miller's work as I wouldn't want to see you get as depressed as I did when I had to read that damn book.  Who knows?  Maybe all it takes is to have more class than me to appreciate it.  And there are many people who will claim that it is ridiculously easy to have more class than me!!!

 

Final note:  In my book reports on Death of a Salesman, I lied my ass off and ended up getting perfect grades from my teachers.  I had already learned by that time that school is not always about acquiring knowledge, especially in non-science courses like Literature or History, but instead is about being taught particular viewpoints by instructors with their own agendas.  Getting straight "A's" in courses like that is where I learned to lie like a politician and feed the same bullshit back to the professors that they were espousing.  The sad thing to me was seeing how many of the other students were convinced by those professors that they were being taught the actual truth, instead of an opinion.

Sir, as someone who has read those depressing books and written more essays on them than is good for a soul, I totally agree. It's not for everyone. For instance, the most depressing book I've read is Tess of the d'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy (not even correct French, which should just be Tess d'Ubervilles), which is basically about a silly girl who thinks the romances in gothic novels are a legit way to live real life. In the end she commits adultery, ends up in loads of debt that she leaves to her poor cuckolded husband, and dies of some venereal disease from fooling around with men too much. Yeah. And this is considered a masterpiece.

Which I understand -- the language and craftsmanship manage to attain a certain "standard" so to speak. But it's so friggin' depressing I had to periodically splurge on chocolate every time I got through a bit of it.

As for the teachers... It really depends on which ones you get. I got really good teachers who were just interested in knowing whether or not you tried to use your brain to think about the essay topics a bit. Whether or not the book was good for your soul -- well. To be fair, they had a preset curriculum to follow that they had little leeway in changing.

Edit: Totally forgot to put down what I'm reading now. I'm currently juggling The Heir Chronicles by Cinda Williams Chima and The Fall of Ile-Rien by Margaret Wells. But I'm getting sidetracked because I'm actually stealth-rereading Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones when I should be finishing one of those two series.