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

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch 22, his autobiography

...is a bit shit, considering he's such a massive hero figure, rest in peace. But really, him and Martin Amis swanning round Fleet St in the 1970s, hic, then Palestine/Chile/Cuba, he really is quite unlikeable. It must be my fault, but I find his wordsmithery, as we used to say 'pretentious.' Surely, if I was twenty years older I would have thumped him.

 

To each, their own I suppose but I absolutely loved The Great Gatsby when I got round to reading it some ten years ago or so. Fitzgerald's prose was wonderful.

*Chortle.
I haven't gotten round to reading it yet but I can imagine. Needlessly verbose at times, old Hitch.

 

Farenheit 451 I found it boring, and never managed to get into it.

 

How dare you blaspheme...

 

I dunno, I've always heard wonderful things about Bradbury, and his ideas are iconic, but his actual writing leaves me pretty flat. Lovecraft is the same way.

 

I haven't read any Lovecraft. Though to be honest, he is kinda gimmicky/trendy now a days.

 

His ideas have an amazing depth and darkness to them, but his actual prose sounds like someone kicking a drum full of cinderblocks down the stairs, in a fake English accent.

 

I came here to mention anything by Lovecraft but it seems someone has already beat me to it.

I was also going to mention Lord of the Rings but someone recently beat me to that, too. I actually though The Hobbit was better and whenever I mention that, it always seems that some asshat has to condescendingly bring up that it was intended for a "younger audience" as if that is meant to demean my taste in literature. Still, I have to respect the guy. After all, he inspired most of my favorite fantasy authors.

Soooo let's see. I guess I would say almost anything by Stephen King. I actually really enjoyed his Dark Tower series (especially Wizard and Glass) but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have to force myself to finish it. Even my favorite book of the series was longer than it needed to. Where I like to see dialogue and character interaction move a plot forward, King really seems to love the narrative approach. I usually enjoy his short stories, no surprise there.

 

The Catcher in the Rye- Boring, obnoxious- why it is considered a "classic" is beyond me.
Divergent- It was just...bad.
The Hunger Games- Basically just a lousy romance (I hate romance novels) in a "look at me im a dystopia lel" suit. Disgusting.

 

I agree. There's not that fake archaism and "epicness" (I'm speaking purely in terms of prose style; they are still great books) that you find in The Lord of the Rings.

 

Thank you!

With The Lord of the Rings, it feels like he tried too hard to be grandiose or, as you said epic. And the plot is just bleh! I get that fantasy books of that type weren't really a thing back then and more than anything he was a trend-setter of his time but I just don't think the plot has aged that well. It comes down to what is considered today to be one of the most cliché, ultimate good vs. ultimate evil tropes. Granted, I do think the main focus of the series was more about the corruption of power than it was of good vs. evil and on that front I would say that he did very well but it was his presentation that I couldn't get on board with.

Forgive my lack of technical terms. I can't say that I rightly understand how to use such terms as prose or even how to identify different styles and so instead I avoid using them so that I don't make myself look like an ass.

 

Well, I very well make catch hate for it but I think a good lot of them did it better.

 

True. It's like saying Ford's Model T and its assembly line sucked. By modern standards, yes, but he came up with most of the stuff that we use today.

However, that doesn't compel one to treat Tolkien as anything other than a pioneering historical curiosity. I've read a lot of Lovecraft, and I almost never recommend his stories. What he gave us, however, is the sense of the unstoppable horror from the beyond that is outside of any motivations like love, hate, or greed, and while many have followed in his footsteps, the ones who have failed are the ones who tried to imitate him.

 

Which is why, if you noticed, I specifically mentioned that today it is considered a trope and not that Tolkien is considered the trope but rather the story of ultimate good vs. ultimate evil. Sure, at the time it was new and innovative but even then, it was only so within the fantasy genre. Certainly good vs. evil had been done plenty of times before Tolkien. And that is part of the reason why I have such a distaste for his work. There are few shades of gray to be found within his characters. Even Boromir (IIRC) could be argued as having not been misguided but rather corrupted by the magic of the Ring and so his evil actions with good intentions were not necessarily the result of his character traits but rather an outside influence (the Ring's magic). Even Frodo, near the end began to succumb.

Yet in the genres of fantasy before Tolkien (mythology and folk tales and such), things are not always so cut and dry. The "good guy" and the "bad guy" are not always so easy to identify.

And I respectfully disagree that without him, there would never have been an opportunity for someone else to have done it. What I'm saying is, I don't think that if I went back in time and killed Tolkien before he had a chance to write his stories that, that would mean the death of high fantasy as we know it today. Certainly it may be different but I do believe that the rise of the genre was inevitable. After all, look at folk tales and mythology. Humanity's relationship with the fantasy genre goes back a long way. Tolkien just did it first.

But hey, that last part's just speculation, really. Like saying if Hitler had made it as an artist, would he have turned into such a phenomenal douche? Can't really say for sure. It's also fair to note that the only works of Tolkien I'm familiar with are Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

 

I think it's better to wonder if the mid-20th century German resurgence would have been quite so horrible if Hitler hadn't been in charge of it. From all accounts I've read, Adolf was an extremely unpleasant man in person to pretty much everyone; during his Vienna years, historians have been unable to find anyone who called him a friend. However, he can't be held responsible for Germany's bucking up against the restrictions imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles, there were dozens of groups, left and right, itching to take over from the Weimar Republic and lead make Germany great again. The question is, was anti-semitism so ingrained in the German psyche that anyone to take control would have used the Jews as a scapegoat, and would a different person or group have been so obsessed as to try and commit actual genocide?

And without Tolkien, would Elves all be tall, blond, and haughty, with better tech than any other two races put together?

 

The real magic of Tolkien is with his worldbuilding; it's just breathtaking. I think he's at his best in The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin.

 

I tried really hard with The Silmarillion. For real-real, not for play-play. I really wanted to say that yes, I have read this book, it's in my list of things that I have read. It read too much like a religious text for Middle Earth. Not just content, but tone, style, the whole nine. And I'm not a theist of any kind, so I have no experience with approaching that kind of literature in a way that makes for an enjoyable engagement. Also too many names that sounded too alike for me to keep any kind of track of what and who and where. I dropped out pretty much after the description of the "song" and all the secondary gods who were singing and... yeah, I was done.

 

I wonder if The Silmarillion is the fantasy equivalent of hard scifi? Like, a total focus on world building at the expense (in my opinion) of other elements of storytelling, like plot and characterization? I admit, I've barely skimmed the first parts of it--I'm another reader who found The Hobbit more enjoyable than The Lord of the Rings, mostly because I got tired of all the non plot/characterization elements...

And I also get impatient with most of the hard scifi I've read, for similar reasons...

But I think Wreybies likes hard scifi, so possibly the parallel isn't as clear as it seems to me.

 

I see the parallel, and nope, I actually don't like "hard" Sci-Fi. Or at least not hard enough to call myself a Hard Sci-Fi fan, and trust me, if you say a thing like that, other fans will grill you to make sure you're not a poser. Genuine, hard Hard Sci-Fi, for me, is very much what you describe. I feel like it gets so balls deep in the tech, and it's often at the expense - for me - of a story I can genuinely engage. I actually often refer to is as "tech porn". I'm reading The Expanse novels right now and that's about as hard as I can engage, and the authors of those novels will be the first to admit that they are not hard enough to get that stamp on the cover, so to speak. I much prefer Social Science Fiction. It's gotta' be about about the people.

 

Perhaps at the expense of the some of the characters (although Turin is a pretty good character, as is Feanor, given the amount of time devoted to them), but certainly not of plot--it's probably one of my favorite plots, actually. It's just in more of an epic, saga-like format, focused more on the big picture. It's really a mythology of Ea (Tolkien's created universe), and, as such, has different goals than a novel, for example.

 

I'm something of a Tolkien nerd; I could go on

 

Yeah as I understand it from internet sources and people I know who've read it it's really about the connections between stories. It's intentionally a little distant from the characters; told like the sagas they are.

 

Quite.