There were too many of them to even mention - the books which seem to be generally approved and liked, but which had the opposite impact on me; so here are only a couple that come to my mind amongst the first:
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D.Salinger)
I could never entirely comprehend the anglophone world's admiration for such "mediocre teensy American pseudo-classic", as one of my friends put it in words in class discussion of it; and in fact, it remains the mystery for me till the present day.
Certainly, when we studied it in our Literature class, we analysed all the symbolism in the book, references to popular culture, cut the book's contents literally in pieces as we all bloodily wanted to know what the hell is in that book that impresses the anglophone world so much (our professor was already going crazy with us, needless to mention, and was dying to move on something "more serious") and why the hell the book still seems so "dry" to us; we even read the damned book in original English instead in translation to our language, but even after all that, our opinions of the book were barely changed. Certainly we had some better and fuller picture of it and how (and why) it must be perceived by people who like it, but the book was so uncongenial with us, who grew up on and were educated in, I daresay, more "serious" literature (it was basically a black sheep in our repertoire) , that it still was for us barely something more than just another teen angsty book, just one in the row of many similar we have read outside of school - amusing, but nothing special and terribly, insanely overrated, and certainly not something that belongs to the shelf of "classics".
The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald)
Had it not been, very honestly, a matter of the lost bet, and had I not been "forced" to read it that way, I would have never read it as I would have probably dropped it after ten pages. Whilst I was reading it I was thinking how the book should be used to keep the fire burning in the fireplace.
Madame Bovary (G.Flaubert)
It was one of the books from obligatory school reading repertoire which I could barely bring myself to finish. Unlike the previous books listed, it at least provoked in me some slight track of interest, or some of its parts proved to be borderline amusing, so it was certainly less of a torture to go through.
Also, all the books I have read - or attempted to do so - written by Balzac, Zola or Hemingway. Especially I disliked the books by the latter, whilst Balzac and Zola were not as bad per se as boring for me.
I always try to make a clear distinction whether I disliked the book because I considered it to be very bad per se, or because it bored me to death, but I would still not argue that it is a bad-quality book as such.
The Cather in the Rye, for example, is something I truly consider to be bad book, whilst Le Pere Goriot was "only" very slow and boring.
Only my opinion, though.
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Originally Posted by Dorian Gray
