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I've only read The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, and The Portrait of a Lady. I liked all of them though I have no desire to read any of his other work. Not Crap.

The Turn of the Screw is not bad, but generally his fiction bores my waistcoat off. He was, however, enormously influential on the evolution of the modernist narrative form and in literary criticism.

Ty Webb wrote:The Turn of the Screw is not bad, but generally his fiction bores my waistcoat off. He was, however, enormously influential on the evolution of the modernist narrative form and in literary criticism.

I was thinking of making this poll gay/not gay but I didn't want to offend anyone, least of all the relatives of the deceased if any of them should frequent this board.

Oh, he loved pole. Hot, young studs. That's a given.

Has anone here read The American Scene, the essays that arose out of HJ's travels through America? I've wanted to for a long time, but it remains there on the shelf, mocking me. It will be the first of James' books I've read.

Not crap, if convoluted hundred word sentences are your thing. Otherwise obviously crap as a narrative stylist and fodder for english teachers.

According to the face-recognition lookalike generator, I look most in the world like Henry James.

Henry James, therefore, is not crap. I'd do him.

I used to think that he was a brilliant writer that I simply didn't appreciate. Thing is, just about everybody I know feels the same way.

He's probably brilliant, but he still bores the shit out of me. Thus, I'm giving him a crap.

WF 5, because I like some of the film adaptations.

James was an absolutely tremendous intellect, a mind as powerful as Jane Austen's at her best. He's always searching, prying and taking apart his characters' motives. Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady is so loveable and charismatic. I love all of his later novels, though some of the earlier ones (particularly the loathsome Bostonians) are uninteresting Balzac-like attempts to build zany plots.

If you miss out on Proust or James because of the length of their sentences, you're really doing youself a disservice.

Upon my first year of attendance at the esteemed (by some, but not by me) University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where i had begin persuing a degree in Music performance (which i would later drop in favor of a math major, which also fell along the wayside as i continued on with my general studies and eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in radio-tv-film with minors in music and philosophy), i was enrolled in the "honors" program for entering students who had achieved outstanding grade point averages in high school (mine being a 3.85), and upon enrolling in an honors composition class being taught by the venerable ska aficionado Dr. Paul Klemp, we were assigned the exhausting reading exercise that was the Henry James tome The Turn of the Screw, the sentence structures and lengths of which caused no end of frustration, exasperation, and hair-pulling amongst the dozen or so members of my class and me.

CRAP