Supposed to Love It: Don't--Supposed to Despise It: Really Don't

Many artistic productions are acclaimed by critics and/or by fans. One MUST try/adore/admire...

Some people don't bother or do bother and don't feel the same. 

Many artistic productions are disparaged by critics and/or by fans.

Yet people love them anyway. 

And many productions change from one category to the other according to what's in vogue: classic writers like Longfellow get criticized for not being edgy enough OR, as in the case of Roald Dahl, too edgy and opinionated. Other productions rise and fall, sometimes with the general public, sometimes within the field. 

Speaking of Roald Dahl...

I actually have never cared for Roald Dahl's works. Although I like a few of the movies, I find the books quite creepy, rather like The Wizard of Oz, which I don't care for either. However, my reasons have to do with the creepiness, not with his supposed political incorrectness. Censoring Dahl would be, to me, rather like replacing all of Salvador Dali's excessively creepy watches with nice pristine Rolexes. He wouldn't be Dahl anymore. And he is one of the authors many of my students prefer to research. 

Speaking of political incorrectness, I don't know where Hemingway sits these days. Is he a great writer because he wrote well? An awful writer because he was drunk a lot? An evil writer because he was misogynistic? No idea. 

I don't particularly care for Hemingway either, but I am a fan of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." It has a great final piece of dialog. I suppose it could be labeled something awful. Whatever. It's fantastic:

"That was a pretty thing to do," he said in a toneless voice. "He would have left you too."

"Stop it," she said.

"Of course it's an accident," he said. "I know that."

"Stop it," she said.

"Don't worry," he said. "There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There's the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You're perfectly all right."

"Stop it," she said.

"There 's a hell of a lot to be done," he said. "And I'll have to send a truck off to the lake to wireless for a plane to take the three of us into Nairobi. Why didn't you poison him?  That's what they do in England."

"Stop it. Stop it. Stop it," the woman cried. Wilson looked at her with his flat blue eyes.

"I’m through now," he said. "I was a little angry. I'd begun to like your husband."

"Oh, please stop it," she said. "Please, please stop it."

"That's better," Wilson said. "Please is much better. Now I'll stop."

I've mentioned elsewhere that I could never get into Siddhartha by Hesse. Although not fiction, Thoreau's Walden strikes me in as similar: a lot of navel-gazing, self-pandering exhortations over the meaning of life...nature is involved somehow. 

The trope bores me. I don't care at all about the navel-gazing. And I was an outlier in high school. While my friends and acquaintances in the art club/AP English were reading Walden, I was reading Gone with the Wind (didn't care for it), Cynthia Voigt's books (love them!), Lord Jim (loved it!), and paperback romances I borrowed from my less arty/intellectual friends (mixed reactions). 

I consider myself the winner here. 

I'll be returning to this idea of taste but the point here is: Never allow intellectuals or artists or "rebels" to convince you that a particular "daring" artistic recommendation or "righteous" critique is not, in essence, part of a trend. Reading whatever I want, stars or no stars, is the most honest part of my life. It doesn't make me holy or unholy. Merely a reader.