The books you hated!

[Bloodandglitter]

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I can’t tell you how many times I fell asleep while reading it

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I can’t tell you how many times I fell asleep while reading it

Reminds me of a poem…

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Oh how the tables have turned, Whitman, you ol’ bore.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

This thread has me thinking about something.

If at 20 someone asked you for five books you loved and five you hated then we flash forward to now, years later and with so much more life experience which can change our tastes, how do you think your love/hate lists would hold up? The same, maybe no longer caring for some of the favs, gaining some respect for one you used to dislike? No change at all?

I’ll recuse myself from this discussion lest I indict myself on the matter of sparkly vampires.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

This thread has me thinking about something.

If at 20 someone asked you for five books you loved and five you hated then we flash forward to now, years later and with so much more life experience which can change our tastes, how do you think your love/hate lists would hold up? The same, maybe no longer caring for some of the favs, gaining some respect for one you used to dislike? No change at all?

For me, some things have changed for sure. I think a bit less of some books as I see them through more experienced lenses, both as a person and as an author. I notice way more than I used to when it comes to good/bad writing.

But also, I still more or less hate what I hated, and like what I liked. Everything is far more nuanced now, yet the overall taste isn't that different.

 

[SmilingLez]

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I can’t tell you how many times I fell asleep while reading it

Gone With The Wind is my sleeping pill of choice. I have never been able to watch the entire movie either, without falling asleep

 

[Bloodandglitter]

Gone With The Wind is my sleeping pill of choice. I have never been able to watch the entire movie either, without falling asleep

I'm the same way!

 

[Deadbed1968]

Most of the rest has stayed the same except that I've forgiven myself for not liking a lot of classics. I was a bit of a literature snob as a younger person - now I read for fun, and fuck it if its not "good literature".

This is exactly how I feel. I read for enjoyment, not to meet some arbitrary literary standards. I left required reading back in college.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Wandering, meandering, pointlessness for most of it. I almost feel like the structure, if you can call it that, was practice for Anna Karenina, which is brilliantly put together and the reason I love that book so much.

That is all true but bear in mind that it was never supposed to be a novel. It was a serial. It was a cheap soap to be published in a magazine for money. When it became popular - it was basically the hot soap opera of the time - it ended up running way longer than it was intended or inspired to be, much like a TV show that runs too long or you know someone's 300 chapter aimless lit saga. Then like a decade later, a publisher decided to put all the chapters together and bind it as a novel. So it's not really Tolstoy's fault that it meanders and stretches out and is generally tedious to read. It wasn't his epic opus novel. It was his pay gig on the side that grew out of control.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

The hate for Catcher in the Rye is interesting to me. I like that book. Holden Caulfield is a shit, but that's the point. He's not an idealized narrator/hero.

I haven't read Catcher but I think the point that you make addresses something general about how people read. We get this A TON here on lit. People tend to read with their morals and will dismiss/trash anything that transgresses their morals, and when they do this they usually miss the point. Good writers will often provoke because it forces the readers to broaden their perspectives and learn something. When one reads moralistically, they shut out anything that they don't agree with. They keep their blinders on and miss out.

On lit we get the same thing. You can't have infidelity in a romance story. It's not romance. This sucks, end of discussion, 1 star. A Dom should never be abusive. This is wrong. This sucks, end of discussion, 1 star. That sort of thing. The blinders are on. "You didn't agree with my fantasy, BAD." In regular literature it's, "You didn't agree with my morals, BAD."

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

The Stranger by Albert Camus. Had to read it my junior year of high school, and what a fucking miserable experience. I'm sure that's part of the point, what with it being a book about nihilism and whatnot, but I would have rather someone just punched me in the dick a few times.

 

[Treeview]

I took a Lit class as a sophomore in college. War and Peace. I got a day behind in reading and couldn’t gain it back. Cliff Notes helped me wring out a C

A year or two after graduation I gave it a try for rec reading. Too many storylines with complicated names. Too confusing

I gave it up and read Edward Abbey and Michener

 

[nice90sguy]

With a few exceptions (Salinger springs to mind) , I hated almost every classic novel I was made to read in school by my English teacher, who I couldn't stand. I tried re-reading one or two since, but the damage was done, unfortunately.

 

[Voboy]

This thread has me thinking about something.

If at 20 someone asked you for five books you loved and five you hated then we flash forward to now, years later and with so much more life experience which can change our tastes, how do you think your love/hate lists would hold up? The same, maybe no longer caring for some of the favs, gaining some respect for one you used to dislike? No change at all?

About the same, actually.

All my favorite books from then are books I still read. I still generally prefer nonfiction, too.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It was cancelled, just like Carnival Row and Firefly, because how dare we be allowed anything nice.

Occasional gemstones still appear, but there's a reason I watch very little TV any more.

Edit: Shadow and Bone is like the YA version of Carnival Row. I want to like it, but I just can't.

The first season of the Witcher was also amazing... and then it shat the bed so spectacularly I will never get over it.

I wanted to love Carnival Row, because it looked beautiful and had a great cast, but the script was so leaden we gave up after three episodes. She has a traumatic past, he has a backstory, there's dodgy politicians, no shit...

Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy's best novel, and not depressing unlike most of them. Best read at a chapter a week as intended, to get the soap-opera effect. We actually enjoyed it in the end at school, despite initial disappointment at it knocking To Kill a Mockingbird off the syllabus (teacher told us to grab copies from the stockroom and read it or at least watch the film, but swore it was much easier to write about Mayor and the complex characters, than TKaM where there's not much to say beyond 'racism huge and bad').

Hardy's poetry also does bleak better than most of the war poets. It was fun to analyse to a ridiculous level of detail.

I've read some Dickens and Austen since I could get them in my phone, so my opinion has evolved from 'Dickens is boring' to 'Dickens had some great characters and some great social commentary squeezed in, but you can tell he got paid by the word, and the middle 400 pages of David Copperfield should just be skipped until that whiny bint Dora finally dies.' I like Austen's humour now I understand it, but I keep getting the characters mixed up.


Rowling should have given up on the idea of her books growing up with the readers and just stuck to the level of the first 3-4 books. It's interesting how nowadays most kids read the first three or four, or see the films, and stop there, just getting told a summary of the last one (which was crap and turned into two boring films). And tell their friends not to spend money on her franchise. It's a crying shame she went bonkers after being the first billionaire to give enough money to charity to stop being one. She could have had such a positive legacy, but couldn't take criticism of her books becoming dated and not standing up to scrutiny.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I took a Lit class as a sophomore in college. War and Peace. I got a day behind in reading and couldn’t gain it back. Cliff Notes helped me wring out a C

A year or two after graduation I gave it a try for rec reading. Too many storylines with complicated names. Too confusing

I gave it up and read Edward Abbey and Michener

I recommend the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. It's based on part of War and Peace (about five chapters?) but the intro song is all about how this is Russia and every character has at least five different names but they'll try to explain:

"Andrey’s family, totally messed up
Balaga is fun
Bolkonsky is crazy
Mary is plain
Dolokhov is fierce
Hélène is a slut
Anatole is hot
Marya is old-school
Sonya is good
Natasha is young
And Andrey isn’t here..."

 

[lmc89]

Anything Philip Pullman, just no!

 

[nice90sguy]

The Bible. I found it boring and stilted as heck. Maybe because I was forced to read it so many times growing up with the forced church attendance. Yeah, it’s got good parts, but there are many better books out there.

As a challenge to myself as a teenager I read the Old testament and some of the New Testament. The Bible started out very weird indeed, more like SF than a religious tome.
Robert Crumb's incredible comic-book version of The Book of Genesis captures its weirdness (without changing one word of the text, or putting in any subversive, satirical or salacious images).
I highly recommned The Book Of Genesis, with his illustrations, to anyone who's forgotten, or never read it.

 

[EdwardsOtherSide]

Pretty much my high school reading list.

I am in the "Catcher in the Rye" haters club.
It romanticizes adolescent angst in a deeply unhealthy way.

Another is "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe of Nigeria.
We get it. Colonialism was bad. Noted. But no one wants to talk about how the characters abused each other before Europeans show up and how the characters seem incapable of tying consequences to actions.

Let's talk about "Romeo and Juliette" and "Hamlet". It's like they actively wanted us to hate Shakespeare. More with the adolescent angst, and "woe is me, my decisions suck".
(I love "Much Ado About Nothing", "Twelfth Night", and "Coriolanus".)

 

[Treeview]

I recommend the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. It's based on part of War and Peace (about five chapters?) but the intro song is all about how this is Russia and every character has at least five different names but they'll try to explain:

"Andrey’s family, totally messed up
Balaga is fun
Bolkonsky is crazy
Mary is plain
Dolokhov is fierce
Hélène is a slut
Anatole is hot
Marya is old-school
Sonya is good
Natasha is young
And Andrey isn’t here..."

Thanks but I’ll pass. Russian history doesn’t interest

I’ve taken about 2.5 voyages with Patrick O’Brian/Far Side of the World.

 

[onehitwanda]

Thanks but I’ll pass. Russian history doesn’t interest

I’ve taken about 2.5 voyages with Patrick O’Brian/Far Side of the World. Hhh

Which weevil should you always choose?

 

[StillStunned]

Thanks but I’ll pass. Russian history doesn’t interest

If you get the chance, I recommend watching "The Great".

 

[EdwardsOtherSide]

Thanks but I’ll pass. Russian history doesn’t interest

Unpopular opinion; Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova is the most interesting person in Russian history.
Her story is riveting and deeply entangled with the ugliest aspects of Russian history and culture.

 

[Treeview]

Which weevil should you always choose?

Is the weevil debauched like the fine Doctors sloth

 

[onehitwanda]

Is the weevil despauched like the fine Doctors sloth

The sloth was a Vampire, a most evil Vampire, and the Doctor was false and damned to have brought it aboard.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I hate, I'm using the word hate, but it's worse than that, I abhor the Twilight books.

I’ll recuse myself from this discussion lest I indict myself on the matter of sparkly vampires.