The Worst Classics You Have Ever Read

[Melmoth]

Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Eliot's Middlemarch, Austen's Emma... are some which come to mind...

[kelby_lake]

To Kill A Mockingbird. A patronising piece of coughing up chinese proverbs and giving us moral lessons which we are obviously so unaware of. thank god she didn't write another book.

[CathyEarnshaw]

I really loved Emma, it is one of my Austen favorites. But I could not get through Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man without constant breaks.

[Joreads]

Oh! I thought of another one! I hated The Great Gatsby. I had to read it for my lit class last year. Everyone else liked it, but for some reason I just couldn't stand it...but I did like Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams...

I didn't like it either I had to force myself to read it. Everyone I talk to loves it. I sometime wonder if people like these books because they have been classed as Classics and they feel they have to?

[Equality72521]

My classic hating is mainly directed towards Mrs. Dalloway. I really, really, really hate that book.

[kelby_lake]

I didn't like it either I had to force myself to read it. Everyone I talk to loves it. I sometime wonder if people like these books because they have been classed as Classics and they feel they have to?

Like Gatsby or not, you have to admit that the writing is beautiful. I understand that the book's quite serious and contemplative, but it's hardly the worst classic- far from it.

[WICKES]

On The Road is terribly dull and boring.

Rucksack bohemians on the road to everywhere.

To be fair, I think On the Road is a very misunderstood novel. People read it expecting a hedonistic, drug fuelled ride. In fact much of it has a rather sad, melancholy feel to it. Kerouac was by nature quite a shy, sensetive man and not the Keith Richards/ Keith Moon type extravert people imagine.

I thought it was ok, but as a Brit I really see it as a book by an American for Americans- it is about reigniting/ reinvigorating a love of and appreciation for freedom/ space/ going west... all that stuff. The problem I had with the novel was that it felt like he did all that travelling just so he'd have something to write about- that seemed kind of inauthentic. You also sense that he didn't really enjoy it much and was often lonely and depressed.

[Etienne]

Traveling is not just about enjoying, relaxing having fun and tripping. That's vacations, authentic traveling contains it's dose of melancholy, sufferings, adventure and disgust. Why, would you ask me? Because authentic freedom and discovery implies this. Not everyone who travels "travels" in this perspective, and that's a big gap in understanding some things. Traveling with everything organized, or doing only the things where you know you have fun and comfort makes one miss many things, that while may be less "enjoyable" on a purely hedonistic perspective, might be much more rewarding in an inner, intellectual, or spiritual perspective.

In the same way, an intellectual or an athlete might suffer a lot during the process of doing what he does, how is that justified when it is not to make a living (and that person could actually earn more doing something else)? It's because the person loves what he is doing and it includes this suffering, and that doesn't mean that he is always happy about what he is doing and is having "fun", but these are the things that are, in the end, the most rewarding, those in which there is a part of suffering.

Some might call it masochism, but "masochism" as typically understood might very well be only a perverted version of a certain instinctual "love to suffer" which is a basis to self-improvement. There are many other illustrations of such a concept, namely in religions, or love relations.

That was a bit longer than I expected...

[WICKES]

I have bit of a problem with Brave New World. I do like it and I love Huxley, but the idea that after a cataclysmic war/ revolution/ upheval etc the world would be taken control of by a benign council of world leaders who would rule in the best interests of everyone else seemed to me pretty optimistic. I found Orwell's vision more realistic.

If 1984 and Brave New World were the two great dystopian novels of the 20th century (funny, I've just noticed that they were both educated at Eton!) then for me Orwell's was far the superior and far more accurate.

Traveling is not just about enjoying, relaxing having fun and tripping. That's vacations, authentic traveling contains it's dose of melancholy, sufferings, adventure and disgust. Why, would you ask me? Because authentic freedom and discovery implies this. Not everyone who travels "travels" in this perspective, and that's a big gap in understanding some things. Traveling with everything organized, or doing only the things where you know you have fun and comfort makes one miss many things, that while may be less "enjoyable" on a purely hedonistic perspective, might be much more rewarding in an inner, intellectual, or spiritual perspective.

But if you read his other stuff (and a biography) you get the impression that it really brought him nothing- certainly little inner/ spiritual growth or peace. He died very bitter, lonely and unhappy. He was looking for enlightenment, that is clear, what is also clear is that he never found it. People like Hesse are more rewarding. I'd recommend Siddhartha over all Kerouac's books any day.

[Etienne]

I'll have to agree with you on Huxley, and Huxley in general, not just Brave New World. He was a great intellectual and a very interesting person, but he is in general a boring writer, the form of essay suits him much more than that of, say, a novel.

I am not saying Kerouac is the greatest writer ever or that On the Road is a work of much depth, I was only objecting to that particular sentence of your, about the point of his travels, which, maybe you are right about in the case of Kerouac. Also my post does not exclude the fact that one dies bitter and sad afterwards, take the obvious example of Bobby Fischer, the chess player, if you look after his conquest of the chess world, you might wonder what in the hell was the point of it all. However are we going to call what he did futile and useless? I wouldn't.

Some people amassed huge fortunes, and died unhappy, bitter and sad, same goes for absolutely anything. For some people hedonism might be this very quest, and many of them will die sad and bitter.

But in all these cases, it is a matter of overburdening oneself (in different ways) rather than this simple beneficial suffering I talked about.

[Hank Stamper]

My classic hating is mainly directed towards Mrs. Dalloway. I really, really, really hate that book.

+1

i dunno if i really really really hate it, but it is probably one of the most pointless books i have ever read and instantly forgettable

[Scheherazade]

+1

i dunno if i really really really hate it, but it is probably one of the most pointless books i have ever read and instantly forgettable

Hallelujah!

I can even start a "Mrs Dalloway Haters Club"!

[Etienne]

I've only read To the Lighthouse by Woolf, and even though it was good I was not so impressed, so I ain't going to join your club since I won't be reading it! Orlando looks like a very interesting book though.

[JBI]

I found Mrs. Dalloway to be breathtakingly incredible. I think though, that a lot of criticism on it is based on a mis-reading. The book in itself is a study of human vanity, tinged with a nice little King Lear subplot to add a little flavor.

[mortalterror]

I found Mrs. Dalloway to be breathtakingly incredible.

At least we agree on that much.