A Brief but Pithy-Recommended Reads - NOT!

A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Little Murders, Jules Feiffer

From time to time, it occurs to me that I need to do some backtracking, that I need to return to the significantly lauded works from years before.

But usually I don’t do that because I have so many ‘new’ books piled up in ziggurat, my curiosity about them is ‘forward’, not ‘back there’.

But recently, I gave it a shot. And in doing so, was disappointed.

I gathered up the three notables, listed above.

Read them through and through, paid attention to dialogue and syntax, paid attention to story and substance and style.

Either they have aged out or I have.

I found all three to be tiresome, tedious and boring.

• Farewell To Arms is dreary and maudlin, a predictable soap-opera of Hemingway’s bloated macho and an ending that Agnes Nixon of ALL MY CHILDREN would have rejected. It simply had no punch. It just wandered off at the finish.

• Gatsby has some wonderful moments, I’ll admit, but again you can see the ending from right at the beginning. You know as you go in that the whole tricked up, rich mess is going down in flames.Some weird, ill-fitting vocabulary here and there and an immaturity of plot abounds.

• Little Murders, from a decorated, far left political cartoonist (made his bundle excoriating the Viet Nam war) and award-winning playwright, is an inane, childish, lame allegory on violence in America. Reads like a bored 10th grader doodled it out. Has all the depth of a puddle in the desert sun. Useless.

There. I have spoken my heresy. May the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as hurled my way by teachers and professors from across the spectrum, miss me by just enough. But, you know what? I ain’t recanting!

(A lot of Shakespeare doesn’t do much for me either…)