In college, I took a class called “Literary Humor” in which one of the assigned readings was Portnoy’s Complaint. I slogged through about half of it, bored to tears, reading just enough to fake my way through the class discussion. I came across this book a few weeks ago and decided to give it another chance…I thought maybe I would have acquired some comedic sophistication in the intervening 10 years and that I might be able to better appreciate it now.
No dice. It was just as lame and singularly unfunny now as it was when I first read it. Am I missing something? Do I have to be Jewish to appreciate the humor?
What “Must Read” books have you plodded through only to turn the last page and utter a giant “Feh”?
I’ll second “Portnoy’s Complaint”, and throw in the other Roth novels I’ve read. If there’s a point, I’m missing it too. Maybe it was something so different and new when it was written that it became a must-read, but it’s pretty much gone past it sell-by date now. For me, anyway.
I’ve decided to read at least one must-read novel a month, to offset the junky genre stuff that makes up most of my reading. It’s hard to approach some of them with the proper attitude. I recently read “Wuthering Heights”, and I’ll be damned if I can see why it is regarded as a great love story. I detested virtually all of the characters, Heathcliff and Catherine most notably. God, if ever two whiny, selfish, destructive people ever deserved to be stuck with each other, it was them. Bi-i-i-g fat feh.
Sorry about the above sucky grammar - I’m just on my first cuppa joe after too much fun yesterday.
The Odyssey. I was forced to read this in Junior High & High School, and both times I never understood this book. Furthermore, whenever class discussion time came around, discussions about characters, story lines, important events came up that I had NO recollection of reading about. I always sat there wondering if I had read the right book or not.To this day I can’t get through a few sentences without wondering what is going on.
A Confederacy of Dunces. If ever there was a clearer literary case of the emperor having no clothes, I’ve yet to see it. Maybe Bret Easton Ellis comes in a close second.
Maybe I was just too far removed culturally from the time depicted in the book, or maybe the point was just lost on me. I could see the humor in some individual vignettes throughout the book, but as a whole, it stank to high heaven. Ignatius Reilly was less comical than he was unappealing.
I just thought of another one…A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway). What a pile of steaming tripe…it was supposed to be this enduring love story, but for me, all of the characterizations (and I use the term loosely) were so dry and flat, I just couldn’t make myself care about anyone in the story one iota. There was no nuance whatsoever…the love story was literally (and I apologize for not remembering the character’s names, that’s how little impression this book made on me) a matter of Hemingway stating flat out “Joe loved Mary”. Ummmm…why? Tell me what they’re feeling…give me a reason to believe it.
A while back, someone mentioned The White Hotel in one of those “great books you’ve read that you’d recommend to others” threads, so I checked it out of the library. Someone better give me a compelling reason to continue reading this book, or I’ll turn it back in after 50 pages.
JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is the stupidest book to ever make a required reading list. I read it in high school and thought I juts didn’t get it. I read it again five years later. I read it again in my early 30’s. (I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.)
It sucks. The characters are uninteresting, and I can’t imagine why anybody thinks this book changed their life.
I hate to say this, since I’d rather have a red-hot poker shoved up my nose than have to read another page of Faulkner, but I’ve found that books that left me cold the first or second reads suddenly became more profound the third. Not that I often read things three times, but I had to read the Odyssey three times at various stages, and it wasn’t until the last that I appreciated how much Homer got across within a few austere lines of poetry.
Same with Hemingway–I didn’t read any one work three times, but I had to read a lot of his books and short stories. I finally started to admire his writing when I had the themes pointed out to me.
I’d like to second the “Catcher in the Rye” complaint but can’t you get thrown out of our generation for admitting it didn’t move you? I’m layin’ low.
Confederacy of Dunces was amusing, but I didn’t get why it was considered some remarkable work of unmatched genius.
I recently read Cold Mountain, and while I enjoyed it I didn’t think it was National Book Award material.
Most of the books that popped up immediately in my mind have been mentioned: Catcher in the Rye, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Portnoy’s Complaint. Let me add a few more.
The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway. “We fought. It was a rotten thing to do. Later, we had a drink. Nobody liked Cohn. We drank some more.” The Lost Generation still doesn’t appeal to me.
Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was enthralled at first, but the point of view switched to different characters, and the book went downhill (for me) from there.
Oliver Twist, by Dickens. I don’t think I’m alone in disliking this one. It was a bit clumsy.
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. A boring stream-of-consciousness story about a dreadful drunk written in at least three different languages. Lowry apparently was impressed with how many German and Spanish words he knew.
Lake Wobegone Days, by Garrison Keillor. I think that maybe this fellow’s stories are best in small doses, with people around who will laugh at anything.
I got about two-thirds of the way through Gravity’s Rainbow, and then simply stalled out on it. Even thinking of resuming or restarting it just makes me feel very tired and drained of energy.
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (in which Natty Bumppo finally dies) I finished out of pure grudge only in a “Frontier Lit” course.
The one and only set of Cliff Notes I ever bought was for Huckleberry Finn. That was mostly pure laziness though; I took one look at the tortured mass of phonetic dialect for page after page and said, no thank you. Besides, I had things to read for fun then, and it allowed me to compress studying into a single night before the large essay test on it. Used the Notes and my highly developed essay BS’ing ability to effortlessly coast through that section of class. Aced the test, too.
At the rate I’m reading Finnegans Wake, I’ll be finishing it in about a decade. But the way that’s written, it’s not like you can lose your place in it, and I find it actually entertaining in small doses.
i liked Catcher and Portnoy… but i read them about 5 years ago (i was 14) when i was going through a phase of only reading really short american books.
James Joyce, yes. well. never bothered to even try more than a few chapters.
absolutely hated The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass. yuck.
ditto Glamourama by Bret Easton Ellis. American Psycho was at least funny…
authors i don’t get…
iris murdoch, salman rushdie, nietzche
but i like authors whose heads are not so far up their own arses.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just in a reading funk. I’m currently only partially through the following books and none of them have seemed to really catch my interest, despite them being in the “Must Read” category:
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (2nd attempt)
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller (3rd attempt)
Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (2nd attempt)
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
I’ve read a lot of other Hemingway short stories, but I have yet to find a novel of his that interests me. I am glad to note that others besides me found Catcher In The Rye to be utterly inane…all I wanted to do was slap the kid and tell him to get over himself. Ack.
I have to admit…I kind of liked Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Depressing, and the characters were a tad annoying at times, but I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s style. Oh well. To each their own, I suppose.
I usually like everything I read, but here are a couple of the supposed “greats” that I have utterly despised.
The Great Gatsby - I actually didn’t find it too painful to read, but the class discussion quickly revealed the pointlessness of it. I didn’t care about a single character, and I felt like none of their emotions were genuine. I was disgusted to find that it was number two on that list of the 100 greatest novels of all time (forgive me for not remembering what organization compiled that list - Ulysses was number one).
The Old Man and the Sea - YUCK! Yes, I know all about the Christ allegory and what have you, but - my goodness, what a boring piece o’ crap!
That’s all I can think of. I’m only 17 and haven’t read that many “great” novels.
I had to read “Heart of Darkness” in my second-semester freshman English class.
Start with a setting of the purely imaginary “dark jungles” that the Victorians apparently thought EXISTED, and every racist thing that you ever heard about Africans, put them together and write incredibly boringly about them and you MIGHT come up with something as detestable as that book. I HATED it. I don’t care when it was written. That thing should not still be in print. It was the most offensive thing I was ever forced to read. And I am NOT one of those PC-police types, either.
On the other hand, I got an A on the paper I had to write about it. So maybe it was worth it.
