For me, it has to be Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen. I found the portrayal of Mr. Collins to be most… uncomfortable… for me… The reason? Well, I am a real-life Mr. Collins: A phony, an ass-kisser, a social-climber.
How about you?
Well, that seems a bit extreme. For my part, I simply found the book virtually impossible to read. And I had to read it, for a course. This morning, I was waiting next to a woman who was halfway through Austen’s Nuthanger Abbey, and loving it. De Gustibus, and all.
I couldn’t tolerate The Great Gatsby when it was inflicted on us in high school. Bored rich people swanning about and slumming and it all came to nothing in the end. At least that’s my memory of it nearly forty years later; maybe I’d like it more if I read it now.
The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dump the untrustworthy bitch already. No, don’t give her another chance - see what she did? Moron.
Don’t get me started on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, cripes, what an unremitting downer.
I love P&P, Mr Collins is much funnier than all the other blokes put together.
Indeed. I liked it much better eighteen years out of high school.
The Scarlet Letter can take a flying leap, though.
You likely wouldn’t. I just re-read it for a book discussion group, and I tried to go into it with a good attitude. I really did. And the writing is really gorgeous and dreamlike.
But the characters are all despicable, half of them die, and then it ends. At least it’s short.
heart of darkness. never had 120 pages been so long
I thought The Glass Bead Game was fairly undeserving of its Nobel Prize.
The author spends something like 1000 pages describing how even the greatest teacher with the most interesting and worthwhile thing to teach can’t seem to make a great impact on his students (except maybe in a one-on-one situation – which we don’t get to see because the book ends before the results can be shown). All of this is as a lead-up to a few short stories that have the actual lessons he wants to teach packed into some 40-50 pages.
Personally, I skipped them because, to me, crying for 1000 pages about how hard your life is trying to make other people be as good as you instead of using that same space and effort to try teaching your actual lessons isn’t a very good proof that you’ve actually got much to teach. Fix yourself before you worry about fixing me. If you are fixed (i.e. as good as you seem to believe you are), then it’s on you to prove it not to simply state it up front (expansively).
There’s also the issue that any book nominated for a Nobel should succeed on all three fronts of fiction. It should be:
- Entertaining
- Use intriguing prose
- Craft a meaningful message into a story in a non-intrusive way.
The book perhaps succeeded on points 2 and 3, but was an abject failure on point #1 (unless you find the prose/message itself entertainment enough – which isn’t what is meant by the criteria). There is no story and nothing happens. It’s 1000 pages of laboriously watching a man do very little and not accomplish much of anything. While a technical feat to pad that out that far, that’s not entertainment. If you have no desire to fashion entertaining stories, there’s no point in writing fiction novels instead of essays.
The Catcher in the Rye
They nailed mine right off the bat - Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Dreadful. Boring, dull, endlessly dragging on about the heath and the red dirt and the dismal, red, dull, heath. I was assigned this book in high school, and this was the first (and only) reading assignment I couldn’t finish. I even read Silas Marner for Pete’s sake. This book was painful.
The other is Moby Dick. Last year I decided to give it a go, because the story is famous and all, but reading it is murder. The essays on whaling are bad enough, I don’t need a sermon (an actual sermon!) in my literature.
Thomas Hardy defines pain. No other famous author causes me more twinges than Hardy. Sadly my senior HS English teacher was a fan.
De-lurking to point out that you don’t know what you’re talking about. The Nobel is not awarded for a single work. Never has, never will. It’s a lifetime achievement award.
I adore Pride and Prejudice! I can’t stand Joyce.
Most of the books listed in the link I find at least readable, if not all that enjoyable.
For books I would gladly suspend my absolute protection for all books rule, look no further than Dickens. All of them. There is a special circle in Hell for the author of A Christmas Carol. Of that I am sure.
My father apparently has a thing about finishing what he starts. So after listening to Atlas Shrugged on tape, and declaring it the world’s worst book, he for some reason forced himself to finish all fifty cd’s of it, complaining all the way. So now I’ve heard more than I ever want to know on why Ayn Rand is totally the worst writer ever in the history of the universe. I have to say, just the bits I overheard make me want to find John Galt and slug him in the face.
This. I found it terribly dull and pointless, despite all the praise.
In high school we had to read Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises. A brief plot summary:
And that’s about it. I understand that the same criticism can be applied to pretty much everything Hemmingway has written, but I have no urge to confirm that for myself.
Your father deserves some kind of medal for sitting through all of that. At least with the book you can skim the parts that drag.
I think some books require you to live out a bit of your own life before you can really appreciate them. I just re-read The Great Gatsby, twenty-odd years after the first time in high school, and it was a totally different experience.
When you’re in high school, you still naturally believe the sentiment expressed in the first line. And the second line might as well be written in Chinese: you don’t yet have any frame of reference where this sentiment makes any sense at all.
Add the word “unreadable” before the word “unremitting” and we’re in agreement. Worst “classic” ever.
And put me down for loathing Catcher in the Rye. The prose was serviceable enough, but it’s basically a Judy Blume book (yes, I’m aware which came first) with swearing. A whiney, snivelly loser spends X pages whining and snivelling and not actually doing anything to resolve their problems. By about page 50, I kept thinking that if his parents would ship his ass to a strict military school, he’d be kept busy and wouldn’t be able to obsess on his “problems” (and he had no real problems).
And Moby Dick, as a novel about whaling and a crazed obsessed captain while being a nifty period piece? Good stuff. Moby Dick as a metaphor for Ahab’s aging and his spear is his penis and Queequeg is his repressed homosexual rape fantasies and the play of the dew on the morning lilly in that one scene was about God’s inhumanity towards us vis-a-vis slavery…ad nauseum? No. It’s the absolute worst book in the world to read for DEEP MEANING (regardless of whether there actually is DEEP MEANING or not). It works well as a novel. Just leave it at that.