• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Overly Pompous and Luvvie Books. (What Critically loved books do you despise?)

me and martin amis

yep - every single book. i'd actually quite like to slap him. :p
sorry (well not very) to have shocked you. ;)
 
rivergirlie said:
yep - every single book. i'd actually quite like to slap him. :p
sorry (well not very) to have shocked you. ;)
Click to expand...
Why? I've just heard about him for the first time on this forum (too much hiding in my wardrobe, perhaps), and he has only garnered praise (see this thread). But the descriptions of his work don't really do much for me. I'd love to hear more about why you found his books so horrendous - I'm genuinely curious.
 
In that case, rivergirlie, my diagnosis is: Stop reading Martin Amis books! The pain will just dissolve... If you've read them all and haven't liked even one, then I doubt he's going to delight you in the future. May I ask what you disliked in particular about The Information and Night Train (two of my favourites)?

(Actually though, I'm not sure Amis qualified as 'critically loved' per the title of this thread. I think the last book of his that garnered widespread praise was Money, 21 years ago...)
 
The Lovely Bones. I couldn't stand the narrator's effort at making the book touching. I didn't finish it. Even if the storyplot gets better in the end, I feel no loss. The narration ruins everything.
 
I tried to read Last of the Mohicans. Couldn't get through it. I really don't know why J. F. Cooper is considered such a great author.
 
I read Frakenstien, AND I HATED IT! I've never hated a book like that before. It was so annoying. And it didn't have any of those cool "It's aliveeee!" scenes either. All it was was this ********** idiot who SOMEHOW, MAGICALLY, creates a living thing, and after that it's 200 pages worth of "Oh boo hoo, what have I done...boohoo *sigh* *gasp* *sigh*", and so on and so forth. And has the worst ending ever. Just watch the movie instead. Shelley was supposedly 19 when she wrote it, and it shows through and through. The writing is mature, and the descriptions of gloom are somewhat amusing, but the plot is extraordinarily ridiculous and after the 100th whine you just start to hate it.
Also, Don Quixote also got extremely repetitive and corny and annoying half way in. It was just "and then he saw the most beautiful woman in the earth for the gazillionth time, and she was all chaste and stuff, of course, and she was just dying for him, so then blah blah blah happens". Really boring. First I thought that it was meant to be funny, but turns out it wasn't, and even if it was meant to be funny, it wasn't funny at all.
I just really needed to vent that out.
 
Good topic Corso...

It brings to mind two thing that bug me.

When I was first beginning to pursue a writing career, I walked into a "Books-A-Million", and went to the paperback Fiction section. I stood in the middle, and looked in each directions. My thought was "Jesus. How can I compete with all these people?" Then I began to pick up books at random and read from them. I would estimate 90% of the books I picked up were ABSOLUTE, TOTAL SHIT! Poorly written birdcage liner intended to feed the masses with "Stephen King wanna-bees" and self importance. Very irritating, but encouraging at the same time.

More to the point, I think, of your question: I personally think Thomas Wolfe is the most difficult-to-read, incomprehensible author of acclaim. His writing is so painfully flowery, it detracts from the story. It seems to me he uses words found nowhere else in the language only to display his own intelligence.

Irritating.
 
am i missing something about benjamin zephaniah?

i've also got this awful emperor's new clothes feeling about benjamin zephaniah - is it just me or is it the most atrocious heap of b****cks? please enlighten...

thanks, shade, for you suggestion re mr amis. i feel so much better now. :p (actually, of any of the books, information was my least unfavourite.)

i've got a theory on the go at the moment that there are certain books you read an particular ages - catcher in the rye, for example, has got to be read pre-a-level, as must le grand meaulnes. hesse, cocteau and anais nin are undergrad books - you'll never open them again, i promise. what do the rest of you think?
x
 
leckert said:
I personally think Thomas Wolfe is the most difficult-to-read, incomprehensible author of acclaim.
Click to expand...

I was sixty pages into Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and I had no idea who the main character was or if, indeed, I'd actually met any characters yet. Maybe it was complete tiredness as I read on the train in the morning....I'll try again one day.
 
This might get me killed, but I didn't like The Catcher in the Rye. After a while, it seemed like the word "phony" or "depressing" was present in every sentence. It felt repetitive - Holden talks to, or meets, somebody, gets along pretty well with them, then whines about how phony they are. However, I thought that the book got much better once he went home and visited Phoebe. I especially liked the part when he talked about how he wished he could be a catcher in the rye - it felt like a good display of the less whiny side of Holden. But, a good ending couldn't make up for a mediocre beginning and middle.
 
There are probably a fair few I could mention, but the ones that come to mind first are:

Virginia Woolf - Tried three of her books, and apart from a brief passage in Orlando, couldn’t connect with her writing in any way. I just found it pretentious and highly annoying.

Pablo Neruda – Bought a collection of his work after seeing ‘Il Postino’, and the few poems that did connect were swamped by the kind of ‘Hedgehog explosion against unicorn rainbow’ poetry that I really hate.

Thomas Pynchon – Struggled all the way through ‘V’, and didn’t enjoy or understand it. My feelings towards the guy are not helped by ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ staring down at me from my ‘to be read’ shelf. Although strangely I read ‘The crying of lot 49’ a few years back and I seem to remember enjoying it.

Oh, and 'Catcher in the Rye'. I'd guess that would be near the top of any 'over-rated book' poll.
 
Stewart said:
I was sixty pages into Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and I had no idea who the main character was or if, indeed, I'd actually met any characters yet. Maybe it was complete tiredness as I read on the train in the morning....I'll try again one day.
Click to expand...

That is the same experience I had with Look Homeward, Angel
 
Things Fall Apart.
Was anyone else forced to read this in highschool? I remember harboring a great animosity for it at the time, being that I couldn't understand why everyone else in the class was so enraptured by it. Even more perplexing to me was their disdain for The Giver and e. e. cummings.

But on a less nostalgic note, I couldn't make it through all of Finnegan's Wake. I'm preparing to give it another go, but I was wondering...any thoughts?
 
Idun said:
On the question of Wuthering Heights - I never understood people saying that this book is a beautiful love story. For me, Heathcliff (with all his cruelty and hatred for the humankind) was unable to love anybody.
Click to expand...

This is one of the ones at the top of my list too. The thing I keep asking myself: Why did I read it three times???
 
Bonzo said:
This might get me killed, but I didn't like The Catcher in the Rye. After a while, it seemed like the word "phony" or "depressing" was present in every sentence. It felt repetitive - Holden talks to, or meets, somebody, gets along pretty well with them, then whines about how phony they are. However, I thought that the book got much better once he went home and visited Phoebe. I especially liked the part when he talked about how he wished he could be a catcher in the rye - it felt like a good display of the less whiny side of Holden. But, a good ending couldn't make up for a mediocre beginning and middle.
Click to expand...

I think 16 year old boys are just like that. The author depicted one with all his warts intact, is all. And if you've ever lived in a house with a teenaged boy (I have two) most of their conversation is repetitive. They also whine.

The trick with that book was to look beyond what he said into what he probably felt. If you put a wedge between yourself and everyone you get along with - call them all "phonies" - the chances are good you don't trust that anyone really likes you. Holden had a problem connecting with other people, except for children. His fantasy about standing at the cliff and saving the children from falling off was an analogy for keeping the children from growing up. I think one of his major issues was facing adulthood, and he wanted to spare other children the agony.

I haven't read the book in decades, but as I recall he was "projecting" - one of the main issues of the book was what a total phony Holden was while he was pointing the finger at everyone else.

Like I said, I haven't read it lately, but I read it two or three times long ago, and really loved it!
 
I've got one: The Mists of Avalon. I thought it was poorly (dare I say "badly"?) written. The dialog was silly - outlandish, really - the motivation of the characters could change on a dime without explanation, and the whole book should have been trimmed. I couldn't finish it.

And I can say all that because the author is dead.

I hope she doesn't haunt me...
 
funes wrote
I'm glad to see that I am not the only one to have that reaction to "modern" fiction. I read one of Oprah's picks (Where the Heart Is) and found it dreadful. I also read Martin Dressler (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and found it predictable and dull. I think that's why so many people (me included) are turning away from "Literature".
Click to expand...
Don't feel bad. Remenber "Revenge of"Naked Came the Stranger.""
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top