The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is the most boring, whiney, and pretentious thing I’ve ever read. The whole book is basically just Joyce complaining about how when he was an adolescent he was sexually frustrated and sometimes the other boys teased him. But you can just tell from the text that the author expects you to find his dull and unexceptional bitching to be the deepest, most fascinating thing ever.
**Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang ** by Joyce Carol Oates suffers from two major problems. The first is that Oates was a well to do bookish woman in her 50s when she wrote the book, and didn’t seem to do any actual research about youth gangs. As a result, her descriptions of not very uncommon events, like fist fights or smoking marijuana, are laughably inaccurate.
The second is that the book is full of unapologetic misandry. I probably wouldn’t have cared so much except that I was the only guy in a feminist literature class. There’s a difference between highlighting the difficulties of being a female in a patriarchal society, and implying that all men are potential serial killers just waiting to murder women for our own sadistic pleasures. Oates implies the latter in Foxfire. Oh, and when we stab the hookers, we like to mock them by claiming women’s basket ball is boring and that they lack the emotional self control to be the CEO of a major company.
Are we allowed to defend books in this thread by denigrating the people who un-recommend them?
Last of the Mohicans? Overwritten, and written by a guy who didn’t get out in the woods enough, but it rocks so hard! It’s intense - it’s the closest thing the first half of the nineteenth century had to an unapologetic action movie.
It was clearly published because it was so incredibly deeply movingly affectively written, and not because it was written about anything. I got much the same vibe from the Helprin. I’m sure it reduced readers and editors with Lit. backgrounds to tears, but for an awful lot of us, they were tears of boredom.
I read the first six pages of The Da Vinci Code. I concluded that Lester Dent could have accomplished as much in three paragraphs of a Doc Savage novel. I didn’t read any more.
Sinclair Lewis is one of my favorite authors, but *Bethel Merriday *blows chunks.
*California Girl *by T. Jefferson Parker won the 2005 Edgar Award for best novel and its pages should be perforated. The Mystery Writers of America must have been tripping.
I read the entire trilogy, and the best thing about it is that after I was finished I could say I had read it. Something at least happens in the third book - it makes no sense, but it happens.
Bottom of my rereading list.
I recently read We Need to Talk About Kevin. I thought it was well-written and reasonably engaging, but I found the main characters so despicable that I just wanted to slap them all. Irritating as hell.
I have the 1998 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Susanna Clarke has a short story in it. It has all the Regency setting and glacial pace of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at 1/20th the length. It is also hands down the most boring story in the collection, despite what could have been some very good scenes. It reminds me of why I find Jane Austen so deathly dull.
I agree. I got about halfway through before realizing that I hated the son, I hated the mother, I hated the father and there was nobody else of significance in the book, so I stopped reading it.
Adding David Baldacci’s Split Second to the list. If real Secret Service agents were so stupid we would have lost every president of the past 100 years. Mr. Baldacci owes me for the brain cells I wasted.
Re: Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Since it won the 2004 Hugo Award, it’s obvious that more than just Lit majors loved the book. Personally, I think it’s one of the best I’ve read in recent years.
(Googles it) Hmm, no… Not yet! Might be good, might be a slog, but definitely worth looking into, thanks!
(Side note: I find that often I prefer the “found footage”/mysterious books/etc. of various creative works as much as the main work if not moreso, and wish I could get a better look at them than what the creator allows. For example, the grainy “dream” transmissions from the future in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, the video logs in Event Horizon, the Book in Evil Dead (the original), the forbidden quoted books (Necronomicon et al) in the Cthulhu Mythos works, and so on. In this respect, The House of Leaves indulged my affection for this sort of thing and let me read a ton of “the story within the story”.)
Oh, and then there’s The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. It’s engagingly written, but the characters don’t develop and there’s no resolution to the mysteries presented, leading to ultimate irritation.
I’ve never read any of his novels, but I did try to read his tribute to his dog…A Big Little Life. It was actually very sweet in the beginning, but devolved into glurgy mess by the end. This book, along with another Koontz doggie book came to the attention of an organization I’m involved with at roughly the same time. I think I was the only one in the group who wasn’t completely blown away by both books. Also, following the introduction of these books to the group, some people had the tendency to look at sleeping (or otherwise contented-looking dogs) and exclaim “Bliss!” It was a tad creepy when a group of people would start “Bliss!”-ing at the same time.
Ummmm… if you loved *Gormenghast * and *The Last of the Mohicans * and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but want something slower, less literary, and more to the left, then Babbitt by this Nobel-Prize winning author will help fill the lonely hours.
There was an extract from Babbitt in my dad’s college reader. All the other extracts have aged well, but Babbit is well forgotten.
All 3 volumes would make one nice thick paperback with suitable editing
One paragraph.
Hm, where to start.
Anything after the first Clan of the Cave Bear. I simply can’t deal with Ayla invents every tech in the world and missionary style sex.
Anything after The Obsidian Butterfly. Really, I mostly started losing interest after she started being timeshared by the were and the camp. The whole sex based angst is tiresome after a while.
Everything by Hemmingway. Self indulgent wanker with very little originality. I find it baffling that one of the word processing programs for the Amiga would spell check, grammar check and compare somehow to fiction by Hemmingway. sigh
Keeping in mind I have a real liking for SF/Fantasy/Thriller prose of the turn of the last century [I have a thing for Abe Merritt frex] I frequently hesitate to recommend them to modern readers, you almost have to grow up reading them to enjoy the style of writing.
