Anything by Thomas Hardy.
Other than books, lots of grim German cinema (my fiance was going through a phase). I actually sort of liked the Herzog, but I finally had to put my foot down about the Fassbinder.
I had to read A Seperate Peace three times. I really, really, really hate it.
I also had to read Romeo & Juliet three times. I really, really, really hate it as well. So many other possible plays, even in just the tragedies, and I had to suffer through this three times before we could get to something like Julius Caesar or MacBeth?
Catcher in the Rye. There are no words in the English language sufficent to describe my hatred of this book. Though I suppose we could start with “Holden Caufield is a whiny bitch.”
Anything by Dickens. The only adaptation of Dickens’ work I like is South Park’s take on Great Expectations.
Anthem. Thank God I didn’t have to read anything else by Rand. I probably would’ve killed myself. Plus, it’s not like the idea was novel to me or anything–I’ve read plenty of far better science fiction with the same idea.
Tess of the D’Ubervilles. It’s not so much that it was bad (although it is) but that the freaking plot is disjointed as hell.
The Color Purple. First, I’m not a fan of the epistlatory style of writing. Second, I didn’t like it. Look, if I want to read about incest and rape, I’ll go read Heinlein. I am never ever reading anything by Walker again.
I’m sure there a lot more. That’s just what comes up off the top of my head from middle and high school. I could probably come up with some things at college as well, but I was normally able to stay away from the classes filled with reading stuff I’m not interested in.
Tracy Lord, I am sorry for getting off topic, but while I have toned down my bashing of christianity from when I started, when someone says something negative about religion, I am going to agree with them, for the potshot I am taking are not gratuitous (without cause), but well earned. I would not agree that a forum without negative comments on something that I believe is wrong, just as I would disagree with the existence of a movie about a celebrity, which avoids mentioning that person’s homosexuality.
That being said, I thought that Dubliners wasn’t that great.
The worst book I ever had to read for school was Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge in tenth grade. It was so contrived and so unrealistic. Every time the scene changed, Hardy would spend six pages describing the architecture. So dull, and filled with eye-rolling stupidity. I’ve never read any Hardy since, and I’m avoiding him.
My stepmom’s favorite book is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. She told me how great it was, and how much it moved her and how I must read it. See, I never quit reading books - I even slogged through The Mayor of Casterbridge. But I quit BMHaWK after 100-something painful pages. The structure of the book: whites invade an Indian settlement. Fighting ensues. Indians die. Rinse and Repeat. I think the history behind it is interesting, but the book as a whole was not.
As far as films go, I’m a devotee of The Criterion Collection. So I checked out The Leopard from the library, as I was currently reading (and enjoying) the book for my history class. Again, I rarely turn off movies before they’re over, but I only made it 2 1/2 hours into The Leopard. (The entire movie is just over 3 hours long.) I know I was close to the end, but I realized that I was wasting my life watching this dull, confusing piece of crap. Well, “piece of crap” is strong - it was beautifully shot, for example. But I never would have understood what was going on had I not been reading the book. I just decided that I couldn’t be bothered to care about the film.
Hmmm, no one had posted about Thomas Hardy when I started writing. Now I look like a bandwagon jumper. 
So, this means I should “Beware of The Leopard”?
Do the Hitchhiker’s books count as classics? If so, I can’t believe I slogged through the last three.
I’ll second Wuthering Heights. I just hoped someone would climb up in a tower and shoot me before I had to read one more page.
For films, it’s a tossup between Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, not coincidentally both with Orson Welles, an overrated hack IMO. I’ve never made it through “Citizen” without falling asleep, and “Touch” is just plain awful and unconvincing. Charleton Heston as a Mexican? Motherfucker please.
In high school - The Old Man and the Sea. He’s old, he’s trying to catch a big fish, he likes DiMaggio, now please just get on with it.
In college, Galileo’s Dialog Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The story about the book, the science, the politics, the Church, is interesting. The book itself is not. Really, really not.
I would agree with you, except that where Liberal expressed an opinion related to the conversation (he didn’t like the book), you took it a step further to ridicule people for their belief. There is a difference between a criticism that is on topic and a completely gratuitous swipe.
Having said that, I’ll also add “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe. Or however you spell his name. We had to read it in 9th grade for English, and the only good thing to come out of it was being able to say “Yams are a man’s crop” with a straight face.
As much as I liked both the movie and book versions of *Possession : A Romance * by AS Byatt, I’ve not managed to get through any of her (his?) other books. Dull does not begin to describe them.
Books for high school English:
A Separate Peace
Ethan Frome
The Old Man and the Sea (although I generally like Hemingway)
Siddhartha
The Sound and the Fury (#1 most overrated, crappy book ever)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Movies and TV:
Ghost In the Shell (I fell asleep)
Akira (it sucks! Sucks sucks SUCKS!)
Books:
The Old Man and the Sea.
Les Miserables.
It was a major struggle to get through either of them, but I had to for school.
Movies:
Gone With the Wind.
Citizen Kane.
Duck Soup.
I tried watching each of these because they’re “classics.” All put me to sleep. I so expected “Duck Soup” to amuse me, but I found the non-Groucho Marx brothers to merely be annoying.
I slogged through about 3/4 of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury many years ago. It was bad enough that it put me off Faulkner forever. Faulkner: “Hey, I know! I’ll write about a quarter of this book as a retard’s stream of (semi)consciousness. Everyone will love it!”
Uh, no.
I recently got rooked into reading L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time,” because it’s a “classic” of children’s literature. (Newbery medal winner and all that). What a pile of pigshit. The writing was atrocious, even by the standards of 40 years ago (when it was first published). Of course, if you really dig books that are written almost entirely in passive voice and tell really lame thinly-veiled religious allegories, then it’s just the book for you.
And I recently finished Bowles’s “The Sheltering Sky.” That book made it onto a couple of those “100 best books of the century” lists. It’s not awful, but certainly now worth all the hubbub.
Seconded. In fact, I had the start a thread to get people to convince me to read this big, heapin’ pile of donkey dung.
/Ethan Frome. Worst book ever; so bad I’ve been mentally rewriting it for 25 years. (My versions involve the Titanic, TB, exploding meth labs, or stampeding herds of buffalo.) Hey, because something is dull and pointless doesn’t automatically mean it’s good.
I didn’t care for *The Scarlet Letter * either. An interesting subject but the book was slow and dreary. A prime example of taking an interesting theme and dulling it down.
I loved John Steinbeck, though.
Pretty much everything I was forced to read in high school and college English classes bored me to tears – either because the work itself was uninteresting or because the teachers beat any literary quality it may have had into submission. It took me a good 20 years to acknowledge that Shakespeare could write a ripping good tale.
As far as movies go, most of the “epics” didn’t do anything for me. I remember falling asleep during *Dr. Zhivago * – and I thought that one was pretty good.
When I saw 2001 as an 18-year old, I thought it was the coolest, deepest thing I’d ever experienced. When I saw it 20 years later, I laughed at it.
I will only mention those that they forced me to read at school. I won’t mention those that I forced myself to read:
1.- Martin Fierro by Jose Hernandez. I loved it.-
2.- The Go Between by some guy (L.P. Hartley?). Magnificent.-
3.- Los Pasos Perdidos by Alejo Carpentier. Great book.-
4.- Miss Julia an A doll’s house by Ibsen. I liked them very much.-
5.- Don Quijote de la Mancha. I will confess that I despised it. It’s supposed to be one of the greatest classics if not the greatest.-
6.- Arms and the man by Bernard Shaw. Great play.-
7.- Treasure Island. Best adventure book ever.-
8.- Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn by twain. Great books.-
9.- Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. Best ghost story ever. The sixth sense is a bad copy of this magnificent book.-
10.- Fausto and Werther by Goethe. Good ones a bit dry but good nonetheless.-
11.- And lots of poems by Dickinson, Shakespeare, Borges, Calderon de la Barca, Pablo Neruda, Rubén Darío, etc.
I love reading and I was the only person in my class that finished the books that they forced me to read. I miss that part of school.-
Just so you know, in addition to what Audiobottle already noted, I didn’t say anything negative about religion; rather, I said something negative about myself. My inability to enjoy and understand the Bible was due to my own ignorance. It wasn’t the fault of either the book or the religion.
A Tale of Two Cities. I had to read it in college and found it the most boring thing I’d ever read. This was surprising, since I usually love Dickens. It did end up being useful as a sleep aid, however.
Other than that, I generally have liked everything I’ve been required to read. I guess that makes you and I both geeks, Indygrrl.
You mean like the Chronicles of Narnia?