RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

Raise the flag! Sound the horn!

It's Wednesday!

What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[white_aster]

Thanks for the rec! This was exactly the sort of comm I was looking for, to complement one that I am in on Pillowfort. :D

And oh gosh, SAME. I have this issue with most "classic" books just in general. I guess I am too wedded to a modern perspective/storytelling expectations. I may find them interesting as sort of sociological relics (it's interesting to see what in Asimov makes me go, "huh, actually, that was really ahead of its time there, sir"), and as the building blocks on which other things were built (I'm kind of lightly interested in seeing what literary scholars say about how Asimov uses the Three Laws as plot devices - right now I see them as an interesting thread of the theme of human arrogance/overconfidence in technology in the Robots books). But in some ways, they're not really "good" as stories (see the aforementioned way that the detectives do very little detecting to a frankly absurd degree, or the absolutely BIZARRE story structure of something like Homer's Odyssey), and that keeps them from being as entertaining as they could be. (Also, frankly, when you're the person who has first explored a topic decades ago, by the time I, a modern reader, have read it, what you have to say is probably no longer going to be really revolutionary, which also cuts into the entertainment factor.)

Anyway, yes, my reading of classic anything (except Jack London...I remember loving Jack London as a kid) is usually pretty limited. I mostly was on a robots kick and figured I'd go back to the well, so to speak. Also, really, Asimov's stuff is fairly short, so it's not a long slog, even if I do get something I'm not enjoying.