I agree with Wuthering Heights… I read it in high school, and I thought even then that it was horrible – it seemed like it had been written before anyone had invented color.
I don’t get the connection. All Quiet on the Western Front was written in 1929, and is about WWI. Salinger wasn’t even born until 1919, and Catcher wasn’t published until 1951.
Seems as though a hearty, steaming cup of STFU before writing would have done dear old Mr. Korzeniowski, and his readers, a world of good.
:smack: And don’t go looking for a Hitchcock movie called The Secret Agent. It’s called Sabotage. Not to be confused with Saboteur.
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: Actually, Hitch DID make a movie called Secret Agent. It’s got nothing to do with the book. And it’s actually better than Sabotage, if you ask me.
If you hated the book, you’ll hate the movie even more. I certainly did.
Last of the Mohicans. It’s the one exception to the rule that movies are inferior to the books. When I read this, I honestly thought that English was Cooper’s second language and I was reading a bad translation.
I’m joining the Wuthering Heights crowd. Every single character was an annoying whiny bastard/bitch who deserved what s/he got.
Not sure if either of these authors were ever best sellers but:
Anything by Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan. Hated them.
But of course, as many will probably attest, everyone is different. There were actually plenty in this thread that I enjoy. 
And they all drink Pepsi.
I enjoyed the first Jonathan Kellerman books I read, but I’ve come to realize how utterly crappy and repetive they are. Alex Delaware is called in to assist on a murder, his gay detective friend Milo dresses badly, Alex and his girlfriend make dinner and screw, murder solved.
On the classics front, another vote against Salinger’s Catcher…. Actually, I find it to be a just fine adequate tale, it’s just I can’t get my mind around what in the world makes it a “classic”.
As for regular commercial bestsellers, nonfiction, Who Moved My Cheese is pathetic. “You need to see change as an opportunity.” Great. I ain’t paying you $12 for taking a fortune-cookie aphorism and stretching it through enough pages to square-bind the thing.
The Chicken Soup for the Soul books sucked.
If we’re talking bestsellers, anything Ann Coulter has ever written. It amazes and disturbs me that she has enough of a following in this country to get her books on the bestseller list.
Dune. I read it in college, was very disappointed, then lots of people told me that it was great so I tried again. Stopped halfway through.
I mean it would have made a great 200-250 page novel, it’s those extra 300 pages or so that bore me to tears.
Lord of the Flies
On the Road
There are a few books on here that I was okay with, but nothing I love. I hated all the Dickens I read in high school, but I think it’s possible that that’s just not the time to teach Dickens.
Well, Ben Affleck was the bomb in it. Or not. Given the movie, I can’t imagine the book was any good.
I’ll join the hatefest for Silas Marner. I also had to read The Mill on the Floss. These were books I didn’t so much read as burrow through. You just had to take a machete to the turgid prose and grimly hack your way through to the end. My theory is that English Lit types forced students to read them because, having read them, everything else would seem good.
Which may explain why I enjoyed Heart of Darkness. After you’ve worked your way through Mill on the Floss, Heart of Darkness is a red-hot, thrill-a-minute actioner!!!
Mark Twain would agree with you there. (Well, maybe not about the movie part—but Cooper would have been his “worst” pick.)
Gee, some of the books you folks have been naming have been ones that I thoroughly enjoyed, or at least kinda liked.
By God, you’re right. Well…my face is a bit red. I could’ve absolutely sworn that Catcher was published in the early Thirties. Crap.
I imagine I could still construct a post-war, widespread-numbness-and-nihilism argument that contained fewer holes than a Dunkin’ Donuts, but it wouldn’t be nearly as germane.
Those two books always dovetailed so well in my mind that I made a false connection. Sigh.
Proceed with the Caulfield-bashing.
Anything by John Le Carre, the poor man’s Graham Greene {and that ain’t saying much - Greene was vastly over-rated: lapsed Catholics yomping around exotic locales for three hundred pages in search of The Meaning Of It All} - quit it with the fucking omniscient narrator, already: it takes a character three pages to drive across town because we have to be treated to an interior monologue of everything that flits across his mind plus the plot exposition. And I bet he just made up all the spy stuff.
Same here. I wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t.
I’ve liked both of the film renditions though.
I could not convince my neighbor that this book was not only not a “TRUE STORY” but that it TRUELY SUCKED. I even bought her a copy of the parody “The Ditches of Madison County.” We remain best friends but don’t discuss books anymore. 