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kyatic's reviews
894 reviews
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
1.0
I loathed this book. I hated it. I hated it so, so much. Perhaps this is because I was forced to study it at A Level, I don't know - but then again, I also had to study Pinter and Shakespeare, and I loved those. I think I just hated this book because it is awful. These things are supposed to be subjective, I know, but I just don't see how this can be. I don't see how any sane human could muster up even an ounce - no, an atom - of enjoyment at this hateful, wretched book. There are so, so many things that are preferable to this novel. Stubbed toes. Gum disease. Chronic sinusitis. It's hard to name something not preferable to this book, except perhaps the 1994 TV adaptation.
Hard Times, for me, epitomises everything that is loathsome about being nudged to sit through a Dickens novel. It is like wading through lexical porridge; every word is painfully strung out into six more words, each of no less than four hundred syllables (or so it seems) - reading this book is like chiselling away laboriously at a great stone wall on some low-paid archaeological dig, only to find out that you've been hacking away at a leisure centre from the 1980s. There's just a lot of work and no real pay-off. Dickens' work is palatable in small doses. A Christmas Carol was readable only because of its brevity; had it been another 100 pages or so long, I think I would have loathed it just as much.
The other issue, after the semantic saturation, is that for the weightiness of the book, the characters are paper-thin, more archetypes than actual characters - you have the pious, feeble saint, Stephen, who was honestly such a wretched character that I half expected him to drop down dead of chronic weediness halfway through - think Tiny Tim, only with an alcoholic wife. Stephen is to Tiny Tim what Hollyoaks: After Dark is to its parent programme; Dickens aims for gritty realness with Stephen's unique working class plight, but it's still just patronising schmultz. Look at the poor man. Look at him. Look how pathetic he is. Look at how pathetic he is, with his stringy hair and his bitch wife and his hot friend who he can never marry. I bet he cries at night just to feel alive. There's also Louisa Gradgrind, the beautiful, intelligent victim of both society and Dickens' inherent misogyny, who I feel is the sort of character who would be played by Anne Hathaway circa 2006, and her vile brother Tom, who has absolutely no redeeming features apart from his short name. We follow these two characters from childhood to adulthood, and I still couldn't tell you a damn thing about them except that they both have daddy issues in spades. Oh, and they're both absolutely wretched victims of circumstance, of course, because this is a Dickens novel.
Other 'characters' rendered 2D in this tome include Mr Bounderby (Big Ears with a Freudian twist), Mr Gradgrind (Michael Gove for the Victorian era) and Stephen's wife, who appears to consist entirely of blancmange and wine. The characters are so thin as to be transparent; their fates are obvious from the start, and not just because this is a Dickens novel (come on, at least 75% of them are fated to die from the title page). This means that you just don't give half a damn about what happens to them - you just can't muster upon the scraps of empathy to care one whit about their fates, because you have cause to empathise with them. They're not people; they're merely vehicles for Dickens' ideas. They all stand for the ideals of creative education - and hey, characters can stand for ideals! That's fine! They just need to stand on their own two feet as a character too, and these folks just don't. I was half hoping they would all drop dead on page 3, just so that the remaining pages could be filled with calming, soothing nothingness. It would be more interesting than the oatmeal narrative of Hard Times.
The actual plot of the book is quite hard to describe; not because nothing happens - this is a Dickensian melodrama, and there's more twists and turns in this plot than in Bounderby's swollen guts after dinnertime - but because I can barely remember what happened, despite having read the damn thing so many times. I do recall thinking that, if Victorians had a Jeremy Kyle equivalent, then Hard Times would probably be quite well-suited. They could call the episode 'My brother is a scoundrel, my husband is a drunk and that man over there keeps trying to kill his pudding wife!' Not the catchiest title, but then it's hard to make the word 'catchy' fit a book that reads like pulling teeth.
The worst thing is that for all the loathsome, bitter stodge of the book, I agree completely with Dickens' educational philosophy. His hatred of utilitarianism is something that I can totally get behind. If only he were able to write about it in the form of a novel that didn't make me want to gently press needles into my fingertips, then I think we'd have got along swimmingly. Unfortunately, the ideology of a book is not always enough to save it from tedium, and this was definitely the case with Hard Times. For all I agreed with it, I despised it. It was like going to visit a really acerbic relative, with whom you oddly agree about contemporary issues, but they're so vile that you find yourself wanting to argue against your own belief system - damn it, Aunt Marjorie, I agree with you that the Tories have messed up the economy beyond repair, but put your teeth back in and stop dissing the gays! That sort of thing.
In summary, I despised this book. I have read pamphlets on gum disease while waiting for dental surgery that filled me with less trepidation and more genuine narrative interest than this book. I remember reading an entire 6 page spread of French gardening adverts for a dare when I was 14, and I enjoyed it more than this book. When I finally finished studying this god forsaken, wretched tome at A Level, I crumpled my copy into a ball, scribbled TERMINATED across the front in indelible ink, and threw it into a hedge, leaving it there for several days in the rain, before carrying it inside and putting it back on my bookshelf like some sick trophy, a reminder that I could do the impossible. When I went to university and read the list of books on the text list for my core module and saw the words 'Hard Times' at the top, it was like looking straight into Satan's rectum. I honestly thought I would rather picnic in a war zone that sit through another month of this tripe. I would rather read tripe. But I persevered, and honestly, if I grow up to sire three Nobel prize winners, I will not count any achievement in any of our lives quite so highly.
I still have my copy of Hard Times, its bright green cover glaring at me like Gatsby's green light, but I will never return for it. I only keep it to remind myself of the hurdles I have overcome, and of the things that can be achieved by the simple dedication of the human spirit. Educational reform, perhaps? Personal growth? The ability to confront and challenge your own ideologies and compare them with the contemporary social hegemony, thus achieving both an intellectual and sociological change? No. None of these things. The greatest example of human spirit, ladies and gentlemen, is that people have read the entirety of Hard Times. Sometimes more than once.
Hard Times, for me, epitomises everything that is loathsome about being nudged to sit through a Dickens novel. It is like wading through lexical porridge; every word is painfully strung out into six more words, each of no less than four hundred syllables (or so it seems) - reading this book is like chiselling away laboriously at a great stone wall on some low-paid archaeological dig, only to find out that you've been hacking away at a leisure centre from the 1980s. There's just a lot of work and no real pay-off. Dickens' work is palatable in small doses. A Christmas Carol was readable only because of its brevity; had it been another 100 pages or so long, I think I would have loathed it just as much.
The other issue, after the semantic saturation, is that for the weightiness of the book, the characters are paper-thin, more archetypes than actual characters - you have the pious, feeble saint, Stephen, who was honestly such a wretched character that I half expected him to drop down dead of chronic weediness halfway through - think Tiny Tim, only with an alcoholic wife. Stephen is to Tiny Tim what Hollyoaks: After Dark is to its parent programme; Dickens aims for gritty realness with Stephen's unique working class plight, but it's still just patronising schmultz. Look at the poor man. Look at him. Look how pathetic he is. Look at how pathetic he is, with his stringy hair and his bitch wife and his hot friend who he can never marry. I bet he cries at night just to feel alive. There's also Louisa Gradgrind, the beautiful, intelligent victim of both society and Dickens' inherent misogyny, who I feel is the sort of character who would be played by Anne Hathaway circa 2006, and her vile brother Tom, who has absolutely no redeeming features apart from his short name. We follow these two characters from childhood to adulthood, and I still couldn't tell you a damn thing about them except that they both have daddy issues in spades. Oh, and they're both absolutely wretched victims of circumstance, of course, because this is a Dickens novel.
Other 'characters' rendered 2D in this tome include Mr Bounderby (Big Ears with a Freudian twist), Mr Gradgrind (Michael Gove for the Victorian era) and Stephen's wife, who appears to consist entirely of blancmange and wine. The characters are so thin as to be transparent; their fates are obvious from the start, and not just because this is a Dickens novel (come on, at least 75% of them are fated to die from the title page). This means that you just don't give half a damn about what happens to them - you just can't muster upon the scraps of empathy to care one whit about their fates, because you have cause to empathise with them. They're not people; they're merely vehicles for Dickens' ideas. They all stand for the ideals of creative education - and hey, characters can stand for ideals! That's fine! They just need to stand on their own two feet as a character too, and these folks just don't. I was half hoping they would all drop dead on page 3, just so that the remaining pages could be filled with calming, soothing nothingness. It would be more interesting than the oatmeal narrative of Hard Times.
The actual plot of the book is quite hard to describe; not because nothing happens - this is a Dickensian melodrama, and there's more twists and turns in this plot than in Bounderby's swollen guts after dinnertime - but because I can barely remember what happened, despite having read the damn thing so many times. I do recall thinking that, if Victorians had a Jeremy Kyle equivalent, then Hard Times would probably be quite well-suited. They could call the episode 'My brother is a scoundrel, my husband is a drunk and that man over there keeps trying to kill his pudding wife!' Not the catchiest title, but then it's hard to make the word 'catchy' fit a book that reads like pulling teeth.
The worst thing is that for all the loathsome, bitter stodge of the book, I agree completely with Dickens' educational philosophy. His hatred of utilitarianism is something that I can totally get behind. If only he were able to write about it in the form of a novel that didn't make me want to gently press needles into my fingertips, then I think we'd have got along swimmingly. Unfortunately, the ideology of a book is not always enough to save it from tedium, and this was definitely the case with Hard Times. For all I agreed with it, I despised it. It was like going to visit a really acerbic relative, with whom you oddly agree about contemporary issues, but they're so vile that you find yourself wanting to argue against your own belief system - damn it, Aunt Marjorie, I agree with you that the Tories have messed up the economy beyond repair, but put your teeth back in and stop dissing the gays! That sort of thing.
In summary, I despised this book. I have read pamphlets on gum disease while waiting for dental surgery that filled me with less trepidation and more genuine narrative interest than this book. I remember reading an entire 6 page spread of French gardening adverts for a dare when I was 14, and I enjoyed it more than this book. When I finally finished studying this god forsaken, wretched tome at A Level, I crumpled my copy into a ball, scribbled TERMINATED across the front in indelible ink, and threw it into a hedge, leaving it there for several days in the rain, before carrying it inside and putting it back on my bookshelf like some sick trophy, a reminder that I could do the impossible. When I went to university and read the list of books on the text list for my core module and saw the words 'Hard Times' at the top, it was like looking straight into Satan's rectum. I honestly thought I would rather picnic in a war zone that sit through another month of this tripe. I would rather read tripe. But I persevered, and honestly, if I grow up to sire three Nobel prize winners, I will not count any achievement in any of our lives quite so highly.
I still have my copy of Hard Times, its bright green cover glaring at me like Gatsby's green light, but I will never return for it. I only keep it to remind myself of the hurdles I have overcome, and of the things that can be achieved by the simple dedication of the human spirit. Educational reform, perhaps? Personal growth? The ability to confront and challenge your own ideologies and compare them with the contemporary social hegemony, thus achieving both an intellectual and sociological change? No. None of these things. The greatest example of human spirit, ladies and gentlemen, is that people have read the entirety of Hard Times. Sometimes more than once.
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
2.0
Reading this book had the same effect, I should think, as eating a vat of caramel and then licking salt off the pavement: sickly saccharine sweet, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and makes you feel nauseous for days after. A valiant attempt at tackling the big questions in life, but comes across like a particularly pretentious greetings card. I've read more fulfilling itemised VAT receipts. Fine, I suppose, if you like your books like you like your coffee and you're a fan of skinny six shot pumpkin lattes, but for the fan of literature and espresso, best avoided.