It appears that Great Expectations is required reading for pretty much every American high school student - that’s how it was inflicted on me, too. Aside from the hate that other Dopers have so lavishly and articulately heaped upon it, what really bothers me is that there are so many other wonderful books out there that we could be reading instead. Rubystreak, I would have infinitely preferred Lord of the Flies.
I thought of another classic that I personally detest, though I can at least understand the literary merits: Madame Bovary. Mon Dieu, I wanted to slit my wrists and die a quick death, which is what Mme Bovary should have done.
Those of you excoriating The Bridges of Madison County (which would be in my bottom 10), should keep an eye out for “The Ditches of Edison County”, My wife loved the original, and I made her read the parody, and know she can’t even think of any scene in the original without laughing. She’s never forgiven me.
My flat out worst book ever was “Mutant 59, the Plastic Eater”. An airport, a long flight closing in 2 minutes,a book required, and the result was this. The damn thing… a professionally published book, with covers and everything,… had SPELLING mistakes. I finished the flight reading the inflight magazine. Don’t ask me anything about it, I’ve blotted it from my memory.
Worst book by a writer who can actually write was Ian McEwan’s “Saturday”. I reread it recently, and it’s effectively already dated and largely unreadable. It will be his most ignored book in 20 years, I confidently predict.
Yes. I loved Dickens’ Bleak House.
And I remember enjoying Hawthorne’s short stories, such as The Birthmark.
My mom told me we were related to Hawthrone, perhaps that’s why I made a point of giving him another try.
But The Scarlet Letter was a grim slog for me.
For me, the worst book-which I have tried to read 3 times and failed after about page 17–is Bonfire of the Vanities. I don’t know who wrote it-I dont’ care. I didn’t care about the protagonist one whit, in fact, I disliked him enough by page 17 that I truly hope he ends up dead or hurt or something. Ugh.
Other books that I hated and will not read again and do not recommend in the slightest: Bastard Out of Carolina --to say the author has an agenda would be mild. We All Fall Down -by some right wing fundamentalist who writes shite and can only get published from some online source. I had to read it for a book club (a book club mind you who does a recipe book once a year–I no longer belong) and to use this book for kindling would be a kindness.
I had en English teacher once who told me, “You need to read Great Expectations before you die.” So I went and read it and it was astoundingly bad. I went back to him and told him it sucked and I hated it and he said, “Now death won’t seem as scary.”
I never read GE in high school. I was, however, assigned The Bear by William Faulkner.
That piece of trash was so confusing I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I know it was supposed to be representative of “stream of consciousness” but Faulkner took three paragraphs to say that a boy was 10 years old. I had to have the teacher explain it before I rolled my eyes and said, “Why didn’t he just say that?” I truly believe the only good thing Faulkner wrote was A Rose for Emily.
Is it because we’re “forced” to read the books in school that we don’t like them? I did enjoy Watership Down, but I don’t see a lot of schools assigning Gone with the Wind or Tom Sawyer, although we did get assigned Huckleberry Finn.
The worst book I’ve finished voluntarily is Eragon, because my Dad gave it to me as a gift.
In the first few pages it appeared clear that the writer had a so-so grasp on the way English idioms are used in fiction, and a sophomoric love of dropping lingo into places it shouldn’t be (f’rinstance, and I’m paraphrasing: “two of them had longswords, and two of them had hand-and-a-half swords”: umm, sorry but that seems like a passage straight out of a D+D module.) This became so annoying that halfway through I read the author information to verify my hunch that it was written by a teenager, which it indeed was. Now, normally I’d give him credit for this, but his connections in the industry he had to get this pile of dreck published more than make up for his youth in terms of how much credit is due.
Of course it doesn’t help that it’s filled with every cliche in the fantasy world, and several cliches that were invented purely for the book :).
That said, I am going to see the movie because it’s physically impossible to film it without lots of sweeping panoramic wilderness shots, and I’m a sucker for fantasy wilderness cinematography. Now, I don’t know where it was filmed, but I’d even give it a huge stinkin pile of pass if it was filmed in New Zealand, because the terrain in the book is much more suited for New Zealand than LOTR was. In fact, that’s about the only thing I wouldn’t think would be a cliche.
Which of course means that they filmed it in Switzerland or France or somewhere
It’s probably safe to say that everyone in this thread reads for pleasure (so that’ll weed out anyone who would complain about having to read anything.) But we all have our own genres of interest and often authors of interest inside those genres and aren’t likely to pick up something way outside when we’re reading for pleasure. Heck, my bookshelf is basically nothing but science fiction and a little fantasy (filled with Asimov, Card, Heinlein, Niven, Morressy, Steele, Adams, Swanwick, King, Rowling, lots of anthologies and issues of the commerical magazines, and several other authors), a few non-fiction (mostly on chemistry and not counting my textbooks) and humor books, and lots of Calvin and Hobbes. I’ll read other things (I discovered a liking for Chekov and Tolstoy, for instance, while having to read them in high school) but when I’m reading for pleasure I generally stick in those genres. And I can like things I normally wouldn’t have read, or at least appreciate them as literature, but some books are just not worth it. For instance, I had to read Camus’ The Plague. I’m not about to pick up anything else by Camus, but it’s not because I hated what I had to read. On the other hand, for a somewhat-related class (same professor, different subject) I had to read one of the Left Behind books (Apocalypse, which I think is the penultimate book in the series.) Besides my own personal conflicts with the entire freaking premise of the book it reads like badly ghostwritten Tom Clancy. I’m talking like those books that have Clancy’s name on them but are written by a completely different guy, like “Tom Clancy’s Op-Center”.
I think some of the problems are that books are forced on students at the wrong time. It was pointed out above with Lord of the Flies versus Great Expectations. I was probably too young when I first read 1984 but it wasn’t forced on me. Heck, I loved Tolkien as a kid and my parents had The Lord of the Rings sitting right there on the bookshelf, but I couldn’t actually manage to read it until fairly late in high school. I was told once that one shouldn’t read Ecclesiastes until the age of 30 (or something like that.)
Ah, Eragon. That’s one of those books I just can’t decide whether or not I want to pick up and read. I’ve seen a lot of reviews just like yours, that it was written by a teenager and it shows, being very cliched. Heck, I’ve seen the previews for the movie and can’t decide if the guy’s deliberately ripping off McCaffery and several other writers or not. Reviews like this don’t help:
I have an Audible subscription and it’s time to pick another audiobook (hard for me since I’d rather read a book than listen to it.) I’m not coming up with anything else I want to get, so I’m trying to decide whether or not to get the audiobook of Eragon.
From what the critics were saying, Eastwood kept the bones of the story and tossed the glurgey dialogue.
Anyone else tempted to try some of the clunkers mentioned here? Great Expectations is in the TBR. I think I’ll give it a go, just to see what all the fuss is about.
Previously on this board, I’ve mentioned how much I despised The Pushcart War when I had to read it for a sixth grade book club/book trivia competition. At the time, I thought it was silly bordering on stupid – come on, puncturing truck tires with little pins? I recently looked it up again, and it’s just as bad as I remember – mainly because it seems to be nothing more than a big piece of socialist propaganda (something that went completely over my head as a child).
It’s a book that’s better when you consider the author’s age than it is alone. Definitely not the worst book I’ve read in the past five years, but nowhere near the top 100. I finished it, and I no longer bother to finish books that I have no interest in.
I do hope the book is inspirational to kids, though.
