Or about 2/3 of Anthonology.
It might be ironic*, but I’d like to forget all of Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Umberto Eco’s La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana. I really wanted to enjoy that book, and kept trying to – until the very last page.
It kept promising to become interesting, if I just kept on – and its main conceits were my own particular preoccupations, as though it were written just for me. A dull, dull book - and it’s for no absolutely specific reason that I’m inclined to blame the translation. It’s just that Umberto Eco couldn’t possibly write anything that dull, eh? I mean, we’re talking about a man who wrote page-turner semiotics texts.
*It’s presented as an amnesiac’s narrative.
Nicely done, that.
I enjoyed those, probably because I was a teenager. I was still a teenager when For Love of Evil came out, though, and it didn’t stink any less for it. This is the series where he included afterwords about the writing process, isn’t it? I seem to recall him gushing about his new word-processor increasing his productivity – not in any of the ways that word processing might reasonably be expected to increase productivity, but rather through the use of TEMPLATES.
Dude, word processing templates are for business letters, not novels. <cough>Hack!<cough> Sorry, a little tickle there - I meant “Jesus, what a hack.”
Ethan Frome, a book so bad that one of these days I’m going to rewrite it.
This time it will be set in Ireland and when Zena throws her hissy about the red glass pickle tray Ethan and Mattie will overpower her and she will wind up head first down the well. Ethan and Mattie will then sell anything in the house that appears to be of value and use the money to book passage on a ship. By the time suspicious neighbors have alerted the local constable, Ethan and Mattie will be high fiving and hugging each other on the ship as they head towards their new life in America.
The ship will be the Titanic.
I will be first in line to buy a copy, if only in hope that it overwrites all memory of the original in my mind.
Too many ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ type horror anthologies when I was very young. … But in 8th grade we were required to read “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. Couldn’t do it. NO ONE in class could do it. We all got ‘Fs’. Of all the literature out there in the world, “Heart of Darkness”…the mind reels. What a horrible thing to do to kids. I am certain many, many of my fellow students were turned off from reading, for good, after that fiasco. (Except me, I became an even more voracious reader, still am, knowing there must have been something, anything, I would have enjoyed.)
Naked Lunch. I read it when I was 16, after seeing the movie and liking the movie. It was during the chapter that comprised vignette after vignette of men raping small boys and then murdering the boys at the moment of orgasm that I decided to put the book down and not pick it up again.
You didn’t watch the film, did you? 'Cause it deserved a lot of hate as well.
Dhalgren.
Many years ago, when I still coached our school’s AcDec team, the overall theme for the year was Science Fiction. Dhalgren was the chosen novel. Out of all the years and all the authors and all the books, they chose that one.
I quit coaching the next year.
Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird. I may have mispelled the author’s name, but I dislike the book so much, I don’t care. I understood the point the book was trying to make. I think it could have been made in a way that didn’t make me physically ill.
Erase that book! erase it!!
::whines::… well geez you guys I was all excited to come up with a book that I absolutely loathed… and after reading some of the titles already mentioned I am stumpted on which title I truly hate… however… 'Great Expectations ‘Wuthering Heights’… ‘A Seperate Peace’… ‘Heart of Darkness’…?? Really?? If you throw in ‘Gatsby’ and a few Steinbeck novels… you just described my high school honors english classes to a T.
OH! and ‘Catcher in the Rye’!! Ya really can’t forget that classic…psh. OH!.. and throw in Plath too. Hmph… I’m not sure if I loathe these so much as love the ability to reference them and make some others feel inferior. Kidding… of course. :: shifty eyes::
(… you know what the worst part of most of these books were? I had already read most of them before knowing they would eventually be assigned to me… by choice. God… what a nerd.)
Celestine Prophecy. The Da Vinci Code too. Celestine Prophecy was the Da Vinci Code of the 90s but Ron Howards and Tom Hanks never made a movie of it.
It woud have been nice if Arthur C. Clarke had never written a single sequel to Rendezvous with Rama (let alone two…), and retired to a quiet life in the tropics instead of collaborated with hack co-authors.
Also, whatever the last Tom Clancy book that I read was. I guess its already out of my memory enough. Think it was the China v. Russia one where Jack Ryan became President after the Capitol gets wiped out by a Japanese airliner at the end of the previous novel.
Oh wait. I’ve sort of revived this thread to say:
Well I thought about saying When We Were Good. A cheesy yet briliant dystopian novel of the early 1980. I was, I confess, hoping for some sort of happy ending. However turncated. But the ending was worthy of Orwell’s the whole thing made my flesh creep.
But I called her to say : I HAVE NO MOUTH BUT I MUST SCREAM.
Picurer it posy coltail post virgin (not that night but not to long before. Floated in on a cloud of angelic steam.
Picks up a random book. :eek:.
Deflated bliss.
YES. And especially My Sister’s Keeper; the only book I have ever literally thrown across the room upon finishing.
I’ve got to go with The Road. I was trying to explain to my husband how depressing this book was, so I read him some of the character names from the IMDB entry on the movie…Baby Eater, Amputee in Cellar, Cannibal #1, etc.
If there is some enlightening message in that book, I didn’t get it.
Lord Foul’s Bane. I was so upset by the rape scene that I put the book down. A year or so later I picked the book up again and finished it. Why did I do that? I still don’t know.
Interesting! I came here to post the same thing. My boyfriend insisted I read it when I was 15. The same scenes are what scarred me for life.
The DaVinci Code.
Twilight.
And a book I read at school in Scotland and never got into – Catcher in the Rye.
I just never “got” the book; I found the protagonist to be whiney and umsympathetic, and I never could make myself care what happened to hm or what he thought.
In the face of utter despair, a father’s love for his son endures.
I have read the original Peter Pan. The Disney movie was better. That’s how bad the original book was, that Disney IMPROVED it.