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

I cant understand why anyone like's GoT. I'ts writing is nothing special and the plot is drawn out and far too big to get your head around. You also have all the people telling you how awesome it is because peole die every minuite, when barely anyone ever dies and when they do it's bland and boring because i dont have any connection with the characters.

 

Delete: I revisited Frankenstein, and didn't find it unattractive to read. At least not the start. I'll give it another go.

 

One of the stories or novels I despise or do not really care for is the Great Gatsby, it just seems so mediocre, that and a few other 'great' books people have told me to read. (Which I cannot remember currently!)

 

I put down "The Old Man and the Sea" in high school because I thought it monotonous and depressing. I know life sucks without needing a book to tell me that life sucks, and I'd prefer to think that we're not all just doomed to meaningless ends. I can't take fatalism in my fiction.

 

Really? I love Fitzgerald's prose in The Great Gatsby.

 

Jane Austen. After recently reading pride and prejudice for my literature class, I can say I despised every character in it. Elizabeth is remarkable bland and doesn't do anything, being a purely reactionary figure and not doing anything to forward the plot. Darcy is the generic grump with a heart of gold. All the characters seem so small minded, only caring about what happens inside their little community. The social commentary may have been witty at the time, but nowadays saying "the upper classes are arrogant" isn't exactly revolutionary.

 

Anything by Stephen King. Same plot, disappointing resolution, bland and recycled characters. He does, at times, write rather well though, which does save some of it.

Two obvious examples of absolutely egregious, yet famous book series are 50 Shades and Twilight. It is really frightening they are so popular...

 

I have to agree. The plots are non-existent; the characters are dull cardboard cut-outs; the MCs in particular are astonishingly tedious and absent of personality; the social commentary and use of metaphor twats you around the head without subtlety whilst simultaneously having the local village idiot shout "Metaphor! Metaphor!" directly in your face . I do not understand the appeal, at all.

 

Is that a metaphor?

 

It is, and incidentally it twats you around the head without subtlety whilst simultaneously having the local village idiot shout "Metaphor! Metaphor!" directly in your face.

 

I pretty much give anything before 1900 an automatic pass on this because the voice is just archaic and dated and I hate to judge authors from different eras.

I agree with Foul's Bane. Good Lord was that a chore. Agree on Name of the Wind - talk about a Gary-Stu character. Was not able to get into the Jim Butcher Dresden books at all. Agree with Harry Potter books 5-7, but I thought the first 4 were fine.

I've gotta disagree about books 1-3. I thought they were tight and superb with some really good prose in them. I remember re-reading the prologue to book 1 and just getting really discouraged that I'll never be able to write anything that good. 4-5 went off the rails, though, and are pretty awful all around.

 

Yeah. I don't remember the mother's reaction, except that at least initially she appears not to know. One thing to remember for Covenant himself is that at the time of the rape he doesn't believe in the fantasy realm he is in. He thinks it is all part of a delusion he is suffering through as a result of being hit by a car, and that navigating the land is something he is going to have to do to return to "reality" in his real body. Even so, he's disturbed by his own actions. Nevertheless, he's not a likeable character even if you make that allowance. And I agree that Donaldson's writing style in those books is slow-paced.

BTW - I see that Dhalgren is now available in audio form via Audible. Thinking of getting it.

 

In the end, as I think you probably already know, I gave up. It just wasn't my thing. Now, Dhalgren on the other hand, was, for reasons of personal taste, a book I was willing to invest in, even though for many, many, many readers it feels just as torturous to get into as Lord Fouls' Bane felt for me. Dhalgren is a weird book. Not everyone wants to deal with the metafictional unsteadiness of it, and anyone who has read Delany knows that he has a strange grasp of language. You have to let go of any normal semblance of str8-forward idiolect.

 

Dhalgren is definitely one that I've tried to recommend, only to see people give up on. I like Delany's unusual use of language. I feel like he plays games with his word choice, sentence structure, and even (particularly in the case of Dhalgren) story structure. It is fun to try to puzzle out what he's doing. I'd argue there are streaks of modernism in his work.

 

Oh, absolutely. And in the same way that Naked Lunch can be engaged in so many different ways, from different starting points in its structure (what is real? what is metaphorical? what is simply drug induced? how many combinations and permutations of the aforementioned are there?) so too do I think Dhalgren is a kind of sweaty, fevered dream that sometimes rises up into a temporary state of lucidity, and just where those moments is highly arguable.

 

Forgive me, but....The Great Gatsby.

 

I was never sure what to make of A Separate Peace. It was so incredibly slow, so deeply focused on putting its characters under a microscope, and I just wanted to get on with it. I could empathize with Gene's envy of Finny, but I couldn't condone what he did, and I couldn't stand to see the story circle back to it and force both him and the reader to keep confronting it and analyzing every last shred of guilt and self-justification.

I also thought A Prayer for Owen Meany was kind of garbage, but I suspect I could get a round of agreement for that. It's very get-off-my-lawn in a way that feels far more ignorant than any of the ideas it tries to mock.

 

A Wrinkle in Time. Maybe it's because I never read it until I was seventeen, and it's intended for a younger audience. Maybe it's because I chose the audiobook over the paperback, since I was going on a long trip for work and needed something to listen to.
But the main character is just. So. Freaking. USELESS.
Seriously, she hands off authority and decision making at every turn, never makes any leadership decisions, and in the climax of the book we get her one moment of being helpful when she... Hugs her brother and says she loves him.
Yeah.

 

I may catch hell for this, but "The Catcher in the Rye". Sorry if somebody's already brought it up, I did a quick skim of the thread and didn't spot it. Unlike a lot of Americans, I was never forced to read it. Tried it in my twenties, tried it in my thirties, just could not get more than a couple dozen pages into it. I just remember hating everything on the page, and not in a good "Oh, he's a scumbag, let's see what he does next!" way, but in a "I'm wasting valuable time that I could be using to do something pleasant, like wrapping a baseball bat in barbed wire and inse..."

Anyway, you get the picture.

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde... just never got into it.

 

Such a self-indulgent book.

 

I wouldn't go that far but she's certainly a little simplistic for my taste.

 

I haven't read the book yet but I have to say I loved Stephen Fry as Wilde in the movie of the same name.

 

Harry Potter. I wouldn't say I don't understand but the story is very familiar with it's extremely tropic folklore stuff and a bunch of obvious historical parallels, and the plot has a whole bunch of significant holes constantly. And while Snape is a pretty decent character a lot of the others just aren't developed enough. Like Voldemeort; wasted potential, comes off too simply as "the bad guy." And Dumbledore is confusing. The hell is a teacher recruiting students for a war? I think McGonagall was always right on the issue of the student's safety. Wizard schools have no fucking OH&S.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlySaneMan. Plus the prose is just... decent. It's not that impressively written. Ultimately, it's just a big children's story. The problems all stem from insufficient maturity, even as it matures. It's good for what it is, but it's not.