Dumbest Literature Mistakes You've Made

There is no penance strict enough for that sin, my son. Let your own guilt be the punishment, 8-)

I never heard of it before I started to read it.

I actually started it, under the assumption that if you're going to put over a dozen books into a Rapture series, that means you've got to have a pretty detailed and well-thought-out apocalyptic vision. Ha.

Well, someone has to read Left Behind. I am just glad it isn't me. I barely made it through most of the Bible. Song of Songs was nice, 8-)

Someone has to read them and write TV Tropes articles about them so the rest of us can steer clear...be thanked, braved martyr to the cause!

It's things like Left Behind that just begs the reading public to stop encouraging crap writers. I can't believe someone's making Fifty Shades of Grey into a movie?

Reading part of Modelland could go either way. On one hand, it made feel better about my own work. On the other hand, it blasted away a large chunk of what little faith in humanity I have left.

Could we please not turn this into a "books I don't like/bash unpopular books" thread? The past few have been locked.

Yeah, too much and it gets old. Let's stick to personal stupidity rather than the stupidity of others.

Once, when I was very tired, I decided that I did not like a character in my book and that it would be better if I got a rid of her. Obviously, the logical conclusion should be to delete all pages that she was on. So, I deleted fifty pages. Out of a book of eighty. (I later ran her through a "Mary Sue Litmus Test" and she was almost irredeemable, so at least that got extinguished.)

That was my third attempt. What happened on my other two? Well, in one I got bored of it, and reading it now pains me since I did not fully know English grammar at the time. (I was 13.) Later, somehow, all of my second attempt got deleted. How? I still don't know, but the reason now rests between sentient lawn gnomes and leaving it out in the shower. I'm leaning on gnomes for now.

I had to do a paper on World At the End of Time by Frederik Pohl once and picked up City at the End of Time by Greg Bear. I had no idea what was going on in class. Or the book itself.

The second mistake was to read World at the End of Time. It's well written, I guess, but it just infuriated me. Frederik Pohl and I obviously have extremely different philosophies.

EDIT: I got Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl mixed up again. That's another mistake.

edited 19th Jan '13 5:27:59 PM by Zendervai

AHEM NOTE PLEASE:

Dumbest literature mistakes does NOT mean "Dumbest mistakes I made and it had something to do with books!"

This thread when you made a dumb mistake regarding the content of a book, and later you realised you were interpreting it totally wrong, and now you confess.

So, for example, statements "I wish I had read/not read book X" is NOT relevant here.

But, "I though character X was a man all the time!" or "I thought book X was about G, then I realised it was actually about M" are more in line with what this thread is about.

My confession: Due to a really weird review in my local language newspaper, I though Harry Potter was *forced* to go to this harsh magical boarding school with cruel teachers who taught in dungeons and made him use creepy ingredients...

And the first book I picked up was the Goblet of fire (it has just been released) I got confused about the goblet age curse, and thought Angelina Johnson had a beard...

Yeah, that was weird, and now you know :D

edited 22nd Jan '13 4:22:23 AM by ryzvonusef

Due to fangirl gushing over The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I thought the main character was a girl and refused to realize they were not for quite a few pages. Because you don't usually call guys wallflowers. (And because of course it isn't possible for fangirls to ever like books with male leads)

I also though The Lies of Locke Lamora was about sea monsters around a lake called Locke Lamora. Lies = animal haunts, Locke = Loch.

Recommended Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad to my brother and gave him a brief synopsis which, in my albeit sleep deprived state, amounted to 'some guy goes down the amazon or something and starts hating everything.'

'I thought Beowulf was the longest poem in the English language?' (On Paradise Lost)

For a fairly long time, I didn't realise that Charlotte and Emily Bronte were different people and thought Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written by the same person.

I made the exact same mistake with Mary and Percy Shelley.

I spent the two years between the summers of 2005 and 2007 being frothingly, vehemently wrong about Snape. And to think I could have spent that time being just as publicly right about Hogwarts...

Note for January 28: Tehimt ayamt. Or tawimt ayamt, as the case may be. In any case 2013 is going to be an excellent year for deserted buildings.

edited 28th Jan '13 3:47:53 PM by DomaDoma

Ok, my dumbest moment from literature classes. At university, no less. It was my first year, and I'm inclined to like linguistics part of my studies more. That's all I can say for myself.

We were assigned to read a thick book of poems by Jirina Haukova, a Czech poet and translator. I didn't have time to read them all and the meaning of her poems completely eluded me for most cases. I've never found it easy to analyse poetry and to talk about it in the first place.

The professor insisted that each of must say something worthy of a university student. All I remembered was that Haukova had there poems about children, and I said that she used children's talk and their ideas, Blah, Blah, Blah, and that those poems I quite liked. The class later agreed that her poems about children and with children's talk were completely trashy and the worst of her writing, with no redeeming qualities. Basically, that sometimes children do talk like that and that everyone is charmed by it, but nothing to write home about. I felt so embarrassed. But I did have a good laugh about it later.

edited 6th Mar '13 10:51:25 AM by XFllo

I was in the advanced literature group at my high school, so it was populated with a bunch of proud geeks (myself included). The teacher assigned us The Eve of St. Agnes. I guess we had a hive mind because most of us discussed how creepy it was. "He hides in her closet and listens to her breathing! He only tells her she's not dreaming after sexy time!" The teacher was caught between irritation and laughter, as she was a Keats fangirl. From that point on we referred to it as the "Creeper in the Closet poem."

Now older, I do see why was in fact not supposed to be creepy. It is quite cute. But I still have a good laugh.

edited 7th Mar '13 7:19:39 PM by Phoenixflame

When I first read the first A Song Of Ice And Fire book; I thought that the main character family were literally anthropomorphic wolves (with Cat ears, since the mom of the family is called Cat); who adopted non-anthropomorphic dire-wolves. I thought Littlefinger was an living disembodied pinky with an evil goatee; and Varys was an actual spider informed by actual birds.

In fact, I imagined all the animal imagery as literal.

Man, you must've been baked.

I was off meds at the time, but mostly I'm just absurdly literal minded.

As in, when the text says "Golden hair", I imagine hair made of the metal gold. When the text says "he had fire in his eyes", I imagine the character as having his eyes on fire. When "his eyes and ears are everywhere", I imagine disembodied eyes and ears hiding around the place.

You just reminded me of a story from my linguistics class that has a funny literature moment. People who have anarthria learn any language as foreign and they cannot understand metaphors. (The teacher said she knows only one guy who managed to understand them.)

She told us a story how they diagnosed one client with anarthria. He was read an extract from a book (Grandmother by Bozena Nemcova, a most classical classics in Czech literature) and there was this sentence: "The children's eyes popped out when they saw how many beautiful things there were in the château." He imagined literal Eye Scream. The story has it that he was laughing out loud uncontrollably for a really long time.

edited 12th Mar '13 3:57:37 PM by XFllo

I initially refused to read Pale Fire because I hated poetry.

I had stayed away from the novels of Joe Abercrombie because of all I heard about them being ultra-grim dark. However, when I happen to pick up Best Served Cold, I discovered that he was often hilariously funny and didn't totally deserve his reputation for being a downer.

Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, not wanting to read something or not giving something a credit before knowing the work is not that dumb or embarrassing.

If that's really the Dumbest Literature Mistake You've Made, I think these are the options:

• a) you are not honest enough
• b) you didn't dig deep enough
• c) you don't talk about literature that much
• d) you are a brilliant literature analysis genius.

I like those posts about swapping authors' gender. The English language is unforgiving about this, and can be confusing. Like those posts mentioning Evelyn Waugh. I thought he was a lady as well, based on the name Evelyn, but I actually never said it in front of anybody. But it was close.

edited 24th Apr '13 7:39:56 AM by XFllo

Thanks to a poorly-written, blurb, I had thought that The Bridget Jones's Diary was The Bell Jar-esque Apocalyptic Log chronicling Bridget's problems spiraling out of control. I'd never have thought otherwise until I learnt that it ws based on Pride and Prejudice, and thought "hmm, that's weird..."