h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd like to talk about literature for a moment, particularly 'The Catcher in the Rye,' by JD Salinger. A lot of people babble on about how brilliant it is, but the fact of the matter is that is is quite simply one of the worst books ever written. It should in fact go like this: 'I got expelled from school for the quintillionth time, this time right before the holidays started. I didn't want to go home right away so I just went around and drank and smoked a bit. I did eventually go home to meet my sister but I swore her to secrecy about me returning.' and you wouldn't lose anything. The quality of writing is poor, what passes for a plot is vague and uninteresting, the main character is a complete hypocrite, characterisation is non-existent, and overall the book seems more concerned with hidden meanings than the actual story. Now, in my opinion, the main point of books is to tell a story, not to make a statement (unless they're actually non-fiction, of course), and so any hidden meanings should comlement the story, not take precedence over it. After all, books are just our way of preserving and telling stories whish were originally told by bards, seanchaí, travelling storytellers and poets, etc., and these guys weren't slightly interested in hidden meanings.

So why is that all of a sudden a book must have myriad secret meanings, statements, and metaphors if it is to be considered good? This is not to say that I dislike all books with hidden meanings - in the same year as I read 'TCITR,' I also read John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice And Men' and thouroughly enjoyed it. Now that's a book in which the story and hidden meanings work together rather than in opposition. Now, to get back to a point about a book not being considered good without hidden meanings, etc., people have found a lot of hidden meanings in 'The Lord Of The Rings' despite JRR Tolkien explicitly saying at the start of it that there are not any. I think that this is because a group of pretentious English proffessors somewhere like Oxford (I'm not saying anything bad about Oxford here, merely that somewhere like Oxford may be some of the people I'm talking about) decided that only books with the afformentioned hidden meanings could be good, so then when they read and enjoyed 'TLOTR,' they noticed there were no hidden meanings and so had to invent some in order to justify their enjoyment of it.

In the preface to 'The Stand,' Stephen King describes a hack as 'an artist whose worl is appreciated by too many people,' which is why the so-called exprets in Literature hate him, but he has legions of loyal fans who are all waiting on tenterhooks for his next book to come out. In the introduction the 'Nightmares and Dreamscapes,' a collection of short stories, he describes a literary anorexia that has descended on the world, whereby the critics seem to <quote> 'regard generosity with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate' . He then says that he may be just a little bit mad at being badly treated by the critics, but I feel that what he has written here really rings a bell when talking about 'TCITR'. Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with having hiddne meanings in books, even writing books to make a point ('OMAM' comes instantly to mind), but to return to my original point, when a writer decides to take a point and write a (bad) book around it, the result is the terrible 'TCITR'. The book supposedly aims to highlight the problems of growing up, but if you really want to know about that, why not just ask a teenager? I know I could do a much better job of expressing the insanity and angst present in all adolescents than some guy who clearly hasn't talked to one for maybe seven hundred years.

To round off this little rant, I would like to complain about so-caled originality in writing. I often read about books which numerous critics say are completely original, and I always have to laugh. These books are all realistic, which really kills almost all potential for originality. What about the numerous fantasy, science fiction, and to a lesser extent horror novels all over the bookshelves? These have the most incredible ideas contained in them, and yet are all but ignored outside the dedicated fantasy/scifi/horror magazines and publications. These rae far more original, and frequntly more interesting and exciting as well as better written than a lot of critically acclaimed books, yet they receive significantly less attention. This is a serious injustice. The main point of books is to escpae from reality, but how can we when so many writers seem intent on keeping us up to date on just how horrible things could be and and telling us what the world's like?

It's been a while since I read that, and soon after I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and I get the two confused.

I will give them both another try to see if I was having an "off period" in reading at the time, but I'm not hopeful.

Although I agree with a lot of what you say, I don't think that the only reason for books is to entertain. I think that's what those professors in Oxford would call the difference between Literature and Entertainment? There are plenty of well-written, original, entertaining novels in any genre (and particularly sci-fi and fantasy - although those two have more than their fair share of the dross too) for people who don't want a "book with a message" and the others for those readers looking for something more.

Generally (apart from TCITR - I'll give you that ) it is possible to read these "meaningfull" books without taking the message on board though.

Try The Life of Pi...