I’m not sure if this is considered a classic but I thought “The Third Policeman” By Flan O’Brien was highly overrated. One reveiwer called it “the funniest book I ever read.” Please! I thought it was vaugely humorous, and the ending was downright depressing.
I liked “Moby Dick” But my advise to anyone that reads it is to skip over all the “soliliquies” in the middle.
I think I hated every classic I had to read in school, except for Huck Finn.
Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter etc. I found them all utterly boring and ponderous and just could not finish them.
Make it a bonfire. They’ll have to light me on fire, too.
God, that book was horrible. And the worst thing about it was it kept getting worse.
Well, no mention of Sir Walter Scott so I will. I loved the movie “Rob Roy” so I was licking my chops over the book but it SUCKED and is UNREADABLE. I bet “Ivanhoe” isn’t any better.
Perhaps another problem, besides having to read them, is that you people had to read them by a specific date AND write a paper or take a test on them. Lazing through Moby Dick as I have been doing for months leaves it as quite enjoyable and we haven’t even got to sea yet. Or, judging by the earlier comment about solliloquies, BECAUSE we haven’t got to sea. I’m wallowing in the atmospherics.
You also had to try to see the books from your teachers’ standpoints so you could get a decent grade. College Anecdote: Friend’s obnoxious roommate had to write an interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Friend and I got high and dictated the paper to him, interpreting the Lady as a metaphor for the Virgin Mary. Roommate’s teacher "F"ed the paper, saying, “She isn’t Mary! She’s a prostitute!”
Funny. I always though she was Joan Baez.
Wife says to add her, too. And she LIKES Hardy.
If you were paid by the word and expected to drag the stories out over months of serialization you might write more like that, yourself.
I think we’ve done this before. Either that, or I’ve got a powerful feeling of deja vu.
I agree with many on this board who submitted Turn of the Screw by Henry James, but I submit that The Beast in the Jungle by the verbose Mr. James is far worse. The whole point of that book is that nothing happens, but it takes an awful long time to not happen.
I also agree with John Knowles’ A Separate Piece. I had to read that book twice, and it didn’t improve on second reading.
James Agee’s A Death in the Family was reportedly an award-winning novel, but you couldn’t prove it by me.
Isn’t that the pornographic parody of A Separate Peace?
Loved Mockingbird, Huckleberry, Dunces, Catcher.
But any hater of James Fenimore Cooper is a friend of mine.
Mark Twain wrote at least 2 essays on Cooper that are viciously funny. Recommended Reading!
Y’know, I actually enjoyed Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the Leatherstocking Tales. My nominations for worst? Number one would have to be The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway. Plot summary: There’s some people. The end.
Runners-up:
A Doll’s House, by Ibsen. There’s nothing so dated as yesterday’s controversy. I mean, a woman actually (gasp!) divorces her jerk of a husband! How shocking!
Lord of the Flies: Using bad writing to convey a flawed message. Great combo :rolleyes:. By the way, for anyone who’s forced to suffer through it, I find that Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky makes an excellent antidote.
Speaking of Heinlein, it’s been remarked that everyone who reads Stranger in a Strange Land either loves it or hates it. I’m in the latter category.
And to all of the folks who mentioned Steinbeck, I used to think that he was the most hopelessly depressing author on the face of the planet, until I started reading Bradbury. Or rather, tried to start reading Bradbury. There are very few books which I simply cannot finish, but The Martian Chronicles was one of them.
According to Twain, by the way, the definition of a classic is “Something that everyone wants to have read, and nobody wants to read”.
Haha. I’m still laughing outloud from that. 
And while we’re still classic-bashing…No matter how hard I try I can’t get through The Divine Comedy
I had to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ in freshman college, and it was awful. I finished it and said, now what was that about?? Yes, I was in an alcohol-induced stupor for most of the year, but still, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering.
One thing I can tell from this thread is that the collective English departments of our high schools and universities are destroying great literature. Nothing kills a good story more than having to look for Metaphors, Meaning, and Symbolism, not to mention having to Compare and Contrast anything.
A teacher can’t expect a teenager with no experience of the world or adult emotions to understand, let alone like, a book like The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch. Teachers also should stop sacrificing enjoyment for analysis. After all, Charlotte Bronte wrote *Jane Eyre * to be read for pleasure, not to be dissected like a dead frog in a classroom of bored teenagers. When teachers turn what should be a pleasure into a chore, they guarantee that they will produce students who hate to read.
Some books are also just plain bad. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a boring book with an obvious theme (Slavery is BAD) and 1-dimensional characters (Uncle Tom is a Saint, Simon Legree is Evil, and Topsy is just fuckin’ weird). I also agree with the general verdict that The Scarlet Letter is painful to read: stilted writing, characters as Types, and a forced, melodramatic climax.
Dicken’s novels are overwritten and include more grotesque caricatures than real characters, although I do have a soft spot for a couple of his books, like Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House.
Other books require a basic level of education and effort from the reader. Ulysses is one of my all-time favorite books, but to the general reader who is unfamiliar with Irish history, Irish mythology, or Homer’s Odyssey, which Joyce used as a template for his book, Ulysses is completely baffling. In addition, Joyce abandoned the “he said/she said” dialogue structure in favor of the infamous “stream of consciousness” narrative, mixing both internal monologue with external action, thereby adding yet another hindrance to reading Ulysses as casual entertainment.
I will now silently berate the world for the following works not being universally love, as forementioned in this thread : **To Kill A Mocking Bird; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Catcher in the Rye; Animal Farm; Great Expectations; Bridge to Terabithia; David Copperfield. **
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I thought, in high school, that the worst piece of trash I would ever be required to read would be ** The Scarlet Letter**, a book I hate with a burning passion. Even then I thought it could have been an ok story if he didn’t drag it out so long; it was not a great surprise to me that I later found some of his short stories decent.
But I was wrong back in high school; there was to be a far worse book in my future. That book is Don Quixote. If someone told me I’d either had to read it again, or have it put where the sun doesn’t shine, I’d be hard pressed to decide which would be a crueler fate. I’m not sure what sort of sadistic streak compells a teacher or professor to asign this book, but it should be a punishable offense. Why oh why is this book a classic? An idiot gets drunk, gets into a fight, gets his butt kicked, and is baled out by a bigger idiot, then gets into another fight, gets his butt kicked…and so on for over 800 pages. And he’s not even brutally murdered by one of his victims, which is how I hoped the story would conclude, so not even the ending is anything like satifying. Suffice to say, every page of this book was a battle to get through.
I liked Far from the Madding Crowd-I never did read Tess.
I do have to say though, reading Great Expectations is almost worth it if you get to watch a movie version. It’s definitely worth it if you get to watch the scene where Miss Havisham runs around in a giant fireball.
There’s something you have to remember about nineteenth century novels. Print was the only mass medium which existed in those days (unless maybe you count stage plays as a mass medium). People (or the middle and upper classes, anyway) depended a lot more on books for entertainment back then. There wasn’t any competition for the reader’s attention from radio, sound recordings, films, television and computer games, so perhaps it was only natural that books would tend to be wordy and sprawling. After all, on a dull winter’s afternoon or evening when the crops were all harvested or the business of the day was all done and there was nothing really worthwhile to do, a reader probably appreciated a book that took some time to read. So those of you who are particularly hard on books published before the appearance of films and radio are perhaps judging them by standards they were never intended to meet.
I don’t know if William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is a considered a classic, but it was certainly the worst “great book” I ever read. I somehow struggled all the way to the end, but when I was done I wanted to burn the book, burn the clothes I’d worn while reading the book, take a very long, very hot shower with lots of soap, and go to the doctor to make sure I’d had all my inoculations. The man was vile. I realize this thing is supposed to be black humor. Shucks, I even have a taste for black humor myself. But this is just too much. Am I the only person who’s ever noticed that William Burroughs was apparently a sociopath?
I also can’t stand James Joyce. Ulysses and * Finnegan’s Wake* were a colossal waste of time to write and are an equally colossal waste of time to read.
I wonder when someone’s going to get around to bashing Atlas Shrugged?
Of the 18th century “classics,” the one that killed me was Clarissa, which-- if I can work my way around the callouses built up to keep those memory cells separate from the rest of my brain–went like this: a notorious rake kidnaps a virtuous beauty, she escapes, she is recaptured, she escapes, she is recaptured, she escapes, she is recaptured . . . and finally he “has his way with her.” She then spends the last 2/3s of a very long book dying of shame. My faith in the 18th century was restored by reading Tom Jones and Moll Flanders, but Clarissa still gives me the willies.
I think one can glean the finer points of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from a viewing of The King and I.
I want to defend Ibsen’s A Doll’s House - yes, the “issue” at hand might seem quite dated, but all the little ways that Henrik tears Nora down and her fear of displeasing him are still reflective of abusive and controlling relationships.
I’ve never read Dostoyevsky’s The Double, so can’t answer the question.
I’m on a classics-reading kick right now. My public library has a whole shelf of them in the front and I pick up a few every time I go. I just finished Gatsby - Fitzgerald’s use of language and the way he creates his characters has its own beauty, but really my overarching reaction was “yawn.”
I read 100 pages of Great Expectations on my flight from hell Friday night and found myself really liking it and laughing at his comic portraits - I yawned through Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist in high school (“Master Bates! Master Bates!”) but I’m enjoying it.
Gobear, I was a very fortunate high school English pupil. My teacher taught us to Compare and Contrast and find Symbol and Metaphor and Allegory and all that shit because he knew it would be expected of us on the AP English Exam and in our academic futures. He was very up front with us about the value of reading books from a Lit Crit perspective and being able to tell the difference from an author who is spinning a yarn and an author who Has A Point . But mostly he wanted us to learn to understand and love (or hate) the books and be able to describe and back up our reactions to them.
He was a part-time actor who frequently read things aloud to us. He wanted us to find the hidden kink or subversiveness in the works (In Hamlet, Gertrude describes Ophelia’s death with such detail and precision that you realize that she stood, watched the entire thing, and never called for help or tried to intervene).
I apologize for the eulogy/hijack, but the most important thing he taught me was that it’s absolutely okay to dislike books that other people think are great or that have risen as “Great Works” from their time. Read them, try to understand what was new about them and why they might have touched people and what new things they brought to the language, and then treasure them or cast them aside as you choose. His simultaneous love of and irreverence toward literature is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received, and I need to write him a letter immediately and thank him.
That said, I’ll add:
The Dead…er,The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. Ditto The Pearl
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Who gives a fuck about this self-centered social climber and her boring bourgois love affairs? Please.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair Revolutionary in its expose of the conditions of industrial servitude and immigrant life, it’s still an overwrought and basically horrid read.
The Bridge, Hart Crane
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe. Dickens may have been paid by the word, Wolfe had so such excuse. And didn’t he write sequels?
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton. Apparently the deep sexual frustrations of we Puritanical New Englanders can only be released through daredevil sledding stunts.
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. Just go see the musical, okay? If you are masochist enough to read the book, any time they start talking about Napoleon it is safe to skip the next 200 pages. You will miss nothing of the story.
The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The house is a metaphor for something, I’m sure of it!
Oh, and what’s that book by Emile Zola about the young woman who has children and her life is just one tragedy after another? She works as a laundress in Paris for a while? It’s supposed to be the precurwsor to the existentialist tradition of Sartre and Camus? Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh. My mind has blocked out the title.
In closing, I share Dorothy Parker’s sentiments about any and all works by Theodore Dreiser.