10 Books You Can Do Without

[Scheherazade]

Today I have finally put together my top 10 must-read books list (I am house-bound; too much free time at hand ) and it made me wonder which books you could do without...

Here is my list so far:

1. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

2. Mrs Dalloway by Woolf

3. As I Lay Dying by Faulkner

4. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

[Beaumains]

In no particular order:

1. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (poorly written and absurd)

2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (I've never identified with angst)

3. Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews (incest is not a good thing)

4. The Dark Tower , by Stephen King (the story lost me completely)

...And that's really all I can think of at the moment. I guess I've been lucky in choosing what I read.

[ArcherSnake]

In no real order:

1.) On The Road, by Jack Kerouac (makes little sense)

2.) Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger (I hate all teenager literature)

3.) The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Sparks (just wierd)

4.) The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (my 10th grade English teacher analyzed it to death, making me dislike it)

5.) The Lovely Bones, by Alice Seabold (sick, strange, and WRONG WRONG WRONG)

[Sitaram]

5.) The Lovely Bones, by Alice Seabold

I saw an old copy for sale in a discount store, and on the cover it quoted the New York Times as saying: A compulsive book, to be read in one sitting.

Now, in my mind, a reader may be compulsive, but a book may only be compelling.

Perhaps I am mistaken in my understanding of the proper usage of the word "compulsive".

A month later, I saw someone reading a more recent edition of the book at an airport. I asked if I might see the cover. Sure enough, they had changed the cover to "cover up" their original grammatical error.

I am searching with google on "compulsive book"

I encounter, so far, out of 800 links returnend, only one which uses "compulsive" to modify "book"

http://www.book-castle.co.uk/emma.php

she has now recaptured that turbulent twelve months in a compulsive book ‘Between Angels and Demons’

Although American Heritage On-line Dictionary does say

Compulsive: Having the capacity to compel: a frightening, compulsive novel.



But I rather imagine that using "compulsive" to modify a thing has only been accepted fairly recently.

What would the difference be, then, between a compelling book and a compulsive book.


The word compulsive has connotes some kind of disorder. If I say that someone had "a compelling reason" to do what they did, I am not hinting that there is something chronically wrong with them.

This is interesting. If I google on "compulsive NOVEL" then I get 300 hits, all with the same usage. But when I search on "compulsive BOOK" then I get 800 hits, but only a handful are examples of "compulsive" modifying "book", while for the majority of hits, "compulsive" modifies a person (the buyer, reader, collector, thief... etc)...

Sorry to be cluttering this thread with a long post which is more about grammer and etymology.

Say, perhaps we should have a forum for grammar, etymology, usage. We could post the 100 most frequently misspelled words, the most common grammatical errors, and interesting things from manuals of style.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strunk_Jr.

In the original edition, Strunk describes the purpose of the book as follows:

"It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention ... on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated."
The original was revised in 1935 by Strunk and Edward A. Tenney. After Strunk's death, it was again revised by E.B. White, an editor at The New Yorker who had been one of Strunk's students. This 1959 edition of The Elements of Style (often referred to as "Strunk and White") became the companion of most American writers as well as most college freshmen.

[papayahed]

The first one that comes to mind is Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I know there's more.......I'll be back!

[Jay]

Crime & Punishment by Dostoevsky is leading my list (still haven't finished reading that one)

Do I have to have read the book to make it a 'book I could do without'? I'm kind of keeping away from books that look/sound 'dangerous'.

[Bianca Fransen]

Ah, I cannot think of any.. I know some books I disliked - but then I disliked them so much, because they hit a nerve. So they were actually quite good. Like 'Goodmorning, midnight' by Jean Rhys. A book that I absolutely loathed.. but I still want to reread it some day to see if it still knocks me out.
And many books don't do much for me.. but they are great for one trainjourney.. so I still like them to be written.

[mono]

Hmmm, so difficult to narrow my list to ten, but here goes (in no specific order, of course) . . .
1. Creation by Gore Vidal,
2. The Celestine Prophecy Series by James Redfield,
3. any poetry collection by Billy Collins (please do not ask),
4. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein,
5. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein (sorry ),
6. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling,
7. anything by John Grisham,
8. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell,
9. Flowers for Algernon by Keyes Daniel,
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (sorry again ).

[merrycollie]

The Lovely Bones.

[underground]

you know, i actually liked the beginning of the lovely bones, and i thought the whole idea of a story narrated by a dead person was sort of neat. plus the heaven in that book is the kind of heaven i'd like to have. but i lost interest after suddenly years went by and the investigation was sort of halted/forgotten. i really thought that the whole story would be about how mr. harvey would get caught, but it became more of the family that was left behind moving on and stuff, and mr. harvey's end was unsatisfying.

i also thought the ending was corny and bad (because the narrator decides to have "you" as an audience), and my least favorite part was when susie for some reason fell down to earth and then instead of pointing out where her body was and stuff, she used the day to have sex with her junior high school crush.

which reminds me. the relationships are also too unrealistic. come on, with a sister murdered or not, it's kind of impossible for a couple fourteen-year-olds to have a relationship that actually last. and for susie and ray to have sex because they happened to have kissed way back when they were fourteen and the fact that susie was in ruth's body... it's just wrong.

i guess it's too happy-ending? i don't know, but apparently if you write about heaven your book is guaranteed to be a best-seller. (*thinking of mitch albom's the five people you meet in heaven and some other book about a near-death experience*)

::edit:: oh, and as for my list, i'll put digital fortress by dan brown for now. i'm sure there are many other books because i tend to read books that i don't like anyway, but my brain is all muddled up now. no wait, i can think of another one: dragonsong/singer/drums by anne mccaffrey. the trilogy was supposed to be good, but i read each one of them without any enthusiasm.

[Aramis]

"Wicked" - by Gregory Maguire (The play rocks, though, so I was very disappointed.)
"The Color Purple" - by Alice Walker

[Pendragon]

1.) Moby Dick by Herman Melville (You hope the whale swallows the author!)

2.)Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Then only "great expectation" I ever hoped for was that the book would mercifully end!)

3.)David Copperfield, ibid. (To quote Dorothy Parker "This is not a book to be lightly tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force!"

4.)Anything writen by Stephen King! (Sorry, my opinion does not necessarily reflect, etc. etc.)

5.)The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Unless, mayhap ye be a thesbian! Love to watch a play performed, hate to read them!)

6.)The Poems of Carl Sandberg (Can you say "boring")

7.)Anything by Stephen Crane (He makes Sandberg look interesting!)

8.)Anything by the sisters Bronte (Whole family couldn't write!)

9.)Art Bushwald's so-called humor (He's no Dave Barry, that's for sure)

10.) Upton Sinclair The Jungle Yuck! (I still have a stomach, and the dry heaves aren't funny!)

[Aurora Ariel]

....Gosh!This question is too difficult for me to answer right now!I'll have to take at least a week to think about this!lol
Considering that there are millions of books I have not yet read or will never get to read it's really hard to pick a top 10!Maby there is a number 1 still lurking somewhere and I will read it in the near future-I may discover my favourite book tomorrow...

[Themis]

1. (Die Kalvierspielerin) The Piano Player - Elfriede Jelinek
2. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
3. (Das Parfüm) Perfume - Patrick Süskind
4. Any book written by Stephen King (I had to read some for class and I really hated them)
5. (Die Verwandlung) The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
6. Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy (and generally, books by Tom Clancy)
7. The Chamber - John Grisham
8. (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
10. (L'étranger) The Stranger - Albert Camus

[samercury]

Books I could do without (in no specific order)

1. Great Expectations- Charles Dickens (sorry Dickens i usually like your books but...)

2.The Ox-Bow Incident- Walter Van Tilburg Clark (got on my nerves)

3. The Scarlet Pimpernel- Baroness Orczy

... that's all I can think of right now =)