vanity fair sucked.
Well, I don’t enjoy Dostoevsky, but I have read The Double. We discussed this story in my Madness in Literature class, and we were never able to fully resolve the ending, at least not as a group. There are two takes on it: either it’s really an imposter like Ivanovich says and he’s being taken away so the double can have his life; or Ivanovich is totally off the deep end of a mental illness, probably something in the delusional schizophrenic family, and the scene is his warped perspective of what happens when they drag him off to the asylum. Most of us thought it was the latter, but a few die-hards believed that there really was someone trying to destroy him and take over his life.
You understand the dread that suddenly came over me when I read this post? I have tried for years to suppress the memory of this book. Please lord have mercy on me.
I am about to say something that will get my ass kicked multiple times:
I liked The Scarlet Letter.
I have weird taste in books. I also liked The Name of the Rose - did anybody here ever read that? It strikes me as a book that would have quite a throng of haters connected with it. And in an objective light, Crime and Punishment is not THAT bad, really.
My votes for the worst:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Was there a point to this book? All the symbolism was so digustingly blatant - “all beauty is made up of three components” - I actually beat my head on the table when I read that. I spent 200 pages hoping it would get good.
A Separate Peace. I have never stopped hating this book. It’s bad on every level.
My dislike for To Kill a Mockingbird is well known, so I’ll leave it alone for now. I used to live in Chicago, and they were trying to use the book as a way to fix the city’s deep racial divide. Yeah, 150 years of segregation and discrimination and oppression is gonna stop after everyone in the city is subjected to a PoS book.
Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen Must Die. This is the only book I have ever stopped reading halfway through.
I didn’t care for Huckleberry Finn either. [Comic Book Guy]Worst ending ever![/Comic Book Guy]
I haven’t read the Russians, but I did slough all the way through Ulysses, and only the first chapter was worth it. (The first chapter was brilliant, unfortunately the rest of the book is about someone infinitely more boring). This was the worst thing I have ever worked my way through.
Whoever didn’t finish Huckleberry Finn up there is cheating themselves. Of all the great classics it is the easist read and has the most wonderful insights on America.
Hated Madame Bovary and wanted to throw** Anna Karanina** in front of a train.
Incidentally, I’m about to tackle War and Peace…again. I’ll see if I can make it through this time.
I read “The Scarlet Letter” in high school, and kind of got into it. I even wrote a looong essay for the AP English exam based on “protagonists who flout society’s norms and expectations” (or something like that–it’s been a long time). The sample character was Jean Valjean, but I felt for Hester Prynne even more.
“Confederacy of Dunces” was hysterical!! I went to my freakin’ junior prom with that guy…I thought it was so funny, I loaned it to a co-worker last week. Don’t know if I would have appreciated it in high school, though.
Also read “Name of the Rose” as an adult, and liked it very much, but don’t know if I would have gone for it in my teens.
Now that I have defended my faves, I will actually respond to the OP with the ones I hated most.
“The Sound and the Fury”–relied on Cliffs notes to pass. That thing was so obscure, I didn’t realize Quentin had committed suicide–and he was NARRATING at the time!! Also, anything else by Faulkner–jeez louise, am I the only one who can’t stand ploughing through impenetrable prose about white trash?? I don’t know how the Pulitzer committee made it through.
“Grapes of Wrath” was less awful if you skipped the every-other-chapter weather report. That and “The Pearl” weren’t horribly written, just horribly depressing.
Can’t come up with a third choice that I hated as much, so I will end the post with–Hi Opal!
I think maybe The Eighth Day by Thorton Wilder. At least with all the other books I’ve read, I can think of reasons why they might be good. Language, symbolism, I guess. This book is so dull. AND it had the capability to be a good novel but it went horribly wrong. A main character as described as doing his profession mainly to get money. The main, main dude, John Ashley, looks for a wife by making sure she’ll have no outside interests or ambitions. (Okay, okay, I know it’s another time.) Really it’s just the lack of passion. Even Tale of Two Cities had passion- the revolution and whatnot. I can’t possibly see how this book that is just so dull, so detached could be a classic. I literally can’t comprehend how anyone could have emotion for it. The characters are wooden, the speech is so like words out of a can…Horrible thing.
Okay, I haven’t read a lot of the older stuff mentioned, as my high school English teachers generally taught newer classics. So I have little to comment, except that anyone who didn’t like the Brothers K needs to reread it, because they missed something important. (My coworker and I have a running joke about how everyone should act like characters in TBK - it involves lots of shrieking, mock tears of joy, threats to commit suicide, etc. Really, wouldn’t the world be more interesting if we all emulated Dostoevsky characters?)
Anyway, the only books I hated in high school were Of Mice and Men and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Not a lot of people seem to agree with me on the latter, but it was boring and I hated McMurphy.
Hum, this is interesting. We’ll need quite an oven for all of us about to burn for Tess, I’ve a feeling everyone just wanted her to go the fuck hwome already and leave us alone!
I adored Heart of Darkness, really. I compared the experience to wading through peanut butter - indeed, it’s the longest short book around. But that just made it more fun to savor.
Perhaps having seen Apocalypse Now a couple of years earlier helped.
Wuthering Heights didn’t bother me nearly as much as Tess. Still melodramatic, but I seem to remember enough “writerly” things going on to make it tolerable. Oh, and I credit Madame Bovary (and her hateful accomplice, Eugenie Grandet with killing my interest in the French language - it was beyond all the Camus and Ann
So many people hated A Separate Peace, which I find surprising. I don’t remember it all that well at all, just a vague sense that I liked it but found it a bit fluffy.
And paws off Terabithia, which I read on my own. What a brilliant little novel, disturbing in the right way.
I agree that the problem is that H.S. English teachers haven’t the foggiest idea of how to pick literature for teenagers - and too often fail to place works in an historical context. Ibsen makes no sense if you don’t know exactly what the consequences of divorce were for a “respectable” woman at the turn of the century.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery.
Even thinking about this book makes me wan…ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
I can actually see that happening - people in the future may find those books useful for understanding what was going on in the minds of Christian Fundamentalists in the early 21st century.
I’ve actually enjoyed a lot of the books in this thread… :o
However, I simply loathe Henry James. Good thing the movies are better than his prose. 
I have thrown a few of his books out of sheer disgust (you would have thought that I would have figured it out after one book!). Bleh.
Great Expectations is horrible… and this from a Dickens lover. It took me four tries to finally finish the novel (I’m stubborn, what can I say?) and while I will gladly reread some of his other novels, this one ain’t one of them.
I didn’t hate The Great Gatsby but I did think, “That’s it?” I was rather underwhelmed by it.
Virginia Woolf makes me want to stab my eyeballs with a fork. 'nuff said.
I have a pretty virulent distaste for most late 19th century to early twentieth century American literature. Naturalism? Blech. Stephen Crane? Hurl. Spoon River Anthology? Great Gatsby? All awful.
Oh, and there is a special place in hell for JD Salinger. If you didn’t like Catcher, then by all means read Franny and Zooey. Consider it an experiment to see just how insane you can drive yourself by reading.
On the other hand, Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books of all time. I think I am going to weep in the corner now…
And while I never agree with astorian politically, he is dead bloody on regarding Melville. Billy Budd reads like a swift kick to the solar plexus.
To the Moby Dick haters, I recommend Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. I made my tortured way through Moby Dick in my college American literature course and feel confident in saying that Ahab’s Wife is the book Moby Dick should have been. It’s far more interesting, the language is more accessible (but with a definite 19th century feel). It’s sweeping, engrossing. And like the work is springs from, it’s got a great opening line. (I remember liking Bartleby and appreciated the memory-jogging reference!)
Oh, you To Kill a Mockingbird haters! I love everything about this book. And, I grew up in a small town and my daddy was a lawyer. When everyone in the balcony stands up and Scout is chided to her feet as well for “your father’s passin’,” I get tears every single time.
More Southern fiction: I really liked Cold Mountain. Until Ahab’s Wife, I felt it was the best book I’d read in 10 years! I’d stayed completely away from the book’s hype, however, and feel sure that soured many of its detractors.
I tried to read Heart of Darkness about a year ago. It had never been forced upon me and I was looking forward to it, really, if only to more clearly understand the Apocalypse Now parallels. Blek ick pooey. I skipped ahead to “the horror! the horror!” just to see what “the horror” was. Underwhelmed, I was.
And I agree with TV about 19th century novels as soap operas. If you read Hardy’s Return of the Native with this in mind, it’s actually pretty good. Dickens: I liked Oliver Twist. Speaking of long-windedness, **UncaStuart ** (and others) – have you read Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones: A Novel by Erica Jong? It’s sort of a Candide on acid; it lovingly lampoons the whole genre. (At least that’s how I remember it!)
Daowajan – I was considering answering the OP with The Name of the Rose, but thought better of it since I didn’t actually finish. I enjoyed the movie and thought the book would provide more of the same sinister intricacies. Maybe it did, but they were incomprehensible to me. (Though of course we’re now mortal enemies, now that I know your aberrant Mockingbird opinions 
)
My nomination? The Sound and the Fury. It’s incomprehensible, even in a literature class, even with Cliff notes. Even 20 years hence it’s thoroughly unreadable; I know, I tried. Is there ANYONE who gets it?
It appears I’ve just met my doppelganger.
Cool!
Oh well. At least someone’s even read Flann O’Brien. He s one of my personal favourites as my (misspelled) handle will show (same author, different book).
Half man, half bicycle. Hehehehehe, roar, heheheheh. And that’s not even mentioning the surreal conversation.
Sorry, I know this thread was meant to be more of a poll than a discussion, but I think in the case of someone er…mildy criticising the author from who you get your handle, you should be able to stand up and defend them.
I love it, but I don’t claim to get it. But to me, it’s less a book about “getting” than about experiencing – and much as I enjoyed the experience, I can easily understand why other people wouldn’t enjoy it at all. (It does get a lot easier after the Benjy section, though.)
I love Faulkner in general, though – whenever I read him, I feel like I’m immersing myself in a comfy whirlpool of lit’ry genius. Absalom, Absalom! is my favorite book.
Hijack over. Let’s see – I slammed The Pearl earlier. Another of my well-loathed books would be The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s come in for a lot of abuse on this thread, but that book’s easily the worst of his that I’ve read. In fact, I was surprised when I sort of enjoyed The Sun Also Rises – after Old Man, I was bracing for the worst.