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

Try Fanny Hill. Just as infamous, and a lot funnier. Sometimes unintentionally.

Or Moll Flanders. Almost as funny as Fanny Hill.

Huh, I think my mom actually has a copy of Moll Flanders somewhere.

Lets see: A Separate Peace I found mostly dull; A Catcher In T He Rye I couldn't really see the point of, and for the life of me can't see why the Moral Guardians want to ban; any Holocaust books I've had to read, especially Night, Surviving Auschwitz, and Maus, as they're kinda the exact same story; the Shakespeare plays I've read (Romeo And Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet), although that might be because I was in high school and found the writing itself to be nigh incomprehensible. That's all I've got for now.

Someone mentioned that Jane Austen's books are focused on the two things considered important by british people: Money and romantic love. Basically balancing those means you'll live a happy life, but that's trickier than it sounds.

^^ Oh dear Lord, Night! The worst part of that book was that I felt like a dick for not liking since it was autobiographical and all.

edited 14th Nov '09 4:02:49 PM by LizardBite

the Shakespeare plays I've read (Romeo And Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet), although that might be because I was in high school and found the writing itself to be nigh incomprehensible.

Dude, the title of this thread is 'Books you feel like you should like but didn't'.

Anyway, I'm another person who hates The Catcher In The Rye. My religion teacher forced us all to read it in I think 2nd year, but I'd never heard of it before then. Thus, I read it, and I thought "Well that was rubbish. Waste of £10." A couple of years later, I started seeing references to it all over the place, and was astonished at just how popular and 'classic' it seemed to be.

I liked The Catcher In The Rye. Perhaps this is because I was not forced to read it.

I think The Catcher In The Rye is really a love-it-or-hate-it deal. I loved it, but I read it voluntarily. I just thought it was amusing, not profound.

edited 14th Nov '09 5:44:07 PM by Penguin 4 Senate

^^^Might have been part of the problem, as my teachers more or less treated them like books.

Hmm, well...I know I read A Separate Peace but I remember nothing about it. So I guess that's your answer on that one.

Jane Austen bores me, for reasons already stated by others.

The thing about Lord of the Rings is, I really liked it at the time I first read it as a teen, but in going through it now I see lots of flaws that I didn't notice before. On the other hand, some passages seem to have been magnified in quality by the passage of time. It's like I'm more aware of both the good and the bad now. I guess that's just judgment improved by age.

The Great Gatsby. The titular character is the most shallow love interest stalker I've ever seen, his love interest is a bitch, and it has a Shoot the Shaggy Dog Ending.

edited 14th Nov '09 8:24:16 PM by Hilarity Ensues

I have to second The Great Gatsby. I found the prose tortuous, and Gatsby's crush on Daisy was so infantile it was pathetic. I know this was supposed to be a critique of the decadence of high-society America, but I just felt like telling the characters to just grow the hell up.

Also, The Day Of The Locust. Relatively obscure, but hailed by my university as a brilliant work of satire. The characters are utterly flat and dead boring to read about, but apparently this is okay, because they're just there to demonstrate Hollywood's decadence. To make matters worse, the author seems to think that using random religious symbolism equals satire.

Thirding The Great Gatsby, part of its problem is that the time its critiquing has arguably passed, so its not very relevant, and yet, despite this, teaches still make you read it.

A Separate Peace was pretty bad, until I had to read Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War. At that point, it because fantastic in comparison.

Farewell to Manzanar, a book about J-A internment. Luckily, my English teacher actually agreed that the characterization was inconsistent.

The Iliad. I know it's an epic poem, and full of gripping drama, and all that, but every other hero was just so screwed up, every line is dripping with prose, and names are confusing, such as when they refer to Paris as Alexandros and then once go back to Paris. Plus, there aren't any paragraph-breaks. Maybe I just got a bad edition.

But I have thought about re-writing the whole thing, which is probably a bad idea.

edited 15th Nov '09 6:00:39 AM by krrackknut

every line is dripping with prose

Ok, let me just say something here: It's not.

Why? Because it's not prose. It's poetry. Epic poetry.

I like to second Making Money. It just felt like a rip-off of Going Postal with the economics instead of postal service.

Sorry. I meant 'purple prose'.

The Fountainhead.

I loved the hell out of Atlas Shrugged when I first read it, but I struggled through about 150 pages of The Fountainhead before I finally admitted to myself that my initial "WTF is this shit?" reaction was the correct one.

The Crucible: I seriously thought I was going to love this one. My brain was going, "The Salem Witch Trials with McCarthyism? This is gonna kick ass!" I love that sort of rampant, destructive paranoia and fingerpointing.

So imagine my response (hint: *WHAM*) when Arthur Miller turned Abigail Williams into a mustache-twirling, eeeeeeeeeeevil little slut who went around sentencing people to their deaths (and bullying/threatening the other girls into it) because she wanted to get into John Proctor's pants. Yes, the whole Salem Witch Hunt was due to the sexual frustrations of a sixteen-year-old girl  ^*

...Um, what? Seriously, Miller: of all the ways you could have set up that witchhunt, you somehow managed to pick one of the stupidest and insulting to my intelligence, and then run with it through the whole damn piece. Fuck you, Miller. Fuck you.

edited 16th Nov '09 2:14:50 PM by Sparkysharps

Well, it's Arthur Miller; isn't he like the the 20th century king of 'Bitches Wanna Fuck Me' literature as opposed to BWFM pulp? Or is that Norman Mailer? I can never remember.

It is indeed Arthur Miller.

The Oddyssey is a big one. I though it was going to be long and slow and dry, and I was prepared for that when I started. I also expected it to have all the fun age-of-mythology/ wishbone's oddysey bits and I was excited to see them as they were (more or less) actually written. What I didn't expect was for it to be so mind-numbingly bad. There's a difference between "Old fashioned" and "Badly written", yeah, but sometimes they just happen to coincide. It's like cave paintings and pyramid art. It's kind of cool in it's own way, but we've gotten beyond that sort of thing. We know what perspective and pacing and character development are now, and there's no sense in spending that much class-time reading something that was never even meant to be read like that in the first place. There's another thing: The Oddysey was an oral tradition. Who the hell decided that they were going to write it down in Iambic-whatever-the-hell? Was it actually told like that? Probably, actually... oh well.