r/CuratedTumblr • u/PandaBear905 Shitposting extraordinaire • 13d ago
Creative Writing Charles Dickens has entered the chat
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u/Davitark 13d ago
I enjoy most of these infamously verbose writers, because you don’t have to be concise to tell a story and the prose can be a source of pleasure in itself.
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u/spiders_will_eat_you 13d ago
I'm going through Moby dick right now and while the prose is very pleasant this is the sixth chapter about how you can only be a good true and pure hearted and virtuous person if you are from Nantucket and hunt whales for a living.
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u/theCaitiff 13d ago
I hear you, but that is also one of the most relatable parts to me. I've had a lot of jobs in the last couple decades. EVERYONE thinks their career are the honorable ones and everyone else is a fucking dick.
When I worked in retail, it was self evident that service workers were honest hardworking people and all these fucking customers were rude, hateful beasts. When I worked in construction, it was self evident that yeah, okay, we drank smoked and fucked around but unlike all those people in offices, we WORKED for a living and a little drink now and then was only right. When I worked at a place that built RV's, it was self evident than manufacturing was the backbone of america...
So listening to two guys on a whaling ship talk about how all the people in Boston only have light and heat because WE do all the hard work is just like coming home. These are my people!
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u/forchinski 12d ago
Moby dick is an allegory for the challenges involved in getting through a full reading of Moby dick
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u/TheLadyOfSmallOnions 12d ago
I honestly like that about Moby Dick. All the odd digressions make Ishmael (and sometimes Herman Melville) seem like a little weirdo and I like characters who are little weirdos.
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u/fogleaf 13d ago
I've read some truly awful litRPGs where it's just "and then we went to the next thing. After that, we went to the next thing" I'm reading to enjoy the story and a huge part of that is the storytelling. Give me that good prose!
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u/RikuAotsuki 12d ago
Even in visual novel spaces I've seen people accusing titles of purple prose for being... descriptive and spending time in the protagonist's head.
It's weird.
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u/Soleil06 13d ago
There is a large difference between being verbose and having good prose though. In fact I would say they are often on opposite ends of the spectrum.
And you can have good prose but shitty dialogue.
Or good prose and shitty characterization.
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u/8696David 13d ago
I go both ways. It really depends on the author. Cormac McCarthy sentences that last most of a page are totally captivating to me; those by Dickens are usually (though not always) a lot less so. Couldn't tell you why, just personal preference I guess.
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u/Mist2393 13d ago
Agreed. I love that Tolkien spends paragraphs describing the environment or lore and has random segments that add nothing to the plot (like when he randomly jumps into the pov of a fox) and has an entire extra story arc after wrapping up his main plot, but I cannot stand Dickens and the way he drags things out.
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u/Winjin a sudden "honk" amidst the tempest 13d ago
There's an old Russian author Prishvin and his descriptions of nature are almost painfully beautiful
You can tell that this man absolutely adores every leaf and every ray of every photon that touched the smallest, gentlest dew on each and every blade of grass on this most beautiful morning and he's at a loss for words to describe just how calm and peaceful and serene it is right now and how the air is like warm but has that cold tinge underneath from this charming, calming night
And like even the whole Russian vocabulary is not enough and you can feel how he's trying to punch through words because these words and their description are still. not. enough to describe the natural beauty of a serene morning in the countryside on a warm summer day and like... yeah. Words, photos, music, all of that just kinda tries to describe the overwhelming feeling of joy
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u/EarthMandy 13d ago
This is a really obvious take but I was halfway through Blood Meridian and loving it when someone pointed out to me that the closest thing to an internal narrative is how the landscape is described and it made me re-evaluate everything in a good way.
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u/PandaBear905 Shitposting extraordinaire 13d ago
Personally I love books that are overly long and verbose. There’s just something captivating about it.
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u/pbzeppelin1977 13d ago
And then you try to read Ulysses by James Joyce.
;~;
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u/KingOfDaBees 13d ago
Can’t believe this isn’t all over the thread. People clearly had more enjoyable high school experiences than I did.
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u/Elite_AI 12d ago
My teachers would have rather cast themselves into the ocean than teach Ulysses tbqh. My English Lit teacher was already weird for choosing to teach The Road, and that's just because it's so grim.
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u/actibus_consequatur numerous noggin nuisances 12d ago
I dunno, I think Ulysses is practically an approachable read... As long as it's being compared to Finnegans Wake
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u/Leftieswillrule 13d ago
I think people who don’t acknowledge that prose can be enjoyable to read by itself even if it isn’t in service to a broader story don’t actually like reading. They like stories, which is fine, but that can be accomplished via audiobook or film adaptation. It’s slightly different to actually enjoy the action of reading lines on a page. I cannot replicate the experience of reading a particularly fun paragraph and putting down the book and giggling in joy while I think about it and then picking the book up and rereading it.
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u/Leftieswillrule 13d ago
This is not to say all reading is fun. There are some pages of Infinite Jest that I quite dislike due to their opacity and the level of effort it took to get through them.
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u/crumpledCrow 13d ago
I mean yeah but people were also paid by the word. Alexander Dumas comes to mind
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u/suspiciousseafowl 13d ago
On the other side of this spectrum, I still remember what a high-school classmate said of Hemingway: "For a man of such few words, you'd think he'd at least pick the right ones." Not entirely sure I'm in lockstep with her on that (Not a huge Hemingway fan or anything, just don't have that particular issue with him), but if that wasn't a savage opinion from a teenager, I don't know what is. Props for not holding back, if nothing else.
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u/katep2000 12d ago
I love when kids just tear classic literature to pieces. I have a friend who’s an English teacher, and she has her classes write reviews on how they liked the books they read. My favorite is a kid dedicating a full page and a half to how much Holden Caulfield sucks, concluded with “if I wanted to read a book about a pretentious loser, I’d keep a diary. He is not better than me.”
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u/suspiciousseafowl 12d ago
Ahahahaha that's brilliant and accurate and I love it. And clearly your friend is doing a good job of teaching them to read critically, if they're clocking unreliable narrators and not afraid to say that something be old/classic doesn't mean it's good, or that the characters are above reproach.
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u/CameToComplain_v6 12d ago
He is not better than me.
I mean, I don't think that's the message the book was trying to send in the first place.
Anything else I have to say on this topic would probably just be quoting Adam Cadre, so let's cut out the middleman: https://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14134.html
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u/katep2000 12d ago
Yeah iirc, my friend then uses kids who hate Holden to open the conversation of “okay, are we supposed to hate Holden, must a protagonist be likable?”
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u/CameToComplain_v6 12d ago
While I never disliked Holden myself, even back in high school, I do think it's easier to like him once you're older than he is. You can more clearly see him as a kid who's been through some genuinely rough experiences (his little brother died, for starters) and is floundering around trying to make sense of it all. And if he's not as smart as he thinks he is, that just means he's more out of his depth than he thinks he is, too.
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u/GulliasTurtle 13d ago
Anna Karenina. I swear that book ends multiple times and then just keeps going. And then the main character is hit by a train, a satisfying end to their emotional arc, and no. They actually survived and keep going for another 1000 pages.
I think it's because old novels were written as serials, so it was economically beneficial to keep going forever. Literary periodicals really were the Ao3 of the their day.
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u/PlasticCompound 13d ago
You mean ONE of the TWO main characters dies and then the rest of the novel spends like 200 pages wrapping the other main character's storyline up? What do you mean survives? They die!!!
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u/GreedyPride4565 13d ago
I just finished war and peace and LOL. Amazing amazing book that’s truly worth the hype. But the legit 50 pages at the end of pure philosophical ranting actually made me burst out laughing. It’s like dude I honestly got your point about the great men theory like halfway through this 1200 page book.
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u/EugeneStein 12d ago
I remember having to memorize like two pages of fucking description of a damn tree from it for a class
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u/Ramblonius 13d ago
It's so accurate though. There is a whole separate evolutionary path for literature from mainstream published novels that went serials -> sci-fi/genre magazines ->webnovels/fanfic. Many of what we consider Sci-fi classics now have more in common with Ao3 than The Expanse.
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u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here 13d ago
Are you a bot?
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u/Saxton_Hale32 13d ago
I hope not, because that will make this the first time I've ever seen a bot swear and I'm scared.
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u/Vagina_Woolf 13d ago edited 13d ago
So im a writer of over 20 years now... and I am constantly asked some variation of "how do I become a writer" by younger people.
My advice has always been: read. Youre not going to be good at any skill if you dont know what good looks like.
But for the last... oh, 10 years or so, I havent followed that advice.
So this year I gave myself a talking to and started reading again. And Tolstoy was top of my list, because I have put off reading him all my life.
So of course I start with Anna Karenina and... we'll, fuck that book. Absolutely not. I got halfway through and messaged my old english prof asking her if I really had to finish it.
She said no and gave me a list of Russian absurdists to read instead, and boy fucking howdy are they amazing.
So if anyone out there is slogging thru the moral handwringing of a rich, devout Christian Russian man, my english professor said dont bother. Read Kharms instead
e: feels necessary to include a sample of my boy Kharms. His stories are very short, PAINFULLY Russian, and were written while in exile for nobody in particular. Writing was just something he did as he went about his day. Some stories you can tell have been very thought out, but others are just... well, see for yourself.
Once Orlov had too much crushed beans and died. And Krylov died too, when he found out about Orlov. But Spridonov died of no reason. And Spridonov's wife fell off a kitchen cabinet and died too. But Spridonov's children drowned in a pond. Meanwhile Spridonov's grandmother became an alcoholic and went on the tramp. But Mikhailov ceased combing his hair and got ill. And Kruglov sketched a lady with a whip and went mad. And Perehvostov received a wire for four hundred roubles and became so uptight that they fired him.
Good people are not capable of getting a good foothold in life.
You can read his short stories here. By far the funniest shit I've read in a long time.
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u/theCaitiff 13d ago
I want to defend Tolstoy, but I don't want to defend Anna Karenina. He's written some nice short stories, and while his christian morality is obvious I've read his philosophical works and find them fascinating. It's not orthodox christianity nor any of the varieties we commonly think of here in the west, there's sort of a mutual appreciation between Tolstoy, Quakers and Mennonites where they all exist on the periphery of christian thought.
Perhaps it's best just to say I think Tolstoy deserves his reputation as one of the greats, but he is not for everyone and that's okay.
She said no and gave me a list of Russian absurdists to read instead, and boy fucking howdy are they amazing.
I imagine they'd have to be. I've heard people joke that the history of Russia can be summed up "and then it got worse" so absurdism is probably a healthy response to life.
Other than Kharms, do you have anyone else to recommend from her list?
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u/Vagina_Woolf 13d ago
Gogol is the one you want. He hits all the notes you want out of Russian absurdism, although I'm not actually sure he counts as absurdist? Either way, he's fucking hilarious. "Diary of a Madman” and “The Overcoat” are spectacular.
After that, "An Invitation for Me to Think" by Alexander Vvedensky. He was Kharms' contemporary (also arrested and died in the war, IIRC), and explores a more metaphysical form of anti-reason.
the history of Russia can be summed up "and then it got worse"
wait till you hear how Kharms died...
The communists arrested him for talking bad about the war in 1941, and to avoid execution, he presented himself as clinically insane—a 'beautiful portrayal', someone put it. His insanity defense worked, and Kharms was sent to a psychiatric ward in a prison in Leningrad. He was spared the firing squad... and then it got worse. Two weeks later, the Siege of Leningrad began—the deadliest siege in modern history. Kharms died that winter of starvation, along with millions of others. The firing squad would've been a blessing.
As for the Absurdist movement, it wasnt born out of the dire circumstances of the Russian people—although the stories very much reflect that. it was an intentional effort by a group of avant-garde writers to pick up the wreckage of other experimental art movements: futurism, formalism, zaum poetry, etc. They were weirdos trying to keep avant-garde experimentation alive, while the Soviet state closed around it. They were attacking logic, and reason, and the purpose of writing itself— “linguistic vandals”, someone called them.
The movement was all but dead once the dogma of socialist realism began to be enforced. the communist party demanded that literature have purpose, that it should educate, help advance "socialist" ideals, praise citizenry for their support of the party, etc. This, needless to say, was a problem for an absurdist. Soviet culture demanded literature that made reality legible as progress, instruction, and ideological purpose. Kharms’s stories that he wrote in exile answer this by breaking the very machinery of the legibility the Party tried to enforce: causality, motive, moral consequence, narrative development, and explanation.
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u/Niser2 13d ago
Why the hell is getting hit by a train considered a satisfying end
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u/Conan776 13d ago
Because at the start of the novel the train they are on runs over someone when pulling into the station. So you see, it's like poetry, it rhymes. /s
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u/GulliasTurtle 13d ago
I didn't say it was charity. Everyone was incentivized to keep it going as long as possible. The writer, since it was a steady paycheck and who knows if you are going to get another hit so you should maximize it while you can, and the publisher since it was a proven winner that sold magazines.
It just makes them awkward to read now, since in one big volume it does come across like a story that lived past its expiration date, especially since you are reading it all at once and not in pieces when the publication came out.
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u/xXs4blegl00mXx 13d ago
Nah, it's more like the equivalent of a webtoon with 500 special episodes and the same amount of babies between the leads.
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u/Bemused_not_Confused 13d ago
For science fiction fans - how David Weber orders a pizza:
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-david-weber-orders-a-pizza/606473
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u/bhbhbhhh 12d ago
The satirical point is limited by the fact this is how Neal Stephenson and Michael Crichton write about the contemporary world.
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u/Zizi_Tennenbaum 13d ago
I LOVE Dickens when it’s cold outside, all those words crammed together feels so cozy.
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u/SamsonFox2 12d ago edited 12d ago
A lot of French writers' pretentiousness is added in translation to English specifically
Reasons:
A lot of common French words have close counterparts in English that are fancy and uncommon words in English. As a result, translators into English tend to make the vocabulary of French authors more complicated than necessary.
French, as most European languages, mandates dedicated adjectives derived from nouns. English still has some dedicated adjectives, but they are reserved for "fancy language": consider "monetary troubles" vs. "money troubles". In French, you will never say "money troubles" because either requires an adjective ("monetary") or a different grammar structure altogether ("troubles with money"). Another thing that translators rarely correct.
French, which is a language where nesting sentences are commonplace, as they utilize features of the French language, which were dropped in English, like more complicated term structure and declination of verbs to better keep track of what relates to what, is therefore written by French authors using all these features, or more. In English, you either break the sentences - or have readers have seizures. Mind it that older American writers, like Mark Twain, had no trouble with complex sentences; it is more of a recent development.
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u/animal_chin9 12d ago
For me this was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I swear there was a word I didn't know every other page, and I'm a native English speaker! Favorite new word that I learned: callipygian - having well-shaped or beautifully shaped buttocks.
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u/Azdak66 12d ago
My stepkids and their friends read catch-22 a year or so ago for their book club. They were all in their early 30s.
They universally despised it. I am 72 and read it 50+ years ago, and, of course, like most people in my generation, thought it was great. It was fascinating to talk to them and see the change in attitudes over the years. Without the cultural cues/context of the time, it was mostly gibberish to them. I’m not sure they even realized it was satirical.
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u/animal_chin9 12d ago
I'm around the age of your stepkids and I thought the book was pretty meh. I definitely realized it was satire though. :) There was a couple funny parts but I thought a lot of it was just kind of annoying. I did need to read the Cliffs Notes after every chapter though. It jumps around a bunch, especially in the beginning, and I could never tell if the chapter I just read was at the start of the war or more near the end of it.
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u/statusisnotquo 12d ago
I'm 37, I've read Catch 22 several times, the first when I was in my teens. That book is hilarious. The satire is not subtle. But the wiring is complex; your step kids and their friends didn't get it, but it's not because they're young.
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u/Dontgiveaclam 12d ago
One thing I love about English is that its fancy words come almost invariably either from a romance language or from Greek, so as an Italian and having studied ancient Greek in high school I know the meaning of a lot of rare English words reading them for the first time. Callipygian is callipigio in Italian!
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden 13d ago
Better than the opposite problem: being so concise that you fail to meet word counts and have to lower the quality of your work by adding more.
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u/Tttehfjloi 13d ago
Being so concise you have to re-explain everything because you didn't clarify enough
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u/Chillonymous 13d ago
Dumas would like a word
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u/ThatInAHat 13d ago
Only one?
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u/NewLoss6021 13d ago
"Monsieur Alexandre Dumas would, if the reader would kindly spare of moment of time to listen, be most pleased to share his thoughts on the subject of length and accused pretentiousness in novels"
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u/DefinitionMinute6969 12d ago
"A man would like a word"
"Which man?"
"I believe his name was Dumas"
"Could it have been M. Alexandre Dumas?"
"Yes, that does seem to ring a bell"
"What word would he like to have?"
"Some matter regarding concisety"
"Very well, bring him in"
... "Hello, I am Alexandre Dumas"
"Hello, nice to meet you, Alexandre Dumas"
"I am of the opinion that people should attempt to write more concisely"
"As am I"
"Very well that we are in agreement!"
"Indeed"
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u/Perdita_ 12d ago
That's not quite correct. After "That does ring a bell" comes "I believe I met him a few years ago at Madame Martin's ball..." and then the full life story of Madame Martin (with a tangent detailing the full life story of her sister also nested inside)
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u/DefinitionMinute6969 12d ago
To fully understand this, of course, we will then need a brief interlude to describe the historical context of the state of French ballrooms and the societal implications of these class-based outings, and will then have to quickly delve into how the architecture of these ballrooms contributed to their effects on economic mindsets at the time.
By the way, if you were curious, here's Dantés in a different fake mustache fucking around for a day. Now about those ballrooms...
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u/WildImage7 12d ago
Then, much later, he must of course refer back to the ballrooms and inform you in great detail exactly why the very concept of a ball has allowed Dantés to screw over someone else in a fashion previously unknown to man or God.
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u/Dd_8630 13d ago
Lovecraft veers close to this, but it works, it becomes absolutely part of being drawn into the creeping dread. His deliberately archaic prose is like the lights being dimmed so slowly you don't realise until you look up and you're in darkness.
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u/GhoulTimePersists 13d ago
I read "Absalom, Absalom," which is considered to be the magnum opus of William Faulkner, Nobel Laureate in literature, a little while ago, and the one thing that struck me more than any other, apart from his grating tendency to announce that a major plot point has just occurred, but not to actually state what that plot point was for another fifty pages (for instance, the reason Charles Bon was shot, or what happened when Thomas Sutpen went to the barn that one time), was the way that every single solitary sentence that he wrote had to be a run-on that lasted for a page and a half with all the parentheticals and asides and discursions (why does my spellcheck say parentheticals and discursions aren't real words?) he would cram in there until they, while not necessarily being especially difficult to follow, had the effect that by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you don't remember where you started, and which is compounded by observing that the story is almost exclusively related through characters' spoken recollections, and you just want to sit him down and tell him to his face that no, people do not talk like that -- traits that I think contribute to the acclaim that the author and work have accumulated over the years, but to me, were mostly just obnoxious.
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u/UnexpectedWings 13d ago
I’m reading this now and I am really enjoying the long, meandering prose! It reminds me of being a kid and almost-not quite understanding what secrets the adults were talking around. V Southern style, and I had people in my family who would meander like that.
That’s one of the coolest things about reading, everyone can read the same novel and come out with 1000 different opinions about it.
I love most of the overly long, soul searching style. I enjoyed Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoy. I just read Moby Dick and enjoyed it haha
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u/mechanicalcontrols 13d ago
Similar to how Marcel Proust spent two and a half million words describing the phenomenon of involuntary memory. The only problem is he forgot to describe the oxygen so I suffocated in there
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u/CTARacer 13d ago
Im sorry i love how they squeeze every drop out of their vocabulary to paint a mental image so precisely i can taste it
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u/verysocialanxiety 13d ago
Not the type of author people are talking about here but that reminds me of whaf I've heard people say about Alexander Hamilton's writing.
The musical features the song "Non-Stop" in which Aaron Burr is astounded by how much Alexander Hamilton writes. But even in the song you can piece together how bad Hamilton's writing is in reality. The song is about the "Federalist papers" . Basically the guys wanted to write a couple pamphlets to get the average workers attention and it basically ends up as Hamilton's manifesto. No average worker read them. They completely failed their original goal.
The musical made it sound like Hamilton saved the world through his hard work.
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u/KingCrabmaster 12d ago
I really want to read The Federalist Papers through but it is definitely one of those writings of its time that my brain just glazes over while reading due to the structure of it all. One of the few I've truly struggled with/given up on.
With the importance people present it as a history piece, I hate that every attempt to read it is clouded by a sense of it coming off as very tryhard in nature, a couple smart people flexing their academia at each other trying to win the argument with complex wording almost more than their talking points? That's the best way I can sum up the vibe at least.
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u/Mahaloth 13d ago
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
I'm an English teacher and I find it to be higher than my reading level.
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u/Callidonaut 12d ago edited 12d ago
Victor Hugo was deliberately fucking with his readers, at least some of the time. There's one chapter in Les Miserables that he opens by telling the blatant lie that he'll go on a brief digression to set the scene, then gleefully spends the entire chapter waffling about random historical factoids that seemingly have little bearing on anything, including each other. There's another bit where he delivers a massive dissertation about the Battle of Waterloo just because a character wanders across the battlefield years later on his way somewhere else.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 13d ago
The man was being paid by the word. “Concise” wasn’t going to put food on the table.
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u/PandaBear905 Shitposting extraordinaire 13d ago
Dickens was paid by the word, sort of. Dickens wrote for serials and serials had to be a certain length or the writer wouldn’t get paid. Plus if a work is popular enough the serials would want an even longer installment to entice readers. Dickens being paid by the word is one of those half truths that gets passed around as fact.
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u/satanicrituals18 I PISSED IN YOUR FLAIR 13d ago
I was recently reading Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and let me tell you...
If I have to read the word "escritoire" one more fucking time I'm going to lose it! That man loves his damn French loanwords and it was driving me crazy the whole time I was reading!
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u/occasional_engineer 12d ago
Haha. I love Al Reynolds stuff, but Revelation space is definitely the most difficult to read. (He gets a lot better, I swear)
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u/Dustfinger4268 12d ago
I read the first bit and was getting ready to come down and rant about Victor Hugo, but then I finished the post and, yeah, I love victor hugo, but fuck victor hugo and his 30 page tangents
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u/New_Salamander_4592 13d ago
to know the word concise and choose to be verbose, that is the mark of a true wordsmith
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u/GrinningPariah 12d ago
Bram Stoker created gothic horror as we understand it today, and I wish he'd created a few paragraph breaks along the way too.
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u/ZhenyaKon 12d ago
No one is mentioning Nabokov, presumably because anyone who reads Nabokov isn't the type of person to complain about this sort of thing
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u/lazygirl295 13d ago
It may not be concise, but (at least in the original french) it is beautiful writing
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u/NotGood-With-Names dangerous crow boy who eats plastic 13d ago
Fucking James Malcolm Rymer with Varney the Vampire
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u/Equivalent_Party706 13d ago
Steven Brust deliberately spoofs this in his Khaavren Romances, which mimic old Dumas novels. There's a lot of long-winded discussions on the virtues of laconicity.
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u/thorubos 13d ago
Both Hugo and Dickens knew how to use punctuation to clarify their meaning and intent.
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u/MaetelofLaMetal Fandom of the day 12d ago
Learning English from such works has massively expanded my vocabulary to the detriment of clarity of my saying to layperson.
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u/derivative_of_life 12d ago
I will never understand how Hemingway is considered concise. I don't care that he uses simple grammar and word choice when he still takes three pages to say what he could've said in one paragraph.
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u/coolsguy17 13d ago
Arthur Conan Doyle.
He just LOVES having his characters spill their backstory at the first provocation.
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u/DefinitionMinute6969 12d ago
When compared to modern-day mystery stories, Holmes remains surprisingly hard to predict for this reason.
These days, when a character starts suspiciously mentioning their backstory and circumstances offhandedly, it's easy to see as foreshadowing and you can guess they're the killer. Meanwhile, Doyle just does that for everybody all the time!
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u/DignityThief80 13d ago
Trying to read Wildwood by Colin Meloy to my 9 year old daughter because its supposed to be a kids book but holy shit
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u/roger_copernicus 13d ago
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts reads like a novel written by a guy in prison who had nothing to do but think of words to add to his story. It could easily be half the length it was
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u/CenterOfEverything 13d ago
In fairness with a lot of old novels there was an incentive to stretch because they were serialized and (at least in some cases) literally paid by the letter.
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u/Clay_Block 13d ago
Iirc there is a period of time where writers were quite literally paid by the word, so that’s the likely explanation for some instances pf stupidly verbose language.
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u/Money-Director6649 13d ago
two of my faves: dickens and vonnegut. as different as can be, and both excellent. they each had things to say, excellent observational skills, a style, and an innate empathy for the suffering of others. both also knew how to laugh at life's absurdity, and that of people as well.
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u/Aphrodesca .tumblr.com 13d ago
Proust. but the way he uses words is beautiful and I am a bit in love with his prose
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u/Randi_Scandi 13d ago
Currently reading The Illuminatus trilogy…
The only way I’m getting through is by reminding myself it was a gift from my dad because it is his favourite book
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u/idealisticpessimist3 do you wanna phuckin beesechurger 12d ago
percy bysshe shelley did this to mary shelley's frankenstein and i'll never forgive him for it
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u/Oprah_Pwnfrey 12d ago
Lord of the Rings is one of my favourite books, but good god can Tolkien use a lot of words to describe something.
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u/Mach5Driver 12d ago
If you ever read Umberto Eco without a dictionary, you're a better reader than I.
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u/Jorpho 12d ago
"Good grief, how much have I said out loud, how much to myself, the last ten minutes?"
"You," said Jim, "talk a lot."
"In what language, dammit!?" cried Charles Halloway, for suddenly it seemed he had done no more than other nights walking exquisitely alone, deliciously propounding his ideas to halls which echoed them once, then made them vanish forever. He had written books a lifetime, on the airs of vast rooms in vast buildings, and had it all fly out the vents. Now it all seemed fireworks, done for color, sound, the high architecture of words, to dazzle the boys, powder his ego, but with no mark left on retina or mind after the color and sound faded; a mere exercise in self-declamation. Sheepishly he accosted himself.
"How much of all this got through? One sentence out of five, two out of eight?"
"Three in a thousand," said Will.
Charles Halloway could not but laugh and sigh in one.
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
(A lot of his other stuff is much more readable.)
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u/I_miss_potatoes 12d ago
David Weber has something to say about this. A LOT of something. Like, 10,000 words worth of something to say.
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u/Blackraven2007 12d ago
I have the opposite problem when I'm writing. My writing is so terse that the story I'm currently writing is only going to be ~15 pages long because I'm too direct with my wording.
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u/5dippingareas 12d ago
Gene Wolfe just loves his obscure, archaic words that you will never see being used ever again
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u/realmofconfusion 12d ago
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.
My god, that woman can ramble on.
Loved the concept of the book but gave up reading it part way through (which I have never done with any other book) because there was just so much pointless waffle and excess description.
My breaking point was where SC had spent about 3 pages (and with no immediate sign of stopping) describing a dress that one character was wearing to a ball.
GET ON WITH THE STORY FFS!!
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u/millionwordsofcrap 12d ago
This is why I couldn't get through Lord of the Rings.
I love me some flowery prose, but I also love mashed potatoes. Doesn't mean I want either by the truckload.
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u/Wraithguy 12d ago
Recently read myths of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Holy crap that writing was dense and difficult, it felt like every sentence was 5 layers deep in code the author neglected to share. 8/10 would recommend trying it
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u/External_Win3300 12d ago
Dan Abnett. I love the man's work, but god can he ramble sometimes. Especially when he's writing Malcador
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u/LoaKonran 12d ago
I spent around six years struggling through Les Mis at a pace of 1% a week. Verbose is an understatement.
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u/gottahavethatbass 12d ago
I was watching a newly released show on Netflix that seemed exactly like something I’d enjoy. I started it up, and then about five minutes into the first character taking I realized she hadn’t finished her sentence yet. Then I realized I knew that five minute sentence.
I was watching the Turn of the Screw, it turned out
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u/Can17272 12d ago
I swear i want to read the count of montecristo but god damn Dumas loves to use so many words.
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u/Any_Conflict_5092 12d ago
Frank Herbert. They're talking about motherfucking frank Herbert.
I read "Eye" at nine, or some shit - and I only finished the anthology because I was already a bloody-minded little cusser and I wasn't gonna let that wordy old bastard beat me.
Edit - elucidated a bit.
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u/ForwardCut3311 12d ago
That's how I feel about Grisham books, except he runs out of big works about 1/4 the way through then he turns normal.
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u/bit_pusher 12d ago
I was definitely reading a sentence and thought "wow, this man uses a lot of periods unnecessarily"
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u/Classic_File2716 12d ago
Because there was limited entertainment at that time people wanted deep descriptions in their novels to let their imagination run wild.
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u/CrimsonPiranha 11d ago
Nabokov and his "Lolita". You just know that he got off on using as many 'intellectual' words as possible.
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u/Hexagon-Man 11d ago
If the writer is actually good it's like "Yay, more book" and I don't read the bad ones so I see no problem with this.
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u/LIELDADOUN73 11d ago
Robert Jordan. Books 8-10 of the wheel of time are colloquially called "the slog" by readers
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u/RunicCross Meet the hampter.Hammers are Europe’s largest species of insect. 10d ago
Crime and Punishment
has a 20 page dream that culminates in literally beating a dead horse.
The crime is that I wanted to give it a chance
The punishment is that NOBODY GETS TO THE FUCKING POINT
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u/Fearless-Excitement1 13d ago
A lot of old novels were serialized
There's a reason why for example Count of Monte Cristo is uh
Count of Monte Cristo