• 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.

Worst/Most Overrated books

I agree with The Lovely Bones, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and surely there must be a Catcher in the Rye suggestion on this thread? I agree with that too. Heartily!
 
Virtually all books that sell by the truckload are 'overrated', no matter how good (or indeed awful) they are.

Dan Brown is a bizarre phenomenon. A thriller writer who isn't even outstanding within the genre (in fact a very poor stylist and only a workmanlike storyteller) gets caught up in a tide of frenzy purely because his book had a 'controversial' religious theme. Duh.

The Harry Potter books are also overrated, but in a different way. Yes, they are brilliant. But is ANY book so good as to merit outselling every single other bestseller of the year, on its first day onsale (as Half-Blood Prince did)? Of course not.

One such book, however, that I do not think was overrated, despite being a runaway success, was Captain Corelli's Mandolin. You couldn't hype that highly enough.
 
The Lord of the Rings. I found it soooo long winded. It just went on and on and on and on.....:rolleyes: Yet, I know a girl who reads it once a year. :eek: I barely made it through the first book, and haven't even considered picking up the others.
 
namedujour said:
If we're delving into the classics, I would have to say Tess of the D'Urbervilles wins for tiresome melodrama, and (don't hit me, but...) all of Charles Dickens with the exception of Tale of Two Cities, the only book he wrote that I was ever able to finish. The blinding tedium of his excessive detail and wordiness is what gets to me.

Oh, and Wuthering Heights. Each of the three times I read it and in all movie versions (glutton for punishment?), I kept looking for something to like about Cathy and Heathcliff, and some point to their relationship. Wasn't there. I had to admire Bronte for writing a book with totally despicable, non-sympathetic characters and getting me to read it more than once. I'm over that now, and probably won't be going back. But I can still hum the campy Kate Bush song, "Wuthering Heights" to myself in order to put it all in perspective.
Click to expand...

i agree on the charles dickens.
 
GreenKnight said:
Virtually all books that sell by the truckload are 'overrated', no matter how good (or indeed awful) they are.

Dan Brown is a bizarre phenomenon. A thriller writer who isn't even outstanding within the genre (in fact a very poor stylist and only a workmanlike storyteller) gets caught up in a tide of frenzy purely because his book had a 'controversial' religious theme. Duh.

The Harry Potter books are also overrated, but in a different way. Yes, they are brilliant. But is ANY book so good as to merit outselling every single other bestseller of the year, on its first day onsale (as Half-Blood Prince did)? Of course not.
Click to expand...

i agree to your choices.
 
Evil Homer said:
...I totally agree with Shakespeare writing in Prose though. When it's written in play form it just doesn't seem like it's meant to be read. And with just speech you get the feeling your missing something. What the hell the characters look like for one thing. But I still rate Othello one of my favourite books though.
Click to expand...

"When it's written in play form" - iambic pentameter? Rhyming couplets? Or plain speech? You get all three in Shakespeare's works. They are written in 'play form' (whatever you mean by that) because they are, er....PLAYS. For performance in a theatre. You can read them, even enjoy reading them, but they are not 'books' in the conventional sense. That much, surely, is obvious?

"...Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe..."

Now doesn't that read - and sound - much better than, say, "let's skip forwards a bit, to a dark and quiet night"?
 
This thread is odd...if (say) someone claims that ALL of Dickens' works are overrated, and we assume that person has read them all, then why did he or she bother? If you read one, or a few, and found them all equally tiresome, why 'beat yourself up' reading the rest? I wouldn't.

Worse still, if the person says the books are overrated but hasn't actually read them...well how would they know?

It seems to me that a lot of people say 'overrated' when really they mean 'I didn't like it' - not the same thing at all though.
 
Herenya said:
...I disagree that Wuthering Heights is overrated. Considering the life of the author (ie - she didn't do anything, go anywhere)...
Click to expand...

Hmmm..."didn't do anything, go anywhere". Contentious. And she certainly travelled a lot in her mind! But you're right. 'Wuthering Heights' may be many things, but overrated is not one of them.
 
PhilW said:
This thread is odd...if (say) someone claims that ALL of Dickens' works are overrated, and we assume that person has read them all, then why did he or she bother? If you read one, or a few, and found them all equally tiresome, why 'beat yourself up' reading the rest? I wouldn't.

Worse still, if the person says the books are overrated but hasn't actually read them...well how would they know?

It seems to me that a lot of people say 'overrated' when really they mean 'I didn't like it' - not the same thing at all though.
Click to expand...
Perhaps they have started all of them but never finished? I have never been able to finish any Dickens that I have started, with the exception of A Christmas Carol. I just find his style so long-winded and monotonous. I have been told to try A Tale of Two Cities, though, as apparently the style is quite different to his other works.
 
One novel popped into my mind when I heard the word 'overrated':

The DaVinci Code!
 
MonkeyCatcher said:
Perhaps they have started all of them but never finished? I have never been able to finish any Dickens that I have started, with the exception of A Christmas Carol. I just find his style so long-winded and monotonous. I have been told to try A Tale of Two Cities, though, as apparently the style is quite different to his other works.
Click to expand...

Good point - I hadn't thought of that.
 
The Age of Innocence was pretty bad. I got through it...but Lord..the novel is supposed to be about defying convention and yet Wharton's writing style was so unbelievably stuffy and prudish...it completely killed what little merit I felt the story might have still had.

I'll probably be slaughtered for this.

Dickens' Great Expectations is pretty bad too.
 
The Stand by Stephen King (took itself too seriously and was way too long)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (boooring!)
Emma by Jane Austen (simply too irritating)
 
Tolstoy-War and Peace(finished) <- this took me over a year..
Tolstoy-Anna Karenina (attempted and failed)<- i;ve given up on this one
and I've skipped most of the thread so I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it but I HAVE to say;
J.K Rowling - the entire harry potter series... what is all the fuss about?!:confused: the entire series absolutely fails in every sense...
me = hatemonger
 
Nepenthe said:
I concur with these.
Click to expand...

Good to know,thanks again for this most interesting peace of news.



The alchemist and the kite runner would be my first.The first being one of the worst the segond being overrated.IMO (i just discovered what it meant so i'm delighted to use it for the first time)IMO(again)
OMG still working on this,another few weeks of hard labour..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top