My Amazon review: Just a note to echo the other negative reviews found here: If similes like, “I was baffled like a grandchild out visting whose grandparents go on playing cards” are your idea of good “literary” writing than maybe you will pat yourself on the back if you manage to slog through this great clod of rubbish. The rest of us will just lament our squandered time
The Cider House Rules. I read the book when the movie was made because there was a huge uproar over how it advocated abortion. The only thing I remember is one of the characters saying, “Either shit or get off the pot.” I remember wishing Irving had taken his own advice. Terribly slow-moving.
The Feelies by Mick Farran
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
and the only two books I’ve ever actively destroyed:
Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter (dropped down a storm drain)
The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullogh (its fate is described in the last line of my review)
Yeah, Adams is an odd one. Maybe he is what Harper Lee would have been if she hadn’t known when to stop. He had one superb book in him in Watership Down - instant classic. Then there was Plague Dogs which is at least an interesting attempt, kinda, if not my cup of tea. Everything else has been pretty weak sauce.
I Am The Cheese
Screw that book and the English teachers that made us read it!
Different strokes and all that–I devoured the first one and found it pretty action packed. But it’s definitely not the best of the lot, as King was young and had a very affected style in it. For best, we’re talking Drawing or Waste Lands.
Among American classics, I hated Willa Cather, etc. when forced to read them in high school. Recently I bought and read a volume of Dreiser’s trilogy and thought it was horrible. I do recall being very impressed by Frank Norris’ The Octupus when I read it in high school, but don’t like most American novels of that era.
++. Mine was a gift from Mother, but I couldn’t finish it.
Notes from Underground is one of my favorite novellas, but I can barely read Dostoevsky’s longer novels. :dubious: BTW, recently I watched the old black-and-white Peter Lorre movie, Crime & Punishment; is it close to the novel?
Among writers of thriller fiction, there are several I like a lot (including Adam Hall and many old-timers), several I tolerate, and some I strongly dislike. Don’t waste your time with Colin Forbes.
John le Carré – Do read his early books. Do not waste your time on his post-2000 novels.
(While browsing my own Notes about Thriller Writers to recall the name of the detested Colin Forbes, I see that a bought a novel by Stephen Horn several years ago and made a note “Be sure to buy some more” :smack: I’ll tie a string around finger for next book-store trip.)
Well, I haven’t read the novel and I haven’t seen the movie. So they have my lack of direct experience of them in common.
For classic horribly bad works, Silas Marner wins hands down.
I warn you. Do not be led astray by the wonderfulness of Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, even though it’s followed by the pretty good The Fabulous Riverboat. They will lead you down a path, some might say like drifting down a river, to the remainder of the horrendous Riverworld series. And you will end your days frustrated and enraged that so many questions were left unanswered, so many plot lines let adrift, so many conflicts left unresolved.
On the topic of books not to read, let me mention Heart of Darkness. I’m sure there’s something there very meaningful for some people, but I just found it tedious. I did like the ending, sort of – perhaps because it was an ending – and am attaching it as a spoiler for those who don’t want to read the whole novel.
[spoiler]"‘Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on earth–more than his own mother, more than–himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.’
"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. ‘Don’t,’ I said, in a muffled voice.
"‘Forgive me. I–I--have mourned so long in silence–in silence. . . . You were with him–to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .’
"‘To the very end,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very last words. . . .’ I stopped in a fright.
"‘Repeat them,’ she said in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want–I want–something–something–to–to live with.’
"I was on the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The tedium! The tedium!’
How could I tell her that most of the readers were just rooting for his quick death as a way to escape the novel?
"‘His last word–to live with,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t you understand I loved him–I loved him–I loved him!’
"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
“‘The last word he pronounced was–your name.’”
…
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody else in the boat moved. They’d all long-since fallen asleep.[/spoiler]
I just wanted to point out how awesome this sentence is. 
I’m watching the tv series “Lost” on Netflix, and Sawyer is reading “The Fountainhead.” That’s how you enjoy Ayn Rand - stranded on an island with nothing better to do, and a limited supply of books.
I’ve read most of his books, but only started that one - it seemed like the entire story was going to be about someone chained to a bed and trying to survive, and I wasn’t interested.
I quite liked “Insomnia” - it’s on my re-read list. I really appreciated a story told from the perspective of old people - it made me realize how few books I’ve read like that, and how invisible old people are in our world. But diff’rent strokes and all that.
I thought of another one: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. The link is to the review I wish I had written.
Just as an additional warning, this book contains the following sentence: “And whether his death was a suicide or a true accident, it killed him.”
John O’Hara’s From the Terrace is so bad it strains credulity. I couldn’t believe I was actually reading what I was reading. And at the same time, he was turning out short stories as good as anything he (or almost anyone else) had ever done.
George V. Higgins is another whose late stuff is astonishingly dreary, page after page of one-note griping by a pageant of colorful characters who all sound exactly alike.
Oh, and that reminds me, Damon Runyan.
Liked a lot of these books.
Lord of the Flies is really obvious in its symbolism, but I liked it as a kid and again as an adult. Same with Catcher in the Rye minus the obvious symbolisms. Mystic River was extremely depressing but I thought on the whole very well done.
A voice crying in the wilderness–the Anne Rice Sleeping Beauty books were IMHO very erotic.
Babbitt may not have aged well as fiction, and it’s certainly true that it’s much more loosely constructed than we’d tend to think of a good novel as being…but is a fascinating look at twenties culture in America among the self-admitted upwardly mobile.
The trouble with Left Behind is that the authors are telling the wrong story. (Well, that and that they don’t write very well.) Much more interesting would be if the Rapture comes and the folks who get raptured in the books are the ones who are left behind.
Agatha Christie’s novel N or M? was a shameful waste of paper. I don’t remember much of anything that happens in Howard’s End except that I thought it sucked.
So many books to unrecommend, so little time! (Actually, I take it back. These days I don’t generally finish books I don’t like, and I have some trouble unrecommending books I don’t finish…)
Well, I won’t go so far as to denigrate them, but by the time I hit your post (#82), three books had already been mentioned that I would have put in a “Approve of a book list - Read these!”. To wit:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
Cryptonomicon (Stephenson)
which are all, in my estimation at least, wonderful books, the first two filled with great prose and the third with great ideas.
So there.
It’s been years since I read Foxfire, but I don’t remember there being even one man in the book who wanted to kill women for fun. While most of the male characters were depicted as condescending jerks at best and rapists at worst, the story is set in the '50s and most of the characters (both male and female) are criminals, lowlifes, and delinquents. The members of the Foxfire gang do develop a very anti-male attitude, but these girls are hardly saints themselves and it was never my impression that Oates shared their views about men. I felt the novel made it pretty clear that while some of these girls had definitely been mistreated by men in their lives, the extreme “men are the enemy” view of the gang eventually caused it to self-destruct.
I always thought of *Babbit *as a better version of Death of a Salesman. I hate Death of a Salesman.
I’ve read Cryptonomicon multiple times but I completetly understand why people dislike it.
Stephenson has great starts, and I love the digressions, but he writes (relatively) horrible endings. You pretty much have to read his works for the journey, not the destination.
I don’t think the limited supply of books is the issue. More the limited supply of toilet paper.
It’s been a couple of years since I was forced to read it, but I distinctly remember that dozens of the townsmen lined up and paid for the privilege of raping a girl with severe mental and physical handicaps. I remember one of the characters had a habit of randomly mentioning incidents of violence against women she’d read or heard in the news. And that she literally declared “All men are the enemy.” It was just hard for me to sympathize with protagonists who hated me. Maybe if Oates was a better author she could have made it work.
Ignoring the gender relations stuff, I still think it was a crummy book. I felt it was going for gritty realism, but failed and wound up being absurd and unbelievable. It was a while ago so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I remember a lot of the gang’s plots were preposterously convoluted and implausible.