Which do you dislike the most?
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Which do you dislike the most?
I have no idea which i dislike the most .... maybe Kafka .... but the most "overated" might be ... wel ... Kafka i think.
People are going to hate me for this. I'm going to list a few authors who I think are over rated. Now that doesn't mean they don't have value, just that their reputation exceeds my estimate of their merit. And let me emphasize, my estimate.
Mark Twain
Ernest Hemingway
ee cumings
Norman Mailer
Allen Ginsberg
Kate Chopin
Ayn Rand
Joseph Heller
Arthur Miller
I stayed from contemporary writers, since it takes time for reputations to settle in. And by coincidence I see I picked only American writers, which probably means I don't feel comfortable with knowing the reputations of foreign writers.
Personally I never liked James Joyce.Though alot of people have told me he's the greatest writer ever.I've read all his stuff.
While i disagre with Ryduce, i agree whole heartedly with Virgil!
I dont agree with Twain or Hemingway.
Joyce is a great writer, but I've always been put off by the people who say he's the greatest. He almost made my list. Remember, the question was over rated. I think Twain and Hemingway are good writers, just way overblownQuote:
Originally Posted by Ryduce
I also agree with Virgil on some points.... I enjoy Twain and Hemmingway but i think they're over rated.
I don't think ee cummings is over rated.... quite the opposite i think
I definatly wouldn't put Kafka on my list, but i haven't been exposed to any Kafka so i suppose i dont know if he's over rated
My list:
Margaret Atwood
J.K Rowling
Dan Brown
Daniell Steel
Modern writers. I think people give these writers far too much credit. As one who is against the Hollywoodization of the novel, I think people confuse "good writing" with "an enjoyable read" - these authors manage to spin an enjoyable read, but in terms of their abliity to write - they are given far too much praise
I'm sure he'd feel honoured. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
This whole thread reminds me of that scene in Manhattan where Woody, accompanied by his 17 year old girlfriend (Tracy), encounters Mary (Diane Keaton) and Yale. Perhaps it's a bit like that Saturday Night Live skit you mentioned:
"MARY: What do you do, Tracy?
TRACY: I go to high school.
MARY: Oh, really. Really. Somewhere Nabokov
is smiling, if you know what I mean.
YALE: LeWitt is overrated. In fact,
he may be a candidate for the academy.
MARY: Right!
YALE: Mary and I have invented the Academy
of the Overrated for such notables as
MARY: Gustav Mahler,
YALE: Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung.
MARY: Scott Fitzgerald.
YALE: Lenny Bruce. Can't forget him, can we?
MARY: How about Norman Mailer?
WOODY: I think those people are all terrific.
YALE: Who was that guy you had?
MARY: I didn't. It was yours. Heinrich Bol.
WOODY: Overrated?
MARY: Don't wanna leave out Heinrich.
WOODY: Gee, what about Mozart?
You guys don't wanna leave out Mozart while you’re trashing people."
Joyce
Dostoevsky
Tolstoy
Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi
Col. Mohammad Khan
Mumtaz Mufti
Mirza Ghalib
V. S. Naipal
Kobo Abe
Charlotte Bronte
Frank Herbert
Robert Anson Heinlein
When compiling these lists, can I ask exactly what you mean by over-reated?
Do you mean that they are respected as great writers by the literary 'establishment' but that you personally don't like them?
Or that they sell lots of books but you think they shouldn't?
Or perhaps that you had high expectations of them and were disappointed?
I ask because there is a great disparity between the lists of authors. Virgil's contains only 'literary' authors - Charles's is much more populist - EAP's is a mix of the two.
I think we need to establish a consistent definition of 'over-rated' rather than just spitting out endless lists of writers we don't like much.
But what do I know - I have read and love everything written by Kafka - and Joyce's Dubliners is one of the best collections of short-stories I have ever read.
You can interpret it as you please.I don't hate Joyce,I actually enjoyed The Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man,but all the people I've known who have read him universally agree that he's the best and that Ulysses is the greatest book ever.I just happen to think this is a bold statement.There is too much great literature in the world for someone to be called the greatest.
It was established at the beginning that over-rated does not mean you do not dislike the authors. It simply means that, at least what i think, they are given too much credit and you just constatnly hear about Hemmingway or Joyce (two authors i quite enjoy btw) everywhere. If you were to walk into a small-time bookstore in America for example and take a look at their classics section, they would have tons of Hemmingways novels (despite the fact that he may or may not be considered classsics to some people) and maybe one Herman Melville or Hawthorne.
That's just my opinion on this subject
We could do another thread about writers who don't get enough credit.That might be more interesting to talk about.
Agreed, there are many ignored authors, who are truly great, or who have written at least one great book.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryduce
Thanks for bringing up Melville. :p I think he's trash. No one paid attention to him until he was adopted as a hero among the Jazz Age literati, and since then no one has questioned that he's a "classic," but I think he ought to have been forgotten at the bottom of the dump heap.
Kafka I like well enough, but his writing strikes me of amateurish at times. I would catagorize Kafka as a "pleasant read" for the more morose of us.
I would also add to the list the name of Thomas Hardy. Don't know that he's held in especially high esteem, but I wouldn't recommend him to anybody, even for light bedtime reading. Absolutely dripping with the melodramatic contructs of his day.
Although I've never actually read too far by him, how about Marcel Proust. I can't speak from experience, but from what I've read elsewhere about him he seems he would be acheingly tedious.
I think Steinbeck is over-rated. I enjoy his novels (my favorite so far is Cannery Row), but they're just not as super-great as people make them out to be. By the time I graduated high school, among the various required English classes I took, I had gone through, in considerable depth, both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men twice. Not even the works of Shakespeare enjoyed this much attention. Maybe the social commentary in those books made them attractive to teachers (especially in California, perhaps) due to the abundance of possible essay and discussion topics, and thus everyone gets the impression that Steinbeck is a great writer from a young age.
At any rate, at least Steinbeck is a step up from Margaret Mitchell.
Stephen King. I've read one thing by him that was good in my opinion, a short story starring Sherlock Holmes but realing featuring Doctor Watson as the real solver of the puzzle, and having Holmes and Lestrade conspire to cover up the crime in the interests of the family. The rest is ravings. He is like the old pulp writers, you love him or hate him.
Perhaps this is heresy since he is my favorite classic author, but Twain is slighly overrated. He came to live on his reputation, not his writing towards the end of his life, and a lot of it lacks the wit and spark that made Twain who he was.
Melvile should be read aloud in the garden to bore the inscects off the vegetables. It would be better than pesticide. http://www.smileyville.net/aiwan/pleasantry.gif
I agree. Steinbeck is pretty good, but not even near superstar status.Quote:
Originally Posted by bluevictim
Steinbeck is the greatest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :banana: :banana: :banana: :thumbs_up :thumbs_up Nobody disagree or I'll fight em.I'm kidding, but seriously he's the man.
Perhaps David Eddings, who is pretty famous despite the obvious flaws in his books (which are, in the end, just about black'n'white superhero-beating-evil).
I've never posted here before, but as overrated authors is one of my favorite subjects, I have to join in.
Ultimately, I think you can make a case for any author being overrated. A work has to stand alone, and often more credit is given to the person than the work, and it's sometimes unbalanced.
With that in mind, I think Joyce is one of the least overrated writers because his writing is staggeringly good. His books (especially Ulysses) have very little going for them in terms of story, but the writing is mind-blowing. Criticize him all you want for readability--I do--but it's excellently crafted.
More or less the same goes for Pynchon, who I'm surprised no one mentioned yet. I give him less credit than Joyce because he's not as much of an innovator, but there's so much craftsmanship in his works that I have to respect his writing even if I don't understand it. Maybe it's misguided to respect what you can't understand, but I enjoy being a naive reader on occasion.
People I think are overrated: Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning (poets and critics alike give him too much credit for the dramatic monologue), and T.S. Eliot (who I love, but The Waste Land actually isn't that great).
No book has ever made me cry more than the end of "Grapes of Wrath".
Grapes of Wrath deeply effected me.It made me believe in human goodness.
Grapes of Wrath deeply effected me.It made me believe in inhuman badness.
As well. ;)
Grapes of Wrath deeply affected me. It cured my insomnia. ;)
To each his own my friend.
My list: Dan Brown, Harold Robins, Danielle Steel, H. c. Mahler, Wilbur Smith, Helen Fielding,
It appears that everyone hates Dan Brown.Why so?I never read any of his books,but I've been meaning to get the Da Vinci Code.It seems pretty popular to normal folks, but serious literature fans hate it.
There's a thread on it in the authors section - you'll get all the opinions there.
OMG YESS!!!!!!! Modern audiences seem to be more interested in books that do the thinking for them. Even though I loath to say it, Rowling may be a small exception b/c she actually incorporates some archetypal ideas into her works. :idea:Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles Darnay
Dan Brown has found a very interesting theme but I don't like his way of writing. I have a feeling of reeding screenplay for the movie not a book. Of course it's only my opinion. It's an easy reading - short sentences, short chapters. But maybe I think so beacuse I read before Hiram's key, Hiram' book, Rex Deus etc. and then Da Vinci's Code. I'm pretty sure that it would be a great movie. ;)
J. K. Rowling, definately. And Dan Brown. Both of them have intriguing stories and ideas but their storytelling abilities themselves get old and boring fast... doesn't seem to drag me in enough. I love the concept of "The Da Vinci Code" though.
Ayn Rand
She is loved for her p[hilosophy ... but modern philosohpy students and proffessors do not consider her a philosopher. She also repeats ideas in the re-accurring themes in her very long books: The Fountainhead went on for about 700 pages of the same old thing to drive home a point that she made in the first 50 pages.
Chuck Palahnuik. He's the "in" thing around here, especially among some of the college kids that would never willingly pick up Crime and Punishment or any sort of actual classic on their own time--he's fallback literature. I've read some of his stuff and it's stale. He starts out with plots that really are pretty good in concept, but his writing style just zaps all the interest out of it.
And totally agree with IrishCanadian about Ayn Rand.
What about Arundhati Roy? I think she is the most overrated.
If anything, Arundhati Roy is underrated.
Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy---their books are just dense and monlithic in tone. You have to read a page twice to get it.
I agree with that. He simply neatly packages existentialism into witty pop culture and viola! A book thats not at all innovative or original.Quote:
Originally Posted by higley
I struggle to say any authors though are overrated - as a community I believe writers are some of the most under-appreciated individuals out there.
That being said, I still feel Jack Kerouac is a bit overrated, though I do greatly enjoy most of his writings it is really just not of the greatest form IMO. I feel similar about John O'Hara. Also JRR Tolkien has never done anything for me.
But cast this thread into the fire! We should all be ashamed! ;)