Am I Damned With Faint Praise? No, I Am Praised With Faint Damnation. The Quiz Says...

[dr_pretentious]

take the WHAT BAD BOOK ARE YOU test.


and go to mewing.net. not as good as reading a good book, but way better than a bad one.



Oh, yeah? You can liken me to Tolkien anytime. Praise me with that faint damnation. Oh, wait. Wrong strategy. Ahem: please don't throw me in that briar patch, and no, you can't whitewash my fence.

Really, though, the questions on this quiz cracked me up. I'm not big on memes, but this one got me.

Comments

Impossible to understand

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

I'm _The Crying of Lot 49_! Which I tried to read but had to put down..no..that was_Gravity's Rainbow_...whatever is the difference.

Re: Impossible to understand

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'll admit, I was never able to finish either of them, but I have it on good authority that Gravity's Rainbow is the one in which the protagonist can tell where the Nazis are going to drop bombs because he gets an erection when he's standing within the future blast radius. His erectile patterns become a matter of national security. I suspect that premise is unique in the Anglophone literary tradition.

Re: Impossible to understand

[wombats.livejournal.com]

I get to be crying alot as well. I did finish "Gravity's Rainbow". I only started it because of the song by Laurie Anderson "Gravity's Angel". I finished it because that's what I did with books. I'm not really proud of that. Finishing "G R" has since allowed me to stop reading other bad books without guilt, although that's not many. Ugh, what trial, and your description of it is mild. I mostly found it to be a semi-paranoid, conspiracy nut-style rambling mixed with good dollops of whatever sexual perversion was on the author's mind at the time.

Re: Impossible to understand

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

You're kidding!

That sounds like a plot for a comedy-porn movie.

Was I spared this book by going into philosophy instead of comp lit?

Re: Impossible to understand

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know if mischievouspie ever had to read it, but Anthony did. I was spared, by virtue of being a poetry specialist. Ant claimed to like Gravity's Rainbow, but his attempts to praise it never moved me to pick it up.

I did like Pynchon's Vineland, though, which is much shorter. Vineland features, among other things, a lawn maintenance company called The Marquis de Sod, a blond Japanese character who's described so that it's obvious (but not stated) that he's an animee character who's stumbled accidentally into the novel, and a gigantic automated accupuncture device called the Punc-u-tron. Or was it Puncutron? No, I think it was hyphenated. It's one of the grad school books I don't plan to sell off.