People are always mentioning books that have affected them, which is good. But sometimes I can’t help feeling a bit monstrous in my attitudes. I tend to be very cold when I don’t like something, and often a bit…insensitive. (You experience that many book/movie deaths, sooner or later, they’re going to all feel like red shirt deaths, you know?)
Someone on these boards in a rape thread mentioned Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky (about how she was raped in college) and they said something like, It’ll make you cry and scream in rage. I had read that book, and I think what happened to Alice Sebold was awful but I came away really hating her as a person and finding her just so pretentious and unlikeable. I feel weird saying that to people, though, because people are always saying how uplifting and inspiring it is and it’s about rape, so how do you criticize it without looking like you condone sex crimes?
Or YA books about Serious Issues. I liked the books Speak and Wintergirls (the first one was about rape, the second is about self injury and anorexia). But sometimes people will say things about them like, “This book made me cry for days and days,” or “I was alone in the house when I finished it and I just had to hug my dog.” I liked these books, but I got through them pretty easily and felt they were pretty light in terms of readability. I feel like kind of an insensitive cretin, though, for saying that.
I can’t think of any movies that made me feel that way. Well, I thought “Thirteen” was pretty light and very movie of the week on Lifetime, and people seem to think it’s Very Serious. Oh, and the Oscar winning Crash, though there seem to be people who agree that it’s not as great as people think it is.
Over the past 30 years or so, I have tried numerous times to like “Dr. Who,” and have failed miserably every time.
I have countless friends who love the Doctor, the kind of friends who usually share my sensibilities. So, I probably OUGHT to love “Dr Who.”
Alas, I’ve hated every incarnation of the show, and every actor who’s played the role- even guys like Tom Baker, whom I usually love.
I’m prepared to believe this is a failing on my part. But I’m not prepared to give the Doctor any more chances. He’s had quite enough opportunities to grow on me.
Not only did I hate Alice Sebold’s Lucky, and find it pretentious and irritating, I hated The Lovely Bones. I didn’t find it moving or uplifting or anything like that. It was just annoying. And bad. So it’s a bit awkward when people I know discuss how much they enjoyed it and I need to find something else to do in a hurry.
I’m glad it isn’t just me! SO many reviews talk about how wonderful it was, and how awful it made them feel for Alice Sebold. A little part of me felt guilty that most of the emotions I got from it were how much she irritated me. I didn’t even like the Lovely Bones. I do remember my mom saying she felt a bit bad about disliking Alice as a person, but she liked The Lovely Bones.
A lot of educated people (it seems) raves about Theodore Sturgeon, about how he is one of the All Time Greats of science fiction. So, a number of years ago, a sci-fi book club I was in decided to do his More Than Human.
Which I hated. Thought it was extremely bad science, poor social commentary, and a complete waste of my time and money.
Told the group this as well. IIRC, one of the things I noted for the group was that the book had such horrible science (even for the time) that it wasn’t really even science fiction, and therefore shouldn’t have been suggested. And I don’t mean bad science in the way of “we know better now” bad science, I mean bad science in the manner of “anybody educated merely by watching The 700 Club should realize that mutations don’t work this way” bad.
Unfortunately, there was a guy who came to the group who truly loved the thing. He was quite upset that I didn’t like the book and we got into a rather vigorous… discussion… about the merits (or lack of) the novel. He was so mad that he left in the middle of the discussion and never returned… and apparently, he was a regular.
Which I felt bad about.
(I tried reading it again a few years later, to see what, if anything, I missed. Not much.)
It’s Beloved for me. It seems to be almost a requirement that American women must love this book. I really disliked it and I’m quite frankly surprised I managed to force myself to read the whole thing. I could not like the characters and that makes it very hard to dig up feeling for the story line.
I have no guilt whatsoever for not liking Madam Bovary.
A friend of mine could not stop raving about Confederacy of Dunces. She loved it. Thought it was hilarious. She just knew I would love it, too. She knew it! So she loaned it to me.
I could never make it past the first chapter or so. The affected dialect, the unlikable characters… just, egggh. I felt bad about not ever finishing it, but it was just completely, 100% unappealing to me.
I love John Coltrane, and I have a decent musical background (theory and performance), so while I believe I do intellectually “get” A Love Supreme, it does absolutely nothing for me at all personally.
I thought The Lovely Bones started off pretty strong but toward the middle became boring, and then ended stupidly. I feel particularly bad about saying this because the book was a gift from a friend who’d remembered I’d said I was interested in reading it.
I guess I’d better spoiler my specific complaints about the ending of the book. [spoiler]Okay, so late in the book the police realize that Susie’s killer, Harvey, is a serial killer responsible for the rape and murder of many different women. Susie’s father has also been convinced that Harvey was the killer for years, and indeed became so obsessed with this idea that it almost ruined his life. No one knows where Harvey went when he left town, but the police would be happy for any leads.
Years after the crime, Harvey returns to the town where he murdered Susie. His presence sends Susie’s former classmate Ruth into some kind of psychic shock, and Susie takes over her body. Susie had been watching from heaven, so she knows her killer had just passed by. So what does she do with her brief time back on earth? Does she take two minutes to call the police and inform them that Harvey had returned to the area? No. Instead she uses Ruth’s body to have sex with Ray, the guy Susie had liked while she was alive.
I have no idea why Sebold thought any of this was a good idea, unless she was just really hot over the notion of ghost sex. Ironically for a book written by a rape survivor and from the perspective of a rape non-survivor, there’s no indication in the text that anyone felt Ruth should have been the one who got to decide what sexual acts were performed using her body.
Harvey is never brought to justice. An icicle falls on him and kills him. Very convenient. It’s suggested that Susie manged to make this happen from the astral plane, but that doesn’t seem especially satisfying as revenge and it also eliminates any chance of Susie’s family, Ruth and Ray, the detective, or the families and friends of any of the other victims getting the closure that would come from Harvey’s arrest and conviction.[/spoiler]
I wish I could see in City of God what the hell ever it is other people see in it that puts it so high on IMDb’s top 250 list (currently #17). I found it to be abominable.
Lamia, I know a lot of people have commented on that aspect of the Lovely Bones. And I agree.
KneadToKnow, I thought the same thing. It was kind of meh. It felt like it’s been done a thousand times already, wasn’t that original, wasn’t that well made. The whole thing seemed to be “Look! There are poor, third world people!” Oh wait, really?! I hadn’t noticed.
I love Robbie Coltrane, and I love British drama and comedy series, and I love an unlovable lead character (like House or Monk). So a friend loaned me Cracker, a reportedly brilliant series about a rather despicable but brilliant detective who solves murders which puzzle the police.
I didn’t like it one bit. It was gloomy and slow and rather depressing. It was set in a dark cheerless locale in northern England and it had me wanting to slit my wrists after an episode. I was expecting a bit more Robbie Coltrane-esque humor, but there was next to none.
So I had to return it to my friend and report that it wasn’t my cup of tea. I think she was shocked that I couldn’t like it.
Those of you of a certain age will understand what I mean when I mention Go Ask Alice. It was supposed to be so profound and moving, but about halfway through it I started thinking it was just dumb. I actually wondered if I just wasn’t getting it. It still seems to be the kind of story high school girls make up, and I’m not convinced it isn’t.
Other than that, Catcher in the Rye. One of the few books I didn’t finish. Maybe I should, but I just couldn’t stomach that boy through another page. Did I miss something more interesting or meaningful in the last couple of chapters? Because otherwise I still think of him as a spoiled whiner. Makes me feel a bit like a Philistine occasionally.
I don’t think it was supposed to be profound or moving so much as, “Don’t TOUCH drugs! Don’t even THINK about touching drugs. They will FUCK you up if you so much as go to a party where they are!”
Books or movies you feel bad about not having liked/gotten
This topic was puzzling at first because why should I feel bad about not liking something? I might be disappointed that a book wasn’t better or that people can’t see how shallow or obvious a movie was.
But this:
I feel kind of bad about not liking the “The Dark is Rising” series of juvenile fantasy books. I didn’t read them until I was an adult looking for good books for my daughter. By that time I was not their target audience.
When someone in Cafe Society gives them an enthusiastic recommendation (which happens frequently) I can’t help questioning their taste a little, even though I know it’s completely unfair. And that makes me feel bad.
A lot of things I liked as a kid and remember fondly would seem pretty stupid if encountered them for the first time today (…ohh, for example Marvel westerns such as the Two Gun Kid.) And the Rising books weren’t stupid, just several notches down from the Hobbit or Roald Dahl fantasies.
I love both A Confederacy of Dunces and Doctor Who but I totally understand that other people wouldn’t like them. If you don’t grow up with Doctor Who, it will probably lack that magical feeling so it won’t appeal to adults. And Ignatius O’Reilly has to be one of the most polarising characters in fiction. I would not recommend that book to other people unless I really knew their tastes well.
For me, it was Amelie. It just seemed treacly and forced. But it was so nice and cute and positive I felt bad for hating it with a passion. It seemed like everyone else loved it, so I just shut my mouth to avoid sounding grumpy and cynical. Until I read the opinion of other who felt the same (and expressed ideas I could not) and realised I was not alone, and not just being mean.
Maybe the opposite, I don’t know … but a few years ago, I loved the novel Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. I thought this was the greatest book, just well written and compelling. At a meeting of my book club, people were talking about recent good reads, and I was pretty enthusiastic about how great this was.
Then one woman in the group got very huffy and pointed out that it was about child abuse. She seemed profoundly offended that I was using positive words, like “great” and “fantastic” about a book about child abuse. She stressed, A LOT, that the book was “heartbreaking” and “sorrowful.” It was one of those things where I tried to explain that I thought it was, you know, great in the sense that the author succeeded in creating memorable characters, all that jazz. And I do confess that the more this woman insisted on her point of view, the slightly more intense I got.
TO THIS DAY, I strongly suspect this woman thinks I myself am a child abuser because I was so thrilled to read a book about child abuse.
Maybe this is more of the thing where I feel bad that she didn’t get it! But really, branded a child abuser in my own book club? That’s harsh.
That is harsh. I’ve never been confused about that, though–I’ve heard people describe stuff like Capturing the Friedmans as great/well-made but I never think, “Wow, they must LOVE child abuse.” Sometimes, though, I do get the feeling that people play up the, “This was SO hard to read, SO heart breaking” description so it doesn’t sound like, “Wow, I LOVE reading about rape.”
Weirdly enough, I think I fall into the latter camp. I do enjoy reading about rape and sexual abuse–not because I’m some perv but because it genuinely interests me from a sociological point of view. I’m not sure why.
The flip side is when you read a book about rape or child abuse or whatever and it’s bad–because crap authors use those things as a way to make their book seem Serious and Deep and Worthy Of Oprah’s Book Club and whatnot–and you speak up about it, people look at you like you’re a freak show who doesn’t care about The Children. Like–okay, the book A Child Called It was out-and-out crap, but among a certain segment of people, if you voice that opinion, people WILL look at you like you’re the worst person since Hitler.
Actually, you kind of read my mind. I was going to add that, conversely, I don’t think something’s great just because it has an Important Subject. A Child Called It, for example, I think of as crap because it’s like child abuse porn. A laundry list of a shitty life. Like if this guy hadn’t been abused, he’d have no story to tell.