Fans of Interracial Romance discussion

hawthorne's scarlet letter for me...

They are going to take away my womanhood badge but I hated The Awakening by Kate Chopin. It was such a waste of time. I actually really liked The Scarlet Letter.

Pretty much every classic I was made to read in school. It's a long list.

I have to majority of classics. When I was about 10 my father purchased a collection of classics for me, however they are in the basement collecting dust and I have never read any!

I didn't like Demian by Herman Hesse (I didn't even finish), Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Great Gatsy by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I hated Daisy), The Stranger by Albert Camus (what a waste of time) to name a few. I posted bad reviews here on Goodreads. They are some of my worst rated books in fact.

I really liked The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Is that the same book?

I didn't like Anna Karenina. by Leo Tolstoy. I know it's supposed to be scandalous, but I just thought it was boring.
Surprisingly, I loved The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I was fully prepared to hate it because I had to read it for an English assignment, but I thought it was great.

LOL. Eugenia, Grapes was socialist too. ;) I really liked that one. I actually like a lot of the classics, including The Scarlet Letter, LOL. It was ahead of its time in its investigation of human psychology.

I think one of the only ones I didn't like was Crime and Punishment. Ugh. I didn't care for Romeo & Juliet either. I thought it was crass and shallow.

Catcher in the Rye, blech. There's also a Russian WWII era book I read in high school. Started with a D I think but I can't for the life of me remember it. See how memorable it was for me Lol.

Also I didn't like but was oddly fascinated by The Bluest Eye.

LOL, that too. Yes, Grapes was told in a beautiful way.

Rae wrote: "Catcher in the Rye, blech. There's also a Russian WWII era book I read in high school. Started with a D I think but I can't for the life of me remember it. See how memorable it was for me Lol.

Als..."


Catcher in the Rye was a bit of a let down for me. I read it voluntarily because people had raved about it. It was much ado about nothing.

Eugenia wrote: "Gatadelafuente (Danielle) wrote: "I really liked The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Is that the same book? "

See how much I hated it, I got the wrong author. LOL. A book with a socialist manifesto a..."

I didn't really get a socialist message. I did get that there needed to be protections for workers and for the public from unscrupulous companies in the meat-packing industry. It worked to a sense. They passed the Food and Drug Act (part of the reason I now have a job).
I guess we just got different things out of it.

Great Expectations

Anna Karenina

The Great Gatsby!

Come to think of it pretty much all the classics!

Well I've found some gems in the classic genre: Jane Eyre, Call of the Wild, White Fang, To Kill a Mockingbird (modern classic).

Great Expectations is so frustrating. That old woman is the devil, LOL. I loved Jane Eyre. :D

I actually like The Catcher in the Rye, but not as much as Franny and Zooey or Nine Stories. I think mainly because I was in a "I hate the world phase" when I read Salinger's works.
I have never liked anything by Toni Morrison and I have tried like five of her books. I just don't get them. However, hand me anything English from the 1700's through 1800's and I am in love.

Tried LoTR. Hated it. The man wrote about the most insignificant details. It was worse than reading the dictionary.

Eugenia wrote: "I tried to read Toni Morrison, there's a lot of symbolism so it can difficult. I also found that as much as I love Lord of the Rings the movie, the book was not even good and I tried and I tried to..."

I really enjoyed Song of Solomon. Beloved was hard to read because it was so full of despair and evil doing. Sula was kind of weird and disturbing. I love Edgar Allen Poe. I love most classic horror and pulp fiction like Robert E. Howard, although it's not considered 'classic' in the literary sense.

new_user wrote: "Tried LoTR. Hated it. The man wrote about the most insignificant details. It was worse than reading the dictionary."

I haven't gotten aroudn to tackling Tolkien yet. I'm going to.

Oh I loved Candide by Moliere. It's brilliant.

By Voltaire, you mean? ;) It is pretty clever. I like Moliere too. The Misanthrope is witty. Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, they're all good. Even Camus' writing is good, even if The Stranger leaves something to be desired. You can see I'm not an existentialist, LOL.

yeah i meant voltaire. :-) dumas is good, didn't like balzac though. from what i remember of him, he seemed rather dour and miserable. or was that hugo hmmmmmm it's all a blur now. when i win the lotto i will take time off to renew myself with them

The Stranger was really stupid to me. I guess I'm not philosophical enough to appreciate it. :)

LOL. Yeah, in the original French the writing's solid, but it's basically just existentialism in a nutshell, so not my cup of tea either. Pretty pessimistic.

Maybe it was Hugo that was depressing, Justine? I can see that. He does have some painful moments, but Les Miserables was actually pretty hopeful too.

Michelle wrote: "Gatadelafuente (Danielle) wrote: "They are going to take away my womanhood badge but I hated The Awakening by Kate Chopin. It was such a waste of time. I actually really liked The Scarlet Letter."..."

I thought she deliberatly drowned herself because she was so sick of her oh, so terrible life. Being a rich man's wife with whiny kids and a boring vacation every year. Please!

Michelle wrote: "Gatadelafuente (Danielle) wrote: "Eugenia wrote: "I tried to read Toni Morrison, there's a lot of symbolism so it can difficult. I also found that as much as I love Lord of the Rings the movie, the..."


I haven't read Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'll have to read that on your recommendation, Michelle.

I liked Song of Solomon because I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. It was very interesting to mix the realism with surrealism in that book. Very dreamy. Beloved made me mad and depressed. The ghost part was pretty cool, though.

Michelle wrote: "I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and didn't like it. It's about Yosarian, a guy who really wanted to get out of the military but couldn't quit, and the army wouldn't release him early unless he was..."


I read about Virginia Woolf and her friends. Very modern morals in that group. A lot of bisexuality, homosexuality, and swinging. It was pretty eye-raising for the time period. I haven't felt a huge urge to read her.

Michelle wrote: "I'm a former English major, so I had to read a lot of "classic" books."

High-five. My minor, not major, but still fun. Strangely enough, I haven't gotten around to Woolf, but I think Hawthorne was more progressive than most of the female authors of the same time. Then again, he was a man. He didn't have to worry about bias or his ideas being dismissed out of hand.

I like Hawthorne. He really probed into the deep core of puritanical beliefs and looked at the hypocrisy of it very well. And it wasn't a beat one over the head way. It was very much allegorical and with a good, often creepy story to enjoy.