Secondly, I started a thread a while back asking for book suggestions, because sadly, I’ve decided it’s time to retire Tom Sawyer from my 8th grade curriculum. Believe it or not, some of the books being dissed here were offered up as possible replacements. A Separate Peace for one, Watership Down for another. And the really sad truth is that there weren’t many suggestions that fit within my parameters–sex and swearing at a minimum.
Finally, as if it were possible to be final in this thread–but this is an attempt–I have to defend Steinbeck. Have you read Cannery Row? Sweet Thursday? The Moon is Down? Look, Grapes of Wrath is maybe my idea of torture, but The Moon is Down is probably one of the finest examples of propaganda ever written–propaganda for insurgence against an overwhelming oppressor. Read it. It’s short, and powerful. During WWII we dropped crates of it behind enemy lines. Cannery Row is about whores, drunks, fishermen, tramps, and low life. What could be better than that?
And Joyce–hate him if you will, but read his book of short stories called Dubliners. It’s…NOT like his other stuff.
Good point, Mariltharn. I probably should have said that it does not stand up to the type of general literary analysis that a high school English class would apply to it, but it does do an excellent job of creating a consistent internal mythology worthy of study.
I like Dickens (tho the beginnings of his books are slow & daunting but the stories do pay off), Brave New World (a bit heady & disjointed tho for 8th Grade), and Frankenstein (tho overwrought & overwritten, and a real disappointment to any kid who’s grown up on the films.
The Color Purple had to be horrid… Until we read “The Invisible Man”, and not the Wells version. Ghastly. It went downhill from there, but I just skimmed the rest.
of course, I did inflict “Time Enough for Love” on them, so I guess it’s all even.
[sub]PS. One more vote for Flowers for Some Stupid Rodent (Algernon). [/sub]
Vergil’s Aeneid. Not the Latin version, the Latin version’s nice. But the Dryden translation… shudder Dryden’s translation makes less sense than the Latin. :eek:
Also in the foreign language category, Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars”. Ugh.
In English… Great Expectations. Read that three years ago. Now, in small doses, Dickens’s writing style is tolerable, and some of his shorter works, like “The Public Life of Mr. Tulrumble, Once Mayor of Mudfog”, are pretty damned good. But in Great Expectations, it goes on and on and on and on. For Og knows how many pages. It has the distinction of being the only book I’ve thrown across a room without intending to hit someone with it. (And don’t get me started on Grate Expectations by Edmund Wells.)
Oh God. I’m surprised it took so long for this book to come up. I absolutely hated this book with a passion, but I can’t remember a damn thing except for the image of the little girl carving callouses off her feet with a knife.
I loved A Tale of Two Cities, although admittedly it was AFTER I read the Cliff Notes for an exam. Once I realized there was a good story tucked in amid all the verbiage I was able to work my way through. Also enjoyed Marlowe and Shakespeare (with the help of Cliff Notes), but Milton’s Paradise Lost escaped me at the time. Maybe I should try that again.
Other items on my can’t-stand list:
** Catcher in the Rye* - could that little bastard be more full of himself?
** The Good Earth*, by Pearl S. Buck
** Ethan Frome*
** Ulysses* (James Joyce)
I’d have to say everything that was assigned in my American Lit class this semester. I never imagined that American Lit could be so boring. I’d have to say that Bartlby was the worst though. Five paragraphs in and my eyes just glazed over.
Thankfully it was an online class and I managed to get a B without actually reading the stories (I tried, believe me I tried but they were all so damn boring).
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It is supposed to be a “classic” but it is really a very stupid asinine story about a small town coming together to draw lots to see who the “winner” is, whose prize is to be put to death by stoning. What was the purpose of this tale is beyond me, and they even made a movie about this shit story several years ago.
Shirley Jackson did the literary world a favor by killing herself in 1965.
sunfish just beat me to it - I don’t know if it counts as a BOOK per se, but I found Milton’s Paradise Lost to be ridiculously unreadable and long, just to suit his purpose of being “epic”… particularly given that he really is dealing with what could be an interesting and engaging subject matter.
As for the rest of the "classics mentioned in this thread… well… a mixed bag. Loved A Tale of Two Cities . Dislike most other Dickens, but not to the point of hate. Liked A Farewell to Arms . Disliked Heart of Darkness, but again not hated; I like to think I “got” it (I read it for a history class and not an english class, which helped), I just found the writing a bore to slog through. Liked theThe Mayor of Casterbridge , REALLY didn’t enjoy Huckleberry Finn , which I’m told is weird. Let’s see. Someone mentioned The Fixer by Malamud, which I actually didn’t think was that bad. I absolutely hated The Giver when I had to read it in sixth grade, thought it a complete waste of time. I like almost all of the plays that have been mentioned, but I’m a sucker for dramatic form, especially performed live.
Overall it was about 50-50 through the end of high school in terms of good stuff and not-so-good stuff, but there wasn’t really that much I truly HATED. Well, there was this one book senior year that I can’t remember the name of, maybe I’ll remember it at some point… I tend to block these things out of my mind, and they only come back when I see someone else has mentioned them in this thread
I’ve read most of the books in this thread, and have loved some of them (Frankenstein, Moby Dick), and hated some of them, but I’ve not seen the book my English teacher assigned that I hated more than ANY other book I’ve read.
Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag
NO ONE else I’ve ever talked to had to read this boring piece of crap except me. It was like banging my head against a wall for the entire time we read it.
I liked The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl, and Of Mice and Men.
The Red Badge of Courage was dense as hell, but I made it thru unharmed.
My vote for “worst book ever” goes to The Great Gatsby. A more boring and pointless book I have never read. A bunch of people gossip about this one rich guy, and eventually the guy gets shot, and that’s about it. Snore.
Granted, The Old Man and the Sea was rather light on plot as well, but at least it had the whole man-vs-nature survival aspect to it. And the guy spends half the book battling sharks, which will always get you a few points on my scale
I majored in English in university and cut my teeth in grade school on some long stuff and some challenging stuff that I adored, such as Catch-22, Beowulf (the original Old English poem), Huck Finn, and the Dune series. But there were any number of things I despised and found unreadable.
Once in university, however, the crap really started to show up in abundance. Among the guilty are most of the novels written by the modernists. James Joyce, William Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, et al were IMHO self-indulgent, over-rated ego-maniacs who wrote only to confound others and to prove how clever they were and obscure they could be while busily circle-jerking each other for the honour of being most incomprehensible.
I also took a course in Canadian lit and was forced to wade through “brilliant” works by the Margarets – Atwood and Lawrence – which were yawn-fests from beginning to end. But did we get to look at a single piece by beloved humourist Stephen Leacock? Oh, no, that would never do, because he wrote only to entertain, not to stupify the snooty academics who set course curriculum. But I digress.
But the one that takes the cake, the one book I physically hurled across the room after just four chapters, was from my sci-fi class. A book that the prof, by his own admission, deliberately inflicted on us as a test of our intestinal fortitude. A book only three people in a class of nearly one hundred admitted to finishing. Yes, friends, I am speaking of The Female Man by Joanne Russ. I even gave it to my sci-fi loving wife (miss Featherlou) a while back to see if I was just a sexist bastard would could not penetrate a novel written in “the female voice.” She didn’t make it as far into the book as I had. It’s bad. Very, very bad. It is a cautionary tale so horrible that everyone should just accept how bad it is and never even touch a copy, much less attempt to read it. You’ve all been warned.
P.S. I kinda liked Great Expectations, although the prose is very wordy. Also, I liked The Great Gatsby. Sorry.
The worst book I read for school - The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I don’t know if I have ever been as depressed and un-fulfilled by a novel as I was by that one. Well, maybe by A Jest of God by Margaret Lawrence. Same shit, different pile.
Remember, I was once an adolescent too, and I’m not so aged that I have forgotten what it was like.
Actually, as an adult, I have much less free time than I did as a teen, even though I was busy with all of the things you note - I still somehow managed to fit hours of hangin’ out into my busy schedule then.
My point was that not all books are suitable for the age group. Some teens may like them, but in general, long and difficult works are best read voluntarially by people who are a bit older, more patient, and more experienced.
That having been said, some may in fact be steaming piles of dreck. May be. I wouldn’t count adolescent boredom with a work one was forced to pretend to read for a hated English teacher as absolute proof of it, though. Particularly as re-reading later may lead to a different opinion - as I pointed out in my original post, this actually happened to me, and more than once.
