I haven’t read many of these (Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby, Citizen Kane) because I never wanted to, nor did I have to. I’m mostly a hard SF fan and have liked Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Niven, Brin and Bear. Have read Dune and liked it.
As for my “classic” book that I just can’t stomach:
Game of Thrones
I just couldn’t get through book #1. It was disorienting; was not able find a “safe” place in the book. The characters were all either awful, or treated each other with unnecessary levels of nastiness. There was not a single sympathetic person in the story.
Now, having seen most of the series, it’s obvious who turned out to be the good guys and bad guys. I was able to maintain an interest in the show but not the books.
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco It starts out well, as a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, but devolves into long rambling speeches about philosophy.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence - Robert Pirsig. Same basic objection. Starts out ok, but then we are subject to page after page of philosophical musings that aren’t at all interesting.
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Writing style is way overblown and wordy. I also have trouble getting over the fact that the main character is a pedophile.
This is bizarre - I was going to reply to Daylate to point out that Ogden Nash also wrote the only poem (so far as I’m aware) about thixotropic liquids:
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None’ll come—
And then a lot’ll.
but I checked for the exact text, and it turns out that’s by Richard Armour.
I’m beginning to wonder if Nash actually wrote anything.
Everyone I know who read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, loved it. I thought it was so-so and less interesting than Pale Fire which it is compared to. The bit with the mother’s letters in the appendices was clever enough and I was glad to be able to figure out the cipher on my own, but there were huge swaths of rambling pointlessness in the book. Yes, I know the parts I intensely disliked fit the narrator’s addled state of mind, but Johnny Truant was a bore.
The trouble with that “paid by the word” accusation is that it implies that he chose to be wordy. I suspect that the truth is nearer to the situation as expressed by Blaise Pascal: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” There are some writers—and I think Dickens was one—who find it easy to gush forth words. But he either didn’t have the chance to (because of the way his work was published serially), or didn’t have to or want to take the trouble to, edit his work, tightening it and paring it down and cutting out the weaker or less necessary passages.
So, while I like and admire Dickens, he can definitely be a bit of a slog at times, and there are chapters that could stand being condensed or left out entirely.
Harlan Ellison’s novels and short stories were allegedly influential classics, but they did a good job of turning me off sci-fi in general (granted, not all of them were sci-fi). I found his stories to all be full of preachy moralizing about social issues, with a distinctly condescending tone (“now do you see what I’m getting at?”)
And if cinema counts, I took some film classes where Fellini and Bergman were repeatedly held up as the pinnacle of the cinematic art form, and this was very common in film criticism and writing as well (see any of Ebert’s reviews on any of their movies). But I mostly thought Bergman’s movies were pretentious silliness that come across like a SNL parody of art films (a couple are exceptional, but not the ones the critics usually rave over.) And I still haven’t discovered a Fellini film that I could sit through.
But — that’s why it’s so GOOD. If Eco had just knocked out a medieval whodunit, it’d be another Brother Cadfael novel. The stuff about Aristotle is what makes it.
Absolutely agree. I haven’t read the books ffs, but I saw the movie (was forced to) and it was the biggest steaming pile of shit I have could ever imagine, most Thundercats erotic fan fiction is better literature than that turd.
The Great Gatsby - Had to read it twice. Hated it! Both times! Every word! Who the heck cares about these… Oh, never mind.
Heart of Darkness - Pure hell in 11th grade. Hell, I say! “The Secret Sharer” was in the same volume. If that got assigned there would have been a murder.
The Last of the Mohicans - just deadly.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - and then I did this, and then I did that, and then I … How can a guy who accomplished what he accomplished make incredibly interesting stuff sound so uninteresting?
Oddly, I became an English major and have worked making fiction for the last 40 years. (They tried to knock me off, but I was more thick headed than they thought).
For you Shakespeare haters out there - you have to see Shakespeare because you don’t know how to read it.
There is a very small sub-set of actors who know how to read the stuff. Let them perform it for you. A warning: The actors have to be really good at knowing how to act this one man’s plays. I mean they have to be really good. If you get a chance go see the Royal Shakespeare Company do their thing.
I’ve seen good Shakespeare, bad Shakespeare and GREAT Shakespeare. The great stuff will grab you and take you on a journey. Start easy. Romeo and Juliet. Measure for Measure. If you want a tragedy, try Othello but, and I mean this, you can’t read his plays yourself no matter how good a reader you are. You need actors who have spent years just working on this one guys plays to open up the doors for you.
My wife has all the books and bought a complete set for her niece.
To be fair, I read the first book; three weeks later, I saw it sitting on the shelf and reminded myself I was going to read it. I had forgotten every single aspect of that book.
To remind you it the single stupidest ending of any story ever told. The Bad guy was defeated by…
…
Touching the the good guy and falling over dead. Because the kid’s mom loved him. It worse than a Deus Ex Machina , because she didn’t even bother with the fucking Machina. If a George Lucas or Michael Bay movie had ever approached a conclusion that asinine the critical world would explode, but apparently the world decided to not see the naked emperor by shoving their heads up each other asses. Not to mention the worst Mary-Sue hero-maker game even a 3rd grader would throw away( Suddenly they decided the super-bowl would have a half-time tiddlywinks contest worth 99 points for each team, and Billy-Jim-Bob-Joe- Orphanis was chosen by random from the stadium to compete)
wolfman, I’m genuinely sorry I brought it up; remember your blood pressure! BREATHE! In, out, slowly. Take a Far Side book down and flip through it. There; feel better? Thought so.
supposedly one of “must read” books, but outside of school NOBODY reads it for pleasure (I’m college grad but I don’t understand half of what he’s talking about!)
The only thing that in anyway polishes the turd Is that I truly believe that abomination lead to the MCU movies are a result. They realized that if a shallow, but flashy, world with approximately 16.5 neuron/seconds worth of thought like that can be successful, how monstrous will a shallow,flashy world with 70 years of deeply thought out, but corny, world building be?.
not to mention Kerouac and friends were lazy, thieving parasites who used people (Jack even used his own mother for funds because he would rather get drunk)
I found that same thing about a book i loved when younger- the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I used to love that book, I tried to re-read it recently and i found the prof’s long rambling and wrong talks on politics to be too damn annoying.
