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daxxh
Posted 2014-04-28 2:33 PM (#7397 - in reply to #5937)
Subject: Re: 2014 Masterworks Reading Challenge		Quote Reply



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Location: Great Lakes, USA		In reply to Dlw28 and francesashton -

I read Dhalgren twice - once when I was 14 and again when I was 18. I thought it was great. Back then, I was into anything sf, and really liked the artsy stuff. Dhalgren starts with the end of a sentence and ends with the beginning of the sentence. It has no real plot. I kept reading to find out about the giant sun and the two moons, but nothing was mentioned about why they were there. There is a lot of sex in the book. Back then, no one talked about homosexuality or anything sex related for that matter (small town in the 1970s), so I got quite the education in that regard. I am lucky my parents didn't pick that one up and read a few pages. I'd have been banned from reading. (I did get a lecture about reading "such garbage" when my mom read a few pages of A Boy and His Dog. Of all the pages she had to pick from, she had to pick that particular page of that particular story... I hid Dhalgren after that.)

Perhaps it's a classic because it has no plot, because it is artsy or because it has topics in it that, to the characters in the book were no big deal, but were a big deal in the real world. I suspect that were I to read it for the first time now, I wouldn't like it as much as I did then.

I tried to read Lord of Light in my twenties and thought the same - boring. I have never gone back to it, even though I know many people who think it's the greatest book written.

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