Tuesday Top-Ten

I'm jumping on the book-blogger bandwagon and adding my two cents to the Weekly Top Ten List run by The Broke and the Bookish. This Week's Episode...Top Ten Most Dislikeable Characters

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In no particular order...

1. Little Father Time from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Normally I'm all for brooding, precocious children- they usually have the darndest things to say, but LFT manages to be creepy without being interesting. He's an uncomfortably bland presence for 99% his time in the book and a flat out bizarre and morbid force for the final 1%. Not a FAN!

2. Jane Porter from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes. This book is full of monkeys (and their less adorable but more complex cousins the Apes) and therefor I am contractually obligated to love it. And I do, really! Tarzan himself is a wonderful character, as are Le Rou and (I hate to admit it..) Clayton, Lord Greystoke. And Jane does improve throughout the course of the Tarzan series so I can't hate her as a fully developed literary character... but in the first book of the series she is a spoiled, snobby, damsel in distress who totally does not deserve either of her hunky suitors.

3. Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. I'm an academic. I'm a huge nerd who spends ages in musty libraries reading up on world mythologies and comparative studies. I probably hate Casaubon because he makes people like me look like insecure, pedantic, stuffy, out of touch, Ivory Tower snobs. Which.. okay... sometimes we are. But I don't like to see it!

4. Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's Emma. I actually think she's a great, well-developed, (relatively) complex character with some fun psychological knots worked in... but she's just so dratted ANNOYING.

5. Achilles in Homer's The Iliad. I feel bad about this one. But why is it that nothing is evvvvver his fault? Pretty sure a whole lot of bloodshed (Hector!!!) could have been avoided if pretty-boy had just gotten over himself a couple hundred pages earlier.

6. Ashley from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Whine whine whine, fuss fuss fuss, make up your mind and stick with it!

7. Susan Barton from J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Loved the book, enjoyed reading the character, but she's not likeable in the sense that I'd enjoy sitting down and taking tea with her. She's manipulative, invasive and incredibly self-centered. If we met in a dark alley in London... we'd have words.

8. Amy March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Little brat single-handedly tore apart my favorite literary relationship of all time, 'nuff said. Jo and Laurie 4ever!

9.Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Pretty sure she's what's rotten in the state of Denmark

10. Shiva of the Knees from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. This is a love-to-hate situation not a this-is-terribly-written!!! situation. I adore this book- I read it at least once a year. Shiva is an evil little snot (ha! Sinai reference!) every single time.