fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2715 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2715 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Tales of Innocence]

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03.

[Transamerica]

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04.

[Final Fantasy VIII]

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05.

[Interview with the Vampire]

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06.

[Andrew Lloyd Webber]

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07.

[Critical Miss]

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08.

[Great British Menu/Emily Watkins]

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09.

[Mike Malinin, Goo Goo Dolls]

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10.

[Pacific Rim]

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11.

[Star Trek TNG]

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12.

[Homestuck]

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13.

[The Man From Nowhere]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 058 secrets from Secret Submission Post #388.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I totally agree. We had to read War and Peace and Wuthering Hights as summer reading for an advanced English Class in high school. Everyone else hated War and Peace and loved Wuthering Hights. Even the boys. This never made any sense to me. War and Peace is awesome and Wuthering Hights is dull and stupid and the characters are awful.

I'm actually intending to read War and Peace eventually, since I can somehow put up with the Russians better apparently. I think I was the only person in 11th grade who actually kind of liked Crime and Punishment. Oh, also Heart of Darkness, that was cool.

It helped that at the time I was going through a phase of obsession with Tsarist Russian history. So Russian literature was very much what I was interested in reading. I liked Crime and Punishment too.

Hah!

I like them both for different reasons, but I feel you. War and Peace is full of amazing wonderful loveable characters who become even more loveable when love is everywhere mingled with grief, and Wuthering Heights is wall-to-wall terrible people being awful in miserable surroundings and then whining about it, sometimes from beyond the grave.

I'll defend Wuthering Heights, but War and Peace is my heart.

I was reminded of W and P the other day when anon had a few questions about it. All the female characters seemed terrible to me, as in all Tolstoi stories.

I think I am that anon, hi!

Do you mean horrible as in horrible people, or horrible as in Tolstoi doesn't write women very well?

I like the female characters in W&P (pretty much all of them) but sometimes I think they're good characters in spite of their author's ideas about them.

(it's ok if you think they're terrible, though; I'm not trying to start a Tolstoi fight)

Don't read further if you don't like negative opinions about the books you like.)

It's like Tolstoi writes in two separate categories: people and women, IMHO. Maybe it's because the first thing I saw opening the book is Natasha 'listened to him as a woman should. Not like a smart woman retaining information, but like a woman who gets everything he expresses, without interrupting him' (not an exact quote). Or the wife in Anna Karenina who couldn't leave her husband, and packed and unpacked for days. Something about all this grates on my nerves like it didn't before when I first read it.

However W and P is famous for believable, living and breathing characters, and it's great that you liked them. At the very least you'll get hours of enjoyable reading out of it.

Hah, don't worry! I live for negative opinions about the books I like.

That thing you're talking about is real and I don't blame you at all for hating it. imo Tolstoi is really good at creating believable characters and really bad about trying to cram his believable, complex characters into dumbass sermons about Real True Pure and Good Womanhood and The True Purpose of the Family or whatever.

So I often feel the illusion that he's just wrong about his characters, that they have lives of their own that he's failed to fully understand. For me, the douchey misogyo-narration adds to the illusion of depth and reality, because it gives the characters, who already seem like real people, the additional realistic quality of being misunderstood. So eyerolling the narrator is like a secondary pleasure for me that enhances the first.

Which I realize is a pretty convoluted way of liking a thing with problems, but it's just what happened in my head. Getting annoyed is probably the more rational response.

(and I think there may be actually three categories: people, women, and peasants, but that's a tale for another day)

This is an unusual way to experiense a book.) Agh, agreed on peasants.

[ SECRET POST #2715 ]

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