Because they are so bad
I'll start it out:
1. I Never Played the Game - Howard Cosell
2. Listen America - Jerry Falwell
3. Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Al Franken
4. The Misfortunes of Virtue - Marquis de Sade
5. The Spy - James Fenimore Cooper
1. Any of the Twilight books.
2. Candide.
3. Moby Dick (terribly boring).
4. Heart of Darkness
5. Pride and Prejudice.
Each of these books was terribly boring, especially 2 and 3. Twilight was terribly written and incredibly pointless. Pride and Prejudice had to spice to the plot, and Heart of Darkness was just terrible.
Hmmm... and I thought Candide, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and The Heart of Darkness were among some of the best books I had ever read. Just goes to show ya...
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Hmmm... and I thought Candide, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and The Heart of Darkness were among some of the best books I had ever read. Just goes to show ya...I think that might be because some people mistake 'fun' for 'good'. I guess we all do, sometimes, or we used to when we were younger.
I've been pretty lucky so far, in that I didn't read many bad books, but I would like to nominate the first four Harry Potter books (I gave up after the fourth). While they are moderately fun, they are woefully unimaginative in the sense that J K Rowling just took a bunch of stereotypes/myths/established beliefs and put them under one title instead of going to the trouble of actually making up something original. Also Bridget Jones's Diary. Again, fun, but completely empty.
I'd add anything written by Dan Brown or the Twilight series, but I haven't read them.
I read for fun, fiction is not "academic" or "intellectual" for me. I can't imagine whatever other reasons anyone would read fiction for.Again, fun, but completely empty.
(Not to mention her debt to Ursula K. LeGuin)
You have just become my hero.
docendo discimus
I particularly liked Cooper's the Spy .....
and 2 through 5 of those posted by IceM. It appears as if these posters were made to read these in school and still resented this. It certainly tells you something when someone dislikes a classic which has been recomended by scholars and other literary pondits. What you don't like can make you appear grossly ignorant as well as what yiu like.
I can't think of five, but I'm not fond of Ayn Rand.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
1. Twilight - Stephenie Meyer It felt totally useless to me. I could only read the first one cause my friend advised it - had to read it up to the end to say that it was crap, man that was tough not to give up reading it.
2. Any book of Dontsova or Marinina - if the first one if readable at least, the second one isn't worth the paper it is written on.
3. Devil wears Prada - well fun a bit, but then gets boring, but it is only my opinion
4. Doctor Zhivago - I tried and failed, no way I'd ever read it to the end it is the way to boring
5. The leader of the worst books I read is history of Ukraine for 11 form - no truth, it made me go furious
Yes she'd certainly be a contender.
Leaving aside commercial pap like Dan Brown et al, there are few books that I would pointedly caution people against reading. Norman Mailer's 'Barbary Shore' is pretty terrible but that's not news to anyone. Salman Rushdie's 'Fury' mistakes itemisation for intellectual activity with sleep inducing results. Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' resembles the winner of a contest devoted to dull, cliched, middle class malaise.
Only a fraction of books published find wide readership and even fewer manage lasting appeal. People read for a variety of reasons - in that sense, I can't advise against Dan Brown or Harry Potter. For this discussion, I think its best to consider books that are highly recommended usually but I/you had a terrible time with. Personally, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is one I regretted wasting time on and would never suggest it to anyone. I think there's a movie based on the book. It has to be better than the book.
Sigh. I don't know how many times I have repeated this since I joined this forum, but I find these complaints about Melville nearly heartbreaking. He almost single-handedly put American Literature on the map, and I tend to agree with the essayist in my Columbia History of American Poetry edition that Moby Dick is pretty much the American epic, that it is a master prose poem, doing for the American national identity what Dante did for Roman Catholicism as the epicenter of Imperial legacy.
I value the study of literature, and comments like "Moby Dick is boring" miss how much this narrative achieves, how it created the American anti-hero, which remains with us to this day, how it clashed a vigorous Old Testment Protestant order against a romantic rebellion against God.
Some things are really worth the effort people, and Melville's voice is one of those--and African Love, he did a great deal to advocate integration before the Civil War was even considered remotely possible.
That about says it all. And the books is surely worth reading if only for the brilliant passages of absolutely visionary poetic splendor.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Ugh, I hate these kinds of topics because they inevitably end up being a "let's come together to bash proletarian lliterature!" party.
The fact of the matter is that each book has its own value to the person who finds it valuable. And to say that someone is "ignorant" because they didn't like Candide is just...despicable. Seriously, just because literary critics have liked a book for ages doesn't necessitate its quality. IceM has contributed to other topics with intelligent discourse, so obviously his dislike of Candide and Melville has not affected his functionality as an intellectual.
I apologize for the rant, but I hate elitism in all its many forms.
Just forgot to say many people say that Harry Potter is no good, but it made so many children read, that it cannot be bad. Well at least 3 first books - as it moved on it started to go off the field I think. I began to see the author as serial killer.
I head the silence is the loudest thing in the world.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
