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I meant what I say. At best mainstream ficiton is pretty good, the most are average, and the rest is mediocre. The truly bad stuff is just obscure. Being mainstream is neither a a measure of mediocrity. Jk rowling and stephen king for master writers, nor either are they mediocre.Quote:
Originally Posted by tiredstudent
Alright people!
It's easy to talk about what books you love and what excites you and makes you bubble with happiness.
But what books have you read and been seriously dissapointed with. What books have you stopped reading halfway because the plot lines or language or whatever have bored you.
This is not a place, I repeat, this is not a place for you to slag off books and just call them rubbish. We need reasons people! Was it the narrative? the realistic quality of the book? The characters? The writing? the list is endless.
Personally i find that talking about books that you dont like can be more interesting than waffling on about great ones. Especially if someone disagrees!
So whether its a Meyer vampire volume or a Chekov classic lets get them red pens out and make constructive criticsm.
(sorry for bad spelling)
Personally for me it is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
The plot line = Fantastic
The Language = Fantastic
The Characters = Too Many
Although I'm a sucker for a non linear narrative this was too much for me. The amount of jumping between characters and what they were doing confused me and caused a lot of flicking through the novel to remember. Also being a book of 1000 pages it meant a lot of flicking especially to where the footnotes where. I felt as i was reading a make your own horror story goosebumps book like i did as a child.
I'm annoyed at myself for not finishing it as im sure the characters would of blended into one anothers narratives. However, at the time I was so confused and could only have the book out for 3 weeks so I had to stop.
One day I will return to it anad power through.
The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
The only reason why I did not throw the book against the wall mid-way through, and than maybe use it to start a bonfire and dance around it (Ok that last part may be a slight exaggeration) was because I was reading it for an online discussion group so I pushed myself through it to the end.
One of the biggest problems is the fact that I don't do romance, but I had been led to believe by others that the book was more than just a romance, and was a really good Historical Fiction which is one of my favorite genres, so I decided to give it a chance, and found it to be just awful.
For one thing through the entire book I wanted someone to push the narrator off the side of a cliff because I found her unbearable, she was the most useless and incomptant heroine ever.
The writing was bad, the character development was lacking for me, and there is one section of the book in which there is literally like 5 chapters of sex, and I am no prude, but it did nothing to enhance the story, it was just there to wave sex in front of the reader like a shiny object, in addition the book was already longer than it needed to be, so I began to just skip over those parts because they were irrelevant, and not reading them made the book a whole lot shorter.
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Originally Posted by Dark Muse
pffwwww. I picked this book up several times, I'm glad I didn't buy it. I did however get it free for my Kindle, luckily that can be easily remedied.
Dickens is depressing??? Practically all of his novels have a nauseatingly happy ending!Quote:
Originally Posted by RococoLocket
A Tale of Two Cities, all that death in the French Revolution and ends with a man sacrificing his life for another?Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd A
All the despair shown in the workplace and abuse in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield?
Even the greed in A Christmas Carol which was NOT written so much to be the easy-TV morality play it is, but rather a commentary on folks like Scrooge and how they think..."decrease the surplus population" and all that.
There isn't the adjective "Dickensian" for nothing...
The worst I've ever read?
Well, I read plenty of schlock books in high school because they required them (yes, that's good education...) but the "classic" that I honestly felt was the worst of that kidn that I've read, that I really would dispute calling a classic?
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.
ATROCIOUS pacing.
OVERLY-DESCRIPTIVE (and this from someone who doesn't care for that style from Hawthorne or Conrad but can at least respect that their form is decent, THIS is just a mess, description over storytelling.)
FLAT dialogue.
STILTED description (add that to the fact I think there's TOO MUCH description, and you can begin to see why I loathe this book so.)
DULL protagonist (I understand Frome is a very reserved man, but really he gomes across as being so reserved and so introverted that he honestly is not a very relatable character, his SITUATION is relatable, loves a woman that's not his wife and that wife is not-so-nice, but really we can identify with that not because Wharton makes Frome identifiable but because that's an age-old theme for mankind and literature itself, everyone from Homer to Shakespeare to the moderns have used that, FROME is just not a dynamic character.)
The ONLY thing I can credit Wharton for is her setting, not only where and when but the wintery scenery she plays Ethan Frome agaisnt, really does come across as not only a believable setting but also very much approporiate for the despair the novel TRIES to convey, that symbolsim isn't attained effectively as the other elements fall flat, but at least the setting gets us a bit of the way there.
But other than that, Ethan Frome is out in the cold.
That's 19th-century England for you. Would you rather he had written about well-fed, happy orphans who play in the meadows all day long? Dickens had to be at least a little bit realistic. At least his novels had a happy ending; most orphans didn't have that happy ending at the time, I assume.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Macbeth
One of the most powerful scenes in all of English literature is that of Sydney Carton giving his life for a man he considers his better, a man who still has a chance at happiness. How could you not love that ending?
300+ responses to the "Worst Book You've Ever Read"... with half the responses or more naming some classic book that has survived the for generations for some reason. Surely the real title of the thread should be "Books I Personally Didn't Like (for whatever reason... but rarely having to do with issues of artistic merit) or Understand.":D
Wait...I said all that defending Dickens' work, so...why are you asking ME if I'd rather the orphans were all happy and fed and everything was peachy-keen, I just went on about how thematic Dickens' work is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd A
I'd challenge that--I understand what Wharton was trying to accomplish with Ethan Frome, I just think she failed as the plot is slow to develop, unrewarding and trite when it does, the pacing is simply atrocious, nearly all of the characters unrelatable, flat, or both, Wharton's obsession with over-narration and over-description make the work feel even more distant, which CAN work if you've a protagonist like Frome who is by his very nature distant, but NOT when the pace and lack of convincing characterization have already made him so distant...Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I don't dislike Wharton's work because of a personal reason, or a failure to "understand it," but rather because I view it as an artistic failure on Wharton's part. Wharton was a good writer, but Ethan Frome is simply a failed attempt and, to compound matters, many other, perhaps better writers have done the same sort of story--and better.
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. Book about a spoiled brat being raised in New York, who's going through puberty and learns how to swear, and it was bad because everyone raves about it like it's mindblowing, and it's just a dated, mediocre, 6th grade reading level book about a spoiled brat whose familiarity with things like unemployment begins and ends with the letters U and T. Really, just a major, major disappointment, and that's what makes it so bad - if it had been a forgotten book, and I'd read it, I'd likely have a different assessment.
To paraphrase a comment about the book on Amazon: Why has everyone told me how fine his threads are when this emperor is wearing no clothes?
The argument from tradition is the weakest argument you could make. Next you'll tell us that Harry Potter is a masterpiece because it sold a jillion copies.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
Written in a terrible style.
Ever since I discovered ray carney, I've wondered if its actually possible to critically challenge any artistic canon. Don't get me wrong I have never hated a classic. At worst, a classic simply does not move me.
I vaguely remember feeling appalled by a copy of I spit on your graves.
Stopped reading it soon afterwards...
The argument from tradition is the weakest argument you could make. Next you'll tell us that Harry Potter is a masterpiece because it sold a jillion copies.
Sorry, but the argument as to the numbers sold is the worst possible argument you could possibly make. If a work survives the ages, on the other hand, it is because generations of literary critics and other "experts", subsequent writers, and subsequent generations of readers have found that the work continues to resonate. Your personal opinions or mine are largely meaningless as to whether a given work will survive as part of the "canon". The fact that a work of art has survived, however, leads one to suppose that it has some real merits whether a given individual is enthralled with the work or not. This does not mean we must, can, or even should be expected to like every work of art that has survived. However, one does open oneself to a certain degree of incredulity when one makes a proclamation that this "classic" novel or that "classic" poem is the "worst book I ever read" (as opposed to simply a book that I disliked). The tradition or canon need not be defended. It is the opinion that challenges the tradition that needs to make a argument that is somewhat better reasoned out than "It was boring" or "It sucks". Lacking this, the first thought that comes to mind when someone declares, "It was the worst book I ever read" is "Hmmm... I wonder what books this person actually has read... and which ones they actually understood."