Books you feel like you have to like but didn't

Sometimes I like Tolkien's prose. A lot of it is so-so, but occasionally you see a really good passage.

The problem with tolkien's prose is the way he describes scenery too much.

^That's a matter of opinion. I'm more bothered by lack of descriptions.

I actually hated The Hobbit, it was boring as hell and the ending seemed to be thrown in on a Saturday during lunch.

Moby Dick, anyone?

Great Expectations: I expected it to be great, but it wasn't.

The Odyssey, even though it's technically a poem. It's got good action, but the prose was written as though the person who translated it WANTED me to take a spoon and dig out his guts, one by one. Because my body and my brain feel disconnected when I try to read that thing.

Catcher in the Rye and Demian by Hermann Hesse.

I fucking hated those books. Everyone calls them classics. I just call them "TMI into someone's brain" in the first case and Mind Screw philosophy in the second case.

The Road. It was okay, not the transcendental work of sheer genius some people claim it to be, and the apparent destruction of the indent, comma and quotation mark After the End kinda annoys me.

edited 25th Sep '10 6:56:18 AM by snowbull

Wuthering Heights - it's supposed to be great literature, but I just want to strangle the hero and heroine. I majored in English, you'd think I had a taste for the classics.

@Questrayve: I see what you did there @Cresneta: You'd think, but a major in English just means you would get to know the classics, not like them.

^^ I thought that wanting to strangle Cathy and Heathcliff was the point?

edited 26th Sep '10 6:03:07 AM by Iaculus

You just haven't seen it the way it was meant to be seen—in Semaphore.

I've already dropped The Shadow Of The Torturer twice, and I haven't dropped a book since two years ago, when a girl in my class told me I should read Twilight (I hadn't heard of it at that point). But I see nothing but praise for it. Not that it was bad. Just boring.

edited 28th Sep '10 10:02:32 AM by Everest

I gotta say it: J.R.R. Tolkien can seriously ramble. The man can go on and on and ON about trees and hills and mountains. He can write several paragraphs of hobbit dialogue on cakes and pastries and assorted food products. He can go pages and pages into a scene before realizing, "Oh, wait, there are characters here too."

He has a vivid imagination, there's no doubt about that, but there's eloquently describing scenery, and then there's writing a book about trees that occasionally has some characters in it. This is most egregious (take a drink) during Frodo and Sam's chapters shortly after leaving the crew; while Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are adventuring it up in their part of the book, Frodo and Sam have to find a way to fill the same amount of space up until they cross into Mordor almost entirely with "And then they walked through forests. Nothing really happened. They sure were some nice forests."

I still think people are getting Tolkien mixed up with Robert Jordan.

Incidentally (brought up in another thread) I am having extreme trouble getting into The Tale of Genji. It just seems like its all about people having sexual affairs, with nothing really ever happening.

I'm also kinda having trouble with Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Moss Roberts' translation), which I've gotten as far as the second book. I don't hate it, but its one of those books where you have to read it continuously or else you forget what was happening, and I have trouble doing that.

Shifting gears a bit, I really really loved Whitley Strieber's Communion and to a far lesser extent, Transformation (does the fact that I read these kind of books make me too weird even for this forum?) but god dammit I can not stand Breakthrough. Communion was a great book describing a series of weird experiences Strieber claims to have had, but in Transformation I got the idea he was using his stories as a springboard for his political and social beliefs. Breakthrough goes completely off the edge, and it seems like Whitley is now just using his (alleged) experiences to promote some New Age hippie rhetoric. I nearly put the book down when he said newborn babies "are the confidential friends of the sunlight" (if I may quote ED, "lolwut?") and then goes on to talk about how his best friend's daughter is a fucking prodigy because she doesn't eat meat and thinks about the environment due to having been "spiritually awakened" by aliens (she couldn't possibly have been coached by her mom, right?) Geez, no wonder this guy dropped off the radar.

The Culture novels are kinda like this for me. I frequent an SF forum that LOVES the SHIT out of them, so I tried them. I apparently started out with one of the best in the series, so the rest seem kinda...meh to me. I've loved everything else they've recommended me, so I can't tell what it is I don't like about these novels. They just don't really engage with me.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities made me want to stab my eyes out. It's a beautiful illustration of the difference between being profound and thinking you're profound.

Special Topics In Calamity Physics. I'm sorry, all you critics who gave it glowing reviews, but I can't stand Blue's self-indulgently "symbolic" and metaphor-laden narration. I came to read a story, not long-winded pseudo-philosophical hero-worship.

1984 used to be my "favorite book I've never read." Then I read it and discovered a work that seemed to me to be anvilicious.

@Edmon Dantes - That's pretty much what The Tale of Genji is about - Genji's love affairs and his constant f*cking up.

At least with Royall Tyler's translation the footnotes are just as interesting as the the tale itself (if not more so, TBO).

Please tell me that The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy gets much, much better than the first book. Nothing in the writing stood out for me, and I think I only laughed once or twice. I'm glad that it was a quick read, though.

To be honest I thought the entire Hitchhiker's series was overrated.

@Snowbull- which Culture book did you read?

The radio show was better than the books.

Speak by Laurie Hans Anderson. Really, the first half of the book was agony for me. It was depressing and cynical and absolutely nothing happened. I put it down half way. Imagine my surprise when I heard about the end. So, I haven't read all of it, and everyone says it's good, but I could. not. stand it. It's one of my least favorite books. I know I should read the last half to give it some credit, but I can't bring myself to do it.

edited 4th Oct '10 3:39:31 PM by mermaidgirl45