She’s that popular here. Same difference. Same mentality.
No…they don’t go as far downhill as the Clan of the Cave Bear books…but they have a head start so they reach bottom just as fast.
This is the case with most children’s books.
Anything that Oprah has recommended, like:
*The Bridges of Madison County
Eat, Pray, Love
Twilight
*
Love Story - can’t remember the author, but hugely popular in the 70s.
Another vote for Jonathan Livingston Seagull & the Flowers in the Attic books.
& anything by Barbara Cartland. Romance is a genre full of terrible writers. But she was beyond dreadful.
Most of mine have been listed, but I’m going to go ahead and add anything by Kathy Reichs. And I wanted to like her books, I expected to like them, but every time I try to read one I can only manage to stagger through the first ten pages or so before her writing style completely does me in.
Yep. I reckon you could draw a pretty accurate graph showing three lines: Rowlings rising fame and fortune, ever Increaing book length, and ever decreasing book coherency and readability.
[IMO] HP peaked at Prisoner of Azkhaban and went into steady decline from then on. (I really like the first 3 books, I really dislike the last 4).
I think the book I hated the most that was very popular was The Horse Whisperer.
I don’t remember much about it now, but at the time it made me crazy angry in its horrible characters and plot.
I can’t remember the author or the title, but I HATED this novel.
It was the long and boring story of a relationship that was - then wasn’t - then was, for hundreds of pages. Nothing endeared me to either of the characters.
At the end we learn that the hundreds of pages were all dreamt the moment before she dies in a car crash. I think I literally threw the book across the room.
I hated Running With Scissors too. The mean world and good me. Ugh.
Empire of the Ants was stiff and annoying to me. It may have been the translation, but I didn’t care about any characters; ant or human. My French isn’t good enough for me to read a novel. Oh well.
I love the Harry Potter books. Boo to you who don’t like them.
This will probably mark me as being beyond Philistine to the point of Carthaginian, but I gave up on Blood Meridian when I was only twenty pages from the end, which may say something worse about either me or the book than if I’d done so only twenty pages in.
I appreciated a story similar to Moby Dick, but with Ishmael (the Kid) having no moral center, and no redeeming Starbuck character whatsoever; and the Judge’s scientific curiosity based on his belief “that which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” raises him above the average psycho killer.
But like Moby Dick, I lost interest when it became an endless exercise in describing how hot & nasty the Southwest can be. Just lifting the same weight over and over, using different adjectives. I grasp the idea of “the landscape becomes a character in itself.” But the landscape already has a perfectly respectable job: to be the setting. Leaving the actual characters go undeveloped because they’re morally vacant anyway seems kind of facile, as does discarding plot so as to point out the meaninglessness of violence.
Seconded.
I have to defend it, since the book singlehandedly pushed me into developing my own voice as an author. I was 15. It resonated deeply with me and still does. I try to read it as least once a year.
The way I see it, Holden is a little whiny and a little entitled because of the culture he’d been raised in, sure. But the whole point is that this elitest culture was killing him. He lost his little brother to leukemia and everyone insists on pretending things are fine. He was the victim of attempted or actual sexual assault by his teacher and he is expected to go on pretending things are fine. His room-mates regularly take advantage of women without consequence, including the one woman he genuinely loves, and again, he is powerless to do anything about it and his attempted intervention only ends with him getting his ass kicked.
Holden sees the hidden depravity of other humans and is disgusted by the way everyone chooses to look the other way. He is living in a massively fucked up world and from his perspective is the only one who seems to be willing to acknowledge it. His proclamation of everything as ‘‘phony’’ isn’t arrogance, it’s anger. And because he is a child the only way he can find to cope with it is to behave self-destructively, which is exactly what children do when they feel powerless. When he identifies himself as a ‘‘terrific liar’’ the irony is that everyone is a terrific liar. He’s the only one with the balls to admit it.
When I was staying in Mexico one summer I was stuck with only a handful of books to read, and ‘‘Mensaje en una botella’’ was one of them. It’s pretty bad when you can tell a book is awful and it’s not even in your own language.
As I read it (with no prior knowledge of the plot), I thought,
''I might as well skip to the part where…
he finds out she’s a journalist and feels betrayed, thus establishing some pseudo-conflict before they spend the rest of their lives together
I turned to about 20 pages before the ending, and sure enough!
I stopped reading that and started reading a self-help book about overcoming infidelity to save your marriage. Much more entertaining.
I’m agreeing with most of these and adding The Celestine Prophecy. Whew that was bad.
(Sorry, should have read further–couple people beat me to it. Pure and idiotic dreck, wasn’t it?)
I loved the story of Three Cups of Tea but it badly needed better editing. There were a lot of missed typos and awkward phrasing that really could’ve been smoothed out. Something was jumping out at me and pulling me out of the narrative regularly. I passed my copy on to a friend, but warned her ahead of time that she might be unable to finish it because of the poor editing.
HA. The only reason I read it in the first place was also that I was living abroad and was desperate for books. I was doing my junior year of college abroad in Israel and my roommate’s aunt (who was, I think, Israeli, so English wasn’t her first language) occasionally lent her books to read, and then she’d lend them to me. They were always total dreck, but I would inevitably read them anyway. I read at least three Danielle Steel books as a result, and although they were supremely shitty, fucking Message in a Bottle was worse. By a lot.
This is reminding me of a conversation I overheard while browsing the slim pickings of English-language books in a bookstore in Sofia last year. The movie of Atonement had recently come out, and I guess the American (or possibly Canadian, I guess) couple standing a few feet away from me had just seen it.
Woman: Oooh, look, Atonement is a book!
Man: Oh, do you want to get it?
Woman: Hmmmm…no, I don’t think so. OH LOOK A NICHOLAS SPARKS BOOK I HAVEN’T READ!
Man: I suppose you’re going to get that.
Woman: Well, I have to, I’ve read everything else he’s written!
On several occasions, I struck up conversations with English-speaking people in bookstores in Sofia (usually they were there for odd and interesting reasons and on one occasion I managed to help out a really confused British woman), but I elected to ignore these particular people.
P.S. I didn’t particularly like Atonement either. I found the literary device it uses to be kind of irritating.
P.P.S. I’m a bit of an elitist, apparently. But anyone who speaks in capslock praise for Nicholas Sparks deserves shunning.
Yep. I made myself slog through the first one; I was working in a bookstore at the time and felt it was important to keep up with popular items. Disregarding the horrific theology, barely-veiled racism and Antisemitism, and conspiracy BS, it’s just terribly written.
I haven’t touched the others, but I’m assuming they’re the same.
You think so? This is the most widely quote book ever. Its also a book that inspired thousands of major works of arts from lots of different genres: music, painting, operas, etc.
Even if you don’t believe God inspired it, even if you are an atheist it has a powerful message and most of it works as a work of art:
Eh, I don’t think it’s very good either; I came into the thread to mention the Bible too. Yes, some of it reads nice; a lot of it doesn’t. Ultimately, it is what it is, a book effectively written by a committee and run through multiple translations. Calling it uneven is an understatement. Then again, it could be considered more a collection of stories than a single long work, for the same reason.
3 pages and nobody’s mentioned James Joyce yet? I’m astounded.
Oprah may have shilled those books, but if you actually look at her Book Club, her picks are really pretty good. Sure, not every one is great (“A Million Little Pieces”), but on the whole, anyone who tries to get people to read Tolstoy and Steinbeck is OK by me.
I’d have to nominate Eragon. I don’t care how young the author was when it first came out, it’s cliche, badly-written crap. He borrowed elements from every single fantasy story ever, and while this can be done well, with him it just reads like plagiarism. J.K. Rowling did it first (well, before Chris Paolini, anyway) and did it better. Also, Terry Pratchett was published at SIXTEEN, and I’ll bet you anything his book could kick Eragon’s ass.