Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
A tale of two cities
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
A tale of two cities
Giles Corey wrote:
Anything by Philip Roth.
Why am I not surprised?
The Bible.
I was never a fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, although it is well-intentioned. It's too pedantic. It did not suppress anything about Civil Rights struggles in the 1960s, first because it was published in 1960 and second because it takes place in a small town. Pride and Prejudice was great. What I hated was Bronte's Jane Eyre, but I thought later that it was a bit better than I thought initially. However, I despised Villette with its xenophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-French prejudice.
War and Peace was fantastic until the 180 pages of obvious and annoying history essay at the end, which he should have left out.
I thought A Separate Peace and Catcher in the Rye were overrated.
Hemingway's Garden of Eden and numerous others were great, but I thought that For Whom the Bell Tolls was awful and I hated the romance in A Farewell to Arms.
Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is impressive. Check that out.
The technical construction and style of The Great Gatsby make it a book that you might not appreciate as much the first time but which are great later on in life. Same with Tender is the Night.
interested reader wrote:
brishen wrote:100 years of solitude. I even made the mistake of trying again because of the acclaim, years later, and still was underwhelmed.
Arghhhh, three strikes, this thread is out!
Bunch of literary heathens on here! I LOVED 100 years of solitude.
(in my family, my older sister and my parents read books I can't stomach, and vice versa; there's much better overlap between my tastes and those of my younger sister and brother)
Loved it as well, even when I had to read it for school.
a custom house clerk wrote:
The Scarlet Letter is by far the worst.
Okay, but I loved the prefatory essay. Or at least this snippet: "[It} is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum."
That stayed on my office wall when I went back to school for my phys ed degree.
After some thought, I'll go with Dracula. Stoker's idea to write in vernacular is incredibly annoying. It's like reading a facebook post.
Hmm, it's funny I've never even heard of some of the most frequently mentioned books in this thread much less read them. And I was the most voracious reader of anyone I knew when I was in school. And as an adult I've look up top-50 and top-100 classics lists to try to fill in what I missed in school. So yeah I'm not sure exactly how classic some of these titles are that people are saying are overrated. Not that highly rated if I've never heard of them or seen them on any lists of top-100 classics.
One book that I don't think was read at either high school that I attended but that I went back and read as an adult after seeing how highly it was rated on the top-whatever classics lists was Fahrenheit 451. I found it very underwhelming and overrated. But really it's all subjective anyway, and everyone has their own preferences.
I tried to read Moby Dick a few years ago, and made it about halfway through before giving up in disgust.
No disputing tastes wrote:
"War and Peace" I found to be okay, but not in any sense a life-changer. Truly meh IMO.
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Have to agree with an earlier poster about the Bible. Tiny slices are valuable as literature, but vast stretches are just boring and/or self-contradictory, and it fails as historical fiction or science fiction: In either case, it's too far from reality (pi equals three? zombies?).
And evidently a whole lot of folks agree with me, because even among those who call it "the word of G-d," well over 90% have never read the entire thing. If you *really* thought it was the output of a being that had created a universe with more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth (true stat btw), wouldn't you want to read everything it had to say?
I’m sorry that the void in your life causes you to attack other’s religious beliefs. Does it actually make you feel superior to do so? Why can’t you feel superior, but keep it to yourself?
I liked both of those, in fact "A Tale of Two Cities" is one of my favorite books of all time! Granted, I didn't know about the "twist" and I was 35 years old when I first read it.
coach wrote:
Giles Corey wrote:
Anything by Philip Roth.
Why am I not surprised?
Nor I.
Most famous scene is a teenager masturbating into food.
Pure genius. You defend this?
For any book I've read after age 30, I can't really think of one that I thought was overrated (regarding so-called classics).
I will have to admit that I have not managed to finish Atlas Shrugged or Gravity's Rainbow yet, so I guess that says something, but I want to reserve ultimate judgement until I've finished them and had time to reflect.
Giles Corey wrote:
coach wrote:
Why am I not surprised?
Nor I.
Most famous scene is a teenager masturbating into food.
Pure genius. You defend this?
No. But you stated anything by Roth. Did you read them all? How many have you read? By the way I don't like most of his novels either.
Who else besides Kafka and Roth do you dislike? Bellow, Proust, Singer, Doctorow, Wiesel?
Fiction for work commute wrote:
I have a long work commute and normally listen to non-fiction audiobooks, but I've been trying to branch out with some fiction and have been wanting to listen to some classics. However, I have read some classics that turned out to be exceptionally boring and seemingly pointless books... Was wondering if anyone had some in mind they think are overrated. Care to share?
There is no such thing as an overrated piece of fiction. Someone mentioned Steinbeck. They are clearly not your true reader, they are the Harry Potter and hunger game types.
Are you interested in what happened to families being pushed west during the dust bowl? If so you will like grapes of wrath, if not don’t even think about it.
You want something disturbing, read Blood Meridian, If not don’t even think about it
Are you interested in what life was like in Russia during the napoleonic wars, read War and Peace, not overrated, maybe overwrought.
You want something infinitely funny and depressing at the same time, read infinite jest.
You want some brain candy read hunger games.
You want encyclopedic knowledge about whales, read Moby Dick.
You want unprecedented wit, read Shakespeare.
Don’t convince yourself something is overrated, just not the right time