Books you think are overated.

I understand. Shame, I was getting my bits of wood and nails at the ready.

Hard Times was ok, I liked it but it wasn't anything great, and it's the same with Oliver Twist. Dickens is, I think, good but the sort of overrated that his fans have gone just short of solidifying him in gold and worshiping him like a god, and if you say for one moment you don't like something about him you are chastised for 'not being well read, or intelligent enough to 'understand''. The Anne Rice school of overrated.

 

This is so true. I read A Tale of Two Cities. I enjoyed the plot but found Dickens' writing to be too 'stuffy' and dense. Nonetheless, when I tell people this ( including people who have never read Dickens) I am told I am being pretentious!

 

*Enters thread. Takes a mental note of a couple or three names. Leaves.*

While I'm here...though I've not read anything else of his, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead struck me as laughably amateurish for the most part.

 

The Twilight Saga and Harry Potter pretty much. There are soo much better fantasy books out there that don't get even as half as much attention as these do. Some don't even get as 1/4 as much.

 

I liked Miss Havisham... or, well, the idea of her. Frozen in time, surrounded by old memories, getting revenge. It's just that his writing is stuffy and gets difficult to read after a while.

 

People who complain about Dickens should remember that he was writing 150 years ago or so, and the styles appropriate to that time aren't the ones we use now. Don't judge Dickens by the same standard we use today.

He was popular in his time, and is still in print now. I, for one, would love that kind of career.

 

Have you read/enjoyed other Victorian writers? The long sentences of Dickens, the archaic formations, the verbal flourishes, are not unique to him. I can't imagine that he is any more difficult than Austen, Trollope, Melville, Thackeray.

 

It isn't difficult at all, in fact. Dickens may not appeal to everyone, but he's not writing in Swahili.

I find Melville to be quite good.

 

When I was about 40, I decided to go back and re-read books that had been required reading for me in high school, and which I had hated or avoided at the time. One of the first that I read was Great Expectations. I found that there was a lot there, especially understated humor, that I had completely missed the first time around, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

OTOH, when I went back for The Red Badge of Courage, I found it every bit as dry and lifeless as when I had been required to read it at 14, again at 15, and again at 19 (in college). To this day, I don't get why it is considered such a classic.

 

I think Melville is great. Yet I can see why some folk, drenched in modern productions, might find Dickens a touch daunting. But if Dickens - vivacious, endlessly inventive Dickens ( surely less dry than all of his contemporaries ) - is difficult for some, then so (I guess) must all other Victorians (and earlier writers) be difficult too.

People are missing out on a whole lot of wonderful stuff.

 

Yeah, some great writing. I like Conrad as well (he wrote later, but many also find him too wordy).

One thing about Melville that people may not realize is that he was capable of writing humorous passages as well as serious ones. I'm thinking particularly of the scene in Moby Dick where Ishmael first meets Queequeg, having been forced to share a bed. I laughed out loud at least a couple of times reading it. Melville's prose renders it as a sort of dry humor, which is exactly what I like

 

I completely agree. And for me, it isn't a lack of appreciation or a lack of like for that era's authors.
I love Austen (even though she came before Dickens), Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain (though they came after Dickens), and Louisa May Alcott (published Little Women the yr before Great Expectations).
It took me about 6 months of falling asleep every other paragraph or getting confused and having to re-read multiple pages before finally giving up. Just couldn't do it. My brain felt abused after each page, I just couldn't finish it!
However, I did love Tale of Two Cities.
So for overated books, in the category of victorian writers, I would have to go with Great Expecations.

 

Despite being a peice of 'classic literature', Shelley's Frankenstein has to be one of the most boring books I have ever read. I despised studying it for Lit :\

 

For me, Percy Jackson is way overrated. Sure the books can be entertaining and are quick reads, but Percy Jackson himself seems so bland and frankly, he's arrogant.

I also didn't find the Hunger games to be as cool as everyone makes it out to be. I do like the characterization, but I want to smack Katniss for being so dimwitted sometimes.

I think a lot of books get popular due to themes. Everyone loves a tense football game (Hunger Games) and every kid had some of the experiences that Harry Potter did in school. It makes me wonder if you can be popular writing a book that does not include sports, school, summer camp or passionate lust for supernatural bad boys.

What happened to the grand old adventures like the Hobbit? I want to read more of those!

 

Yes Dickens writes the worlds longest sentences. He wrote the first paragraph of the book, "Tale of Two Cities" with only one period.

As for the sharing the bed thing, I did not find it funny at all. The idea of sharing a bed with a man that could break me like a twig would be a little unsettling. I do like the light heartiness that Queequeg offered in this scene despite Ishmale's dread.

 

God I'd love to keep talking about this. I think Dune might have potentially been one of the most disappointing books I've ever read. A ton of websites had listed it as a SF masterpiece and I could barely scrape through 50 pages. I honestly thought it was so dry and unengaging I couldn't even handle most of it. And I can honestly say I have made three separate attempts to try and read this thing at 13, 16, and 20 and I still can't get in to it.

Aside from Mr. Blue Dot and myself, does anyone else feel this way? Can someone please try and make a case for why this book is good?

 

I thought Dune was quite good. I found the writing to be engaging, the world created to be interesting, and I liked the plot and characters. Some would probably put it higher on the list of science fiction books than I would, but nevertheless I enjoyed it a great deal.

 

Great Expectations started off good, but then it went downhill for me.

 

Same with me. Started off interesting and I gradually lost interest.

 

I haven't read Dickens in a while, but I find 19th century English writing of little interest compared to how much they are touted (including Austen and Dickens). I think they pale in stark comparison to the great Russians who came shortly after.


I thought Ulysses and the Dubliners are made too big of a fuss about, though, I did like the Portrait of a Young Artist. I do understand why Ulysses is so highly touted and it was enjoyable up to a certain point. Maybe, one day, when my French and Latin and attention span all improve, I will find it more enjoyable.

Silas Marner did little for me as well.

I am trying to fight my way to the end of Roussea's Confessions right now, and it may not be over-rated, but I find some of it ridiculous and nauseating. At the age of 45 he displays openly the frivolity of "Noble" relationships that belongs to 7th graders today.

 

I've got to read some Joyce sometime. The only thing I've read by him is his love letters.

Those are saucy.

 

I always preferred the Bronte sisters over Austen. Pride and Prejudice is too cliche for me.

 

the great gatsby
-well ,all of my teachers overhyped it.wasn't bad but wasn't wow either
-the whole twilight series,harry potter(the first was the best one),the di vinci code definately, other books so much i can't even remember the names.

 

I actually really liked The Great Gatsby - especially compared to the other novels we had to read for our course.

&& Harry Potter is definatly not over-rated

 

I wonder if this thread will ever make it a full page without someone bringing up Twilight.