I’d say pretty much everything Crichton wrote was better as a movie in large part because he was writing books rather explicitly intended to be turned into movies.
In addition to being a misogynist he was also hilariously petty. He hated a critic name Michael Crowley so much that in his novel Next he had a character named Mick Crowley, who was a critic, who was a pedophile. Just to be a dick and get back at a critic he hated.
Last of the Mohicans
It was a shitty movie but it was SO MUCH BETTER than the book which was so unspeakably horrible no one should ever have to suffer through it, or really anything by Fenimore Cooper. Dude was one of the most godawful terrible writers ever to disgrace the English language. It’s like the Voogon poetry of mid-19th century action adventure novels.
I have the opposite view, I think Waterson got too full of himself and produced a book that’s just not very good or interesting.
It’s about 100 words long, and in the end it’s just another example of the “watch out, learning too much is bad for you!” genre of anti-intellectual, anti-progress, anti-science stuff.
In his book Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny had Yama say this:
“It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.”
And I vastly prefer that sentiment. Ignorance is not to be cherished or elevated.
I burned $20 on it based on thinking that Waterson might create a cool modern fable for adults. I wish very much I had looked at it in the bookstore first, I could have spent that $20 on something better.
Note that the opening line isn’t exactly casual or jovial. The protagonist’s name is not Ishmael, he’s referencing the Biblical character Ishmael who was the firstborn son of Abraham by his wife’s servant Hagar. Later Abram had a son, Isaac by his wife Sarah and Ishmael and his mother Hagar were cast out to make Isaac the only inheritor of Abraham.
After being cast out and wandering the wilderness waiting to die, God saved Ishmael and his mother and “made him a great nation” with 12 sons from an Egyptian wife.
So by opening with “Call me Ishmael” the narrator is giving us a lot of assumptions about himself, that he’s been cast aside by his family especially and that he hopes to become great and powerful despite that.
As for words you don’t understand, look them up and that’s your first step in learning!
Foundling is simple, it’s just a word meaning an abandoned infant that someone took in and raised.
Whale-road is more interesting. Beowulf uses a lot of what are called kennings, poetic descriptions of things that are almost riddles. The whale-road is the ocean because the whales use the ocean as a road. The sky is sometimes called the shoreless sea. Etc. You can try to puzzle them out, or you can google. It isn’t cheating to do it.
As for books and analysis, it’s a matter of study and thought after studying and learning methods of analyzing a text. There are several formalized ways to look at a text, learning them can help you have a good starting place to go with critical reading.
No one is born knowing all the ins and outs of something as complex as Milton. And some writers loved to pepper their work with either references to historic and contemporary real people, or what amounted to popular memes of their era and like any meme if you don’t know what it’s about it just looks bizarre and confusing.
If you ever read Dante, well, a huge chunk of the Inferno and its sequels is Dante ragging on people he hated, again both historic and real, passages about famous dead people praising him through his self insert character, and allusions to all the social things he liked or hated.
BUT.
Remember also that a lot of what people read into a work through critical analysis might have nothing at all to do with what the writer had in mind, nor is it supposed to. Critical analysis isn’t so much about trying to get inside the writer’s head and figure out what they meant, as it is to use the text as a way of looking at the world and to see what you can pull out of it.
There’s this idea call the death of the author, basically that what the author thinks their work means is no more or less important than what anyone else thinks, because the text stands on its own and we don’t expect the author to retroactively tell us what they think.
An example of this, using pop culture, would be JK Rowling telling us that Dumbledore was gay. She never said that in the books so really her opinion on Dumbledore’s sexuality in the text as written isn’t any more important than yours.
She could, of course, write a sequel or prequel and make Dumbledore gay in that, but in the core 7 HP books he’s not explicitly said to be gay so your interpretation of his character is as valid as hers.
Some people reject the death of the author idea and maintain that what the author meant is what a work ‘really’ means. Nothing in lit crit is set in stone and there are no absolutes. This isn’t a science, there’s not method to test an idea and see if it’s true, all you can do is argue about it. Which is fun as hell!
So yeah, you’re not stupid, you’re just beginning to get into the concept and you picked two absolute monsters to start with. Milton is a mountain of allusion, reference, metaphor, pun, historic commentary, and on and on. Also Milton was a political speechwriter and that adds an extra element to some of what he wrote (Lucifer’s Reign in Hell speech is so well written it’ll have you ready to sign up for his army).
And Beowulf is a translation of an epic poem that was told for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and is filled to the brim with old Norse memes.
Basically you decided you wanted to try out mountain climbing and immediately tried to scale Everest. People have literally built entire academic careers out of each of those texts. So don’t feel bad that you bounced off Everest.
I’d suggest you read a good intro to lit crit, or watch some vids, and then try something a bit easier. The Great Gatsby might be a good first novel to really tear into. There’s a lot there, but it’s an easier text to start with.
Here’s a link to a fairly brief explanation of several of the more common critical models. None are “correct”, they’re all just different ways of looking at a work. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/literary-criticism-101/
I’d love a book with an unwanted pregnancy that ends with an abortion. Just to fuck with all the people who seem to love the unwanted pregnancy to joyous motherhood books.
Inventing books!
One of my favorite of Twain’s rants