Literature - what level?

ee   Tue May 08, 2007 8:41 pm GMT
I have an idea. How about we rank well known authors and their works by the level of difficulty. That would be helpful to English learners here on the forum who are trying to improve their familiarity with the language through reading.
Uriel   Fri May 11, 2007 3:33 am GMT
Hmm. Well, they all use the same language, and often I tend to think of literature as hard or easy more in terms of their concepts, not their vocabulary, which might not be so different....

If you're looking for more fancy 50-cent words, older writers like Dickens or Melville tended to pepper their sentences with more difficult vocabulary and more convoluted sentence constructions. But it won't be very indicative of modern speech habits.

Shakespeare has native speakers desperately scanning the footnotes to make sense of a lot of his archaic vocabulary and idioms -- half the headache of reading his plays is having to translate 16th century English into 21st century English -- especially when you actually know most of the words, but can't quite get a handle on how he's using them.

Hemingway was a master of terse minimalism -- he said a lot with very little, and tended to avoid gratuitous polysyllablism. So your comprehension might not be as taxed with arcane usages or rare synonyms.

CS Lewis didn't use a lot of difficult words in his Narnia books, since he was writing primarily for children, and his plots and characters are fairly simple and transparent.

But you can't always trust children's lit to be simple and banal: fellow children's writer Pullman introduces a lot of complex, dark, and provocative themes in his His Dark Materials books, as does JK Rowling in her later books. She's no wordsmith, though -- her style can be pretty clunky at times.
Lazar   Fri May 11, 2007 3:40 am GMT
Has anybody here read Faulkner? He was the opposite of Hemingway: his writing is dense and complicated, and he loved gratuitous polysyllabism.
Po'   Fri May 11, 2007 6:03 am GMT
Is James Joyce difficult? I read a short story by him and I liked it.
Guest 224   Fri May 11, 2007 7:21 am GMT
The Dover translation of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" uses words that I never knew even existed.

And almost every sentence is filled with them. They're not just "big words," they're WEIRD words too.
ESL   Fri May 11, 2007 8:45 am GMT
Has anyone given a try to Edgar Allan Poe? As an ESL learner, I like his style of telling a story which is normally in "I" mode. Plus, suspense all the way!
Franco   Fri May 11, 2007 10:45 am GMT
What about Bill Clinton? Is his prose of much difficulty to read and understand? I think he's the master of literature of the most modern centuries.
Guest   Fri May 11, 2007 11:17 am GMT
He is the master of writing books on sex as well.
Guest 224   Fri May 11, 2007 11:25 pm GMT
I agree that Edgar Allen Poe is one of the harder authors to read and fully comprehend. He uses such loaded words that it requires much energy to analyze his pieces.
Uriel   Sat May 12, 2007 4:14 am GMT
<<Has anybody here read Faulkner? He was the opposite of Hemingway: his writing is dense and complicated, and he loved gratuitous polysyllabism.>>

Lord, I picked up a copy of Faulkner's "Absolom! Absolom!" one day, and just about needed a machete to hack through that crap! Couldn't get into it at all.

All I know about James Joyce is that little snippet of "Ulysses" that I think everyone is exposed to/tortured with at some point -- I don't think it was that hard to comprehend as long as you were willing to throw puctuation to the winds and just ride that ride.

Edgar Allen Poe was still in that long-winded 19th century mode, so his writing, while gripping, can feel a little stilted. One slightly later horror writer who is just as much fun to be scared by but a little more modern in his style is the legendary H. P. Lovecraft. (I also dug that his creepy tales were invariably set in a very decaying part of New England!)

Tolkien was a little in that mode as well, but while his style and tone were deliberately formal, it lent itself well thematically because it echoed the "voice" of traditional tales and legends. It was not unlike Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Mort d'Arthur -- or at least the modern English translation.

I really enjoyed Arthur Conan Doyle's clever Sherlock Holmes tales and I think I read just about every Agatha Christie murder mystery in existence when I was a little girl. I don't know if they count as great lit, but they're still famous cultural fixtures.
Guest   Sun May 13, 2007 3:35 am GMT
Uriel, You have such a nice taste in literature. I also adore Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock holmes tales. I have not read Agatha Christie yet but I'll give her a go. Where should I start if I want to acclimatize myself with her characters and her style of writing?

Have you read Elmore Leonard's novels? Where do you rate him?
1   Sun May 13, 2007 4:30 am GMT
To the latest Guest: One of her best novels is the "And Then There were None." Another great piece is "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd." It's not really intellectual food but rather brain candy. It does not address the meaning of life or anything like that, but the language is advanced enough without being too complicated and the story never gets boring.
Uriel   Sun May 13, 2007 6:38 pm GMT
Well, Agatha Christie had two sets of books with different "detectives" as main characters (plus a few other books that had nothing to do with either one) -- Miss Marple, who was a sly, elderly spinster who was good at solving murders the police couldn't crack, and Hercule Poirot, who was a fat, fussy little Belgian detective. I'd try one of each and see which one you enjoy more as a main character. I liked them both, myself.

No, I've never read Elmore Leonard.
Lee Miro   Thu May 31, 2007 10:58 pm GMT
How about Raymond Carver shorts? I'd think that his minimalistic style would make reading easier, plus his tone is so conversational.

Po- If you stick with his short stories, James Joyce isn't too tricky. It's "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" that most people find hard.
M56   Thu May 31, 2007 11:23 pm GMT
<I have an idea. How about we rank well known authors and their works by the level of difficulty. That would be helpful to English learners here on the forum who are trying to improve their familiarity with the language through reading. >

Slap your writer's text here to see what use it is to students:

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php