I’m surprised that it took so long for the Great Gatsby to make it onto here. I hated almost every character in that book.
I did, however, love Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sue me.
Great Expectations
Romeo and Juliet - I’m sorry, I’m not one for iambic pentameter and that plot is trite, imho
The Count of Monte Cristo was good for the first 200 pages or so, but it just dragged on and on after that…
Worst “Good Book”? The King James version?
This thread has gone two pages and no one has mentioned any of J F Cooper’s awful Leatherstocking Tales? We had to read two of them as a H.S. sophomore, and then write a paper comparing how dreadful The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer were.
I’d like to redub this thread “I Hate The Classics” or “How My 8th Grade Teacher Traumatized Me.”
Me, I hated Ayn Rand’s Anthem with the white hot passion of a thousand burning suns. As a result, I have developed an aversion to her so strong that I cannot bring myself to open any of her other books. No great loss, IMO.
First of all, it’s Absalom, Absalom! and titles of books are not put in quotes. Second of all, I don’t agree that everyone needs to read these books over and over to get them. Faulkner, like so many authors mentioned on this thread, is an acquired taste. You don’t like him? Fine. That in and of itself doesn’t make him (or any of the other greats) a bad writer. There is value in making a distinction between your taste and what is good literature. Keep that in mind.
This is a good point: high school kids aren’t genernally asked to do advanced calculus, so why force them to read Absalom, Absalom! before they’re able to comprehend it? That only alienate them from something they might enjoy when they’re a bit older. I cannot see making high school kids read much Faulkner, with the exception of a few short stories like “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning.” Funny that you can say this about your guy Dickens but not for Faulkner, who you didn’t get. Hmmm.
The book was boring and dull, but I didn’t despise it. I despised the three classes afterwards, where the professor insisted Gatsby was gay because he wore a pink suit…
And I hated Last of the Mohicans, too, even worse cause we had to watch the dreadful Daniel Day Lewis movie, too. One of the few times everyone in class complained about watching a movie. It was almost worth suffering through that dreck to be able to enjoy Twain’s Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.
Oh god. Not Absalom, Absalom!. There were only two books that were required reading in my schooling that I didn’t read. AA was the first. Orlando by Virginia Woolf was the second. Yeurrch.
Being a long time sci-fi reader and having read and enjoy most sci-fi classics, the one I have never liked is Dune. (I know I’m risking a pitting for this)
It seems like it would make a good 200 page book but it’s stretched out into 500 pages.
oh guys, no, not Great Gatsby…
But then again, I hated it the first time I read it, too. I think I had to be a little older to really appreciate it…
But my contribution has got to be Woman in White or Billy Budd . Horrible, horrible, one sentence into Billy Budd I was ready to carve out my eyes… it’s the reason I’ve never attempted Moby Dick.
“Wuthering Heights,” hands down. The style is atrocious, the plot is beyond tedious. Nostradamus probably vomited when he foresaw this aberration.
Honorable mentions:
“The Scarlet Letter” - mentioned above.
“A Tale of Two Cities” is awful, but at least one gets the satisfaction of having one of the characters decapitated in the end.
“Dune Messiah” sucked like a former White House intern. If the first one was too damn long, this one was mercifully shorter - but had no redeeming qualities (or plot, for that matter). I read this one of my own free will. God help me. (The third is better, but not worth reading either.)
Does nobody else who sees this sort of thread immediately think of Don DeLillo? I had to read Ratner’s Star is a sociology class my junior year of college. I pointed out that it was an incoherent, meaningless mess written by an author who is so obsessed with his own supposed cleverness that he can no longer be bothered to produce any sort of plot or characters to speak of, and that if I never heard one of his cringe-inducing jokes about adolescent horniness again it would be too soon. The professor responded that I was projecting my own flaws onto the book.
Among popular literature, I don’t see why Isaac Asimov has such a large following. Some creativity, yes, but as a novelist he’s strictly mediocre. Also, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke is flat-out bad.
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Lord, did I hate that book. I asked a friend of my sister’s with a Ph.D in Literature if, since I understood the importance of the work itself, I was allowed to HATE the book. She said yes. Phew.
Another one is The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike. Suck, suck, suck. Like a Hoover.
I enjoyed Silas Marner. I think I’m a mutant.
I really tried to read this book–mostly because my sister had, and out of pure perverseness, I wanted to see if it was as bad as she claimed. I spent most of my time flipping to the back of the book where they had a translation of obscure phrases, just so I could know what the hell everyone was talking about. I didn’t get too far, needless to say, before I agreed that this book sucked majorly. And I never finished it.
What my sister said she hated most about it was how Heathcliff and Catherine are always made out to be these tragic lovers, when in fact, Heathcliff was a major asshole, and Catherine a silly spoiled little bitch!
I recently gritted by teeth and pushed myself through Starship Troopers.
Classic my ass.
I have to throw my vote in with A Tale of Two Cities. I’ve tried 3 times to read it and failed each time.
I liked Dune. The later books went from bad to painful rather quickly though. I loved Starship Troopers but to each their own.
Return of the Native bored me to tears.
Even since high school and no matter how many re-reads I’ve tried, I still can’t make it more than one-quarter of the way through Dune, which is quite sad because I really want to get the humor in the Harvard Lampoon parody Doon.
Here are just a few of the “good” books which I have found to be practically unreadable:
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
Interview With a Vampire, by Anne Rice
Pretty much anything written by Joseph Conrad.
While certainly not a “classic”, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song won a freakin’ Pulitzer!! What a piece of shit. In fact, everything by Mailer is a piece of shit.
He drones on and on and freakin’ on about the most mundane, pointless, miniscule trivia of the guy’s life. How he got out of bed, scratched his ass, farted, went to the bathroom, which teeth he brushed in which order, who he saw, talked to, what they said, blah blah blah. All without a point or any relationship to the story. Who the fuck cares what he and the mailman talked about?
A pointless crapfest. Shampoo directions are facinating by comparison.
Did I say it was pointless? It was. Pointless.
Oh yeah,
Mayflower
This is exactly what I thought about this borefest. I wanted the two of them bazooka’d after about a minute.