There are so many, so very many.
Catcher in the Rye was bad.
Anything by Steinbeck - the Grapes of Wrath comes to mind.
So very very many…I’ll need to think some more
I too would’ve mentioned Robbins’ work, had I suspected for a moment that his books are generally regarded as “good” by anyone other than a dwindling circle of preening would-be hippies. (Here is a well-composed takedown of the man’s work.)
It should have ended when Mike laughed at the monkey. Then would have been great.
I actually like quite a few of the books mentioned here but I will have to second Joyce’s Ulysses as being the worst good book I have read.
Have you seen the All-England Summarize Proust Competition?
I know I’m not the only one who liked Great Expectations (didn’t read it until college though) but am I really the only one who liked Ethan Frome? Such karmic irony!
Someone on the first page asked about non-fiction. The Perfect Storm sucked beyond all measure. I’m not sure which would be worse, reading the clinical descriptions of drowning again, or actually drowning…
I was never forced to read Proust, although after having tried, I am at a loss as to why this guy is considered one of the great authors of all time, or why his seven-volume series is considered great literature. Someone explain this one to me, please?
I violently hated Moby Dick, because I was required to read it for school… and because I expected something other than what I got.
*Moby Dick * is a great story. It’s laden with symbolism, and even if you don’t get the symbolism, ANYONE can empathize with Ishmael’s slow realization that he’s aboard a ship captained by an obsessed lunatic, hunting a multiton predator that has smashed any number of other ships just like the one he happens to be standing on… and none of his crewmates are going to lift a finger to STOP this madman, for one reason or another, even though they all are beginning to realize, to some degree or other, that they’re doomed if they don’t. Having seen the Gregory Peck film, I was sure I was in for a treat.
Wrong. Herman Melville, I must assume, was being paid by the word, since he never used five where a dozen would do, and never used a dozen when a page or two could be shoehorned in. Any time the story was beginning to spark up, Melville immediately drowned it under a flood of verbage. *Moby Dick * was the book that taught me that Cliff Notes are a boy’s best friend…
Catch 22
Seconding misshannah’s ‘good luck!’ I’m an Austenophile. I even visited Bath last year just to tread those sacred streets where once she walked. I don’t terribly much like Emma, and agree totally with misshannah about Northanger Abbey, it’s a bit weak read as anything but a parody. I have to put in a plea for Persuasion which I think is just lovely, and one of Miss Austen’s most mature works.
I’m also an unabashed lover of Mansfield Park, but that definitely falls into the guilty pleasures category. Fanny Price is such a put-upon heroine! But there are some genuinely wonderful comedic moments in it too.
I’ll see you Clarissa and raise you Swann’s Way (Book One of five) in Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust – the most spectacular, eye-bleeding, head pounding, soul destroyingly tedious book ever written. At least in Clarissa the characters go places, do stuff and are considerate enough to stop and send along a 10 page missive.
Okay, Clarissa too.
Many others have mentioned Thomas Hardy (and with goooood reason), but no one has mentioned mine: The Mayor of Casterbridge. If this is considered a classic, then in 150 years today’s soap opera scripts will be considered literary masterpieces.
I was forced to read Charles Dickens as a schoolgirl. I hated anything by him. Oddly enough, there were plenty of other English Lit selections that I enjoyed. My father and sister love Dickens, so I gave him another go when I was in my mid20s. I still hated him. He’s used up all his chances with me.
I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, so I have a special hatred for Robert Jordan’s multivolume fashion and mannerism descriptions. Now the publishers look at his success, and decide that ALL fantasy works that they publish must be multivolume epics, no matter if the story can and should be written as a stand-alone single volume. Heck, bring back the Doubles, I say. Ace used to put out things called Ace Doubles, which would have two novellas or novelettes (there’s a word count difference, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you which is longer) printed in one volume. The books had no real backs, each side was the front of one of the novels. I had one book which had a novella on one side and a collection of short stories by the author on the other. Stories come in different lengths, and should not be shortened or padded to suit the current notion of ideal book length.
I hated To Kill A Mockingbird. I can never get past the first pages without throwing it across the room. I don’t know how I passed grade 10 English without reading it, but I did.
Hating The Stone Angel actually endangered my mark. I had one of those “parrot my opinions back to me” English teachers, and since I didn’t sympathize with Hagar like she did, I didn’t get a very good grade in that unit. IMO, Hagar was a stupid, selfish, ignorant old hag and she deserved everything she got (and lost). I wasn’t about to feel sorry for her just because she was old. People get old. It happens. Boo-hoo. I don’t care if you’re 35 or 85, a selfish bitca is a selfish bitca.
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. There is nothing wrong with disguising a political tract as a story. Of course, you should eventully come up with a story to wrap around your thesis. And there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with using all your characters as mouthpieces. But your dialogue shouldn’t consist of one character spouting pages and pages of stilted rhetoric and another character saying, “Well, that makes sense”. And there’s nothing wrong with forgetting all about the plot for 2/3s of the book and then hurriedly tacking on three chapters of cliched pap at the end.
I’m just kidding. That’s all wrong.
noodler, if you hadn’t named the book, I would have thought for sure you were talking about The Fountainhead. Blegh.
Actually, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma are the only two Austens I ever tackled. No real reason why it took me so long to get to more Austen, since I loved P&P, Emma kind of took the wind out of my sails.
What would you recommend as Austen’s best after P&P?
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll see everyone’s Henry James and raise them The Ambassadors. Never have I experienced a writer so determined to avoid his own novel’s subject matter. 500 pages of overgrown verbiage.
William Burrough’s Naked Lunch. A novel concieved during heroin addiction and narrated in pidgin English. Ugh. I’ve always found Burrough’s vision interesting and (inconcievably) intelligent, but the writing here is just bloody awful, repetitious crap.
Spider Robinson Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. I’ll admit that I read this assuming it would be science fiction, but anything this poorly written and touchy-feely ought to have been shit-canned instead of inflicted on the general public. With few exceptions, I hate it when an author creates a fantasy world which is nothing more than his personal jack-off fantasy. That’s not writing - that’s masturbation. Are you listening Robert Heinlein?
Don Quixote. I took this sucker with me on holiday last year. The only good thing about the book was that it helped to made my week long holiday seem like a month!
And now two words about The Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Those words are “APPALLINGLY BAD.” Somewhere out there is my Cornell University Comp Lit professor Alex Gelley, from 1970 or thereabouts, who still wakes up in a cold sweat some nights, as he recalls my classroom dissection of this “masterwork” of German fiction:
The characters’ dialogue is purely unbelievable. The characters’ motivations are also unbelievable. The action crawls. The emotional moments are completley flat. [For instance, an infant accidentally falls out of a rowboat along about chapter 17–and drowns–and no one really gives a hoot, including the parents. ] The exposition is nightmarishly slow and BOOOOOORING. The French wrote brilliant, insightful, suspenseful novels a whole two centuries earlier, so it’s not “just the voice of a different century.” It’s just BAD BAD WRITING. In short, if I had turned in any portion of this novel in a creative writing class, it would have received–and deserved–a “D.”
I think I’ll nominate **The Red Pony ** by Steinbeck. If this book wasn’t “easy,” there is no way it would ever be a required reading.