Disagreeing with the author

I'm pretty strongly Catholic, but I actually liked The Golden Compass when I first read it. The setting and characters were interesting, and I could overlook the portrayal of the Church in that book because, well, apart from the names being the same, there wasn't much else in common with the Church in our world. There were very good reasons within the story why the Church was portrayed as something bad.

Then I read the other two books in the series, and the characters and the setting became less interesting and more like sock puppets for Pullman to explain his own philosophical treatise, one that I very much disagreed with.

On the flipside, I just finished reading Small Gods. While not as vehemently anti-religious as the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pratchett still has quite a bit to say on the shortcomings of organized religion and our systems of belief in general. And while I don't agree with all of them, he writes with enough consistent humor and sympathetic characterization that I enjoyed the story anyways. The characters felt like real characters with believable motivations and behaviors, not strawmen or mouthpieces for the author himself.

edited 12th Jul '11 9:58:26 AM by SweetMadness

I've started developing a "don't read" list for authors I don't want to support. This generally is on account of things like particularly nasty author tracts, bigotry, massive grudgewanks, or being John Ringo.

edited 18th Jul '11 3:48:39 AM by FarseerLolotea

Can't say for sure. Sometimes, I guess. But it's mostly with ancient tales and tragedies, like The Iliad for example. I never really liked any of the heroes or their justification. Well, maybe Hector only. But all that can be explained with the fact that people had very different views than most people today, so I'm not sure this would count.

edited 19th Jul '11 7:56:33 AM by whataboutme

Most of the anti-religion preaching in Northern Lights and its sequels went right over my head. At first because I was too young to get it, and then because the things he was attacking didn't seem to bear any resemblance to my religion at all.

I loved Small Gods. Another thing I remember is that Mightily Oats, from Carpe Jugulum, resonated quite strongly with me because he seemed to have several of the same issues as I had.

The F. Paul Wilson short story "Buckets". Basically, one Halloween, the ghosts of a bunch of aborted fetuses take revenge on an abortion doctor. Reasonable enough premise, but at the end, when pressed for the reasons he carried out the abortions, and having all the reasons a normal person would give dismissed as flimsy excuses, the doctor eventually admits that the real reason he performs abortions is "because I can". Huh? Opposing abortion is one thing, but attributing it to Motiveless Malignity is ridiculous.

Oh, fucking Pullman. You wanna hear a disagreement? I think it was stupid to remove Lyra from her position as sole lead. What the fuck did Will bring to the table? He was there for the sake of How Does One Become A Man In Modern Society bullshit and then to have creepy thirteen-year-old sex.

edited 21st Jul '11 2:05:30 AM by FurikoMaru

Christopher Pike wrote a similar story. Two teens get trapped in a city with almost no-one in it, and they try to escape, but powerful wind keeps pushing their car back. Eventually they learn that the ghost of the girl's aborted unborn baby is punishing them for aborting him. That's not as ridiculous as what you described though.

and Oh, WTF?

That's just...wrong. There was a similar subplot in Nancy Springer's Apocalypse, but it was nowhere near that anvilicious. And it was kind of left up in the air as to whether or not it was actually a side effect of what Joanie was doing.

Really anything where the author describes the world as some sort of harsh, evil place that will inevitably fuck up you and everyone you love horribly. This is complete bullshit- yes, the world is not some loving, happy place where everything is good, and yes life is harsh, but that doesn't mean everything is constant tragedy. These people are ignoring the positive sides of life just to support their angsty, juvenile viewpoints.

Cosmic Horror generally gets a pass on this though, just because it's so fun to read.

The Last Kiss was like that (although it's a movie)—the point was that relationships never work out. So they have a bunch of relationships and make them not work out. Putting it in a movie doesn't make it true!

Don't confuse the two eddas. The Poetic Edda was written down well in the Viking Age and got much less Hijacked by Jesus, while the Prose Edda, is essentially a collection of materials by Snorri Sturluson on how the skalds told their stories and what the stories were about. Because it was written in the 13th century it got a lot more Hijacked by Jesus and the whole Trojan war thing was likely Snorri's invention in order to justify the relevance of the myths.

The Chronicles of Narnia is a great fantasy epic geared at young kids, and as an atheist I'm mostly willing to ignore the religious message and symbolism. Mostly. I think he really lost me at the last book, with the Narnian apocalypse and judgement day. It got a little over the top and really ruined the series for me.

I actually quite enjoy most of Lewis' philosophical writings, even though I'm agnostic. He's got an interesting thought process.

He was agnostic himself, as a young man. He called himself "The most grudgingly converted man in all Christendom."

Considering how much it tainted his writing, he couldn't have been THAT grudging.

People who convert to a religion later in life seem to be often more fervent than those born into it.

I have my own opinions on the religion debate also, but I'd rather this not get dragged off-topic too far in that (or any) direction. Could we go back to the main topic before a mod come thumping along?

Anyway, has anyone read a work where at some point, a character dumps in a political or philosophical view out of nowhere that just strikes you as offensive or wrong?

I bought the Little Nemo comic strip collection. Very original comic in its time, amazingly distinctive and different from everything else made then or pretty much since. Made from 1905-1914.

Well, it's also a victim of its time. In one story arc, Nemo has some sort of magic whatever that allows all animals to be able to speak English so he can talk with them. Well, at one point, Nemo is in a zoo and he uses it on a male hippopotamus. The hippopotamus begs Nemo not to use it on his wife, "or she'll talk you deaf, dumb and blind about women's suffrage!"

Ack. Granted, it was a view commonly held at the time, but this was during the women's voting rights movement, so my opinion of the innovative, sadly obscure Winsor McCay dropped a few notches.

Dean Koontz. Constantly. The man can't write a book without going on and on about how everything was better in "the good old days;" people were friendlier, music and movies were better, kids respected their parents, God was in His Heaven, and all was right with the world...his answer is usually that now we're all the victims of trans-dimensional aliens who feed off our suffering...

Cripes, yes, Koontz. I liked his stuff when I was a teenager (many, many moons ago) because of all the monsters and wacky science. Rereading them recently I did a full body cringe every few pages. So formulaic and strident.

YMMV, but I thought one of the messages of His Dark Materials was that there might be a supreme being but whether there is or there isn't, we shouldn't become zealots when promoting our viewpoints...which doesn't exactly work with certain parts of the last book, but I think that's what Pullman was going for.

And the Left Behind books for kids were okay, at least the first few, and then it started going by way of the adult series and I stopped. I can only deal with so much character blandness.

(My first post on these forums. )

Like I said, I did like Lewis's writing, but The Last Battle was just too much. I thought that ending a children's series with everybody going, "Oh, we're dead, yay, this is so great, party time!" was a bit... Well, disturbing, frankly. In fact, I was still Christian when I read it and even then I was uncomfortable with that. Usually, everyone dying is not considered a happy ending.

I adored the Narnia books as a child, though clearly the christian propaganda never took. If I were to re-read those books as an adult it would probably just ruin my innocent childish memories of the series, so I probably won't ever do that.

@the OP

I recall reading Beowulf but I don't remember ever seeing a misogynistic "doomed by her gender" passage. Could that possibly have been inserted by the translator? Does it exist in all translations?

I do not remember seeing it in Slade's translation, which is possibly the most accurate even though the wording is rough.

I have not read Raffel (the most popular printed translation, I believe, there's a different one floating all over the internet but I don't know who wrote it) in its entirety, but since Raffel takes lots of artistic liberties I'm inclined to say that's the one.

Although Pullman was a little too extreme with his beliefs, it didn't really tarnish my enjoyment of his books. There are a few good points buried under that text.

Roald Dahl's belief that TV is evil however...But even that didn't affect my experience while reading Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.

edited 6th Aug '11 11:02:10 AM by chihuahua0