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Originally Posted by nomesque
It is interesting - I don't think we got ANY Aussie books to read. Except Mem Fox's Possum Magic, but that was a LONG time ago  |
Poets...Kenneth Slessor (quite the nihilist) and Richard Drewe are the one's I remember. I enjoyed both, and have bought a "Collected works" of Drewe's a few years ago.
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The depressing nature of My Brilliant Career? I *wince* haven't read If This Is A Man, so I can't compare. But...
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Who knows, I might like it. I should put Levi's
If This Is A Man into perspective though - it's Levi's bearing witness to his experience surviving Auschwitz. I found it soul-crushingly brilliant - probably the book I treasure reading more than any other. The chaos in its followup,
The Truce, is almost a relief, from the ordered destruction of the first. (In pbook form, you can get both together in the one book).
Anyway, speaking of poetry, I never got the hang of Gerard Manley Hopkins at school. He was incredibly easy to dislike, and so I took that easy path. It's only in recent years that I've, at the very least, come to admire his craftwork.
Against the OP's specifications of timeframe, I'll say that I rate Iris Murdoch's
The Sea, The Sea as one of the most begrudged reading experiences I've had (and that wasn't even forced upon me - I only read it a couple of years ago). I actually rated as one of my worst reads ever. I don't pretend to be generally supported in this though.
Cheers,
Marc