Mystic Muse's Magnificent Masquerade Random Banter #225

[The Fury]

I mean, it's not like it's not fun to read, but it can be hard to listen when for the last eight years you've been continually told that you should like the stodgy impossible to read wirting by Hardy and the Brontes, but not the stuff that's actually fun to read. I still think that stodgy writing can stay over there unless it has an interesting idea to convey, like in Frankenstein or Victor Hugo's Overly Long Tale of Why We Shouldn't Treat Released Prisoners Like Dirt.

I never liked that view of literature. I also believe that if you're not enjoying a book, you're allowed to stop reading it.

That really annoys me too. I guess Shakespeare's a talentless hack, since almost all his most famous plays had fantastical elements (a ghost in Hamlet, witches in Macbeth, a wizard in The Tempest)? Swift too, since Gulliver's Travels has so many fantastical elements, and Dickens, what with his love of ghosts. What "great literature" do they read? Kafka? Metamorphosis. Hugo? Angels. Conan Doyle? Also wrote an entire sci-fi series (Professor Challenger is very underrated).

Oh yeah. Don't forget that "classic literature" can also be pretty low-brow. Both Journey to the West and Canterbury Tales had their share of potty humor.

Well, yes, but not for those reasons.

Romeo and Juliet suuuuuuuuucks.

I'll agree that's one of his weaker ones. I didn't really appreciate Shakespeare until I read stuff that was not Romeo and Juliet.

Even though I still don't like it, something I was told that makes me appreciate Romeo and Juliet a little more is this: The tragedy is not that Romeo and Juliet died, it's that they didn't realize that their love was not worth dying for. I'll admit that read is kind of neat.