Solzhenitzyn(sp)-One day in the life of ivan denisovich
after that: anything by robert heinlein, hawthorne, bradbury
can’t stand the 20’s authors. hemingway, faulkner, but i like fitzgerald.
i loved frankenstein! (blush)
liked great gatsby
silas marner…this was a classic for x-hundred years? i think i’ll write one.
Actually, that ain’t the whole joke. This is from memory so the phrasing will likely be off-
Clown1-Who makes, yadda, yadda
#2-A gallowsmaker, yadda, yadda
#1-Nay! Say it not so! Express not such admiration for the gallows lest ye become a tenant. And would you say that the gallows is indeed stronger than a church, the Lord's very house on earth? Sacrilege!
#2-Alright, who then makes the strongest houses?
#1-A gravemaker! For the houses he makes last til Doomsday!
While not a kneeslapper, I do find this worthy of a chuckle.
I haven’t read it, but I listened to it on tape during a long road trip with my brother. It was narrated by David Carradine, which may have been a big part of the problem. The novel may have been shocking and controversial when it was published, but the author’s antics are very tame by today’s standards.
One line in the book actually forced us to pull off the road (ha!) until we could stop laughing. The characters were down and out, hanging out around some jumpin’ jazz bar, and the author pines, “How we wished that we were Negroes, happy and carefree.” *
The times they were a changin’.
*probably not an exact quote
Another vote for
Sir Walter Scott
Salman Rushdie
Herman Melville
Plato’s Republic
How about Norman Mailer? I liked The Executioner’s Song, but The Naked and the Dead is fuggin overrated (except for one great part where a lowly desk-bound officer coordinates an unexpectedly successful attack)
Much of Mailer’s work, like Ancient Evenings, is execrable.
And of course, never was so large a reputation earned on so little as the despicable Susan Sontag.
Shakespeare surprisingly. I understand its value but I cannot fucking read it. I read everything and anything else. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Bocaccio, Dante, Milton.
Shakespeare. Joyce. Fitzgerald.
I like Pynchon, Steinbeck.
Anything written before 1920? WTF?
Anything worth reading was written before 1920.
I was about to start a thread like this, but decided I should do a search first. Looks like it was a good idea. 
I hate, despise, loathe, detest and abhor the Diary of Anne Frank. I don’t care what her circumstances were, it’s still the standard drivel of a teenage girl. :shudder:
I’m also not too fond of Henry James, Lord of the Flies, or Heart of Darkness.
I don’t give a damn…about GWTW!!
I’m glad to hear all the hate for On the Road. When I tried to read it, I was 17, and really into the whole concept. Seemed like the perfect book for me at the time. I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to page through that boring monstrosity. What people get out of it, I don’t understand.
Otherwise, most of the other books mentioned here, I quite like. No love for Lord of The Flies, Heart of Darkness, or Jane Austen? What a tough crowd. (OK, Austen is easy to hate, but she is an entertaining and ascerbic writer if you approach her with the right point of view.)
I fail to see why John Steinbeck is seen as such a great author. I was forced to read “The Red Pony” in 6th grade. To this day, I have no idea what the point of that book was, other than that the boy exhibited several signs of being a serial killer in the making.
One thing I notice is how many of the books mentioned in this thread revolve around spoiled brats. Odd.
Please explain why you hate Ivan Denisovich. I gotta hear this. Was it possibly because it depressed you too much?
Is that all you have read by John Steinbeck? Grapes of Wrath and Travels with Charley are two of my favorite books.
I can’t stand Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. I try to read them. I do, I honestly do. But they end flying across the room. I don’t know why.
Oh yeah. One more thing. Harold “I suck the pleasure from reading” Bloom has a stick up his ass.
So what do we have so far?
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Catcher in the Rye
Catch 22
Huck Finn
The Sound and the Fury
The Stranger
Asimov (Foundation series, Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun)
Notes From Underground (and Dostoyevsky in general)
We seem to be coming up with a good list of excellent and enjoyable books. I loved all these (although Salinger and Dostoyevsky have written better).
I guess the only books that might fit this category for me are On the Road and Remembrance of Things Past. But I don’t think I really ever gave either much of a chance.
I was mostly reading them because I’d heard they were good, not because I had any interest in them on my own at the time.
Must have accidentally deleted a couple lines of my post. I read Grapes of Wrath, but it just didn’t stick with me. I know I’ve read another of his books, but the title is escaping me. “The Red Pony” was just held up by my teachers as one of his greatest works (while I found “The Grapes of Wrath” boring, it certainly was better than “The Red Pony”). I just can’t see what all the fuss was about.
To each their own, though. I love the works of Edgar Allen Poe, so I know what it is like to see others complain about your favorites works.
The Scarlett Letter is one of two books that got tossed across the room. It was never finished, caused me to hate my American Lit teacher, and somehow i got an A on the test. (which made up for the F i got on the Huck Finn test, despite loving the book, just because i didn’t see some allegory crap that didn’t exist in the book that she wanted to me explain.)
The Pearl can eat it.
(the other book i tossed was Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, the story of Heinlein as a guy who lives forever and goes back in time and does what made me throw the book across the room because i saw it coming the moment he considered going back in time. I did finish that one since i like Heinlein, except his later stuff)
Humor response: The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, he’s not even real!!! (joke!)
"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. " -Mark Twain,
“The Disappearance of Literature,” [speech] November 20, 1900
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Just could not stomach the torture.
Of Human Bondage
Dickens’ Bleak House that weighs in at 1088 pages. Its point that the legal system & related costs often bleed people dry could have been made in 1/4 the pages.
Dickens must have been paid by the word.
But really, there are so many classics I didn’t enjoy reading that I’d like to hear about some classics people enjoyed.
Classics I did enjoy reading were Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre, Things Fall Apart, & The Good Earth. Hersey’s Hiroshima was interesting.
One author towers above all others when it comes to my Most Hated List. William Faulkner.
No, Mr. Faulkner, I don’t find the south, race, incest, death, and flies to be fascinating. I keep trying to give away my copy of Absalom, Abasalom, but no one will take it.
I’ve read the first sentence of said book out loud to people who doubt that Faulkner could be all that bad. They doubt no longer.
Julie
I keep a copy of Dr. Zhivago around. Why? When I pick it up, I know I really, really need to go to the library.
Jane Austin is redeemed by the following exchange from Pride and Prejudice: