The writers of this post amusingly recommend ten books that should be “fired from the canon.” I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of all of them, and that I’ve read a bare majority (and most of those so long ago that I couldn’t offer a cogent synopsis).
My favorite line, on A Tale of Two Cities: “If it were written by Camus, that might be OK. But it wasn’t, and it’s not.”
But this, on One Hundred Years of Solitude, isn’t bad, either: “Magical realism wasn’t much of a trick to begin with – Gabriel García Márquez riding round in circles on a smallish tricycle, cigarillo clamped between teeth, occasionally raising his panama for people to throw coins – and is now thoroughly clapped out.”
Others whose particular work is savaged include Virginia Woolf (“Changed the Course of Literature by doing away with plot, not to mention any real reading enjoyment or insight, when she published Jacob’s Room...”), Faulkner, Dos Passos, D.H. Lawrence, and Kerouac.
Suits me. Once you’ve read Tristram Shandy you’ve read it all.
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