The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418 Message #3802846
Posted By: Rapparee
31-Jul-16 - 08:38 AM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Reminds me of Natty Bumpo silently stalking through the forest primeval with a woman he's just rescued, at great peril, and he's lost. Yes! Leatherstocking is LOST! And then...then...a cannonball comes rolling along. Obviously it's at the end of its journey but! our hero follows its path back to the fort! Natty Bumpo is the only human being who could follow a track through rocks, mud, snow, slush, quicksand AND THROUGH THE AIR!!
As for Charles "Chuckles" Dickens, well, improbable is a good word. Come on! Dave Copperfield falls in with a school for thieves and doesn't want any part of it...and Fagin doesn't off the self-righteous little bugger to keep the school secret? Granted, Chuckles did at least visit the slums he wrote about.
Scrooge realizes that he's gonna croak one day and nobody will give a shit, so he reforms his greedy ways and all is sweetness and light? His heirs would have had him locked up as non compis mentes, and if not his heirs then society in general! Raving on about ghosts and all!
I shan't go into the details of "Silas Marner" (son of the Ancient Marner), Bulwer-Lytton's stuff (except that Snoopy made good use of it, "Heart of Darkness," "Jude the Obscure," and the rest of the 19th Century novelists (except Sam Clemens, probably the best writer of the 19th and 20th Centuries).
Let's face it: If it hadn't been required reading would you have read it at all, much less finished it? Don't you wish you'd read "Ulysses" or "Cien aƱos de soledad" or even (God help us!) "Tropic of Cancer"?