Avoid Henry James at all costs.

There is a sentence in The Turn of the Screw which sums up how I have read the whole thing and remember absolutely nothing (and I only finished it twenty minutes ago). I must have tuned out for the entire story. Here's the sentence:

I had perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty.


Oh, man, does this book make it so damn hard to read. I was halfway through it the other night, realised that I had no idea what was going on, so I wiki'd it. It turns out that its a ghost story. I had no idea that there were any ghosts in it, or why the little boy Miles is such a terror. I remember his name only because it is mentioned over and over again, and I remember just one other character, Quint, because I'm sure that is the name of the fisherman in Jaws who goes after the shark. I got more info out of wikipedia than I did from the book. The book is crap. It is awful. It is useless. It is the kind of writing that I would baffle me to edit into something more coherent. Henry James, you have got to stop being such a literary wanker. If I wrote something like this crap in high school, the teacher would have given me a barely-passing grade with the comments "stop using the thesaurus, use actual words."

Avoid Henry James at all costs.