Books you hate

[RobRoy]

Actually, the only list is has come up on that I have found (besides some personal lists of 'my favourite books') was a volunatry response book club survey back in the 90s.

Actually, since we're doing actually, the list you're referencing was a joint survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. Though, that doesn't really sully the numbers one way or the other.

In addition, the Boston Public Library named it one of the "100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century."

A Random House survey of readers placed the book at #1.

As I said, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad one, but there it is.

 

[Billdave2]

I am late to the party but let me add my undying hate Wizard's First Rule. The stupid rule ends up being a paraphrase of "you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the all of the time, but not all the people all of the time" (oh yeah plus the endless S&M). I hate all Stephan King books except The Stand, which for some reason I have the exact opposite feeling for. I loved Ender's Game but hate the rest of the series. But my all time most dispised book of all time has to be that wretched piece of you know what called Jude the Obscure. Forget waterboarding, just make some one read this thing and they will tell anything they know to make it stop.

 

[Soapy Sam]

As we age, books we loved in youth may seem sadly dull second time around, while previously tedious and unreadable works are transformed into joyous examples of art reflecting reality.

On the other hand, some stuff just sux. Always did, always will.
I'm with Darat.
Dickens is bloody awful.

 

[Madalch]

In addition, the Boston Public Library named it one of the "100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century."

Partially because people are pretentious enough that they will lie on polls, pretending that they read and enjoy what they think are impressive books, without mentioning that all they actually read are Playboys and Cosmos.

 

[phrenicgermal]

Actually, since we're doing actually, the list you're referencing was a joint survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. Though, that doesn't really sully the numbers one way or the other.

In addition, the Boston Public Library named it one of the "100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century."

A Random House survey of readers placed the book at #1.

As I said, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad one, but there it is.

I'm looking at the Boston Public Library list and I see that most of those are books that have directly influenced people's lives. Like I notice How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Jungle, and that atrocity Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. There are some very popular pieces of literature there too. However, even though many of these books are translated from other languages, and some, like Mein Kampf, clearly had a bigger influence someplace other then America, I'd argue that this list applies mainly to the US, possibly encompassing parts of Europe. I notice also that it is compiled by a single person, Dawn Cook, and while she may be an expert on books, it almost suggests that the books are compiled from a personal list of books that she herself has noticed are influential. I don't know how she compiled the list so I might be a bit presumptuous here.

I think the best way to make scientific study of the most influential books would be to gather a random selection of some proportion of books from a significant random selection of world libraries, and then take a tally of the books cited by those books. This counts also, of course, if a fiction book directly quotes another fiction book (like those little things at the beginnings of the chapters, or if a character quotes a line from Shakespeare or The Divine Comedy or something). I think that Amazon or somebody has on their book pages a list of books that cite any particular book, so maybe they can give us a back of the envelope guess for books in the countries where they do most of their sales, but it wouldn't be a proper scientific study.

I see that random house as well has a voluntary responce survey posted. Look at some of the other books on there. Battlefield Earth is number 3. On their 'About These Lists' page, they mention another list from the same time from Radcliffe Publishing. Now granted that Fountainhead and Shrugged ar both on there as well, but much lower.

 

[RobRoy]

[snip]I see that random house as well has a voluntary responce survey posted. Look at some of the other books on there. Battlefield Earth is number 3. On their 'About These Lists' page, they mention another list from the same time from Radcliffe Publishing. Now granted that Fountainhead and Shrugged ar both on there as well, but much lower.

<shrug> The fact that you don't find Atlas Shrugged or any of these other books to be influential apparently has no bearing on others finding them so. As I said in my original response, I have no idea if being on these lists is good or bad because, again as I said, L. Ron Hubbard often makes these lists as well.

The point of my response was that one person's tripe can be another's Bible. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

 

[phrenicgermal]

<shrug> The fact that you don't find Atlas Shrugged or any of these other books to be influential apparently has no bearing on others finding them so. As I said in my original response, I have no idea if being on these lists is good or bad because, again as I said, L. Ron Hubbard often makes these lists as well.

The point of my response was that one person's tripe can be another's Bible. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I'm just saying with my proposed method, the influence of different books could be objectively approximated. Of course it could be argued that that would leave out books which are influential in terms of people copying their style or ideas, but I think it's fair to say that if a book does have it's style or ideas frequently copied, then there will be pleanty of books which cite it directly, if only they are books commenting on how that book's style has influenced different writers.

 

[Shoogar]

Another I didn't like was a Frank Herbert book. Might have been The Dosadi Experiment. Just seemed to drone on for page after page. Finally gave up a third of the way into it.

 

[RobRoy]

I'm just saying with my proposed method, the influence of different books could be objectively approximated. Of course it could be argued that that would leave out books which are influential in terms of people copying their style or ideas, but I think it's fair to say that if a book does have it's style or ideas frequently copied, then there will be pleanty of books which cite it directly, if only they are books commenting on how that book's style has influenced different writers.

Ahh, I see. I think by "influential" the readers meant to themselves, rather than to writers in general.

 

[leftysergeant]

Nothing I have ever read by Frank Herbert really makes an awful lot of sense to me. I still do not get the whole Dune cycle.

On a personal level, now that the idea of "influence" enters the discussion, I am thinking about what I have read of the works of Raymond Carver. I knew Carver long before he became famous. We grew up in the same town and he married a dear friend of the family.

I never really got most of what he wrote, aside from one poem in free verse about his feelings of inadequacy surrounding fishing for perch. But, just knowing one person who seemed to be on his way to fame and fortune as a writer sort of encouraged me to take up writing myself. That I seemed not to be getting anywhere with it did not discourage me, having seen how slowly Carver's career got off the ground.

My attempts to wrtite novels have met with far less success than a kiwi trying to copy an albatross. About two years ago, I decided, for some reason obscure even to me, to try writing poetry.

Someone asked me whether knowing Carver had influenced my style at all. I was natural a bit uncertain, since, for the most part, I was unable to sit still long enough to get through much of anything he had written. But I resolved to check it out, and picked up a copy of "A New Path to the Waterfall," his last work, edited by his second wife, Cass Gallegher.

I still don't get him.

I don't think he has influenced my style much, if at all.

<shrug>

 

[phrenicgermal]

Ahh, I see. I think by "influential" the readers meant to themselves, rather than to writers in general.

I mean influenced human thought on the whole. What books caused the greatest changes in how humans see them selves/ conduct themselves/ see the world, and so on. For example, if Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus made a huge impact, then there will be some noteable number of other books, be they psychology or pseudo-psychology or fiction or something else, that make referance to what it says. According to Amazon.com, it's cited by 100 books in their collection. No doubt the book is destined to become classic pseudopsychology for years to come. Now I don't think that the Amazon list of how many books cite a particular book is a good gauge just because they only count books in their collection and books like the King James Bible which are certainly cited frequently don't have anything listed as citing them.

 

[gumboot]

I really did not like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. And that's being nice. Very nice.

 

[RobRoy]

I mean influenced human thought on the whole . . . [snip]

Not in contention. The polls are not talking about what is influential to researchers, psychologists or psuedo-analysts, etc.; just to the individual readers themselves who felt most influenced by particular authors/works.

 

[SoBitter]

Also I couldn't stand Catcher in the Rye perhaps I gazed over the deeper meanings or motifs in the book but i just found the tone of this grumpy louse to be frustrating.

I read Catcher in the Rye in my junior year high school English class. When discussing the topic of the book as an adolescent classic, I stated my displeasure with the work in general. My teacher said that maybe I just wasn't ready for it yet. Ha.

I think maybe you have to read it when you are a grumpy adolescent yourself. Maybe I was too happy at the time.

 

[Redisca]

Other than dime store novels? Well, let's see. Of the generally well-liked books, I hate the following:

1. Anything by Jane Austen. I'd don't care how "controversial" or "revolutionary" her novels were in her own age; today, they are the intellectual woman's Danielle Steel. Formulaic, cold, repetitive, trite -- not even as a teenager did I enjoy Jane Austen's books. No matter how "unconventional" or "plucky" Austen's heroine's are, everything still boils down to the reality that there is little more to a young woman's life than finding a suitable, financially well-off husband. Was Austen decrying the fact that even the most extraordinary (for argument's sake) women were still invariably relegated to minor roles in life? I don't know, and it is impossible to tell without reading into the text a certain depth that really isn't there. Her novels are vacuous, superficial -- and so are their supposedly "plucky" heroines. If I want a critical take on women's roles in the 19th century, spiced up with plenty of irony, give me Thackeray any day.

2. Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". To begin with, I am very suspicious of hybrid genres. When I see "poetic prose", that little skeptical voice inside my head tells me the author really wanted to be a poet but had not the talent. Otherwise, how come there is no such thing as "prosaic poetry"? (Hey, there's an idea for someone looking to revolutionize the literary world.) The main problem, however, is that it's just bloody boring.

3. Stendhal and his "school". I read "Armance" as a college student and was traumatized by how jaw-droppingly bad it was. So traumatized that it took me more than 10 years to tackle "The Red and the Black". My reaction was the same. (And it's not the translation -- I read both works in the original French.) There is a certain school in 19th-century literature that has an insufferable penchant for overblown expositions -- lengthy descriptions that go nowhere, a myriad irrelevant, unimportant details that pad the narrative to a monstrous length. Meanwhile, the plot itself is more often than not wafer-thin. Ivan Turgenev, with his positively weird eyebrow fetish, is another representative of that genre. I don't need a 30-page description of the town where the story takes place; I don't need an excruciatingly detailed account of the protagonist's facial anatomy -- just tell us the story already and make it a good one. Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback" is an exception in that regard: the unabridged version contains a very lengthy description of medieval Paris, but Hugo managed to weave that into the narrative and make every detail relevant, indeed to make the city itself a character.

3. Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader". I know I'll probably get flamed for this -- but if this is how most Germans feel about the genocides of the 1930's and the 1940's, as well as German citizens' complicity in them, then I'd say Germany deserved every single bomb dropped on it by the Allies. Schlink, however, seems to have managed to hoodwink a lot of readers -- a lot. The reasons why this book is so objectionable to me are lengthy; but if you've read it, ask yourself what the novel is REALLY saying.

5. Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita". I can't really say I "hate" this book, but I am very ambivalent about it, and I do harbor suspicions that the readers are being had. I enjoyed this novel immensely, but I have a confession to make: I enjoyed it primarily for all those twisted pranks that Voland's crew (and later, Margarita) played. Call it the vicarious thrill from fictional hooliganism. Wouldn't it be a gas to fly into Noam Chomsky's (or Anne Coulter's, your choice) apartment naked on a broomstick, drizzle his/her Egyptian cotton bedsheets with ink, drown his/her suits in a bathtub, then flood the whole place? Of course, we are above such pedestrian vandalism (and we don't want to go to jail for breaking, what, about 26 laws), but reading about it sure is fun. But apart from this juvenalia, the book offers little. It's philosophical underpinnings are mere plattitudes or Allenesque one-liners ("manuscripts don't burn", "remove the document and you remove the man", yadda, yadda, yadda), while much of its satire is sadly dated. The real people expressed through many of the characters in "M&M" were insignificant mid-level functionaries who have long since died and been forgotten, rendering their portrayals largely irrelevant. The acronym "M&M" is fitting here, because the novel is a lot like chocolate candy: gustationally rich, dark, and sugary, but of little nutritional value.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

Not sure if its already been mentioned but I had to read the Great Gatsby during my final year of school.

I was a good student but I couldn't bring myself to read this tripe. Not only could I not finish it but I never picked up another book for about 10 years because of it.

It should be banned.

 

[Overman]

The Scarlet Letter is a decent read, but I remember having to read that in Freshman English, and it is about the worst possible book to have Freshmen read. No real plot development, no action for pages and pages...ugh.

My sister made me read the Alchemist, and its pages were vomit worthy.

 

[RobRoy]

I was a good student but I couldn't bring myself to read this tripe. Not only could I not finish it but I never picked up another book for about 10 years because of it.

You really didn't read anything for a decade because you didn't like one book?

 

[FSM]

I actually liked Wizard's First Rule... wayyyyy back. But I was young and foolish and did not know better. Today I realize what a complete turd it is.


Nah, just good taste.


Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough For Love are bitter crap? *sigh*


Such as? If you don't mind me asking, how far did you get?

I am rather a literature ho. I read everything I can get my hands on and find that most everything I read brings something of value to my life, even if it's poorly written.

There is thus only one book I absolutely abhor completely and without reservation, and that is Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. I read it because someone I argued religion and philosophy with told me that if I didn't read it I would never UNDERSTAND... right. So I read the entire crappy thing (mostly so I could prove that the book would not have magical enlightenment powers over me-) and from page one of the overwrought, melodramatic, preachy bit of drivel until the last page I hated hated hated it. It's a book about the frickin' Rapture... what a way to ruin a perfectly good Apocolypse!

Also:

I believe that Nabokov is the finest writer who has ever lived.

Maybe I was too maladjusted and immature as a teenager, but I loved Salinger (Although I loved Franny and Zooey MUCH more than Catcher...) One of my favorite books is Kavalier and Clay by M. Chabon.

Sci Fi wise, I think Vonnegut is wonderful and I personally find Heinlein always interesting. Asimov's Foundation books still really do it for me, although I have to have a couple of cups of coffee before I re-read them.

As far as mystery is concerned, nobody does it better than good old standard/classic Doyle, but if you guys get a chance to read Elizabeth George, try her. She's a bit of a cut above the others and I think that she's more talented than the genre has room for her to be.

In horror, I still read Lovecraft and enjoy it, and loved Wolfman's meme parody because I spent much of my young adulthood obsessively reading about Cthulu. I confess to loving Steve King, although I understand that on general principle this admission here will be much like walking into a convention of gourmet chefs and extolling the virtues of Cheetos... for an interesting twist, his son, son of King (Joe Hill) is not bad at all. Tommyknockers was one of the worst novels ever written, but I believe that the Talisman (with Peter Straub) is one of the finest young-boy-coming-of-age-Huck/Tom-style novels I've ever read, and it has added fantasy/sci-fi for extra flavor! As far as GRRMartin is concerned, I read 1/4th of the first book trying not to yawn, blah blah blah, fantasy novel basics bleh... and then BAM! Zombies! I'm a sucker for zombies. GRRM had me at, "Uhhhhh, brains...."

I much prefer the morose and uber-dramatic Bronte sisters to Jane Austen, although there's something, something about that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy...

 

[sumwatt]

This has been a fun thread to read through - so much so i'll make my first post here:

I hate

Anything by Dickens - Tale of Two Many Fraggin Words gag!

Anything by Steven King - One author who writes well, he just seems to have the most absurd climax in every book.

Anything I write. Not that I'm a published author but I usually stop myself after realizing that the 10 pages I've written are crap. One day I'm going to publish nothing but a book of "beginnings" - Every short piece is the beginning of a story I never finish

I hated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas until I was actually in a properly altered state.

While not fiction, and with the utmost respect for his ability to build economic thought out, "A Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith is not terribly fun reading. I've read it all but never all in a single go. I'll pick it up, read a chapter, come back to it a couple years later and read another chapter...

I have a love/hate relationship with a book called "Closer" by Dennis Cooper. It was disturbing to the point of disgust but I really couldn't stop reading it. There have been few books that have repulsed me to the point of throwing a book across the room only to find myself going over to pick it up to find out what was going to happen.

I hate to admit: I love the Lord of the Rings series, but I skip most of Frodo and Sam's adventures in the third book every time I re-read the series. I also hate to admit that I really haven't found any newer fiction that has been interesting enough to read.

I've mostly been finishing school and now I'm prepping for the lsat which has been putting a crimp on time for books not related to LSAT prep or music notation for my drum lessons.