The world would have been better off without the following "classical" writers:

[Doktor Howl]

Let's add F. Scott Fitzgerald to this list. The Great Gatsby is a fucking awful novel.

I liked it, because of the Horrible Doom factor, but I'd have ended it differently.

Daisy had syphilis, Tom died of genital warts, and Nick Carroway watched it all in mounting horror, then made off with the silverware and the maid.

[Doktor Howl]

I will take this moment to throw out props to Robert Louis Stevenson and Johnathon Swift.

ETA: And Kipling.

Yes, yes, and HELL YES.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I will take this moment to throw out props to Robert Louis Stevenson and Johnathon Swift.

ETA: And Kipling.

Yes, yes, and HELL YES.

Tho' I've belted you and flayed you, By the livin' Gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

[Thurnez Isa]

Miguel de Cervantes - yeah I said it.  I hated Don Quixote, longest, most boring book I ever read! UGH!

Don Quixote is my favorite book

[Thurnez Isa]

Let's add F. Scott Fitzgerald to this list. The Great Gatsby is a fucking awful novel.

another one of my favorite books
im going to stop reading this thread it's crap

[Doktor Howl]

Miguel de Cervantes - yeah I said it.  I hated Don Quixote, longest, most boring book I ever read! UGH!

Don Quixote is my favorite book

Yes, but you're Canadian, and allowances have to be made.

Dok,
Has watched CBC.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I have a sort of love-hate with everyone on the list so far. So I'm going to suggestion Alexander Dumas for The Count of Monte Cristo. We had to read that in high school. The books we got were yellowed, crackling hard covers fished out of a landfill somewhere - they smelled like shit and the type was so small you needed a magnifying glass to read the crumbling, urine-stained pages. It was hell and made the story hell.

I'd like to add Louisa May Alcott's stuff, too. My English teacher tried to tell us she was striking out and having a career in a day when women couldn't do that - but she had to write because her dad was a POS and it was that or starve.

. . . I think I'm more irritated by the lies my teachers told than the books themselves. Hmm.

Arthur Miller for The Crucible

and Nathaniel Hawthorne for The Scarlet Letter.

And Charlotte Perkins Gilman should BURN IN A FIRE OF FLAMES for The Yellow Wallpaper. So much hate. So much stab-it-with-a-pitchfork-dipped-in-pitch-and-lit hate.

I feel better now.

[The Wizard]

Ayn Rand. The woman couldn't write, and her philosophy was just a reaction to her upbringing in the USSR.

Personally, I like Byron and Jules Verne. And the next person who goes after Jack London is going to be gunned down.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

James Joyce
Emily Bronte
Thomas Hardy
Lord Byron
Emily Dickenson
William Butler Yeats


All of the above wrote pure shit, and should have been infected with smallpox and dropped down a convenient sewer.

I've never read a single one of 'em.

[Thurnez Isa]

Miguel de Cervantes - yeah I said it.  I hated Don Quixote, longest, most boring book I ever read! UGH!

Don Quixote is my favorite book

Yes, but you're Canadian, and allowances have to be made.

Dok,
Has watched CBC.

I have an extensive first old book collection, including the first collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry published in Canada - which by the way I love.
Fuck this

[Jenne]

Let's add F. Scott Fitzgerald to this list. The Great Gatsby is a fucking awful novel.

I liked it, because of the Horrible Doom factor, but I'd have ended it differently.

Daisy had syphilis, Tom died of genital warts, and Nick Carroway watched it all in mounting horror, then made off with the silverware and the maid.

No no no no no.  You CANNOT de-select authors based on how you'd write their awful stories.

/just being mean b/c I really do like Goethe

[Jenne]

Miguel de Cervantes - yeah I said it.  I hated Don Quixote, longest, most boring book I ever read! UGH!

Don Quixote is my favorite book

Yes, but you're Canadian, and allowances have to be made.

Dok,
Has watched CBC.

I have an extensive first old book collection, including the first collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry published in Canada - which by the way I love.
Fuck this

Aw, buck up--I like Emily Dickinson too. 

[Jenne]

LOVE Goethe!

And if you thought Don Quixote was bad, you should read motherfucking 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea!  OMG WORST BOOK EVER

Don't get me started on Jules Verne. 

I just did!  And really, he belongs on your OP list, because I really like a few of those others.  At least I did in h.s.  Now, admittedly, I'd probably find them vapid.

Jules Verne was important to the science fiction field in its early days.  But it reads like 3 day old shit.

Some people think he invented science fiction, but that credit goes to Mary Shelley.

I think I figured out a good test for good literature:

Find it on Librivox and have it read out loud to you.  If by chapter 3 you don't want to kill a motherfucker, you've chosen a true piece of lit.  If, however, you find yourself wanting to murder, strangle, maim or otherwise do violence to either the person reading the thing out loud OR its author,

then it's shit.

I don't know. I found Iliad on there, and it was a translation I didn't particularly like by a reader I didn't particularly like listening to (had no ability for epic poetry) and I had to turn it off during chapter 2. It's not universal.

But then, I prefer reading it out loud to myself late at night and freaking my roommates out with my whispers of the bloody death scenes.

I know, my theory had holes.    Trust Kai to point them out (you're too smart, Kai, shoo!).

But still, if you can sit through shittily read chapter after chapter and NOT want to commit some sort of felony against a person, with blood involved, then you probably have a quality piece of work on your hands.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Ayn Rand. The woman couldn't write, and her philosophy was just a reaction to her upbringing in the USSR.

Not to mention nothing even remotely good has ever come about from her philosophy besides Bioshock.
I mean think of all the bullshit shes given us, Tea Baggers, Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck, Bioshock 2.
Machiavelli has done more good for the world than her, and he could actually write too.

Plus she was practically the patron saint of creepy cougars. 

[Jenne]

What's wrong with creepy cougars?  *she says with an ear-to-ear grin*