I didn’t like * The Shipping News * either. I found it poorly written and thought the lead character was a hopeless doof. I don’t think I got halfway through that book.
Then there was one book–I think by Anne Tyler, but I’ve tried to suppress the memory of both the name and the author–which featured a man breaking his leg after his cat tries to enter the house through the dryer hose while the drier is on. WTF? And that was just the beginning; it got worse. Maybe that one doesn’t count because as far as I know it wasn’t a classic or bestseller (at least I hope not.)
Whitley Streiber’s Communion --the book about the space rapists from Mars–well, where do I begin? I suppose it wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but I’ll include it because it scared the living #@ out of me.
Cold Mountain could cure anyone’s insomnia in a flash.
And the current best seller The Historian is just plain awful. I don’t know how you can make a book about a modern day search for Dracula boring, but the author managed to do so.
I’ve bitched about her before, but historical fiction author Sharon Kay Penman is capable of writing only three characters: rogueish bad boy, noble knight, and spitfire heroine. That’s it. Somehow, she’s managed to write some eight or nine books featuring only these three characters.
I got a good ways into the Scarlet Pimpernel before coming to a horribly ant-Semitic passage about a disgusting Jewish caricature. I flung the book down and was never able to finish reading it. Baroness Orczy can suck it.
I found The God of Small Things just insufferably tedious. Everybody was creaming themselves over Roy’s genious vision and prose, but all I could see was a Rushdie clone (hint: Capitalize Everything, or runyourwordstogethreforemphasis), right down to the soporific drudgery of it all.
Couldn’t finish Confederacy of Dunces and never saw much funny in the part I read. More cringe-inducing than laugh-inducing.
I’m a big Salinger fan, but Catcher in the Rye is my least favorite of his work. It’s a pretty painful read.
However, might I suggest to the folks that knock Holden Caulfield as a whiny and unlikeable character: Yeah, so? Is it the job of a novelist to create characters that you like? Or are they supposed to create fully developed, three-dimensional, real, believable characters. Maybe the reason people have such a visceral reaction to Holden Caulfield (whether positive or negative) is because he strikes a nerve. What if Salinger intends for you to dislike Holden? If he’s successful at that task is the novel really overrated?
Given that, perhaps I should give Confederacy another chance.
Also, you have my pity if you can’t enjoy John LeCarre.
As for an original contribution to the thread, I’ve never understood the appeal of Dave Barry or Carl Hiasson. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Barry column that wasn’t derivative, predictable or grabbed a cheap and easy laugh. And Hiasson may be a great columnist (don’t know, never read his journalism), but his books are formulaic and his characters cardboard.
You have my pity if you can’t enjoy Carl Hiaasen, but I agree that Dave Barry sucks pustular stumps. You’re pretty much on the money about Holden Caulfield, too: I think Salinger’s point was that he was an annoying little twerp and not some existential anti-hero. Which didn’t make him any easier to read about, admittedly, but I can’t remember the book having that much of an impact on me either way.
Does it count if it was a bestseller in 1850? Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Aaargh. And it’s a classic, to boot. Well, everybody knows its name, my guess is few these days have read it, and with good reason.
Also, to join in the pile-on on The daVinci Code, that one, specifically, and all books that rely on the cheesy device wherein people who are presented as superintelligent and extremely well-educated miss really obvious points so the average reader can solve the puzzle first and feel superior, thereby contributing to said average reader’s positive feeling about the book. There’s a lot of this in mysteries; just don’t present the doofuses who can’t solve the puzzle before I do as geniuses, okay?
[Is it just me or does the word “doofuses” look exremely weird?/hijack]
I’m ashamed, but I’m going through some really cheesy audiobooks at bedtime. They’re free-to-me, and they blow insomnia away. Anyway, tonight I started First to Die, by the very same Mr. Patterson that I maligned above. (Sucker for punishment.)
First chapter-- let’s define our protagonist! Oooh, first-person narrative:
Aaaargh, I just can’t do it. I can’t go through with it.
digs around for an old disc of Richard Diamond adventures
David Sedaris. People say he’s great, hysterically funny, insightful, and on and on. I say he’s just annoying, and what I’ve read mostly seems to be based on contempt for those around him.
Erle Stanley Gardner is bad too. Perry Mason on TV, as played by Raymond Burr, was great, but the books struck me, on the few occasions I tried them, as just being badly written - slow, clumsy prose that puts me off before the end of the first page.
As for classics, I’ll have to agree with Heart of Darkness, the Dickens works mentioned above, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Ditto that!!! What a piece of amateurish crap. Poorly plotted, flat characters, totally unbelievable plot contrivances. I made it almost to page 600 and then kicked myself for wasting so much time on it.
I wouldn’t have hated the book quite so much if it hadn’t gotten such good mainstream reviews. WTF! I’ll never trust Newsweek’s reviews again.
Camus’ L’Etranger. I had the misfortune of having to read it twice in high school. Once for English, and then a few years later for French. It did not improve when read untranslated.
I found Catcher in the Rye more enjoyable than most literature I had to read in HS, so it’s not on my hate list. I can see why it’s on others’ though.
I hated Wuthering Heights, and Mme Bovary.
I was a masochist of the first water, however, and enjoyed Moby Dick when I read it in fourth grade. (Of my own free will, too.)
On my own, I tried to read some things listed here.
I tried to read Confederacy of Dunces, and just couldn’t do it.
I even started a Danielle Steelle book, once. I did not, however, manage to finish it. And I regularly read romance novels.
I got pretty much the same thing from The Catcher in the Rye. I didn’t think the point was “look how great this kid is” but “look how messed up he is”, and how he starts to change a little as the story goes on.
I mean, he ends up in a mental institution. That makes it clear to me, unless you think Salinger was trying to pain him as a misunderstood martyr, in which case I wouldn’t like the book either.
