Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I Read

Happy Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl!

Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I Read

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy


I read War and Peace. I know I read it because it took me a whole summer. Darned if I can remember anything but sleigh rides, balls, and the fact that there was a general.









2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Urgh. It's been (12!) years since I read this, so maybe I'd think differently now, but I remember finding the narrator incredibly pretentious and condescending. I only finished it because I had to read it for a class (and got into a huge argument with my teacher about it). I met Dave Eggers once at a reading, and he came off as a really nice guy and his other books all sound better, but honestly, I haven't been able to bring myself to read any.






3. Pamela by Samuel Richardson

WORST. BOOK. EVER. I literally threw this book across a room. The sexual consent issues in this book drive me batty. It is about a female servant who is constantly pursued and frequently threatened with rape (like, she is once held down while he is about to rape her) from her master--and then, and then -T_T-she marries him! And it's all okay! And, worse, this was apparently super-popular in the eighteenth century and held up as a tale of "virtue rewarded," like, if you hold out on your rapist, don't worry, he'll marry you! T_T Needless to say, read for eighteenth century Brit lit class.



4. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Also from my eighteenth century Brit lit class (for whatever reason, the 1700s were the worst century in traditional classic Brit lit), and also with some (less) effed up sexual mores, my biggest problem with Moll Flanders wasn't the story but the formatting. We had the original formatting, and spoiler alert, not only did 18th century writers like to get cute with capitalization , but PARAGRAPHS DID NOT EXIST. And CHAPTERS DID NOT EXIST EITHER. It was difficult, but I made it through, and honestly, with some proper formatting, it could have been quite an entertaining story.



5. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

I started reading Moby-Dick in middle school, and couldn't get through it. I really wanted to, because I had heard it was the most boring book ever, and I wanted to prove I could read it (#WeirdKidGoals ftw). Fortunately, senior year of high school, I had a professor who wrote her dissertation on Moby-Dick and delighted in assigning it to us. Spoiler alert: I don't agree that it's the most boring book ever. With proper guidance, I learned to love it and have extremely fond memories (and yes, I got through the whole thing!)





6. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

I have less fond memories of Bartleby (though "I prefer not to" is one of my favorite phrases), mostly because, by the end of college and grad school, I had to read it at least three times, and there' s just so much insight on apathy you can have.







7. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

In one of the classes that also assigned Bartleby, I had to read (and lit critique) Benito Cereno. Even though it's a novella, it's dense, and ugh, there is only so much foreshadowing I can take. I get it, the black men are plotting to kill the white men. Oooo. Scary. (Not to mention that, um, they were sold into slavery and just trying to regain their freedom? Totally evil, right?). Also probably colored by the fact that I thought the assignment was contrived and did not see eye to eye with the instructor. But. Not a fan.





8. The Odyssey by Homer

Oh, the Odyssey. Oh, the pink fingers of Dawn. Oh, Odysseus, the devilish trickster who abandons and cheats on his wife and then comes home, like, I'm in charge, so let's kill a bunch of unmarried women for having sex with unmarried men, because that's worse than what I did. Between middle school, high school, college, and grad school--I've read it, or versions or excerpts thereof, four to five times. I've written at least four papers that somehow involved it. I find it long and infuriating, but still, obviously, there is so much to parse, and so much that's had such an influence in Western literature and culture. And I still can't believe the number of times Dawn rises with pink fingers.


9. The Iliad by Homer

I've read the Iliad maybe twice, and find it quite charming in comparison to the Odyssey. Part because it has a neater central conflict and arc, and largely because of the characters, like Achilles and Hector, that I find actually sympathetic. Still, it's Homer, and I got through it (and I didn't have to read it as much as the Odyssey!).






10. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

Ugh. I read this book because a girl I knew in high school liked it, and I read the whole darn thing in search of why. Nope, I never got it. This book made me sick to my stomach. I found Humbert Humbert revolting. I did  not sympathize with him for a second. Nabokov can write, I will give the man that, but do you want to be known for writing exquisitely lyrical prose about a gross child molester?