Books you think are overated.

The Eragon series. They are so dang boring. The narrative isn't at all interesting, and it feels like absolutely nothing is happening.

Also, that Shannara series. It had a decent beginning, but then about 85% of everything that went on was someone debating with themselves the consequences of some choice. I can remember very little else about the stories, and it wasn't that long ago that I read them. So boring...

 

Serious answer - yes page to page and all 388 endnotes.

 

Serious answer - Yes, front to back and all 388 endnotes. I like the idea behind it. It just didn't resonate with me in any way. The Wallace was probably brilliant, but it was just hard to connect with the characters. Don't get me wrong, there were some portions I enjoyed -- particularly about the addicts living in the halfway house. The text was very Joycean and I can see the brilliance behind it, but I just didn't get it.

 

The Holy Bible (Any Edition)

I get it's a compilation piece and I admit it does have some of the most compelling and inspired words ever combined... only in limited parts.

The problem with this book is it's totally all over the place. The sheer amount of contributors has to be the cause of what can only be called inconsistant quality and piss poor pacing. All that being said, does it deserve to be as influential as is 1700ish years after it set the literary words on fire? (literally in some cases)

No.

Final word: Any time you have three chapter consisting of only lists of names... let's just say you had some editing issues.

 

Ya' know, you've just outlined my belief in all literature, and the problem I find answering this thread.

I like lots of books, perhaps a dozen have been enjoyable and actually changed the course of my life. That means that billions of books have not. In fact, I feel billions of books are simply a tragic waste of trees, even if they were printed on ragstock.

I think you could burn down +3/4s of Barnes & Noble in a compassionate scene out of Fahrenheit 451 and the course of mankind would be unchanged. At least the cutesy kitten books would be gone.

But if I had to pick one, it would be 'An Inconvenient Truth.' It is junk science, and actually set back the very thing he claims he cared about.

 

This is the reason why TEEN books get so popular, because joe blow gets sucked into a teen story of 16 year old problems and drama. what kind of writing books are you reading? "How to sell out and make as much money as possible as an author"?. If you are into creative writing so that people will keep interested after the first page, then you should stop, you are writing for the wrong people.

You should be invested into the intellectual crowd, the ones who actually care about novels and creative arts, not the people who want a book to read on the toilet, one they pick up because it's exciting for the 5 pages they read at a time.

Have some respect for authors who spend years developing worlds and characters, enjoy it for what it is. If not, you should get back the hunger games.

 

Amen, Tolkien really defends himself in his work, but the fact that 9/10 of the people who pick up his 1000+ page tomes are engrossed until the last apendix says something in itself. The was a linguistic genius. I mean that literally. The fact that he was one hell of a story teller. A story teller that created a scope that set the stage for multiple genres, and muliple mediums, to aspire to, is just a side note.

Now excuse me, Game of Thrones is on. After watching it might play some Mass Effect. Then who knows, I might get thogether a game of Dungeon and Dragons.

Tolkien... Thats like saying the bible sucks!

 

Eh, we agree to disagree.

A guy has a problem with recyling some old jewelry. He's too lazy to do it himself, so he hires a couple of gullible dwarves. A bunch of ugly people just won't mind their own business. Big deal.

It sounds just like my wife selling her gold jewelrey and getting static from her sister. That happens around here about once per month.

BTW, shouldn't the play on words you use for your forum handle actually be, "FlusterChuck"?

 

This may stun or upset people (and my friends would kill me for this) but I actually dislike Twilight, Lord of the Rings (the whole thing, and yes, J.R.R Tolkien's one, THE Lord of the Rings), Eragon like you said, Harry Potter (yes, THE Harry Potter) and Hunger Games, that was terrible too.

I think that all of these are insanely overrated. I've read all of them and they are just...meh...Lord of the Rings was okay, but even then it wasn't that great. It's mainly because the plot was predictable or I just didn't like it. It is okay to just dislike a book and not know why, right?

A lot of books here...what does it mean?

 

Yeah, i got to quit posting right after i wake up. I do come off as flustered and not being able to spell... you got my point though. Tolkien was a trendsetter and had an unheard level of scope. He truly is a heavy wieght in modern lit. You can dislike his style, and i respect that, but his legacy deserves the acclaim it has achieved.



@phyrlord: Basically, what your saying is Citizen Kane is an overrated film because the CGI sucks, the action is to staled, and the actors talk funny, definitely not as good Avatar or 300.

 

Ya' know, I admire your response. We are going to disagree over style and plot points as a forum. Your polite response makes me want to exchange ideas with you. I appreciate your input.

 

huh? I'm confused, did you do the wrong @? I was saying people should enjoy the deeper/expansive stuff.

 

Twilight is definitely the most overrated book ever, albeit a lot of people utterly abhor it. Hmph, it's very controversial.
Harry Potter comes right after the aforementioned trash(whose name I completely refuse to mention ever again).

 

What does it mean for a book to be over-rated? Ultimately all books rely on achieving popularity some way and how. So we can't just knock things that happen to be popular. Some will turn out to be fads, but not all. And even the fads may be influential indirectly based on the people they inspire. So I find it difficult to decide on a standard by which to deem something as over-rated, other than to give my own opinion on books I don't like that others do like. But then it's just my opinion and doesn't really prove that the book is over-rated. I didn't like Frankenstein that much, but I liked Dracula. I wouldn't say Frankenstein is over-rated. I would just say it didn't suit my taste. Is there really any content to this debate other than a chance to vent about books you don't like that others do? And to vent against people who don't like books that you do like?

 

The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky.

In fact, pretty much everything by Dostoevsky.

 

Yes. Yes sir I did. Allow me to extend my apology in the form of silent prose:

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I do wonder, does this effect your desire to get a good eight books lined up in Barnes and Noble with your name on them? I kinda agree with the 3/4th ratio of junk on the shelf, but when i read The Hunger Game trilogy (I have a fiance, she's a fan) it had two effect on me: A) This isn't half bad if you allow it to be; Kinda like watching zombie flicks from the eighties. It turned into a strange guilty pleasure. And B) I could write this. I could write this and make millions. Kinda like when I hear an Adele song on the radio.

I realized the same about King and Gaiman and so many others. Some are writng Pop music, some Country, some are Punk, and in the right aisle you'll find Symphonies.

Fuck the cutesy kitten books though. They are singlehandedly and wantonly burning a chasm through the integrity of the written AND visual mediums. They are a scourge that needs to be eradicated before our children are left a world where they know not the compass of courage and conviction.

 

I'm about 200 pages into On the Road by Jack Kerouac and I just don't see the magic of it and am only finishing it on principle. So I'm going to choose that.

 

Most of Stephen King's book are overrated, imo. Several people gushed about how awesome Salem's Lot was and it took me about a month to get through it. I didn't find it worth the read. Carrie was another one that intrigued me, yet upon reading it, I was again disappointed with the writing.

I got maybe 4 chapters into It and haven't read it any further. That was a couple years ago.

 

This is very well said.

I know Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Harry Potter keep popping up all over this threads and I'm going to openly admit that I enjoyed all three (even though I'm going to get some flak - particularly for Twilight). But you're right, it is in part personal preference and just like music, we love to bash people who don't enjoy musicians/bands like Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Stones and prefer Lady Gaga, LMFAO, and Nikki Minaj.

So if you don't like classics - as you said Frankenstein - you're evil and terrible. But the fact that I like Twilight, I am also evil and terrible. Both are fads, both love to be hated. And like music, people love to be snobs.

 

I write for basketball and whether or not someone is overrated or underrated is determined by how proportionate their popularity is with the quality of their play they exert. Jeremy Lin for example became the sensation of the entire world for a good couple of weeks because of his story more so much of his play, and since he got so much attention for someone that doesn't necessarily deserve that attention, yet, he gets hate for it.

With books I find it the same. I don't think Twilight was that bad, nor The Hunger Games, but there are a significant pile of other books that I find better that should have been more popular.

 

There are also significant other books that should be less popular. Prime example, PC Cast + Kristin Cast's "House of Night Series." I'm always on the look out for new YA fantasy/paranormal and gave it a go. But it's just terribly written and hugely popular. Spelling errors and typos abound and the general story line and the MC are intolerable. Anyways, if people think Twilight is complete and utter trash (which I don't), they should check out this series. It makes Twilight look like a literary masterpiece.

 

I realize that Tolkein was a bit long-winded -- for me the three books in the Lord of the Rings series were so difficult to slog through that I had to flip to a random section of the book and read if I wanted to finish my Literature assignments -- but the sheer scope of Arda cannot be discounted. He built my first castle in the clouds.

Classics aficionados are going to lynch me for saying this, but Ibsen's plays? Were a letdown. The ones translated by Rolf Fjelde couldn't catch my attention. They had an undercurrent I liked, but I just couldn't get into them. The exact qualities of each play differed and while Hedda Gabler did leave a burning brand in my brain for a few months, my general impression wasn't particularly deep either way.

Here's my last criminal act: I preferred Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost.

Let's light the torches and burn the infidel.

 

Being the daughter of a sports journalist and gone to countless football games myself, I would agree with this. All the same, you can't compare sports with writing. This is just comparing apples with oranges. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and since we are all different we all need different things to satisfy our (reading and other) needs. I for example found Oprah's reading club book list quite boring - but this is only my taste. As for me, I love long-winded books - a few come to mind like John Galsworthy and Thomas Mann. But I also like to read book that come quick to the point so to speak. I think JHockey made a very good and valid point here.

 

Mendelevium -- here's something worse than preferring Paradise Regained --I just didn't enjoy Paradise Lost or Milton in general. And I was a literature student.