[crclist]

I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces, and my feeling was "Yuck. These people were all awful." I looked at reviews, and some people thought the same thing, and the others were like "Ha ha ha. These people are all awful. Isn’t this fun?"

And I was left wondering whether the two groups of people have had different life experiences. Some have had bitter experience of awful people and it'll never be something to enjoy.

[jfengel]

That one was ruined for me in college, assigned in freshman English. I hated it so, so much. And literature in general, if that was the literature they felt was so important as to assign it.

I mentioned a love for Shakespeare in a footnote, something I developed long after high school, despite-not-because-of my high school education. I found my way into it via movies. The same happened with Jane Austen, whom I hated as dumb-people-doing-dumb-things until the right film showed me how it actually was supposed to work.

Conceivably such a thing could exist for Confederacy of Dunces, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.

[ghaff]

I lived in New Orleans for a time and read Confederacy of Dunces. Saw it much later as a play. Think it's fantastic.

But to your basic point. I was having a conversation with a college friend about series including Orange is the New Black and others that I don't remember--possibly Breaking Bad. And they just couldn't get into a series where you were supposed to sympathize with people who were basically, well, bad to various degrees. Probably (for whatever reason) some people just don't like anti-heroes in literature or video.

[jfengel]

There's an interesting comparison to be made between Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad very much wanted you to like its anti-hero even while being an objectively terrible person. Better Call Saul is much less about thrilling to the horrors, but instead hoping that a deeply flawed human being can get better. And he's surrounded by other people who are also good, trying to make him better, and failing.

I don't mean to oversimplify; both are complex shows with extraordinary feats of writing and acting. But I felt Better Call Saul was a more interesting take on the anti-hero because it wasn't just horrible people being mean to each other. If nothing else, comparing and contrasting the differences is a good exercise.

[JackFr]

I realize that there is no accounting for taste, but my goodness, A Confederacy of Dunces is laugh-out-loud funny.