Dumbest Literature Mistakes You've Made

@Bense: I liked the unabridged Les Mis, but it’s a lot for your first read-through, so if someone’s having difficulty I think it’s helpful to be able to start with the core plot and characters, and add in the digressions on re-reads.

Edited by Galadriel on Jul 14th 2020 at 2:51:55 PM

I can see the appeal in an abridged version, certainly. The account of the Battle of Waterloo, for instance, takes up chapters and chapters and advances the plot only on the very last few pages. Great for the reader who understands this is an earth-shakingly historic battle, the outcome of which affected European history for ever after and are just enjoying Hugo at work portraying it - but stultifying for someone who just wonders when we're going to see the plot move forward again.

Now if Robert Jordan could write like Victor Hugo...

Hugo is one of the fathers of the modern novel, which really means you can tell he's helping to figure out what to do and what not to do. The film and stage adaptations of Les Mis demonstrate pretty well how much of the work can be cut and still retain the essential story.

i read all of moby dick in 8th grade. it sucked. i guess it was worth it, since i finished it mostly to say i did, but it still sucked.

I misheard a friend's recommendation of Flowers for Algernon, which I was not familiar with. I thought she recommended Flowers in the Attic, which I was vaguely familiar with, through the movies mainly. I'm not so sure how, but I guess I was only half-paying attention. So, I bought Flowers in the Attic. Needless to say, what I bought was not the heartfelt, innovative novel my friend promised. Recently, I read Flowers for Algernon, and I can confirm that they're both interesting, but in extremely different ways.

I read Pride and Prejudice the first time way too early (maybe 10-12 years old). All I remembered of it was a vague idea of the setting, and that there were a lot of long letters. All of the wit and sarcasm went right over my head.

They retain the essential parts of some of the stories. There are a number of stories that intertwine in Les Mis. The writers of the musical probably choose the best, and do a great job at bringing them to a new medium; but I would sometime like to see some of the other stories told:

Marius learning about his father, meeting his old comrades, becoming a big fan of Napoleon, and then learning there is more to life than the glory of war. Marius' changing relationship with his grandfather.

Even very minor characters have stories worth digging into: the educated man who takes the cemetery job out of necessity; the man whose life labor is a book of birds but eventually has to sell the printing plates for food; the nun who recognizes the priest's voice from their former lives before taking orders; etc. (from memory: it's been 9 years)

As a kid I didn't know Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was candy... I thought it was cooked turkey pieces!

I tried reading Tom Sawyer. I found the prose gave me a headache.

That's not really a mistake, just an honest reaction. Trying to capture dialect can be tricky for the best writers. I recall struggling through Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow because of all the thee-ing and thou-ing and antiquated English (I learned later that Stevenson himself felt he'd gone overboard in that regard in that particular novel). I really enjoyed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I first read it, but different people have different tastes.

I thought Watership Down would be about a navy, and so avoided it despite really liking animal books. Fortunately, my mum bought it for me as a birthday present. :)

My dumbest literature mistake lately was trying to read the Locked Tomb series (Gideon the Ninth etc) in non-consecutive order. Never do this. You will be so confused.

I decide to follow the hype and read bloodwing of the empyrean.....boy that was a mistake, a sort of rule here: when booktok is overype, please try to research why and who said that. I dislike the book, part because I think it was terrible but mostly because im clearly not the type(the book is more a romantasy heavly on romantic side).

It used to be that fantasy a sufficient description of a work. However, today there are so many types of fantasy, so that it isn't useful to determine if one will like something.

I'm consistantly terrible at registering a character's physical features. Like, when I read the first ASOIAF book, I completely missed that Dany has white hair. Or that Harry Dresden in the Dresden Files is like 7 feet tall.

Edited by GNinja on Mar 17th 2024 at 8:25:56 AM

I once checked out a book by Nora Roberts, thinking that she was a fantasy writer in the same way that, say, Robert Jordan was.