Famous books you never cared for/understood the appeal of?

The Country Doctor is amazing.

 

That one really is!

 

I'll give it a shot.

 

Some Girls Bite by Chloe Neills. I just cannot understand how can anyone like this book, lol. My main problem with this book is that the heroine was perfect as in she was the brightest, most powerful and wealthy. It was impossible to root for her. Also, she was your stereotypal strong, independant, witty kickass Urban Fantasy heroine. Besides, the romance deserved a gazillion eye rolls. It was a star crossed, love at first sight mix. And it was completely unbelievable.

Magician by Raymond E Feist. It was awful, full stop. The characters bored me, everything was really predictable and often cliche and the writing was all telling and no showing IMO.

The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett. I just cannot with this book. The character were two dimentionals and the writing wasn't engaging. I especially had a problem with the dialogues. I felt like that the characters lacked life or something. Strangely, lots of reviewers I follow liked it, lol.

 

The Great Gatsby... maybe my expectations were too high when I read it. I couldn't see what was so great about it after one reading.

 

Same here! I still haven't finished the book actually. Not that it was horrible but it wasn't half as great as people made it out to be.

 

I realize I'm necro-quoting here, but I just have to talk about why I despise Nicholas Sparks real quick.

The Notebook. I saw the movie. It wasn't, like, my favorite. But I liked it okay. Watched it a few times. It's a sweet story.

I knew the book was a bestseller. I'd never read anything else by him, so I picked up that one. It sat on my shelf for a long time before I got around to reading it.

Read the whole book in one evening. What. Even. The fuck.

Spoiler

How?

How did a book like that become so popular?

But that's not bad by itself. A lot of shitty books that appeal to the lowest common denominator get published and do well. What really blew my mind was how nothing that was good about the movie was even in the book. The passionate, iconic kissing-in-the-rain scene? Absent from the book. Hanging from the ferris wheel, lying in the street, jumping in the lake? Absent from the book. Allie's trip with her mother to the lumber yard, where she tells Allie about her own failed romance? Absent from the book. Noah's impassioned argument where he tells her what a pain in the ass she is, but he wants her anyway, and blah blah blah "Don't take the easy way out"? Absent. From the book. All of these scenes were replaced by sappy, cliche, sickeningly sweet "romantic" scenes that tell and tell but don't do anything to show why these people love each other so much.

But that's not even the worst part.

The end? Where, in the movie, Allie asks Noah if their love can take them away together? The scene that would have made Vlad the Impaler cry little girly tears? Instead, book Allie remembers book Noah when he comes to her room at night and kisses her. And the book ends with her undoing the buttons on his shirt. Because they are about to have freaky old people sex. Because the perfect way to end this monstrosity is, of course, with old man boners.

Eat a bag of male genetalia, Nicholas Sparks.

Edit: And I will say that reading the book transformed my opinion of The Notebook from "decent chick flick" to "quite possibly the greatest movie ever made." Because if they could get something that good out of a book that shitty, then the people who made that movie are goddamn geniuses.

 

I totally agree. After hearing some of the talk, I didn't bother with it.

Also, anything by Robert Ludlum. I read a couple of his books because he's such a big name, but frankly I don't find his writing very appealing.

On the other hand, I love reading Stephen King, but I can't read most of what he writes because of the yuk factor. It's really too bad because I think he's one of the greatest writers of our time (along with Ken Follett). 11-22-63 is my favourite of his; very low on the yuk.

 

Definitely One Hundred Years of Solitude... I just can't understand why people like it... It sounds like a very boring and long long tale... I read it to the middle of the book and left it at that...

 

I had difficulty staying interested in Tom Sawyer.

 

Kama Sutra - so bland and unimaginative.

Being serious, I've never understood why Lovecraft is apparently so influential in horror. I've moderately enjoyed stuff by authors who've claimed the influence, but after dipping my toes into Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, I could only conclude that I was never gonna "get" the Cthulhu obsession people have. Did I just pick the wrong ones to read? Or maybe I just can't appreciate the historic context?

 

@Sifunkle

I like Lovecraft. If you don't like those two, you're not likely to enjoy his work. Maybe you'd like some of his work like The Rats in the Walls better.

 

Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, I've yet to explore anything else by Steinbeck and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde... I ''get'' them don't get me wrong and fully applaud and appreciate what is within them, I just really disliked reading them and have no desire to revisit them... I love Treasure Island by RLS so it's no his writing, just that particular tale. I even did a whole piece on it for my college unit back in the day and found it doubly tedious because I found although it fit my chosen theme perfectly the way he presented the theme wasn't as compelling as I'd anticipated, that's absolutely no detraction to the tale he wrote because plenty of people perceive it as a stonewall classic, just my own experience and rapport.

 

For me, there are quite a few, but I won't mention them all.

Harry Potter: I didn't connect with these books at all. I really tried. I read four or five of them, but for me it was like assigned reading in school.

Also, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I read the whole thing I get that there's an important social message there, but the ending was too nebulous for my taste after the rest of the book was so grounded in 'reality.'

Lord of the Rings: Nope. Got half way through and it was still hobbits taking a long walk, so I stopped without regret.

As for 50 Shades of Grey, I'm not interested in even picking it up.

 

@Lewdog = Yeah, Mark Twain's books were...meh. I tried, I really did, but it just never really sat well with me. Take Huckleberry Finn. First off, were his parents high as a kite and drunken hillbillies when they gave the poor kid that name? Second off, he sounded too...mature. Like a fully grown, mature adult stuck in the body of a young boy who wanted to go on an epic adventure. Yet despite all this, he acted like a whiny, self-entitled, spoiled BRAT!! Oh, and tricking the whole town including his parents into thinking that he had died? Dick move kid. Dick move. I wanted to hit him in the face when I saw that part in a movie. The ending where the whole town sobbed in relief and hugged him? It should've ended with them slapping him silly and chasing him out of town for his cruel trick.

Don't even get me started with Jim. Really dude? Why are you wasting your time with this snot-nosed kid, especially when he 'accidentally' brought you back into slavery? Sock him in the face and get your ass to freedom already! I kept waiting for him to slap Huck and say, “Shut your stupid face, Huck. I'm going to freedom, and I don't care what you want. Good day.”

Basically...
Jim, despite being an actual fully-grown, mature adult, never did anything but what Huck wanted; Huck was entitled and thought the world revolved around him, despite having the voice of a fully grown, mature adult.

The whole book was... GAH!!

 

I am yet to finish East of Eden. I hate when a book is ruined by association with a person I have severe negative views of. (Welp. Personal failings...oops.)

 

To Kill a Mockingbird - this one was torture for me.
All Quiet On the Western Front - normally I'm a fan of war-themed stuff, but this one I just found kinda boring.
The Diary of Anne Frank - yeah, I know it's a true story about the Holocaust and Anne died at Auschwitz and it was a tragedy and all that, but I found it as interesting as watching grass grow.
The Winter Room (Gary Paulsen) - seriously, the last chapter is basically the whole book, you can skip the rest of it. I did exactly that, took a test on it (read it in school), and aced that test. The rest of the book is mundane nonsense, like what their neighbour ate for breakfast (I'm not even joking).

 

Tolkien, Dafoe, and the like (ponderous and anal about detail)

I'm largely convinced that these authors were secretly big fans of the Marquis de Sade. Don't waste my time explaining how a road was named after a guy who cleaned his toenails there after experimenting with cooking tuna from a certain sea a thousand miles west on which was the major trading center of a bunch of dead people.

 

1984- I know, I know...big brother and all of that. But God, can you get any more depressing. I hated...every...second...of...it. I wouldn't have finished it at all if it wasn't assigned reading for class.

 

The first one that comes to mind is the Lord of the Rings. I tried once in high school and quit because I hated it. Then, the movie came out and I tried again because I didn’t want to see the movie before reading the book. Quit again, same reason. A few years later picked it up again and put it right back down. At that point, I thought, eh, screw it. I don’t even care if I never see that movie. Then, an acquaintance of mine talked me into giving it one more shot. It’s his favorite book and he said I’d just been unfair to it all those years ago. I earnestly resolved that I would go into it with an open mind and, if nothing else, try to respect what he saw in it and finish the damn book whether I liked it or not. Not particularly far into it, I angrily hurled it down the long hallway of the apartment I lived in at the time. The book slid across the floor and came to a halt under my bed. It remained there for the next two years until I moved. When I packed up my belongings, I threw it away. No regrets. I am done with that horrible, unreadable book. I am not sorry.

The other book I can’t stand that gets (and probably deserves) respect is Gulliver’s Travels. I need to make this clear: I completely understand why it is groundbreaking. Everyone who has ever made me read it was right to do so. I’ve read Swift’s contemporaries and completely understand that he was doing something important that no one else was doing at that time period. And I respect him for it. Many of the things that I do like were directly or indirectly influenced by Jonathan Swift. He was a talented writer and the work is absolutely, deservedly a classic. I just personally hate it. I hate every setting, every dynamic and most of all I hate Gulliver. I’m a sucker for satire. I understand what he's satirizing. I can get behind his badass 1700's punk rock "stickin' it to the man" attitude. But, I still hate it. I’ve read it 5 times. I hated it every time. It never grew on me. I feel like I should like it. But, I just don’t.

 

50 Shades of Grey. It actually makes me annoyed that it's so popular, for many reasons.

The Hobbit. Started it many times and was never able to get into it.

The Time Traveller's Wife. I found the first couple of chapters really irritating, though it was a long time ago and I can't remember why.

 

Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

It must be me, because I have tried over and over and I cannot finish the first book of either adventure. I was also bored by the LOTR movies and I haven't seen GOT series, so... I think I'm hopeless.

 

Also I was sort of dissapointed by The Karamazov Brothers... and yes, to the one commenting on A Hundred Years of Solitude, I read it in the original language and it's still sort of boring. I read it with patience and with good mood and I managed to finish it, but it's not a compelling story. It is not bad either, I found a huge ammount of original ideas in it, and I laugh and all, but in a slow, quiet way.

 

You're not the only one. I also fell asleep in Raiders... both times I tried to watch it. I think Spielberg and Lucas are both highly over-rated.

 

I really cannot talk about GOT because I couldn't read more than 50 pages, but regarding LOTR... well, that's a stupid story right there. If you look at it, it's just the confrontation between good and evil. Sauron is Satan, and the formula is "the journey of the hero" (google that), and when I read about the man of the mountain, dancing and dancing with his yellow shoes, I felt like I was going to puke.

Now... this is 100% a story for children written in an awesome way. I have nothing to say about Tolkien's ability. And I need to praise his intensive commitment with genealogies and the incredibly rich universe he created... but the story is for children and I cannot swallow something so superficial.

Conclusion: LOTR is an awesome, true literary, piece of work... but I am not into that particular kind of literature. I enjoy "other stuff" more, like "The Death of Ivan Illich" by Tolstoi.