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Terrible, well renowned novelists

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mberan42:

--- Quote from: Joseph on 05 Aug 2009, 14:13 ---I think there is some confusion in this thread between popular and renowned novelists.  I'm pretty sure (though maybe I'm wrong) that the thread was more pointed towards authors who had been critically aclaimed.

--- End quote ---

Tom Clancy = renowned for his military/war thrillers
Dan Brown = renowned for his mystery/religious controvertial/whatever thrillers
J.K. Rawling = renowned for her fantasy
John Grisham = renowned for his whodunnits/mystery thrillers
Stephen King = renowned for his horror stories
Dean Koontz = renowned for whatever the hell he writes (it was a stretch to think of more people after King)

I think what you're getting at is popular <> renowned, when in fact I believe popular == renowned. Being renowned in your case doesn't mean they write high-falutin' literature.

ackblom12:
I was wondering how long it would take for Stephen King to get mentioned.

R.S. Salvatore
Terry Goodkind
Robert Jordan (the latter half of WoT specifically)
Anne Rice
Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess is a complicated one for me. I loved A Clockwork Orange so much, but his entire ending kind of ruined it for me. I much prefer the version the publishers originally released without his consent. Admittedly it was a dick move, but it just made so much more sense.


--- Quote from: Be My Head on 05 Aug 2009, 14:15 ---
--- Quote from: ackblom12 on 05 Aug 2009, 13:22 ---I've read the books several times, it doesn't change the fact that he spends far too much time on mundane unimportant descriptions and the pacing is terrible in a lot of places. I still find it very enjoyable and I'm unsure if it would have had the impact it did if it was written any other way.


--- End quote ---

In that case we might as well include Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. Hamlet does pretty much nothing for the first 4 acts of Hamlet, therefore it's a boring story right?

--- End quote ---

When did I say that Tolkien was shit or boring? I said the writing is not as well done in a technical sense as many folks seem to believe.

KharBevNor:
Tolkien's writing is technically incredible, it's just that he's employing the style and structure of 10th century Norse and German rather than 20th century English literature. Anyone who's ever read Heimskringla or Beowulf will see where Tolkien is taking his narrative ideas from. Also, it's worth noting that Tolkien essentially wrote Lord of the Rings as something to do on Sunday evenings after a couple of pints with C.S. Lewis., to relax after a hard week deconstructing the philological roots of kennings in proto-germanic bears son folk-tales. The incredible levels of detail are excusable because it was basically his own private fantasy world; that it was such a phenomenal success says a lot about how incredibly clever Tolkien's use of language and mythic narrative actually was. I find the supposed flaws in Tolkien's work particularly intriguing, actually, because it is a work of such obvious eccentricity, crafted with only the authors amusement in mind. When I compare this with, say, a tedious shite-spewing fuckhead like Stephen King, a man who has seemingly been trying for years to see if he can reach some unholy nadir of absolute awfulness in literature by striking a perfect balance between pretension, populism, condecension, lack of technical skill and sheer fucking ball-crushing stupidity, well.

Back on to the darlings of the literati, Virginia Woolfe. Orlando is ok, everything else is pretty much awful. She would almost certainly never have got a word published if she hadn't been busy exploring the genitals of half of Londons literary elite. Most of her work was glorified vanity projects but, in the complete opposite of Tolkien, of such obvious and tedious pretension that reading her work is basically tiring. When she does produce a good passage (I do remember a few diamonds in the awful rough that is To The Lighthouse) she always manages to fuck them up by doing something utterly stupid, like making a sentence that runs for two pages strung together with forty semi-colons.

rynne:

--- Quote from: Alex C on 05 Aug 2009, 13:32 ---Tolkein gives me the impression that he loved language more than he loved telling stories.

--- End quote ---

Well, yeah.  He's so much as said that Middle Earth was invented as a framework for his imaginary languages; something to the effect of "I wanted to create a world where 'A Star shines on the hour of our meeting' is a common greeting."  He wasn't so much writing stories as writing histories.

elizaknowswhatshesfor:
KharBevNor your answer is so right and wonderful it makes me feel a little sexy.

I would like to add On The Road. It makes me so cross I can barely be literate about why I dislike it, apart from dul dull dull.

I like so many other writers in this vein. But it leaves me cold. Cold & bored. These are not things I want from a book.

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