Finally picked up Grapes of Wrath, and damn is it good. Steinbeck has such beautiful prose when he's not writing southern dialect.
What other classics are still compelling today? If it's any help, I don't really dig Vonnegut, Asimov, and Huxley.
Finally picked up Grapes of Wrath, and damn is it good. Steinbeck has such beautiful prose when he's not writing southern dialect.
What other classics are still compelling today? If it's any help, I don't really dig Vonnegut, Asimov, and Huxley.
Really really really cannot recommend Zola. He was a right-wing pedophile and proto-eugenecist. And his characters are paper thin and drab. Some of his crowd scenes stand out. You should read 'The Red and the Black' for a humanist portrait of France around the revolution, or 'Growth of the Soil' by Knut Hamsun if you need a chud writing irl minecraft fanfic.
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That's fair and I agree especially in the case of Hamsun. I don't agree with Zola though thinking specifically of 'La Terre'. (CW: SA, Pedophilia)
spoiler
Which follows around a teenager who is repeatedly and graphically sexually assaulted and admits on her death bed she loves her greatest abuser and is envious of her sister for marrying him.
I concede my original critique was kneejerk and not well explained.
Yeesh, I started La Terre but didn't get that far. And yes, Zola's eugenicist ideas are weird. Like I said, he libs out sometimes. He did stick his neck out during the Dreyfus affair, however, and he was probably assassinated for it.