Top Fifty Literary Put-Downs, Courtesy of the Newark Examiner

by Ernie on 01/05/10 at 9:20 am

Thanks to E-Verser Tom Hutt for sending this in.

Here are three examples. Read the full list by clicking here.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson: Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

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Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (1898): I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

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James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw (1921): I have read several fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.