Short stories by Flannery O’Connor. Puke, puke, puke. Especially the one about the family killed by the one guy telegraphed into the story via a radio broadcast, or something. But I did enjoy when the killer killed the godawful self-righteous philosophizing grandmother. I think the title was A Good Man is Hard to Find. Appropriate, really, since there wasn’t a good man to be found in the story.
My middle school read The Giver when I was in 6th Grade. My friends and I agreed that that one sucked on toast.
I found Walt Whitman’s The Learned Astronomer personally offensive.
Walden (or at least the selection I read) was utter tripe.
My experience with Stephen Crane’s story about the guys in a lifeboat gave me an insight into what it would be like to be lost at sea.
In one college course we had to read The Tale of Kieu, which was translated into English apparently as Vietnam’s revenge for the Vietnam War. I simply couldn’t read it, and I vocally admitted it during a discussion. Blech.
Oh, and Sindbad from The Thousand and One Nights was a jerk.
It’s on my list of flicks to see. But on that note, I did enjoy Dracula (the book). Yes, it’s an odd format, but there’s a certain historical charm to it, and some of Stoker’s descriptions are wonderfully colorful. (Conversely, avoid his The Lady of the Shroud. At the risk of spoiling it for everyone, the main plot thread goes “She’s a vampire! She’s a vampire! She’s a vampire! She’s…oh wait, no she isn’t…”.)
I didn’t mind Walden but thought it was too self-indulgent, and I liked The Old Man and the Sea. I did have the same negative reaction to Gravity’s Rainbow as Algernon, however. Bleah.
Notes from the Underground pretty much invented “black humor” and is my favorite of all Dostoyevski’s works. I can’t think of a more profound portrayal of the psychological/philosophical condition of modern man.
Oh good… I am not the only one on the planet that can’t stand the Lord Of The Rings books.
I loved “The Hobbit”. My uncle bought it for me because on the inside cover it stated that J.R.R. name was John Ronald Reuel… and so there was another person in the world with my name (besides Moses’ father-in-law). This was, of course, before the internet.
The Hobbit started me on fantasy fiction. Since then, I have loved the genre. 90% of my book collection is fantasy.
But damn I hate LOTR. I have tried to read it countless times (I have a big all in one book + appenixes). I can never get past the first time they meet the elves in Rivendale…
Thank goodness for the movies… I know they are not true representations of the book, and that vast subplots and stories have been altered… and other subplots have been added… but at least they are entertaining…
whew…
ok… <dons flame retardent suit and helmet> Do your worst…
Following that, I should probably confess that I didn’t like The Hobbit very much. I read it again recently, and wondered why the dwarves were there at all. I mean, it’s a series of events in which the dwarves get into trouble and Bilbo (or occasionally Gandalf) rescues them. And then Thorin gets all huffy at the end. Geez Louise, what an ungrateful jerk.
I always enjoy reading this type of discussion since it often boils down to a matter of taste. Some of the classics that some people have mentioned I love and some of them I hate.
I enjoyed On the Road, Tolstoy and One Hundred Years of Solitude, which may be my favorite book of all time. That being said, I hate a lot of the same books that others here hate.
I despised The Scarlet Letter, How many pages can he go without having any dialogue? For that matter, how many pages can you fill with one sentence?
I disliked Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, that was the first book I ever used Cliff’s Notes to get through.
I hated Pride and Prejudice. I found it dull and the characters uninteresting.
The one Garcia Marquez book that I haven’t enjoyed is Autumn of the Patriarch, I’ve tried to read it maybe four times, in both English and Spanish. I can never get past page 90. I like Garcia Marquez but I just can’t seem to get into this book.
I don’t know what “buffaloed” means and I don’t really give a shit but somebody has to step in and defend Joyce, the guy who changed art and literature forever and it may as well be me.
There’s an inordinate amount of Joyce-bashing on these boards, mostly by people who haven’t made the attempt to understand ULYSSES or have tried to read it cold, i.e. just picking it up off the shelf and reading it rather than reading it with a book like ULYSSES ANNOTATED or Homer’s ODYSSEY at hand, both of which are neccesary to understand this book. How many times does it have to be said? ULYSSES is an update of Homer’s ODYSSEY. Each chapter is a metaphoric retelling of the characters and events in the ODYSSEY with, for example, Bloom as Ulysses, Molly as Penelope, the Dublin prostitutes as the sirens, and on and on. But that only scratches the surface of this utterly amazing book that effectively turned the last 2,000 years of literature on its head. The puns are MEANT to be dumb–it’s a comic novel that attempts to reproduce the degraded language of everyday life in all its silliness and dumbness. Long live Joyce and
his “cute”, “silly” puns.
I seem to recall saying in my original post that that was exactly what annoyed me most about Ulysses. I can enjoy, say, Huckleberry Finn as a good yarn without needing to understand all the various things of which the river and the journey are symbolic. Ulysses as a stand-alone story is stilted and awkward in places. If you have to spend more time reading the footnotes than the text itself (and in the annotated version I read, the footnotes came every two or three lines), it’s not worth the effort. You’re welcome to it.
FWIW, I enjoyed Dubliners. Not hugely, but I read it without the same general annoyance I got from Ulysses.
Wow, 70 responses, and no mention of the atrocity that is shudderJulius Caesar by Shakespeare? Next time I see that awful waste of paper, it will find itself meeting the same fate as Steve Buscemi’s foot in Fargo.
I kind of liked The Catcher in the Rye. (I mean he kills me, he really does.) One thing that disappointed me, (and is probably the reason that a lot of people didn’t like it,) is because I kept expecting something big to happen. I read it because I heard that several assassins (or serial killers?) had been found with it; so I wanted to see if there was something in there that had caused them to do the things that they had done (OK, my knowledge on this is pretty vauge). I kept expecting Holden to flip out and kill people, but he never did. Other than that I liked it OK. Just my $.02.
OK, I can see all y’all hating on some of m,y boy Willie’s plays, like A Winter’s Tale or Timon of Athens, but Hamlet? Julius Caesar**?
Ditto with James Joyce. Ulysses wasn’t meant to bve a beach read; Joyce wove a multilayered tale that recapitulates Homer’s Odyssey in 1904 Dublin and along the way expands the boundaries of English literature.
But I gotta go along with the Hawthorne bashers. The Scarlet Letter is just a painfully obvious novel where the characters are just playing out a preordained pageant of guilt and retribution. It is a genuinely dull book.
I for one could not agree more: I absolutely love Moby Dick. It is a story about obsession, written obsessively. Theology, symbolism, whaling info … it has it all.
Yeah i started reading Remembrance of Things Past and it was a crock of sh*t but the next day i read a review of
In search of Lost Time the newer apparently more faithful translation.
All these suggestions are well and good, but they don’t really alter the fact that Wuthering Heights is The Most Overrated Classic Ever. It is presented in Literature classes as the definitive Gothic romance. This is kind of like saying that sulfuric acid is the definitive mouthwash.
One of the most irritating things about the book after a while is how none of the supporting characters can ever simply leave, but instead must inevitably sicken and die. A supporting character in Wuthering Heights has the lifespan of a mayfly; they come in, fulfill their function, then keel over almost immediately. After a while it’s not even funny.
The days of the Gothic romance novel were numbered when drinking absinthe went out of fashion. Without its influence, the genre simply can’t be read in the proper frame of mind.
