You’re hardly alone. In another thread, Holden Caulfield was one of the most-hated fictional characters.
I read it when I was a moody loner teenager because I heard it was popular with moody loner teenagers. I came away with the following conclusions: Holden was a total asshole, anyone who identifies with Holden is probably a total asshole, and I hope J.D. Salinger never comes back.
And Silas Marner sucked, too. Maybe if people didn’t have to read so much Charles Dickens in high school, more of them would read recreationally.
I think I’ll attack some classics. My judgements on these books will be considered idiotic by those who actually got something out of these books. More power to you: they must be classics for a reaon, but I don’t get it.
I really hated Madame Bovary. All that “he did this” and “she thought that,” with almost no dialog.
Martin Chuzzlewit is godawful. One can only take so much snarkiness. Hard to believe it’s by the same guy who wrote David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
Heart of Darkness is miserably opaque. Shove it up your whited sepulchre, Joe.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is neither insightful nor interesting, in spite of what my father thought. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a very similar book (oh those naughty Victorians), but even worse.
Silas Marner blows, as posted earlier.
I’ve read Huckleberry Finn three times, trying to see what lit professors see in it. I don’t get it.
And finally, in the world of poetry, Wallace Stevens is a total craphead.
I’ve never forgotten Koontz describing an overly-attentive husband (in From the Corner of his Eye), hovering over his pregnant wife while she was baking in the kitchen. Koontz writes that he “loitered in her vicinity.” :rolleyes:
I think he’s a decent writer who’s fallen into a formula trap to give his fans what they expect. A friend insists that Phantoms and Watchers are excellent, but to stop with those two.
(Note: I totally love Tolkien and LOTR) Whenever I reread LOTR, I skip the Bombadil sections. It reads much better that way. It’s been said that LOTR is a wonderful story horribly told. Of course that’s not really true, but if you do compare the plot of the story with its style, the former totally outclasses the latter.
Now, The Silmarillion… it’s a terrible pity he never finished it the way he wanted to. That is a true work of art.
I guess I’m in the minority here, but I rather liked Catcher in the Rye. Caulfield was a prick, but he was a prick with whom I could relate. He hated EVERYthing, as did I. But I think it’s one of those books where if you’re unaware of the context, it completely goes by you. When read in tandem with All Quiet on the Western Front, I think it makes more sense. Lost Generation, and whatnot.
I would submit for terrible bestseller: House of Sand and Fog. I got about 80 pages into it (or however long it takes for the policeman and homeless woman to start porking) and couldn’t stand it any more. Awful, and I hated the characters.
Eragon, by Christopher Paolini. Look, I’m not denying that simply finishing that big boy was a tremendous accomplishment for a teenager… but ye gods, what a steaming pile that book was. You could practically touch his influences: plot is from Star Wars, telepathic dragons are from the Pern series, etc.
I was even irritated when Dennis Miller (remember him? Used to be funny, then he wasn’t, and he blamed it on 9-11, but really it happened before?) named his son Holden. You named your kid after a whiny little hypocritical byotch in a psych ward… hmm. (His other son’s name is Marlon.)
I’m embarassed to say I’ve never read a Faulkner novel, only short stories. It’s strange seeing them available at SAM’S CLUB/COSTCO due to Oprah’s Book Club. I might try them.
Totally agree with Jean Auel. I thought Clan of the Cave Bear was an imaginative, well conceived and well researched book that kept my interest, but each sequel gets progressively weaker until basicall it’s Alley Oop softcore porn.
I just picked up Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age at a used book sale for $.50. Overpriced. I love Auntie Gore’s venomous essays, but his fiction has always lacked a soul and this one just went to the limit. The final chapter (which I skipped to) has himself as a character ca. 2000 entertaining at his house in Ravella the main character of the book (who was also in some of his other books) and, in what’s supposed to be casual dialogue, he works in a treatise on the datura tree, the Shah Jodphur, more than you ever wanted to know about the lesbian affairs of Paul Bowles’s wife Jane, a bitchy aside about his work on BEN HUR, and general namedropping of people who have for the most part been dead 40 years and save for JFK are remembered by lit professors. Just self absorbed doggerel.
I have this habit of walking out of my library’s sale with a bag of 25c paperbacks and I got 2 of these duds. Horrible and Terrible. She talks with her sad dead kid…who gives her advice and eeerie warnings. Sadly, I accidently got an audiobook of Moving Target. Cliches and talking with dead children. Yikes.
I got the whole historical series that began with Burr and continued up through The Golden Age in a sack of used paperbacks. I really wanted to like these books because Gore Vidal is such an entertaining speaker. Alas, my hopes were dashed. Burr was mildly interesting, Lincoln was just barely readable, and the rest were unbearable. The only time his prose came to life at all was to describe the delights of oysters and Virginia ham.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I read it over the summer because I’m taking a course in African lit and a lot of African writers hate that book. I’m with them. 100-odd pages of NOTHING HAPPENING. I had to force myself to stay awake through it.
I agree whole-heartedly about Silas Marner. I had to read it for 10th grade English and loathed every sentence. Redemption through a cute kid has been done to death by TV and Hollywood. I don’t enjoy someone transparently trying to manipulate my emotions. I realize that the book was written long before motion pictures were invented but it’s being first doesn’t redeem it. The prose stumps from sentence to sentence. I’d never been happier finally closing the cover on a book.
Another real stinker was Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. It was one of my mother’s favorite books. It had knights, jousts, swordfights, sympathetic Jewish characters. That meant it had to be a good book right? It was the worst book I’d ever read as a teen. It still rates as one of the worst things I’ve ever read. I never finished it. It was the only book I ever went out and bought the Cliff’s Notes for. Maybe I was too young for it but I’ve never had the heart to give it a second try.
There are lots of books that I mildly disliked for various reasons. Swann’s Way put me to sleep. I never cracked a smile while reading A Confederacy of Dunces. I couldn’t keep the characters straight in 100 Years of Solitude and though I bought The Satanic Verses as a matter of principle, it hit the wall after 45 pages. I am willing to concede that I just didn’t get the those books due to some kind of egregious personal literary failure and when someone tells me how wonderful one of them is, I’ll agree to disagree.
However, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen fills me with righteous pique. What a hugely overrated pile of poo.
That’s exactly how I felt, even though (don’t ask me why) I read every one of them. It’s almost as if he just doesn’t really understand how humans operate.
Vidal’s archenemy, of course, was fellow 40s queer wunderkind (actually Vidal won’t identify himself as gay, he’s just a guy who likes having sex exclusively with men) Capote. In terms of political insight and biting essays, there’s no comparison, Vidal’s the tops, but in terms of literary style and skill and the ability to tell a story that leaves you hanging on every word, Capote was the master and Vidal a little bewigged and embittered Salieri scoffing into his laced sleeve.
Another one I’ll add: I won’t call it bad, just, imo, overrated- Eggars’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I just never greatly came to care about the characters. Even for a memoir it seemed utterly self obsessed and… I don’t know, it’s like he was trying too hard to be witty and likable (even when portraying his unlikable moments). Of course the fact that I’d read a couple of his op-ed pieces that made me say “Get real, boy!” (they weren’t liberal so much as just unrealistically idealistic) may have flavored my opinion.
Sampiro orders chief security eunuch to place koeeoaddi’s name on a ‘future suspected suspects’ list’.-- j.k., if tastes didn’t vary this would be a dull board
[Hijack]I wasn’t aware until recently of the rumors that Confederacy was actually written largely by Walker Percy [similar to the rumors about Capote and Mockingbird). Personally I discount them- nobody has a strong enough ego to not claim a piece that critically and popularly lauded (even more true of Capote and Mockingbird).*
I’m surprised that Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde and Moby Dick made someone’s hate list. No doubt someone will be surprised at my choices:
I’ll agree with Catcher in the Rye Why someone thinks this is the novel for rebellious teen feelings is beyond me.
Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle , and anything else by Henry James
A Death in the Family by James Agee. But i might give it another try. Throwing a high school student into that novel with no inkling of its background strikes me as really bad teaching.
Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I love most of dickens. But not this
A Separate Peace – Had to read it twice, for two different courses. Hated it twice as much.
Pride and Prejudice I could barely finish this.
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. Heck, I really liked the sprawling mess that is War and Peace, but I hated this short story.
Since Catcher in the Rye is already taken, I’ll add *The Old Man and the Sea * to the list. Good god, that was horrible. And the only Hemingway I will ever read.
Vanity Fair. English major and literature geek that I am, I tried 3 or 4 times to wade through that pile of prose, and finally said screw it. Fortunately, it was never required reading for any of my classes.
For more contemporaries, I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (did I get the title right?). It had potential, but never really took me anywhere.