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

When I read the Catcher in the Rye, it felt like I was missing something important. Maybe I read it too fast, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought.

 

This. I finished and couldn't help thinking, "what's the big deal?"

 

INFINITE JEST!

I'm convinced that man wrote that book as a clinic in trolling the general public. It's a chore of a read. The payoff in the end is not nearly enough to warrant the time spent. I do think the man was a genius, but that tome of a novel is completely overrated.

 

I love the Catcher in the Rye (and have annoyed one of my classes this term making them read and analyse it). To more accurately answer the question: I hated House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. I get that Lily Bart is supposed to be unable to take a single effing decision but that didn't stop me from getting increasingly more angry every time she manoeuvred herself into another corner, yet again! Then there's Dickens... I'm sorry, but I just don't get his appeal. Please, sir, could I have - on second thought, no thanks, I'm good.

 

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth.
I've read this book one and a half times and the second attempt had me forcing myself to finish it, which I couldn't.
I liked the idea of his confessing on the shrink's couch. In fact I could just picture him there, but in the end it just didn't work for me.
The language may have been risque when it was written but even now, there was something grating about it.

 

I don't think I can contribute to this thread because if I'm not enjoying a book I stop reading it. Seems the simplest solution to me.

It reminds me of that joke:

Man: "Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do this." (Lifts arm in the air)
Doctor: "Well stop doing this then." (Lifts arm in the air)

 

I hated Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I should like this because...?
Pass.

 

Some "how-to-write" or "writing encouragement" books don't work for me, notably Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It's too personal to Lamott, and I found it a bit too feminine, if you know what I mean and aren't offended. It's not really that there's anything wrong with it; it's just that I'm not its target audience.

 

Y'know, I just picked up The Shining a couple of weeks ago and I have to say, meh.

It's not "bad" at all, the writing of course is quite organic and skillful — but at the same time it can get rather boring. I'm a little past the halfway mark and things are just starting to get interesting. For me, the ratio of action:non-action is too damn low. I'm spending pages and pages wondering when I'm supposed to start paying attention.

If this is typical King, then he is not for me. (Please don't beat me up for non-exposure?)

 

He can be a bit long in the build-up. I'm a big fan of his short stories and novellas, but his novels are very hit-and-miss for me.

 

His novels are DEFINITELY hit and miss. Some of them, I can't put down. Others (Gerald's Game, Insomnia) have been a tough slog. The ones I mentioned were ultimately enjoyable, just took a while to really get into.

ETA: 11.22.63 was a fantastic novel. I really enjoyed it, but I strongly considered putting it down about halfway through. I felt like he spent way too much time setting up the protagonists new life in Jody. I kept wondering when the action was going to start. As with the others, I'm ended up glad that I finished it.

 

I've never liked King's novels (or most of the movie adaptations) but I read an anthology I really liked, many years ago.

I bought another anthology recently and even his short stories have gone downhill IMO, or maybe I was easier to please as a teenager? I'm not even talking from a writing perspective, just as a horror fan. Many of the stories feel unfinished and most of the others are anti-climactic.

E.g. the first one in the anthology. Starts with a 10-year-old boy ditched by his older brother, so goes to a creepy derelict service station. Endless description of how scary it is. The boy drinks some vodka he found and passes out. You expect something bad to happen to him. About half the story is over.
Then we cut to the slip road to the service station where a rusty, muddy car pulls up. For the next endlesssssss amount of time people keep pulling over to help the broken down car and get eaten by it (the car). We get oodles of backstory for each of them before they're eaten. Eventually a family stops, the parents get eaten, the kids don't. A policeman comes and gets eaten (I'm very bored of people being eaten by now). The 10-year-old walks out of the service station, realises the car is an alien (????) and uses a magnifying glass to scare it away (????????). The story ends. It must be about 10k words.

It's just... not a good story. And it's by no means the worst one.

I want to hunt down the other anthology I read to see if I still like it. The only story I remember (this must have been at least 10 years ago, probably more) was a group of people walking through some kind of pond and emerging with leeches stuck all over them. Anybody know it?

 

The first one almost sounds like From a Buick 8, but that was a novel, not a short story, but maybe he lengthened out one of his shorts. The second is almost certainly "The Body", from Different Seasons, which got made into the movie Stand by Me. That's the same book that produced the film The Shawshank Redemption, starring Morgan Freeman and.... whatsisname, married to Susan Sarandon.

 

Thank you, I'll get a copy!

According to the wiki on From a Buick 8, he's written two novels about supernatural cars. It doesn't mention the short I read, but I suppose this must be a King Thing.

 

I understand the appeal of the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series, as summarised on the book back covers, etc ...but nothing prepared me for how awful they actually are.

Gabaldon's writing is perky enough for chick-lit (which is what this basically is, in my opinion) but lord. The basic premise of the story : a 20th century woman is accidentally transported back to 18th Century Scotland, falls in love with a highlander and tries to prevent Culloden from happening because ...well, because she knows what will happen at THAT battle ...that story has promise. But whew. Diana Gabaldon's execution of that story is pathetic. It's hard to know where to start. Silly characters who swither around for no good reason, silly historical mistakes and clichés, silly events, obsession with rape, bad BAD dialogue ...aargh. Silly to the point of unreadability. I read about 3/4 of the first book and chucked it in the bin. I never chuck books in the bin, but I did this one.

Some people are already visiting Scotland from overseas, hoping to 'see' the dregs of this silly series as some sort of reality. I know. I've met a few. There are even 'Outlander Tours' for the really deluded. The mind boggles....

Scotland is a fantastic place, full of real legend (stories that have been passed down for generations), gorgeous scenery, fantastic (and occasionally frustrating) people who value collectivism and who are generous even when they can't afford to be, a political history that is well worth exploring ...but Outlander is none of those things. It's just bodice-ripping chick-lit in a kilt.

 

I so want that to appear on the book cover.

 

I looked it up and I am finding a lot of reviews talking about some serious rape apology. Like, I normally associate that word with bad examples of feminism, but in this case it's totally justified seeing as apparently you're expected to like a character who rapes his wife, and like the wife who is okay with all this rape in the setting. It also sounds like there's a little too much rape to be honest, even then, rape was still serious. There were plenty of times and places hundreds of years in the past where they would kill you for it. It does at least sound like it's obsessed with rape. Is the TV show that bad?
Also, I saw excerpts with typing out the accent in full detail. Now this is kind of a fiddly debatable issue but that always seemed clunky and annoying to me, and an unnecessary risk of being accused of racism. That doesn't endear me.

 

What's really bad is that she's got the accent WRONG—no matter what you think of phonetic dialogue or the stupid shit they're attempting to say. Nobody talks like that here! I mean, nobody. I understand she wrote the first book before she ever actually visited Scotland, because she liked the look of a guy she saw in a kilt. I mean—this really shows. She did superficial research, so all her 'facts' aren't wrong. But she's not captured the feel of the place or time at all.

And the rapes? Well they happen (or nearly happen) every time folks turn around in this series. It's just ...frankly, weird. I'm not a reader who shrinks from reading graphic rape scenes or graphic sex scenes. But these in Outlander are too frequent and too out of place, and, I'm sorry, smack of sexual fantasies on the part of the author rather than story development.

I haven't seen the TV series, and have no urge to do so. It's had very mixed reviews, and the negative ones seem to support the problems I had with the book. Some reviewers complain that the book is better! Not a recommendation.

 

I don't know if this counts as a famous work as a book, but I found The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis to be an absolute and utter piece of crap, and I'm not even religious.

Call it literary fiction if you will, but the author has no clue as to the time and place he's writing in. I'm not going to go drag my copy out of the trash for page numbers, but in the very first scene he's got a character munching on an ear of roast corn. As in maize. As in the New World, fifteen hundred years after the action takes place. He's got Jesus & co chowing down on seafood species that are definitely not kosher, and definitely not present in the Sea of Galilee. He confused the Apostle Matthew with the Matthew who wrote the gospel, which is not at all a mainstream Christian belief, and his descriptions of Judas and the Pharisees might as well have been from the cover art of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Just a vile, vile book. Nice concept, but nothing else redeeming about it in any way.

 

But other than that you liked it, right?

 

I got the audiobook copy of that collection from the library and was not impressed by any of the stories. And yes, that one stood out as one of the worst in the book.

Outlander was another I couldn't get into, but I did finish the first book.

 

The Argos Catalogue. I just think it's shit.

 

If by Outlander you're talking about Diana Galbaldon, I won't read her books despite being recommended by other Romance readers over the years. I get the sense she's sadistic to her characters and that she might be one of those authors that keep a series going longer than it should. Both these sentiments have been confirmed by reviews over the years so I don't even bother to start them.

I've also refused to read 50 shades. Going by the movie that I couldn't watch beyond the first 15 minutes, I'd consider that book an implement of torture. Although, I respect what that book has done for the genre. I've read stories from my favorite author and other authors that have piggy backed of that book's success.

And I only read Twilght because a bookstore assistant was horrified that as a romance reader I had no interest in the series. This was at a time when they had posters and giant displays Edward and Bella all over the store. I'm rather closeted from the world as far the latest trends. I remembered thinking...what's the big deal? I'm not reading a teeny romance! I've got grown up vampire romances I'd rather read. She insisted I take a free copy home and read it. Took me months and a moment of extreme boredom to get around to it.

So shoot me down and call me names, but it was an enjoyable light read and actually got me interested in YA romances.

 

I haven`t read Fifty Shades myself but I`ve heard that it doesn`t represent the BDSM scene propley. Even promoting certain things that aren`t quite right, safe, or something along those lines. I don`t know that may be just one view of the book but those that I know with those types of.....interests....have very strong opinions against it.

As for Twilight, I think one complaint most people have against it is that Bella gets barely any description at all compared to the detail that goes into describing Edward. It seems like she`s more of a cardboard cutout than a character. I`ve seen it suggested, that this was done so people could place themselves in her shoes and enjoy the fantasy but it could also be just lazy writing.