Amph Most boring books ever

Again, Dragons equal crap.

 

He was a self-centered little puke. I understand emotional disorders fine... Holden is not my kind of guy is all.

 

Oh yeah?! Well you're just a phony!

 

What people may not know is that Shakespeare wrote for the masses, he wasn't some snooty-uppity Brit, he wrote for mass appeal and considering his audience of the times, he did a damn fine job. So when someone says about a movie, "well, it's not shakespeare," that probably means its not meant for everyone.

 

Shakespeare invented "your mom" jokes and wrote some hilarious dirty puns. A lot of dirty puns. Are folks just reading without annotations, or what? Hell, if the reading part is too dry, go watch a play. The verse is easier to make sense of when you hear it aloud.

 

ah done don't like that shakspear feller cuz he done gone write stories where no one talk amuhruhcan

 

So you think Holden has no emotional or mental problems? You think he's just choosing to be obnoxious because he's selfish?

 

Part of it might be that actors have not been pronouncing the dialogue in Shakespeare's plays properly for a long time. There is now an effort by the Royal Shakespeare Company to perform Shakespeare's plays with the proper accent and inflections. They say that when you do that, you discover some hilariously raunchy sex jokes that you would otherwise totally miss because you're misspronouncing the dialogue

 

The Passage by Justin Cronin. That book is such a bore. He can write, but tell a story? No. I find it's the lack of being able to tell a story that makes a lot of books boring.

 

Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article about that over at Slate when the Shakespeare in the Park people were doing Twelfth Night in Central Park. He was begging them to pronounce a number of lines properly so that the raunchy humor would be plain.

But I always go back to what Pacino said in Looking for Richard. Most audiences don't understand Shakespeare's lines because most actors don't. I mean, you can see that so plainly sometimes. There's a really, really horrible bit in Orson Welles' Macbeth that is like the definitive example of this. It's in the monologue after Banquo's ghost appears (spoilers!); Welles just so plainly loses the thread of what he's actually supposed to be saying. He's just accenting wrong all over the place and you can tell in his face that he's just saying the words with no idea of what they mean. But that happens a lot, I think.