I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
How come DH Lawrence? Never read him but I hear people sing his praises occasionally.
Yeah, that’s a general problem with “classics”.
They have been part of the literary sphere for so long that the language and style is hard to see as anything special.
Here’s a vigorous defense in the form of poetry by Tony Hoagland:
LAWRENCE
by Tony Hoagland
On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,
a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life. These individuals, whose relationship to literature is approximately that of a tree shredder
to stands of old-growth forest, these people leaned back in their chairs, bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish, and casually dropped his name
the way pygmies with their little poison spears strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant. “O Elephant,” they say, “you are not so big and brave today!”
It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors with a contempt they haven’t earned, and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people
don’t defend the great dead ones who have opened up the world before them. And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals, this is a fairly minor entry,
I resolve, if the occasion should recur, to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle of maggots condescending to a corpse,” or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life
as to deserve to lift just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples to your arid psychobiographic theory-tainted lips.”
Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut between the spirit and the flesh, and punch someone in the face, because human beings haven’t come that far
in their effort to subdue the body, and we still walk around like zombies in our dying, burning world, able to do little more
than fight, and fuck, and crow, something Lawrence wrote about in such a manner as to make us seem magnificent.
Just seems weird to put Lawrence (revolutionary attitude towards relationships and sex in fiction) in the same category as Dan Brown (carbon copy thrillers which are objectively silly). I’ve never read any of his books but I have read a like some of Lawrence’s nature poetry which is very evocative and in places moving.