Fortunately, I’m not well-educated enough to have been forced through most of the crap in this thread…I tried Gatsby on my own and just couldn’t do it. I had to take notes while reading Wuthering Heights (too many characters with the same names), and I agree about hating Heathcliff and Cathy. My mom is actually named after Cathy, so as you can imagine, I had some serious questions for my grandma! Turned out she had only seen the movie version.
Now, to piss off all the sci-fi fans, the worst book I ever read was
I think The Celestine Prophecy doesn’t actually qualify as a bad good book. That one was just popular and very very bad.
My vote goes to Elizeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Lee. Poem in novel form? Novel in poet form? Whatever. Yawn.
P.s. I completely and utterly disagree with some of the other books mentioned here, but this is a poll not a discussion thread. Isn’t my restraint admirable?
Of the books I’ve read for fun, as opposed to school, I have to go w/ The Arithmetic of Life. Good premise, but some things just can’t be tackled with arithmetic.
Dickens can at least be understood on a first reading whether or not it stands to someone’s taste. I didn’t mean to sound so contentious on the points about Joyce and Faulkner. I actually like them and if you didn’t get it from my post I have read “Absolam, Absolam” a few times and I think it is a great book. I do think that we should perhaps classify books like “Finnegan’s” and “Absolam” in a separate catagory than other novels. Maybe this can be a discussion for a different thread. If they must be approached in an entirely different way than other novels perhaps they should be considered differently. I think that this could actually bolster their popularity as works of art as well as help the general reader know what to do with them.
As for book titles in quotes - get over it you punctuation nazi - this is a internet message board - the quotes help the book title stand out. I don’t believe that this MB will ever be up for printing but if it does I’ll be sure to hire you as a copy editor.
I’m glad someone mentioned Dune Messiah and Interview with the Vampire. I loved Dune, and was unprepared for Herbert’s confusing follow-up. The “action” and “legend” parts of the story appealed to me more than the “special powers” parts.
My own contribution would be Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. It was a day in the life of an alcoholic in Mexico, with lots of non-English words thrown in to show how well-educated Lowry was. Painful (O.K.), but boring and incomprehensible (not O.K.).
I love Dickens and Faulkner, but don’t always like their books. Oliver Twist and Intruder in the Dust aren’t personal favorites.
All I have to say is apparently the NYT reviewer, Dorothy Parker and V.S. Naipaul must have had some financial incentive in this book’s success; because it is not funny, charming nor picaresque. The main character is a boorish lout with no redeeming qualities and the other characters are cardboard cutouts who have no personality nor merit. Far too many trees were sacrified for the paper copies of this book are printed on.
In other words I agree totally with online reviewer Chris T Eigsti from Hyde Park, MA United States
Unlike him, I couldn’t finish it.
I also despise Kerouac’s On the Road. Perhaps I just don’t like books about selfish, drunken louts. I don’t mind flawed heroes. I don’t even need the main character to be a hero at all. But these guys are just worthless.
I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, Tess is the worse book I have ever read. The endless descriptions of landscape is anoying and the charecters are even worse. Angel is portrayed as the good guy, but is a complete hypocrite. The way Tess lets people treat her made me want to slap her, and Alec was WAY too stereotypically villan.
There are very, very few books I don’t like. I can usually slog through anything and find something redeeming about it. Most of the time, it would never even occur to me to dislike a book, regardless of its flaws.
But Frankenstein gives me THE RAGE. I probably wouldn’t be able to explain why I hate it so very, very much. I read it last semester in my Horror Novel class, and we read Dracula right after (which I loved) and while I was describing in class all the reasons I loved it, my Prof interupted and said “So basically you like it because it’s not Frankenstein?”
“Well…yeah…”
“You can’t judge all books based on that criteria.”
No, I think I can. It’s the lowest denominator for me.
Good grief, I am shocked that no one has yet mentioned Walden or Leaves of Grass.(the Leaves of Grass was meant to be sarcastic) While I have followed the entire thread I have to say that I enjoyed almost every freakin book mentioned.
It completely suprises me that so far no one has mentioned Finnegans Wake buy James Joyce…
I also remember The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant being a complete waste. I’m not sure if they were actually supposed to be good though. They were just fantasy at a time when there weren’t a lot of options.
Anything by Faulkner. Everything by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And -
I read Pride and Prejudice, and loved it. I am currently about half-way thru Emma, and it is painfully dull. Someone reassure me - does anything happen besides this pretentious little twit messing up other people’s love lives?
To be honest, I rarely liked books I ever had to read for any class. But I think part of that is that the act of teaching a book sucks ALL the enjoyment out of it. Having said that, there are some books that are worse than others:
The Stranger by Albert Camus. I wanted Mersault to just DIE already.
Anything by Dickens. I’ll be the first to admit that Dickens helped to create many of the staples of fiction. And that he was a genius. But, maudlin is too mild a word.
I just finished rereading Emma. She is kind of a jerk. I don’t want to be responsible for reassuring you if you end up hating it (yes, my self-esteem rests in the opinion of others), but I can say that I enjoy the end and that Emma does grow, somewhat…
Personally I think Heinlein is GOD. But that’s just my opinion.
However, the worst SF/Fantasy book I’ve every read is Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. Eight hundred pages of tripe. The first book that I ever threw across a room after finishing it The book that inspired t-shirts at Cons that read “I survived Dhalgren”.
Dracula is complete and utter dreck, but it’s fun dreck. And The Annotated Dracula is even better, as the annotations take care to point out the especially dreck-y parts – like how Van Helsing’s accent comes and goes.
A Confedereacy of Dunces: Reading this book is like reading a script to a really bad sitcom…only it involves reading. I’ll never be able to understand why so many people thought this book was funny.
Catcher in the Rye: I thought this book was written really well, it’s just it had no point! It was like some moody teenager just wrote about his day to day life.
Fellowship of the Ring: I felt like I was reading a fantasy book written by Tom Clancy (whose books I often enjoy, but whose writing style is all wrong for fantasy). It was just so dry and lifeless. I loved the movies though.
