You come across it while cleaning out your attic: a book, a CD, a VHS cassette.
My God, you think, that was one hell of a novel/song/movie! Nostalgia mixes with anticipation as you prepare to savor it anew.
But what’s this? It seems to have gone rotten! Phaughhh! Retch! Ptooey!
How on earth were you ever taken in those long years ago by this foulness that sucks like an electrolux? Was your taste that abysmal?
Worry not. You are the latest victim of a virulent virtual vampire: the Suck Fairy.
Jo Walton revealed all about the little monster in a blog post on Tor.com. Go read the whole thing (and the many comments that amplify it); this extract gives us the gist of her warning to mankind:
The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.
I, too, have suffered her bite. The superhero comics I loved as a child count some of her sorriest victims.
These old comics I class into four categories.
The first comprises work that still holds up, mellowed like old port. Examples would include Ditko and Lee‘s Spider-Man, Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four and Thor; though I prize them more now for qualities less appreciated by a child, notably humor.
The next category covers those comics that only interest me through nostalgia, or that tickle my camp funny bone, or that still please me for purely formal reasons such as good draftsmanship: 1960s Curt Swan-drawn Superman, Steranko‘s S.H.I.E.L.D, Gil Kane’s Green Lantern.
A third category consists of work that simply disappoints today, with no strong redeeming features, entertaining enough for a young boy but without interest for the adult me; say, Sal Buscema-drawn Marvel Team-Up.
And then, the dread fourth category:
The Spawn of the Suck Fairy.
Suck Fairies casting their curses at ComicCon
My library recently acquired a copy of Marvel’s Essential Iron Man, part of that publisher’s welcome line of cheap, phone-book sized black-and-white reprints.
I decided to check out the strips I so enjoyed at age eleven.
Cover art by Bruce Timm
Oh, dear God in Heaven. Zut alors.
After reading a few stories, I felt like gouging my eyes out. That fey bitch had infected every single page with suckiness of a cosmic level.
Ahhh, shut the “!@#§!* up. Take the Holland Tunnel like everyone else, you douche. Art by Don Heck.
I was mystified by how sucky this printed turd was.
I mean, I certainly have a high tolerance for mediocre comics. Here was far from the worst comics art I’d ever seen. (The most atrocious story in the collection isn’t drawn by the series’ regular, the oft-derided Don Heck, but by the excellent Steve Ditko. Actually, Heck’s art was better than I remembered.)
The scripts were probably no more moronic ( with their Cold War Commie-bashing and brainless plots) than other non-sucky comics of the time (the mid-60s).
Well, thank you, Ms Walton, for revealing the culprit: the Suck Fairy.
How that destructive little vermin has blighted literature — blighted my most precious books!
When I was 12, in 1966, I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R Tolkien. I lived that book as one can only at that age.
I was jonesing for more, and Ballantine Books (Tolkien’s publisher) was canny enough to offer me the following:
The Worm Ouroboros is an odd duck of a novel.
Written in 1922 by E.R. Eddison (1882–1945), it chronicles the war between Demonland and Witchland on the planet Mercury. Its prose style is a pastiche of Jacobean writing, gorged with archaism that I found near-impenetrable; but I doggedly forged on with frequent recourse to a dictionary, much to the improvement of my vocabulary:
But a great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone, carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake: there a cockatrice made of a single ruby: there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye: salamanders, mermaids, chimaeras, wild men o’ the woods, leviathans, all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man’s body, velvet-dark sapphires, crystolite, beryl, amethyst, and the yellow zircon that is like transparent gold.
The book enthralled me.
Jump forward ten years to 1976. I was 22, doing my military service after three years of university, and I picked the book up again. This time I found it easily readable, but rather slight; an enjoyable fantasy.
Cut to the year 2006. Once again, I plunged into the Worm — and stopped after 50 pages. Her Dread Suckiness had struck again. The book was now a plodding, cardboard-thin gallimaufry of tushery, Wardour Street pretentiousness and outright plagiarism.
“Yet, lo,” she said, as a sweet and wild music stole on the ear, and the guests turned towards the dais, and the hangings parted, “at last, the triple lordship of Demonland! Strike softly, music: smile, Fates, on this festal day! Joy and safe days shine for this world and Demonland! Turn thy gaze first on him who walks in majesty in the midst, his tunic of olive-green velvet ornamented with devices of hidden meaning in thread of gold and beads of chrysolite. Mark how the buskins, clasping his stalwart calves, glitter with gold and amber. Mark the dusky cloak streamed with gold and lined with blood-red silk: a charmed cloak, made by the sylphs in forgotten days, bringing good hap to the wearer, so he be true of heart and no dastard.
Thou suckest, o purple prose. Fie upon thee, sirrah!
(Ah, well, at least the illustrations remain lovely. Here are the Lords of Demonland:)
Art by Keith Henderson
The King of Witchland conjures diabolic forces: art by Keith Henderson
To be fair, over the end of the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s, Ballantine Books (thanks to their crackerjack editor Lin Carter) revived many wonderful classics of fantasy in paperback: Hope Mirlees‘ Lud-in-the-Mist, James Branch Cabell‘s Jurgen, Lord Dunsany‘s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, William Hope Hodgson‘s The House on the Borderland and The Boats of the Glen Carrig… all masterpieces immune to the Suck Fairy’s kiss!
(Touch wood…)
I used to re-read The Lord of the Rings every five years , but haven’t done so for the last two decades; you can guess why I am afraid to.
But the Suck Fairy’s master-stroke was her demolition of one of my most cherished loves:
Like millions of 16-year-olds before and after me, I read J.D.Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye and knew– KNEW!– that it was about me, me, ME; its hero, young Holden Caulfield, was me.
All my adolescent longings and heartache and rage against the goddam phonies of the grown-up world were here. I fell in love with a book.
But the Suck Fairy was lurking, biding its time with demonic patience.
J.D.Salinger
I next read Catcher when I was 34.
I was repelled and enraged.
That little preppy brat Holden– I’d kick his snotty rich-kid ass all over Manhattan.
What a nasty, arch, supercilious volume of egotistic peacockery– compounding its silver-spoon ugliness with a bathetic display of mawkish sentimentality.
Damn you, Suck Fairy! Leave me alone with my illusions and my bottle.
*********************************
David L. Ulin, in his reflective essay-book The Lost Art of Reading, is troubled by this phenomenon:
I had lost books by rereading them. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, for instance, which I had loved in college but not so much later, when I began to see it as a young writer’s pastiche, less about life as it really is than a naïf’s projection about how life might be.
He is afraid to reread The Great Gatsby– and is relieved to find it as superb as he’d remembered. (I, too, find Gatsby to be better at each fresh reading.)
He finds a possible explanation in Anne Fadiman’s 2005 book Rereadings:
The former [reading] had more velocity; the latter [rereading] had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicated lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it.
Anne, Anne, Anne… that’s all true, all very well and good…
…but it doesn’t protect your literary treasures against the relentless despoiling of the vile, gloating Suck Fairy.
Is there no hope, then? As we all age, our personal troves of culture age, too.
And the evil Suck Fairy grows mightier.
Yet… is she so wicked? Doesn’t she serve an essential function in our intellectual ecology…culling the herds?
Let’s end with the heartening words of Demetrios X, commenting on Ms Walton’s blog:
There is also an extremely rare counterpart to the Suck Fairy, the Anti-Suck Fairy. It’s only happened once or twice, but I have encountered books that I was very disappointed in the first time I read them, and then found I quite liked them on a second reading. That’s not a matter of growing up or being older either. It’s happened to me with books I’ve read as an adult with a gap of only a few years.
Yes, indeed. The Suck Fairy and the Anti-Suck Fairy are locked in constant struggle, and in the course of a reader’s life may, turn by turn, conquer a book.
Suck and Anti-Suck, in gentler days before their all-out war
Like so many children, I was enamoured of L.Frank Baum‘s Oz books.
An Oz comic strip by its original illustrator, W.W.Denslow
But as an adult, I put them behind me, finding in their simple prose little of the cleverness and charm that keeps Alice in Wonderland or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear so beguiling to grown-ups.
But the Anti-Suck Fairy was on the job! Now I delight again in the Oz books, discerning satire and shrewd political commentary behind the fairy-tale façade.
Likewise, the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I devoured as a teenager seemed unreadable in later life; tedious, racist hackwork.
Art by Frank Frazetta
But good ol’ Anti-Suck showed me the wit and liveliness that ERB masters at his best.
I particularly recommend Carson of Venus and Tarzan and the Lion Man. Among other pleasures: the former for its sly attack on eugenicism, the latter for its genial self-parody and savage send-up of Hollywood.
Time to give Catcher in the Rye another go? You bet!
So take heart, my fellow culture vultures, the S.F. is not invincible.
Can you tell me of your own encounters with the Suck and Anti-Suck fairies in the comments below?
Oh yeah. I have a feeling that my generation of creative people (I’m 23) is consciously affecting a vast, all-encompassing cognitive dissonance about their childhood. It’s some kind of nerd-camp flattening of values. I’m hard pressed to think of one of my peers (friends, acquaintances, or strangers whose work I admire) that doesn’t or hasn’t as an adult scribbled Pokemon fan-drawings.
Don’t reread LOTR, man. Just don’t. Cushion those good memories.
I re-read the first Redwall book last summer (RIP B Jaques!) and yeah. Not good. I still have fond, fond memories of the series. I’ll probably take a stab at Mossflower once I’m done with my real book that adults are supposed to be reading.
Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows is AMAZING though. For me, personally, it’s a better read as an adult. It’s not the nostalgia talking when I say it’s still one of my favorite books.
Oh god, I probably won’t revisit Camus’ The Stranger, though. That was MY “Catcher” and I’m not about to go back to that place.
I’m with you on Grahame, man. camus I’m a bit scared to…when I was 20 his book ‘La Chute’ shook the Hell out of me.
BTW the Visconti movie of the Stranger is bad.
This article perfectly captured why I will probably not re-read “Catcher” anytime soon…though I did read “Franny & Zooey” for the first time in college, and even as a relatively privileged middle-class white undergrad I found their rich-kid ennui insufferable. That’s a book I doubt even the Anti-Suck Fairy can salvage.
I’ll stick up for Tolkien. Just reread the Hobbit to my son, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful book. Read LOTR recently too, and I still think it’s pretty great. The plot plot plot maybe gets a little tiresome, but hIs language remains lovely, and the good parts are still great (like, everything having to do with golem.)
Tolkien’s posthumous Children of Hurin is actually an amazing book as well. Much more depressing, but as good as the trilogy and the Hobbit, I think.
I agree. I’m also fond of Farmer Giles of Ham!
I’ve also been rereading the oz books. They get progressively more crappy; by the fifth they’ve become virtually unreadable. The first couple though…I don’t know about political satire…but they are seriously trippy. You forget how completely bizarre they are. Even weirder than Alice in some ways, just because the Oz books have more of a quest structure. They feel like they should be more normal, but they’re not.
I wrote about the first volume’s illustrations here.
The Hobbit does stand up better— My re-read of LOTR felt like a bit of a slog, although some parts still work. Anything with Gollum…and the bits of Hobbit humor that make their way into the trilogy help. There’s a bit too much of the self-important windbaggery though.
The first Oz book is still enjoyable— As with many things, he probably should have quit while he was ahead.
Wind in the Willows stands up remarkably well—although it was a bit slow for my daughter a couple of years back. I enjoyed the heck out of it myself.
I remember really liking Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in high school–within 4-5 years I hated it (and Atlas Shrugged was truly awful)— Hard to blame the suck fairy though–I’m pretty sure I was just stupid.
I liked The Fountainhead when I thought it was a paean to creativity rather than a not-even-thinly-veiled right-wing tract…in other words, back when my ideology radar was completely nonexistent. The weird rape fantasy even gave me pause as a teenager, though.
Hard for me to admit this, but I recently re-read The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and it does suffer on re-reading. Some of the jokes are just a bit too obvious–and it’s just not as loopy and unpredictable as I remembered it being. There are still some laughs in there, but not as many as I remembered.
I still Adams is a smart and funny writer…but maybe his crowning achievement isn’t…
You read the Fountainhead in high school, Eric? When on earth did that happen?
I’m sure the later oz books were purely to make money. The problem is that they start being just reunions with characters from past books. Said reunions go on for like 10 pages in the third…then creep up and up till by the 5th that’s like half the book.
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz has some genuinely weird moments; I think that’s the last one (maybe the 4th?) that’s tolerable.
Exactly…it’s the ideology radar that wasn’t properly tuned…
Mom and Dad had a copy, I’m pretty sure. Maybe I read it senior year…It wasn’t an assigned thing. Maybe I was trying to commune with the still living spirit of Steve Ditko (then unknown to me, except as Starman illustrator in Adventure Comics).
Well, if we’re talking about child/adult reading dissonance, the all-time classic has to be the Narnia books. Talk about heavyhanded. If I wanted to get preached at…!
You know what I read in middle school that I reread later and found almost inconceivably bad? Those Margaret Weiss/Tracy Hickman dragonlance books. That is some abysmal, abysmal prose there.
Yes. I was aghast when I saw the first Narnia movie a few years ago. I hadn’t read the books in ages…I can’t believe all that Jesus stuff sailed over my head at the time. Apparently I REALLY wasn’t living in a religious household.
Also, Noah, I don’t know about Eric but for me Fountainhead was assigned reading for AP English in 12th grade…along with, get this, Gone with the Wind and Exodus. I look back at that and think, were they TRYING to turn me into a racist Objectivist Zionist?
Dragonlance: I thought I was the only one! Those books were my Lord of the Rings (I know, no accounting for taste) when I was 14. I picked them up again as a young adult and couldn’t even make it through the first chapter. And the fucked-up thing is that those were probably the BEST of the Dragonlance books…the other random ones I read by other authors sucked even at the time.
“Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz has some genuinely weird moments; I think that’s the last one (maybe the 4th?) that’s tolerable.”
I couldn’t stand that one. Isn’t that the one where Dorothy has this male cousin who is with her, who never does a single thing in the entire story, like the author forget about him, or was that just sloppy reading on my part?
I see book 5 was the Rainbow road to Oz one. I completely gave up on the series with that one. It seemed like Baum was just rewriting the plot of the first book again.
I’d say the first three books were decent. Odd thing about the OZ series, is my understanding is it becomes a fantasy utopia where nothing bad ever happens. This isn’t the case in the first book at all. I was surprised on rereading about scenes with the Tin Man chopping wolves to death. It was closer to a traditional fairy tale at times.
Zach, Eric’s my brother. I had the same classes he did (just a year ahead) so I know it wasn’t assigned!
Ah, I thought that was a general “why is this being taught in high schools?” question (still a valid query)
Yes, Dorothy and the wizard in oz is the one with the cousin, Pallas. It also has the incredibly creepy plant people who grow on vines and have no hearts, though. I loved that as a kid, and it’s still pretty awesome as an adult. Also, the land of invisible bears. And the wooden gargoyle people. And the wizard’s miniature pigs. Some definite high points there.
Yes, I really like ‘Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz’. I particularly love the trial of the cat accused of eating the micro-pigs. Baum was sneaking in a broad parody of American justice, with the Scarecrow as a blowhard lawyer!
One thing people forget– the Oz books were kind of bloodthirsty. In the first one besides the killing of the witches and the gruesome transformation of the Tin Man, we have the Cowardly Lion come into his kingdom by slaughtering a Beast that had been feasting on the animals. In ‘Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz’, the Wizard kills the plant-men’s Sorceror by cutting him to pieces with a sword.
Yes, there’s all sorts of pleasant weirdness on display here! Including, in the second book, one of the oddest transsexual metamorphoses as ever to grace the pages of a children’s book.
Hey, Noah. Oz roudtable?
One other classic the Suck fairy missed: ‘The Little Prince’. Better even now than when I was a kid.
Oh my goodness, Hitchhiker’s Guide… Another life-defining book that I’m hesitant about coming back to.
I never read any Ayn Rand, mostly because the evangelization on its behalf creeped me out. Also the length. Long novels are ungainly and weird to me.
The Hobbit is infinitely more vivacious and funny and interesting than the one ring series. As a kid I slogged through the trilogy because as a nerd it was something I had to do (and hated almost every minute of it), but I re-read the Hobbit like, eleven times in as many years. I still have a copy on my self for safe-keeping, actually. But I still shudder at the memory of all that goddamned elf singing.
I disagree. Damn it!
The Hobbit is great, and yeah, probably better than LOTR. But…LOTR has many lovely things in it; great big romantic tragic moments. It’s kind of tottering and gigantic…but the black riders are genuinely creepy for example…and the last scenes at the shire where they come back and everything’s ruined — that’s pretty powerful and weird and harsh. The fight with the giant spider…Sam carrying Frodo up the hill at the end… “You would have a dark queen…” There’s just a lot to like.
Narnia is still great too.
I re-read Snow Crash maybe a year ago, and it was something of a disappointment. It was still fun, still fast and funny and over-the-top, but its defects – the complete lack of an ending, the various aspects of the story that could be explored for deeper meaning but aren’t, the complete shallowness of the book’s gender politics, the insufficient nature of the big grand set-up that the book was supposed to be about in the first place – were very, very apparent. The Suck had set in; I think I’ll be leaving Stephenson’s older works alone for a while (although I might go in for Anathem)
The knuckleheaded romantic Toryism underlying Tolkien’s works becomes more obvious over time, but it doesn’t quite undermine the works the way Snow Crash feels undermined by its weaknesses; I can still appreciate LoTR and The Hobbit on their own terms.
Hitchhiker’s Guide, on the other hand…
Fountainhead is not that long–Atlas Shrugged is mucho longer—and mucho suckier, if such a thing were possible
I felt good about rereading Hitchhiker’s because I read the “Salmon of Doubt” posthumous odds and sods collection of Adams’ late writings and found them quite (surprisingly) delightful.
LoTR definitely has its moments–but it doesn’t quite live up to the monument in the memory
For me, Lord of the Rings was an Anti-Suck book. I tried to read it as a teenager and got bored quickly. I went back to it as an adult and enjoyed it. It’s still not one of my favorite books, but I have a lot of respect for it.
I think I didn’t appreciate LoTR until I’d grown up because it feels like an epic fantasy having a midlife crisis. As the book wore on I got a sense of loss from it, like its world is becoming more peaceful but also more prosaic. It’s a book where the hero fails to do anything heroic; the world is saved accidentally because earlier Frodo, in refusing to harm Gollum, decided not to be a tough action-hero guy. The last volume ends with Frodo suffering from severe post traumatic stress–when he sails away with the elves, it looks an awful lot like a symbolic suicide– and Frodo’s former sidekick settling down with his family in domestic obscurity. Not the kind of things that were likely to appeal to me as a teenager.
On the other hand, when I was 13 I liked Isaac Asimov. I got over that by the time I was out of high school, but recently, just out of curiosity, I reread The Caves of Steel. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I hadn’t realized I’d find it so completely bizarre.
@Zach re: Narnia: Oh, that’s funny. They said they tried to tone down the Christian message for the film.
It’s weird that C.S. Lewis-y allegories are intended to put children in a receptive frame of mind. I’ve only ever heard from people who thought it was about a lion and were turned off by the obviousness of it as adults. I guess it works for those who already buy into the package. You always hear about fundies who think D&D, Harry Potter etc. are from the devil but every Christian I’ve ever known has been REALLY into fantasy!
I had never heard of Snow Crash…and now all I know is that I should avoid it….
I just reread the Narnia books to my son. He loved them; I loved them. They’re pretty awesome.
I found them as a kid, and still find them, incredibly creepy and weird, as well as beautiful. The corruption of Edmund; Eustace turning into a dragon — actually being a believer helps Lewis imagine and care about evil in a way that’s pretty rare in fantasy books, and it’s entirely to the series’ benefit.
The Last Battle, the final book, is I think terrifying throughout; Tash is a really nasty vision of the devil, and of course he actually destroys the entire world at the end. It’s not as good as the space trilogy or as Til We Have Faces — but that’s only because those books are really, really, really good.
And of course the Narnia books are beautifully written, too.
I’m not Christian, for what that’s worth.
@Noah – Actually, Snow Crash is a great book – a defining piece of cyberpunk fiction. It’s just that I put it on an enormous pedestal as a teenager, and by the third or fourth reading its flaws began to seem achingly obvious.
I still need to read this thread, but Noah — you should read Snow Crash. You should just avoid Neal Stephenson.
Nostalgia must be the antidote to the Suck Fairy, else there’s no way to explain the continued popularity of crap like Transformers.
Caro is having you on. Snow Crash is an overhyped bore saddled with mediocre prose.
Well, I’m reading the Possessed now, which is awesome but so long that I’m pretty sure I will never read anything else again. So I am safe from Snow Crash and it from me.
You need to read exactly enough of Snow Crash to know what Americans are good at and what a “burbclave” is. You should get there by maybe page 5? It’s all downhill from there.
I’ve taken it to the beach though. It’s better than a Harlequin. And way better than all his other crap books.
Neal Stephenson’s aesthetic may not be for everyone and his prose style may be exceedingly Victorian – especially in more recent works like the Baroque Cycle – but I won’t stand for seeing him bashed, by gods.
This is my Neal Stephenson Is Serious Business face:
>:[
I agree 100% with Anja. Well, 90%, because I don’t even have her reservations about his style. Stephenson is wonderful.
Did you know that Stephenson coined the word ‘avatar’, in its online cybernetic sense?
And about Ayn Rand– there’s plenty that is loathesome and puerile about ‘The Fountainhead’. But something redeems that one part of her oeuvre: she had a genuine love and knowledge of architecture. There are passages that actually engage and thrill you because of that love.
Even the boring and detestable ‘Atlas Shrugged’ features wonderful passages we can chalk down to Rand’s enthusiasm for human accomplishment, such as the description of the first high-speed train’s inaugural trip over rails forged in Reardon Matal.
FWIW, I’m not sure I understand the antagonism to the Narnia movies. I re-read the first 3 books to my kids (now probably more than a year ago)–and we all watched all 3 movies…and they are pretty much, or close enough to, the same. Both are enjoyable for kids…and have their moments for adults (Eustace and the dragon and the Dufflepudds among them). The end of the Dawn Treader movie definitely goes way too Hollywood…but other than that, it seems silly to complain that the books are too Christian and too propaganda. a) Yes, they’re Christian—(and no, I’m not)–this hardly seems reason enough to condemn them. b) They are, in fact, aimed at kids…and the Christian stuff flies over kids’ head, and they enjoy the fantasy.
Well, I read them when I was 15, and I saw the Christian stuff right away. It didn’t bother me a whit.
Well…my kids are much younger than that…It wouldn’t even occur to them to look for Christian allegory–and wouldn’t know one if it jumped on top of them, given an almost completely secular upbringing.
It’s funny, for centuries kids read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ as an adventure book!
There definitely is a Suck Fairy among my books and Jane Eyre got sucked the most, although I was tepid at best reading her when I was younger, older the Fairy made her unreadable at all; this, despite a good friend whose book club only reads her and perhaps only Emma at that. Bodice ripping, soap opera, interior dialogue – Madame Bovary sucked too. But not Thackery (Vanity Fair)or for some reason Theodore Dreiser comes to mind – both those seem wider broader or with something about which to learn or to keep or to think?! of breathe?
I prefer the Anti-Suck Fairy because that one’s books stay at my house and I reread something of Dickens most winters, even Bleak House. Anti-Suck resurrected Gravity’s Rainbow for me and led me to being a true fan of a Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth when I used to feel excluded by their writing. Perhaps the Anti Suck Fairy requires time and a certain amount of wrinkling –
Hey, Nancy,
I guess Sucky has passed me by– like the Angel of death at Passover– for some of those volumes…Jane Eyre I have new respect for– seen in a certain light it’s an anti-Gothic, anti-Romantic critique, with Jane’s common sense and honestyclearing away the poison at that Byronic asshat Rochester’s house.
Madame Bovary also makes the cut with me as I age, for a rather mean reason; I appreciate more and more Flaubert’s dark, icy, pitilessly cruel humor. It’s a black comedy!
Agreed on your Anti-suck list, though…
Personal/political aside: how in Hades was Michelle Bachmann ever possible…?!? Did we get out of Minn. just in time, Nancy?
Ah, Nancy– are you speaking of Jane Eyre or of Jane Austen?
HA ha you are so right- I was thinking Jane Austen but also my Assistant who is known as Lina but is named also Nancy was saying Jane Eyre- and I was picturing watching that old B&W Heathcliff in the basment with dad and thinking of a horrid bad friend with red curly hair who honeymooned in Bath!
your response to my Suck Fairy demons make you sound soooo patient, much more than I!
Acutally, or actually as the case may really be, I thought of two series I reread when I moved to Wisc – One was a Wrinkle in Time and the other was the trilogy (Gilgamesh-ish) of James Branch Cabell’s – Jurgen who seemed also to be the golem. The former for me I liked way much more than Narnia as a kid but was sucked at by the Fairy; the later I was more confused by but that I may blame on the never-ending Dark Tower series! Or is that just the tarot?!
As for Ms Bachman not only she is she quite insanely from my biz partner’s district but she is also a tax attorney so is she really THIS dumb or is it an act? One thing to note: her district is home to one of the first American Nazi party groups, neo nazi skin head groups and a KKK group up here in Nice MN USA
All fits together somehow.
I love Cabell! A totally forgotten writer.
Other witty fantasy authors are Thorne Smith and John Collier…