[ SECRET POST #2238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 097 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, and there's stuff like Alexandre Dumas if you want to read adventure novels, there are classics that are basically erotica, there are classics that are cheesy romance novels etc. It's not like classics are all dull boring books in which people have philosophical discussions for 1000 pages.

Unless you really only like a tiiiiiny specific portion of literary fiction, I find it really hard to believe that ALL classics are not your kind of thing. ('your' as in OP's)

[dreemyweird]

...I'm almost ready to give up.

Perhaps they just meant that they tried many "classical" books at some point and found them boring.

Also I'm ashamed to admit it, but I can't think of any classics that are "basically erotica" or "cheesy romance novels". Unless you classify Marquis de Sade as classic and erotica? ...Cheesy romance novels, though? "Cheesy" sounds like something really out of place here.

As I already told the anon below, I now think that the only category that actually excludes classics is the category of silly and cheesy literature that was purposefully created to be sold and forgotten. It does exist, though. And don't tell me that Conan Doyle wrote things for this reason: he sure did, but there are worse cases. Some people make teams of hack writers to do incredibly shitty novels under one nom de plume. These most certainly can't be good enough to enter history.

[grainne_mhaol]

But what the 'classics' are is so vast now, and varies from publishing house to publishing house anyway. I mean just look at the Penguin Classics list.

It includes all kinds of sci-fi, erotica, bug-ass crazy rubbish, sensation novels never expected to outlive their financial use to their author, and lots and lots of cheese.

Glancing at the list and grabbing one at random - Lewis's The Monk is on there, a novel so full of hyperbollic gross-out sex and torture porn that the only way the author could up the ante again for the climax was to have the actual devil turn up and throw the antagonist around like a cartoon character.

I don't judge anyone for what they do or don't read, but I think the OP has a very narrow view of what constitutes "The Classics".

[dreemyweird]

Omg, they have Darwin there.



Yes, that was my notion. OP probably uses the term in a somewhat narrow sense.

[lunabee34]

You want a cheesy romance novel classic? Try the Victorians. :) They basically invented the soap opera.

[dreemyweird]

Any specific examples? I can't think of anyone who would write outright cheesy books. Amongst less popular writers, certainly, but not the classical works.

[lunabee34]

Sure. Now, I love these books and think they have a lot of value to offer, but I also think you could call them cheesy to a certain degree, mostly because they have plot lines that are now considered cliche to varying degrees and they rely heavily on sensationalism and melodrama (such as tropes of buried alive! presumed dead but really alive! pretending to be another person!).

I'd put most sensation fiction written in the 19th century in this category. So for example, No Name by Wilkie Collins where the protagonist is disinherited and goes about in masquerade in the household of the person does inherit. Or Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon where George Talboys disappears. Who killed him? Is it Lady Audley? Is she mad? Who is she really? Oh, she's the wife George abandoned all those years ago who made her way up in the world, committed bigamy, and then tried to kill him when he figured out the secret. But it's okay; George just has amnesia from that conk on the head she gave him.

Or Ouida, who although she has fallen out of the canon, was one of the most widely read female authors of the 19th century and certainly one of the richest. Her novels are just an awesome, hot mess.

[dreemyweird]

Thanks! It is perhaps not to my credit that I read neither Mary Elizabeth Braddon nor Ouida (although I have indeed heard of them and have been meaning to read the latter).

I already surrendered myself to the anon below, so I can only give you a symbolical curl from my head or something.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure about cheese, as such, but if you want the original soap opera, look at mythology. Any mythology. The Greeks were the most massively OTT how-many-implausible-and-downright-barmy-reasons-can-we-have-for-strife-and-murder that I've come across, but the Egyptians did some wonderful things with intrigue, murder and incest, the Chinese threw in some quality court intrigue and murderous scheming (and the odd road-trip of awesome) ...

Honestly. The closest thing I've ever seen to a modern TV soap opera is greek mythology. Or Shakespeare. Shakespeare was pretty damn soapy. Though, yes, Austen also has a lot to answer for.

[lunabee34]

I concede your point. :) We have clearly always been interested in telling stories of murder and bigamy and jealousy and etc.

I do think that Victorian sensation literature more closely resembles modern soaps than earlier mythological sources, but I'm all about reading and enjoying All the Things.

[(Anonymous)]

The Victorians has the advantage of a slightly closer-to-modern social structure to work with, I'll grant you. But yes, clearly humanity has ever been fond of telling stories about other people's incredibly elaborate misfortunes ;)

[kathkin]

Oh if you want ancient Greek soap opera - look up the Greek novels? There's about half a dozen or so, and they're all cheesy soap opera romances. With mistaken identity. And seduction. And pirates.

I quite like Heliodorus' Ethiopian Tale because the female lead is awesome but unfortunately the treatment of Ethiopian characters is... questionable. :/

[dreemyweird]

I remember how I hated Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet. I was a child with a strange world outlook, and when we were writing an essay about Shakespeare I wrote that it was a mediocre soapy shit and that Juliet behaved like a dunce. Naturally the teacher was not impressed.

[(Anonymous)]

There's not just de Sade (whom I definitely consider a classic), there's also less brutal classic erotica: Mirabeau comes to mind, Zola is hardly chaste, a lot of Roman and Greek writers are pretty naughty, and there are lots of others. As for cheesy romance - lol, have you ever read a Jane Austen novel? Or stuff like North and South? That's basically 18th and 19th century wishfulfilment. If that's not a cheesy romance classic, I don't know what it is. It's girl meets boy, meets conflict, and in the end they get married.

Again, if OP just doesn't like to read, or only reads very specific things like fanfic, fine. But the way the secret is phrased makes it sound like this person generally likes to read, but refuses to read classics (despite "not having read them" - so they can't have read that many classics and disliked them). And that's just a really weird distinction to make.

OMG OK I SURRENDER

[dreemyweird]

Unless somebody is able to suggest genres that do not include "classics".


I still think that the theory of silly&thoughtless literature was sort of plausible and that it could be that OP tried these books but gave up.

I definitely agree on Jane Austen's works. And Zola is just creepy.

Re: OMG OK I SURRENDER

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I'm intrigued : why do you find Zola creepy? (Not starting wank or anything, I'm really curious, as I love his work)

[(Anonymous)]

Alexandre Dumas can be kind of hard to get through if you're not, uh, flexible with what styles of writing you're willing to read.

...Actually, a lot of classics are written in styles that would get you tarred and feathered in fanfiction circles. (First person, third person omniscient, change viewpoints every other paragraph, put down the thesaurus and no one gets hurt, super-perfect characters, wallowing, lousy dialogue, bizarre grammar, let's not go into the problematic-because-they're-dated aspects...)

[visp]

Urrgh, Dumas. He really went on about things.

[(Anonymous)]

Depends on where you catch him, I think. Though I've read Victor Hugo and Mervyn Peake, I've a high tolerance for long, random digressions, so I might not be the best person to talk. But Dumas' Valois Romances were pretty on-point most of the way through, and I really enjoyed them.

[visp]

Never read those, actually. And I'm not entirely opposed to Dumas, I just find myself skipping through a lot of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, a lot of classics are written in styles that would get you tarred and feathered in fanfiction circles.

Oooh this is actually a thing that drives me bonkers, but perhaps not in the way that you meant. People will be like, "ONLY USE 'SAID' AND 'REPLIED.' OTHER DIALOGUE TAGS ARE RIDICULOUS, GOD." But then you crack open some Dickens and there are ten different dialogue tags to a page. So you're like, "well, Dickens sucks, because look at these things that he did," and the same people respond, "DICKENS IS ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS OF ALL TIME, FUCK YOU."

Anyway. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that what constitutes "good" writing is as dynamic as the language in which one is doing the writing, and I wish that more people would acknowledge that rather than insist on there being hard and fast rules.

(On a related note: I decided to look up why "all of a sudden" is incorrect a number of months ago. Turns out that there's actually no good reason for it. One "explanation" I found even went so far as to note that, one day, "all of a sudden" might be used more commonly than "all of the sudden" and therefore be correct, but for now, it's not correct, simply because it's not the most common usage. WTF?! How can you define a "rule" as "the thing that most people are doing these days?")

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

No, that drives me bonkers in pretty much the same way. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

DA: It's called prescriptive vs descriptive grammar. Prescriptive stuff is the stuff they teach you in English classes about what the "correct" vs "incorrect" ways to use the language are. Descriptive stuff is frequently "incorrect" according to prescriptive grammars, but because descriptive grammar is simply the way native speakers of a language use that language, it's "correct" in its own right. So if you imagine prescriptive grammars being some stodgy old librarian who won't accept self-published lit into their library because it's not "the most common" form, and descriptive grammars being self-publishing authors (like some books you can get on Amazon) and works by those that write fanfic hosted on places like AO3, maybe it makes more sense? If self-publishing got huge, eventually the stodgy librarian would have to allow that type of lit into the library because it was the most common type of published work, and the older novels from places like Penguin or Random House were considered archaic (or no longer in demand). Even if the stodgy librarian still thinks that a book still doesn't count as "literature" unless it's been workshopped and eventually approved by an objective and very experienced editor.

[coffeeyoukai]

I rarely have problems with style (hell, I tend to write in second person half the time, which is about as unorthodox a style as you can get) but the style of most classics just bore me. It's just the rather... what would you call it? old-fashioned? way the author speaks that I just can't get engaged by. Which is a pity because I think I'd love the plot of several of those classics, I just can't stand trudging through the writing.

[(Anonymous)]

Dumas uses a lot of qualifiers "the older man" etc, which aren't really used in modern writing.

I adore the first half of The Count of Monte Cristo, but can't get through the second half, sort of lost the will when it all gets so complicated and rambly. The relationship between Dantes and the old chap who is the prisoner though, that whole section is wonderful.