Hold on to your hats and opinions, folks. Some authors, including those we love, get their asses handed to them. Sometimes by literary figures, sometimes by folks like Samuel Johnson who had more opinions than he should have. This is linked and copied in fun.
8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898)
About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up 'The Old Curiosity Shop', and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot's. If a novelist can't write where is the beggar.
9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000)
How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov
Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.
24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)
I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.
And my favorite . . .
Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. - Mark Twain
