Meme: I just don't like them!

I am breaking my rule of not posting twice in one day to post this excellent meme.

Tahleen of The Broke and the Bookish came up with this meme to name one’s top 10 most dislikeable characters in literature, and boy, did I have fun deciding!

I haven’t numbered them because I really can’t decide which ones I like the least.

Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling. She is a cruel, sadistic, bigoted, bureaucratic toady who will use any means to achieve her goals – even ones she would be shocked to see others use. She is unable to accept facts that are under her nose and she shows not regret over her actions, in fact it never even occurs to her that she is anything but one of the good guys. Caveat: I just finished re-reading the book, so this was the very first character that sprung to mind. On a different day I might not even have remembered her, but re-reading the book brought back to me why I found it so uncomfortable to read (Harry’s stupidity throughout the story was another - I constantly wanted to yell at him to grow a brain)
Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment by Dostojevski. The book is brilliant and the story about Raskolnikov’s breakdown utterly believable, but he is still loathsome and unsympathetic in the extreme, which just goes to show how well he is written.
Fanny Price from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. She’s just so hopelessly wet.
Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. She’s a proud, bratty, selfish bitch...
...which brings me to Heathcliff from the same book. He is vindictive, cruel and a sore loser who can’t stand anyone around him being happy. I will never, ever understand how anyone could think him romantic.
Angel Clare from Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I hate double standards, especially when those double standards cause preventable tragedies. Alec d’Urverville may be a villain, but Angel is a monster.
Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. See the description for Catherine Earnshaw.
Rose Mortmain from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Shallow, avaricious and stupid and may have destroyed Cassandra’s chance of happiness with her behaviour.
Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. She manages to make him sympathetic but that doesn’t change the fact that he is a psychopath par excellence, devoid of conscience and unlikely ever to change. He is so evil, in fact, that you end up hating yourself for liking him.
The last is a tie between Mary Sues and Gary Stus of all kind.

Interestingly, only one of these characters (Umbridge) seems to have been written expressly to be disliked/hated by readers. The hero-villains Raskolnikov and Ripley and victim-villain Heathcliff are written in such a way as to make them somewhat sympathetic, and the others were not written as villains.

Note: This list is subject to change.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

Search This Blog