Oh, and for my own entry, I had to read Beloved and The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrisson in high school and didn’t like them. I felt that she aimed more for making everything as perverse and sensationalist as possible than making a good story.
Again, dunno if he was a best seller, but the J.R.R. Martin series is terrible too.
I liked Moby Dick and Catcher too, and didn’t like Confederacy either–but I know someone who’s read it at least eight times and carries it along whenever he travels. Can’t fathom why.
I just don’t get the huge screaming fangirl/boy crowd for Toni Morrison. I mean, I love Sula and Song of Solomon, but the rest of her work is just…meh. Still, the only book of hers I couldn’t finish was Tar Baby. I didn’t even get through the first two chapters. Utter drek.
I’ll see your Toni Morrison and raise you an Amy Tan.
I pulled the plug at about page 450 when I realized that i couldn’t care less whether they actually found Dracula. The constant switching back and forth between time periods also gave me headaches.
Yes! Summary of Amy Tan’s books in five words: “My husband, he bad man.”
I’m going for the Gold Standard of suck and saying that, yes, Hamlet sucked. Greatest play ever written my fat ass. Not even Shakespear’s best play (Lear was so much better). Had to read it in high school and again in college and it just is not good.
Haven’t read the Vidals noted here but I can’t believe any of it could be as bad as Williwaw, Kalki or The City and The Pillar. Ugh. Stick with tranny movie freaks, Gore.
People don’t read Dickens because they don’t like George Eliot?
(Yeah, I wanted to stuff little Eppie down a well, too.)
How about The Scarlet Letter?
The gripping tale of three generations of Chinese women bickering in the kitchen: the movie of The Joy Luck Division is even worse, especially when you have to watch it in Japan where the bickering isn’t even subtitled in English. It says much for Missus Case’s charms that we stayed together even after she dragged me along to this.
Now that creates an interesting mental image.
Thanks for the warning; haven’t seen the movie. I sort of (really, I’m not that picky when it comes to fiction, and the selection around here is limited) liked Club, so I decided to read The Kitchen God’s Wife. Ugh. It was the exact same story, except only one family, stretched out over a whole novel, with an even more abusive husband. Very bad man.
Oh, the pain… it’s worse for me because I read the book based on the recommendation of my grandson, who thinks it’s the greatest book EVAR! He usually has better taste than this, but I suspect it’s the literary equivalent of sour gummy candy–the appeal doesn’t translate outside of childhood. Now he wants me to read the sequel and I’m running out of ways to tell him tactfully that it’s all been done to death before without crushing his spirit…
Holden Caulfield = Whiny Bitch, check!
I spit on the person who handed me “The Old Man and the Sea” as my first exposure to Hemingway–if I weren’t so bloodyminded stubborn it might have been my last attempt, which would have been a mistake.
All the Anne Rice books written after she made enough money to convince her publisher that her deathless eggplant hued prose needs no editing WHATSOEVER. I keep picking up the newest books, hoping for the best, only to fire them across the room after ten pages screaming incoherent imprecations for the way the bitch suckered me again into carrying one of her overweight tomes home from the library. Then I sulk off to read “Belinda” instead, because even though it sucks it’s a kind of sucking I don’t mind so much. 
Neal Stephenson, everything BUT “Snow Crash.” Huge books of likewise huge suckitude, initial promise never fulfilled, dammit!
Thomas Covenant series, whose episode of Punk’d was THAT?
Sure wish David Eddings would stop writing that same endless book cycle with the same characters over and over…
There’s always more, but I have too much blood in my caffeine system right now. 
True. I hated Cryptomonicon.
I liked the first three OK.
Well, at least they were worth reading, although I got tired of the whole *Unbeliever *nonsense, but the rest sucked.
Agreed.
Oh yeah, I think Anne Rice sucks too.
I didn’t hate Eragon as much as other here did. I can’t say it was great, but I’ll read the sequel.
Read Regina’s Song then after you finish weeping in misery over the poorly written incompetent book you’ll see why all he can do is write the same crappy cycle over and over.
On second thought don’t read it just take my word for it. It’s the only book I’ve ever thrown in the trash.
Has anyone mentioned Stranger in a Strange Land yet? Because that book was the suck.
Originally Posted by Scumpup:
How could I have forgotten about Dean Koontz? (And how can I do it again?)
I read some of his early stuff. Two things made me stop:
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In the novel Phantoms we’re told (by a doctor lady) that a human brain weighs six pounds. (Amazingly, this made it all the way to the silver screen; apparently neither Koontz, his editor, his publisher, the writer of the screen adaptation, the director, nor anybody on set at the time, knew how much a human brain weighs.) Also, just terrible writing; ridiculous dialogue, clumsy exposition, eyerolling cliches.
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In another novel, there’s some dialogue in which a mob boss, known to be responsible for all sorts of evil stuff, becomes mawkish talking about his little dogs. Okay, obvious irony. Then Koontz explains to the reader that the situation is ironic. That’s when I stopped reading and started a new, Koontz-free life.
(I think this was on “Family Guy”: we see a van run over a man on a country road. “Oh my God, we ran over Stephen King!” “That’s not Stephen King – that’s Dean Koontz!” And the van backs up and runs over him again.)
Seeing this thread come back to the top of the pile again caused me to re-read. Previously I itched to moan about the bad press for Elliot (Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss). But the thread’s not for their defence, so I bite my metaphorical lip: to each their own, however twisted.
But I do have to ask how Silas Marner gets to be so well read in the USA. Is there a standard list of books common to the whole of the USA? It seems to be a (fine but) minor and slim book to choose if Elliot is on the list. What happened to Middlemarch? Or … ?
The only reason I didn’t bring it up was because I’ve bashed it so many times before.
It was required reading in one of my English classes in high school. We were forced to read it. At gunpoint. If my English teacher hadn’t had that AK47 aimed at me the whole time, I would NEVER have read it!