The books you hated!

[JGittes]

I don't understand the dislike for The Great Gatsby early in the thread. I didn't fully appreciate it until my third read-through when I was nearly 50. I'm an American expat living in England with a German wife, and the last line:

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

Fully describes American, British, and German current politics and culture and was written nearly a century ago. It applies to personal psychological understanding as well.

Regarding books of which I didn't understand the love, anything by Sally Rooney. She burst on the literary scene a few years ago, and I thought I'd widen my horizons by reading 'Normal People' and 'Conversations with Friends.' I was so confused by Conversations with Friends that I tried to re-read the first 30 pages three times before realizing the problem. She doesn't use quotation marks around dialogue. I re-read the beginning a fourth time but found it not worth the effort. It is well written but interesting only if one is in one's 20s and going through those experiences for the first time.

Except for rousing adventure tales like The Count of Monte Cristo, the foreign classics mentioned here require so much understanding of the time's history and sociology that it isn't fair to judge them by contemporary standards. I generally don't read them because I don't want to invest the time to understand them completely. But I re-read the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Time Machine when I read commentary that the latter is essentially a sequel to the former, and I'll be damned if that's not the worst interpretation of those two novel's relationship.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

That might have been a closet gay commentary. I'd have to dig my copy out of storage and re-read the ending.

 

[SimonDoom]

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I can see why those two novels would be boring. Actually, most of his work starts slowly and has a generally slow pace. If you ever get around to reading him again, I recommend Crime and Punishment. It has the most interesting plot by far - it starts with a murder and is filled with dark psychology and philosophical musings and even the ending is sort of a happy one, which is rare for his work.

Crime and Punishment is a lot like an episode of Columbo. You know who the murderer is right from the beginning, and the detective seems to be clueless much of the time, but it turns out he knew the truth all along. Dostoevsky is one of the greatest novelists of human psychology.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't understand the dislike for The Great Gatsby early in the thread. I didn't fully appreciate it until my third read-through when I was nearly 50. I'm an American expat living in England with a German wife, and the last line:

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

Fully describes American, British, and German current politics and culture and was written nearly a century ago. It applies to personal psychological understanding as well.

It's beautifully written. Even if the story doesn't grab you, the prose is worth the read. Unlike some of the other books discussed in this thread, it's a little on the short end to be considered one of the greatest novels. It's only a little over 40,000 words, barely a novel. I read it in high school, then again in college, and again years later, and I've always felt it holds up well with each reading. I always liked that last line, as well. It's one of the best last sentences in a novel.

 

[JGittes]

--- Unlike some of the other books discussed in this thread, it's a little on the short end to be considered one of the greatest novels. It's only a little over 40,000 words, barely a novel. ...

I understand your reluctance.

But.

Heart of Darkness is only about 34k words, and I'd be hard-pressed to find a more powerful critique of colonial plunder at any length.

It may be a function of the length of lived experience. I continue to find depths to plumb in Big Two-Hearted River; both parts are less than 8k words.

 

[SimonDoom]

I understand your reluctance.

But.

Heart of Darkness is only about 34k words, and I'd be hard-pressed to find a more powerful critique of colonial plunder at any length.

It may be a function of the length of lived experience. I continue to find depths to plumb in Big Two-Hearted River; both parts are less than 8k words.

I'm not reluctant to acknowledge it's a great work. I think it is. But as a novel I don't rank it with Anna Karenina or Tom Jones or The Ambassadors or The Age of Innocence or The Power and the Glory, to name a few. To me, The Great Gatsby is an example of a story that adroitly and eloquently touches on certain subjects but doesn't deal with them as profoundly or deeply as some other novels do. There's a lightness to it. It's not a bad thing, but it holds it back in my estimation of novel GOATness.

 

[RoperTrace]

I'd like to nominate: The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper. Many years later, I had to start, and re-start Gorky Park by Marin Cruz Smith. The last time I re-started it, I discovered that I liked it. That discovery almost made me go back and try to read The Pathfinder again, but nope.
(edit): I'd like to add that Waiting For Godot is the most frustrating play I've ever read by Samuel Beckett.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

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I can see why those two novels would be boring. Actually, most of his work starts slowly and has a generally slow pace. If you ever get around to reading him again, I recommend Crime and Punishment. It has the most interesting plot by far - it starts with a murder and is filled with dark psychology and philosophical musings and even the ending is sort of a happy one, which is rare for his work.

Oh fine I'll give it another go. To be fair I was forced to read it in high school by a real creep of an English teacher lol.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Gorky Park by Marin Cruz Smith.

Fabulous book! Red Square is even better. I've read four Cruz Smiths, all amazing.

 

[WhiteTailDarkTip]

The Mayor of Casterbridge. We had to read it in English at school and my dad was so pleased because he was a huge Thomas Hardy fan. At the time I liked fast-paced SF so I found it stodgy and dull and he couldn't understand why I didn't like it.
School almost managed the same feat with Romeo and Juliet. However, we went to a screening of the classic 1968 Zefferelli film and that brought the story to life for me in a way that the text couldn't, even if the director pruned about half the dialogue!

 

[SimonDoom]

I'd like to nominate: The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper.

I've only read one Cooper novel, The Prarie. It made no impression on me. Sometime later, I read Mark Twain's scathing and hilarious essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, and I don't think I can ever bring myself to read Cooper again.

 

[RoperTrace]

I've only read one Cooper novel, The Prarie. It made no impression on me. Sometime later, I read Mark Twain's scathing and hilarious essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, and I don't think I can ever bring myself to read Cooper again.

I'll have to look for Twain's essay. To be fair, I did read Last of the Mohicans and liked it better than Pathfinder.

 

[Bamagan]

Since it's kind of topical, I rather loathed Wicked. I don't know how much it got changed for the musical or the upcoming film, but I enjoyed almost nothing about the book. The author's MO feels a little skeevy to me, but aside from that, I found his approach to be somewhat akin to de-colorizing an imaginative piece of children's literature in order to make it seem more 'adult' and grim. He took Oz and turned it back into Kansas, and a rather sleazy Kansas at that. In the genre of mainstream fanfiction, its popularity is somewhat distressing and baffling to me.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'll have to look for Twain's essay. To be fair, I did read Last of the Mohicans and liked it better than Pathfinder.

You can find it easily for free on the Internet. I highly recommend it. It's one of the funniest pieces of literary criticism ever written.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I'd like to nominate: The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper. Many years later, I had to start, and re-start Gorky Park by Marin Cruz Smith. The last time I re-started it, I discovered that I liked it. That discovery almost made me go back and try to read The Pathfinder again, but nope.
(edit): I'd like to add that Waiting For Godot is the most frustrating play I've ever read by Samuel Beckett.

Mark Twain has some words for you: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm

-Eddie

 

[HordHolm]

School almost managed the same feat with Romeo and Juliet. However, we went to a screening of the classic 1968 Zefferelli film and that brought the story to life for me in a way that the text couldn't, even if the director pruned about half the dialogue!

Oh yes, Shakespeare at school... A real killer IMO (my particular torture was MacB). And I do understand, to an extent, the desire of Eng Lit specialists who put these courses together to pull apart a text and find out what the meanings are, what the language is saying. But what I don't understand, for the life of me, is the reluctance to show teenagers the actual play being performed before then making them read something often incomprehensible. I mean, it's a live art form, FFS!! So, for example, we only got to see an actual performance about two thirds of the way through reading it, by which time almost all of us hated it (I was, and still am, ambivalent). If the aim is to inspire a love of Shakespeare, my view is the approach falls flat. Death of a Salesman worked a little better, due to *shock horror* the language actually being the same language we used on a daily basis, and therefore we actually knew what Willy Loman was actually banging on about.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Oh yes, Shakespeare at school... A real killer IMO (my particular torture was MacB). And I do understand, to an extent, the desire of Eng Lit specialists who put these courses together to pull apart a text and find out what the meanings are, what the language is saying. But what I don't understand, for the life of me, is the reluctance to show teenagers the actual play being performed before then making them read something often incomprehensible. I mean, it's a live art form, FFS!! So, for example, we only got to see an actual performance about two thirds of the way through reading it, by which time almost all of us hated it (I was, and still am, ambivalent). If the aim is to inspire a love of Shakespeare, my view is the approach falls flat. Death of a Salesman worked a little better, due to *shock horror* the language actually being the same language we used on a daily basis, and therefore we actually knew what Willy Loman was actually banging on about.

The thing about Shakespeare is you have to read him in the original Klingon.

 

[Dearelliot]

Toxic prey by Sandford, usually love his books but cant stand the new character his daughter.

 

[RoperTrace]

Mark Twain has some words for you: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm

-Eddie

Thank you, just read the whole thing an hour earlier. Kind of brutal IMO, when it's almost fifty years after Cooper's death.

After reading Twain's take on the subject of fantastic eyesight/target shooting and the stepping on the dry twig reference, I actually think Cooper invented the fantastic literary license of making his subject/heroes, having super powers, that still pervades books and action films to this day. Think of Scarlet Johansson's martial arts abilities as a 100-lb woman in Iron Man 2, or most shooting skills depicted in 100's of westerns. As a long-time hunter, I'm always thinking about not stepping on the lone dry twig when I was stalking game. Gave up that past-time about 20 years ago.

 

[TheLobster]

Dune. Yes, even the first one (haven't read the others). Why? Because like the works of Neil Stephenson, brought earlier in the thread, it's really just the worldbuilding that holds the book together.

In case of Neil, you have the literary equivalent of puff pastry, where you are fooled by the sweet exterior of the setting; eventually, you realize that what you get inside is mostly the vacuous air of a largely nonexistent plot. But at least the meringue shell was good, even it filled your stomach with unnecessary calories, and you might consider sampling one when the sugar rush fades. That's why I've read both Diamond Age and Snow Crash.

With Herbert, though, you don't even get to savor those outer layers of delicious pastry. Very quickly you will reach the twisted haggis of what passed for a plot, garnished with the assorted seasoning of bad attempts at social commentary and pseudo-messianic b.s. At least it's relatively short, so not much time lost trying to see if there's maybe some 'there' there.

I read crime and punishment Brothers karamazov and notes from the underground and found them all to be excruciatingly boring. I'm not exactly sure why, but his prose had a knack for making me not want to give a shit.

I wonder how much of the dislike for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy that's been expressed in this thread can be attributed to poor translations. Russian is a very different language; its grammar allows for much greater expressive depth without veering into ambiguity, with shades of meaning that would be clumsy or overly verbose when translated into English. I don't believe it's actually possible to translate those authors and produce a result that's better than merely passable.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Guys.

This book is all about how the old gods live among us as regular people who yearn for the power they've lost, and there's a dude in it called Low-Key Lyesmith.

LOW. KEY.

*crams every book award into a t-shirt cannon and aims it at Neil Gaiman's face*

I'm not one to say that an author's work retroactively becomes worse just because said author has been outed as a terrible person. But my god, it's hard to think of anything he did that was worth a shit after Sandman.

Regardless of the overall quality of the book, I don't think it's fair to point out an obvious joke as an example of bad writing.

 

[Plathfan]

my particular torture was MacB

As a child, I had the chance to watch all of his plays on television, mostly BBC productions. But in high school, I became completely smitten with Macbeth, arguably his finest work, alongside King Lear. The witches' opening is one of the most brilliant ever written. So many memorable lines:

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (so much depth packed into just seven words!)

"By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes."

Yes, I know, not every line is profound; some dialogues could be trimmed, and the phrasing often feels awkward, constrained by the demands of iambic pentameter. But for heaven's sake, show a little humility when speaking of one of the greatest minds ever to walk the earth.

 

[DrHappy]

In no particular order:

“Silas Marner,” George Elliot
“Heart of Darkness,” Joeseph Conrad
“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Babbit,” Sinclair Lewis

I thought that all were dreadful to read. It’s as if the merit of the social commentary was what made it a quality book, especially with books 2 thru 4.

 

[WhiteTailDarkTip]

In case of Neil, you have the literary equivalent of puff pastry, where you are fooled by the sweet exterior of the setting; eventually, you realize that what you get inside is mostly the vacuous air of a largely nonexistent plot. But at least the meringue shell was good, even it filled your stomach with unnecessary calories, and you might consider sampling one when the sugar rush fades. That's why I've read both Diamond Age and Snow Crash.

Agree with you about Neal Stephenson, I could never understand his popularity. But then, nothing dates like SF. Some of Robert Heinlein's stuff is cringe-making but he was a titan back in the day.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

“Heart of Darkness,” Joeseph Conrad

Disagree, I liked that one. It has so many layers.