Pajiba

well, this will likely get me stoned, but i'll go ahead: Catcher in the Rye. i spent the entire book wanting to kick fucking Holden Caulfield in his douchebag face.

also, i hate Hemingway.

On the Road. I mean, it was ok. but really not that fantastic.

Lizzie stole my post.

Anything by William Faulkner such as his much-ballyhooed and part of every high school English curriculum "As I Lay Dying", which due to his horrifying use of sentences that go on and on and on and on drove me to nearly punch out the aforementioned English teacher; even though he was a septuagenarian Southern gentleman who loved Tennessee Williams.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, but The Hobbit was required reading in my high school, and I hated every second of it. Fantasy or not, give me a reason to give a shit about your protagonist, or any character in the story for that matter.

"A Confederacy of Dunces" is the funniest book ever written. So what if the comic book guy from "The Simpson's" is a ripoff of Ignatius Riley. That book is so wildly original and inventive that I pull it off the shelf about every two years and read it again. Anyone who disagrees is lacking in theology and geometry! Oh my God! I think my valve just closed!!!

Acghfo;ghri g Hemingway. Ugh. I think I had to read "The Sun Also Rises". Or possibly "The Old Man and the Sea". I don't even know, because I refuse to go near any of his work ever again (except that time I had to read a short story of his in a lit class, which was tolerable ONLY because it was short).

I did like "Confederacy of Dunces", though.

I don't know if this is a "classic" piece of literature, but Naked Lunch was one of those books I felt compelled to pick up mostly because it had been described as one of those books you "have to read" if you are any kind of bibliophile. But, I just thought it was straight up zzzzzzzzz. Made it through about 50 pages and put it down, and I am the type of reader who will give anything at least the first 100 pages or so. Also, Atlas Shrugged. I made it through the first third, mostly out of guilt because it is my wife's favorite book and she is dying for me to read it and love it as much as she does, but after that, meh...

lizzieborden, I also HATE Hemingway. Seriously...we read The Old Man and the Sea in high school and I just kept thinking...LET THE FUCKING FISH GO AND GO HOME!!

Also, read Ayn Rand's stuff a couple of years ago...WTF??

The Bible????

I mentioned in the "Catch 22" post that it was the only book I have ever given up on. I hated "Catcher In The Rye", but at least I managed to finish it. Holden was a complete shit. I can't enjoy or connect with a book if I despise the main character. The only book I didn't like in school was "The Stone Angel", which, like CITR, features an intolerable protagonist.

I had to read Wuthering Heights for an english paper. 2 Hours well spent and then I passed the exam. Couldn't be happier, but I may have missed stuff like the nuance or details I suppose.

Bret Easton Ellis. With the exception of "American Psycho" - which I loved - I've never managed to make it through any of his other novels.

Also, I enjoy a great deal of Bukowski but "Women" is just over long and repetitive.

Margaret Atwood, never got her.

The Koran.

dammitjanet, I had to write a five-ish page paper on either For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms in high school (and I shit you not, I can't for the life of me remember which one, because I swear they're the exact same fucking book), and all I did was go through the stupid goddamn thing and pull out the quotes I needed and just skimmed the rest. God I hate fucking Hemingway.

Managed to get a B on the paper, too.

As I Lay Dying, Of Mice and Men, and anything by Dickens.

Yes, I'll second Confederacy of Dunces. I had someone at the bookstore recommend it to me, and I think I might have made it 20 pages into the book before I just couldn't go on. It's entirely possible that it gets better but with a protagonist that unlikeable, why bother?

I was also bored to tears by nearly everything I was forced to read in school (except Poe, of course, and most Shakespeare). I didn't get it then, and, most of the time, I don't get it now. It would be nice if they'd only let the teachers start with some contemporary fiction and work backwards instead of bashing us over the head with Hawthorne and Dickens and Melville as if the archaic language makes up for the lack of contemporary relevance.

Yes, I understand the novels are meant to be symbolic, and symbols are usually timeless. But since that is the case, why not choose something approachable first then work towards the obscure?

Though I'm still bugged by this nagging feeling that I've missed something deeply important by not finding the deeper significance of the pocket watch in I. M. Fuckwad's "Tempest in a Teacup", assigned reading in 11th grade English with Mrs. Tightwat.

Ah, public school education.

HATE ATLAS SHRUGGED - wow - I "got" it - but absolutely hated it. I'm an english major and trudge through a lot of self congratulatory ego masturbation but holy backwards fuck ayn rand is so annoying and her prose style is just as annoying. every page is just like 'oh and us amazing disconnected brilliant rich people were at x place looking at x people and their petty stupid concerns BLAHBLAH" wow. hate hate hate.

My main objection to Dickens is that muthafucka got paid by the word. And I will never be paid by the word, if i ever am published.

Really, I'm just jealous.

Catcher In The Rye for me, too. As well as A Confederacy of Dunces. Both protagonists were major league douchebags, and I think it is because of them that I hate 87% of people who post on the internet, because I can see aspects of both in most posters.

Well, I'm going to be in the minority here, apparently, because I loved A Confederacy of Dunces, The Catcher in the Rye, and I dig Hemingway. And As I Lay Dying. The book I hated the most? Probably Last of the Mohicans. I wouldn't mind pimp-slapping James Fenimore Cooper.

Hmmm...I hated Melville as a high school student and love him as an adult reader. As a result, I'm much more measured and patient in my assessment of "classics". Sure, there are those that are tiresome intellectual tours de force (I'm looking at you, Ulysses), but there's usually some redeeming feature to be found -- even if it isn't always entertainment value. Also, some "classics" achieve that status from novelty or shock value and don't always age well.

On the other hand, some classics cannot be praised enough. I've had people try to tell me what their various issues with Conrad (, Joseph -- not Skitz's cousin) are, and I simply no longer regard them as sentient beings.

Oh and I meant to say that the Nobel Prize for fiction Hemingway won in 54 was for his entire body of work, but apparently The Old Man and the Sea clenched it.

Catcher in the Rye was supposed to be the alienated-teenager classic for boys, and The Bell Jar was supposed to be the same thing for girls. I read both and was extremely annoyed by both.

Everything Charles Dickens ever set to paper except for A Christmas Carol.

Everything Hemingway ever set to paper with no exceptions whatsoever.

I started A Confederacy of Dunces several years ago; put it down and just never picked it up again. I did find it tough going, but I'm not going to condemn it until/unless I read the whole thing. It's around here somewhere...

Ayn Rand should be disqualified from this discussion because she was not a writer--she was purely and simply an evangelist for her invention, Objectivism, and never wrote or spoke to any other purpose. That makes her a pamphleteer--however bloated her pamphlets--not a writer.

In closing, thanks to all who dissed Don Delillo. I thought I was all alone in thinking his stuff is stupid.

I remember hating Jane Eyre when I read it in high school over a decade ago, but every time I hear about the plot I want to pick it up again to see if it's any better now. I mean, it's got a little girl waking up next to a dead orphan, a cranky/sexy Maxim DeWinteresq love interest, a crazy secret wife... it SOUNDS like something I should like.

Anything by Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway.

The Scarlet Letter. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. The Grapes of Wrath. Moby Dick. Vanity Fair. I've started Infinite Jest about 7 times and have never gotten past page 30, but I don't know if that's really a classic.

Old Yeller. Yeah, I'm a heartless bitch.

[I]"A Confederacy of Dunces" is the funniest book ever written. So what if the comic book guy from "The Simpson's" is a ripoff of Ignatius Riley. That book is so wildly original and inventive that I pull it off the shelf about every two years and read it again. Anyone who disagrees is lacking in theology and geometry! Oh my God! I think my valve just closed!!![/I]

And yet...that's PRECISELY the book I was going to post about. I'd heard so much about this book I couldn't wait to read it. So, last summer, I finally pick it up and...I hate it. Ignatius Riley was the most annoying prick of a character I've encountered this side of Stephen Daedalus (there's another classic book that I didn't get, though at least Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is technically good enough and short enough that I was motivated to finish the damn thing, unlike C.O.D.).

Going back to "the classics," though, I must admit to just not getting the whole Jane Austen thing. Or Dickens. Or the Bronte sisters. Or pretty much Victorian literature in general. (Can I throw in Madame Bovary while I'm at it?)

I guess self-absorbed characters get to me, huh?

Oh I love this. Here's three of mine:

Anna Karenina: couldn't get past the first third. I found it painful to read and just had to throw it aside. It pissed me off because it cost a lot of money (giant fucking book) and I hate not finishing books. But I just couldn't. Largely because of what had happened with:

Les Miserables: BECAUSE THIS IS A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT OF A BOOK. No, really, my hatred for it is visceral and monumental and has no limit. I skipped more pages than I can remember, wondering when SOMETHING was going to happen, and hating every single character. I finished it out of pure anger. Just to say that I had. It was my motherfucking EVEREST. If I were of the book burning persuasion I would've burnt that book. Horrible.

The Grapes of Wrath: I just plain hate Steinbeck. I hated the neverending descriptions and I couldn't get into it.

And Hemingway, but I've never finished a single one of his books. And I never saw what was so great about Catcher in the Rye.

Oh, and let me second The Hobbit. If Bilbo Baggins had any sense he would've kicked all those fucking freeloaders out of his house by page 10, gotten on with his life and that would've been that.

But what's with all the DeLillo hate? (Actually, does he even count as classic literature since he's still alive and writing?) I'll give you that some of his books are overrated (Falling Man anyone? PLEASE!) and White Noise, though I've liked it enough to read it twice, is not totally likeable. But the man's reputation is secure, as far as I'm concerned, based solely on Underworld. Damn that was a good book.

Another one on the "Catcher in the Rye" wagon. I didn't hate it, but it did literally nothing for me. Plus, I think hearing that it was what inspired Mark Ruby to kill John Lennon gave me bizarre expectations. Not like I was expecting to flip the page somewhere in the middle and see "KILL A FAMOUS MUSICIAN" in bold size 48 font in the middle of a paragraph, but I thought there'd be something.

Not sure if the count as "classic novels", but I hate the collected works of J.R.R. Tolkien, while an awful lot of people that I know count them among their favourite books ever. I've tried four times to read "The Lord of the Rings" and never made it past the crazy old tree motherfucker who sings to his river bride. I'd really hope that I didn't even need to explain beyond that...

yA noE wHat I hAte? ThInGs tHat mAke mE tHink two muCh. Like boOks thAt doNt hAve PiktUres (graFic NovEls rUle!) LOL, omg, IMho, Etc.

Wow. Insult Movies and Music--fine. But insulting literature sure brings out the trolls, eh?

Ok, I might as well jump on the hate bandwagon. I hated "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac.

11th grade english sucked! the scarlet letter, the great gatsby, fucking babbit, a farewell to arms, moby dick...i hated them all. how can they do that to kids? all of those depressing books to read in one year! it was child abuse. honestly, to this day i have no idea what babbit is about. i just remember not being able to get into it.

oh i forgot, that was also the year i had to read the sound and the fury. ugh.

Aw, the Silmarillion has some great stories. But...they're kind of hidden in the babble. But the story of Beren and Luthien is great, and the Turin story, too.

Yes. I am a Tolkien nerd.

Rhyme, I'm giving you Les Miserables for your birthday.

If you don't get through it, it works marvels as a doorstop. After all the thing is like a damned brick.

Yes, Dan, that's EXACTLY what people are saying. These people. These lovers of words & dialogue and beautifully written characters & intricate plots. These fans of art. That's EXACTLY what's being said. Thank you for your keen insight!

Posted by: Lainey at July 13, 2009 10:15 PM

tHankz for dA PRops! I sEE yOu fEelin' mE. wOrD uP!

Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner. First of all: the story in it of itself was pretty soapy and seriously messed up (a plus), but then it was presented over and over and over and OVER from a bajillion different viewpoints made me bang my head against the wall. I was like JUST COMBINE THE STORY-LINES AND SWITCH AROUND WHEN NEEDED. God. It was constantly rehashing what was already written.

It didn't help that the English professor's lectures in the class the book was assigned for were more or less just his mental masturbation delivered in the most pompous manner possible. "Faulkner tells the same story over and over again." OH WOW, REALLY?

A Separate Peace too. Holy shit, it is so dull. You'd think a tale of schoolboys during wartime, packed with homo-eroticism and a pretty strong homosexual undercurrent would be interesting, but it's so not. Nothing happens in that book ever. Gene wants Phineas in some sublimated way, laments this a whole bunch and then there's a random and completely unsatisfying ending. UGH. The most uninteresting book I have ever read.

Also: I looooooooooved Brave New World AND Catcher in the Rye. I think Catcher is, as loathe as I am to say, a guy book. Whereas, most girls I know love Separate Peace.

I am surprised by all the Hemingway dislike, and Heart of Darkness ain't just for the boys.

Oh, I hated Wuthering Heights. That's one.
I have to saw I enjoyed Les Mis the Musical, Fig. Is there a detailed description of the showstopper Master of the House?

I've tried to read The Scarlet Letter about four times. Ditto with Frankenstein and The Count of Monte Cristo. Never got into Dickens much, but I love Jane Austen.

Bronte sisters are mixed; loved loved LOVED Jane Eyre but hated Wuthering Heights.

I managed to finish Atlas Shrugged but I almost killed myself having to read the fifty page speech at the end. I read the first nine hundred pages in a week, and it took me another week to read the last seventy-five, because I kept nodding off.

Let's see...

The Grapes of Wrath made me want to kick babies. I'm sorry, but if there's 30 pages describing a turtle crossing the road, count me the fuck out.

J.D. Salinger...pretty much everything he wrote. Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine.

Um, I think that's pretty much it...though Hawthorne and Wharton tend to make my eyes glaze over at times, I don't hate them.

I'm currently trying to get through Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It hurts me.

Posted by: prawntastic at July 13, 2009 10:37 PM

Gravity's Rainbow is a tough read. I can appreciate Pynchon's prose, but it takes intense concentration to follow. Keep going. It's good for you.

Whew...at least nobody has complained about "Dracula" by Bram Stoker yet. "Dude it's just of bunch of letters and shit...WTF!"

On a more "meh" kind of note: did anyone else feel that for a creepy, classic horror story, Dracula was so muddled and weighed down by dead weight that you felt like a good third of the book should've been ripped out? It sucked all the suspense and fright and urgency right out with the meandering diary entries and articles and such. The story being told through written accounts is very intriguing, but it made what might've been a very thrilling book feel slow and somewhat leaden.

Saint Saturn Sunshine

Ha,ha! Look two posts up. I knew this was coming!

NoDice (comment #5), you and I are in complete agreement. Wuthering Heights was the most godawful dreck I've ever read. Slaughterhouse Five just left me scratching my head.

I'm really glad I have the fortitude to pony on with unlikeable protagonists. You know, like Humbert Humbert.

Damn, girl, did we read the same book? Part of the point of Lolita is that Humbert is quite likeable when introduced, even a tiny bit tragic; and as you experience the story from his perspective and he carries you along in the narrative, you become comfortable with him...and then the story takes a, um, squicky sort of turn. And not too many pages later you want to pull his eyeballs out of his living skull with your fingers.

That breathtaking manipulation of the reader makes Lolita one of the greatest works of art I've ever read.

Saint Saturn Sunshine

Believe me, I've heard these complaints about Stoker before. I've also heard the same things about Poe. Telling a story through letters or journal entries is definitely a 19th century device, so allowances must be made.

Dang, I also love John Steinbeck. But I will say The Grapes of Wrath is his hardest work to get through.

But I've read every single word he's ever written and loved it all (again, The Grapes of Wrath was a bit of a slog and the one I almost didn't finish). Cannery Row was amazing. The Pearl was heartbreaking (and incredibly short).

And holy SHIT, East of Eden? An under-read beauty. (I made up that word.)

Y'all are seriously making me want to re-read A Farewell to Arms.

figgy for Anna Karenina, I even got the Cliff Notes and read through them FIRST because I knew it would be difficult (this was just a few years ago). The characters are super-hard to keep straight, especially of the sheer number of them, their names, nicknames, and convoluted relationships.

I tried. I really really tried. I just couldn't do it. Just go watch the 1935 film adaptation, it's wonderful.

pudd'nhead wilson by mark twain

In no particular order:
Anna Karenina
Brideshead Revisited
The Great Gatsby
Heart of Darkness

I had to read all of these in high school: Karenina and Darkness were the only two books in all of high school that I just couldn't finish, the other two had characters so goddamn insufferable that I couldn't relate to anyone in the story. Anna Karenina is the single most overlong book I have ever tried to read; and I finished Infinite Jest.

Nothing new here but here goes:

Confederacy of Dunces - I forced myself to finish with a lot of kicking and screaming just to be sure I wasn't missing something. I hate that book more than any other I've ever read.

The Scarlet Letter - Ugh.

The Great Gatsby - Hated it in high school and reread it two years ago to make sure it hadn't gotten better as I aged. Still can't stand it.

I admit that I do love The Old Man & The Sea though. I haven't been able to finish any of the other Hemingway I've started but I read this one every couple of years as I adore it. I think I was the only one in my AP English class who did.

I'm also not a bit fan of Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men is about the only thing of his I can stomach.

As a total fantasy geek, I feel like I'm committing some cardinal sin when I admit that I couldn't get into The Lord of the Rings. I couldn't make it halfway through Fellowship.

I love reading, and I can fall into a trance when I'm in a good book. I'll forget I'm reading. I'll forget about everything except what's going on in the story. There's something about Tolkien's writing style that doesn't do it for me, although I did enjoy The Hobbit. I read Dracula, which can get pretty thick, and loved it. But damned if I could ever forget I was sitting somewhere reading a book while I tried to get through Fellowship of the Ring.

Wuthering Heights--everyone should just get over themselves

The Sun Also Rises--Hemingway should get over HIMself

Another vote for DeLillo here, although the baseball scene at the beginning of Underworld is one of my favorite pieces of writing. Overall, though, he can't ever seem to curb his tendency to lecture, and he has A Lot To Say. It's as though he doesn't respect his reader enough to make his point in the narrative. That's always been my take, anyway.

My favorite literary criticism of all was leveled at Underworld. I forget who said it, but I'll always remember what she said: "I liked it, except for the whole thing."

I think I'm the only person in the world who adores, without question, A Separate Peace.

But I fucking HATE anything Thoreau. Get a job, hippie.

Catcher in the Rye

fuck Holden, right up his "I'm a douchebag and I don't care" ass. I'm told its supposed to be about Protecting ones self via alienation, the insincerity of the adult world and plain ol "coming of age" bullshit.

All I see is a mediocre story about a little asshole turning into a big one, written by a guy who either A) Has some serious social/mental issues that never got treated or B)Is exactly like the little shithead he created and thus never made friends which resulted in him exiling himself to some cabin in the northern mid-west under the false conception that we give a shit if he ever writes again or not.

Seriously, I hate this book and the status it has somehow achieved in the classic American lit pantheon.

Yeah, Romeo & Juliet. Maybe I just don't like tragedies. I loathe the protagonists but that doesn't compare to the unbelievable contrivances throughout.

Gah, I love books and reading. This thread hurts. Generally, I finish a book if I pick it up, and once I finish it, I usually like it. Or at least appreciate what the author was trying to do. I guess I'd have to echo Tolkein, if we're calling his works classics. But I've complained about him before on this site, so I'll refrain from repeating myself.

samantha t, I'm also on board with you in terms of separating Ayn Rand from the rest of these authors. Rand is... interesting, and she can weave a provocative story, but no one should take her seriously.

My only beef with the classics is that they get forced down kids' throats at times when kids have no basis for appreciating them. I don't really think The Scarlet Letter is a book that adds value to one's teenage years, for example, but I do think it has value. (I remember reading it as a young teen and thinking to myself "This is such bullshit" when I came to the chapter titled "Hester at her Needle.")

I couldn't tolerate a single goddamn canto of Dante's Inferno. I will not apologize, Dante can suck it.

I liked the Hell part of Inferno, but I could never get past it. I did buy this amazing book with Dore's illustrations--so at least the pictures are pretty ;)

I was struggling to think of a highly regarded book I've read that I just abhorred, and then I remembered Atlas Shrugged.

What's interesting about that book, though, is that I'll strongly warn people away from it, but whenever I meet someone who's already read it, I'm like, "Great! Want to talk about it?"

And I love that fifty page speech, especially for the fact that the narration afterwards informs the reader it went on for three and a half hours, which I believe is how long it took me to read it.

Moby Dick
Slaughterhouse 5
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Heart of Darkness (but I think I would have if I had been able to get through it...)

I didn't personally relate to Catcher in the Rye but I could see how male misanthropes might.

I realize this has nothing to do with classic literature, but a couple of years ago my friends and family managed to convince me that the Harry Potter series wasn't just children's literature. Turns out, all my friends and family are just overgrown children. The book I started on (I believe it was the first) was like reading CS Lewis, except without any intelligence or maturity. I hate Harry Potter.

I had to come back to throw my support behind the dislike of Heart of Darkness (which has to this day kept me from seeing Apocalypse Now despite an actual desire to see it) and The Great Gatsby, which thanks a particularly batty drama teacher, note that I was not enrolled in drama at the time, I also had to perform a section of. I was Daisy. Is it a suicidal or homicidal fantasy if you want to kill the character you're playing? I somehow got a B in drama for the semester though, so bully for me.

A lot of people are talking about books they didn't finish, and in all my years of reading there is only one book that I didn't force myself to slough through. I have this perverse need to read them so I can more full explain to people why I wish I hadn't read them. The one I couldn't finish was Satan Burger. Mellick may as well have spunked across a couple of bound pages for what that book accomplished.

Mrs. Motherfucking Dalloway. OH MY GOD. I read it because I loved The Hours (the book & the movie), but Jesus Christ I hated it.

God help me if anyone actually considers this bestselling series a "classic" in any true sense, but no one can compare with ROBERT JORDAN's ability to take a great storyline and destroy it.

How can I name the ways?
*vomiting repetitive descriptions of clothing
*systematically removing all nuance and individuality from previously engrossing female characters
*can not move the story forward
*naming volumes of throwaway characters (and describing in excruciating yet repetitive detail their clothing) just for the hell of it. Oh, and apparently despite thousands of people, names are never repeated.
*main character's pseudo-marriage with three women, and the women joyously becoming "sisters" when the culture for 75% of the participants is repulsed by polygamy

It hurts to read the damn books...but I still need to know how the fracking story ends.

No one mentioned Ethan Frome. That is my all-time most hated book. The book makes a stand for pointlessness and futility. If you are going to create, why why create something so miserable?

Scarlett Letter is somewhere on my list too and I even had a great great English teacher for that piece of lit. I remember hating the book but loving the way he taught it.

measy peasy,

considering it's a series written with 10+ years of time put into it I'd say dumping on the entire thing because you dislike 1 book is well bullshit...

I thought and still think that Jane Eyre shouldn't be taught in high school. Give it to English majors who want to understand how literature progressed, but it's not good enough to give it to high school kids who aren't that specialized.

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Great Gatsby - I just didn't get it, it was so insipid.
But my true, true hate (and I loved studying English at school), was Room with a View. I wanted to beat Lucy to death with her Beadeker (sic). It annoyed me so much I felt like I was suffocating everytime I picked the book up.

On the Road is insipid shit.

Your journey of self-discovery is interesting only to you; rarely to anyone else. Sal is a typical 20-something, unsure of what to do with his life. He gets drunk, he takes a lot of naps, he hitchhikes. An apt representative of the beat generation? Yes. A novel that will change your outlook on life? No. No, no, no.

The only thing I hate worse than Jack Kerouac are the people who regard him as an anarchist prophet. Grumble grumble.

Hah, as soon as I saw the picture of Ignatius J. Reilly I knew Tracer had sent this one in. Two people at Baconeast noticed the book with me, and two people offered their opinion that it was overrated.

I did not get Gatsby, and I could only read a few pages of On the Road before throwing it down in irritation.

The Hobbit! Every line means so much! Everyone is so excited in this book! Exclamation points every goddamned where! This book kept me from reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For shame J.R.R.R.R.R.

Also, I thought The Road by McCarthy was just servicable. I kept expecting it to kick in for me on any level, but it went flat. I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic stories so maybe my expectations were too high.

Oh, and Wuthering Heights was overdramatized hogswollop.

Portrait of a Lady
Moby Dick

Wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy.

Oh, Jeebus, how could I forget A Separate Peace? Oh my godtopus...pretentious twats!!

And, hatred for Vonnegut is NOT COOL! I took a course in college where I was introduced to all of Vonnegut's stuff and was hooked. Also, anyone says HST, and they're gonna deal with the bats.

Also hated Romeo and Juliet, but LURVE MacBeth. Sex, violence, witches? It rules. DID hate Our Fucking Town.....just shut up and lay dead in the fucking cemetary already.

AND, when I was a wee lass, I read Dog of Flanders. TORTURE FOR CHILDREN!!!! I sobbed and hated it so much that I literally hid it from myself. Found it a couple of years ago and couldn't even look at it. HATE!

Guy Mannering - or for that matter pretty well everything Sir Walter Scott ever wrote (slight exceptions made for Ivanhoe, which has moderately interesting moments). His style though is unbearably tedious. No thanks. I shall never go back and try again. Life's too short.

"The Crying of Lot 49" is worth reading if only for the parody of Jacobean plays.

I was having trouble thinking of a book I didn't enjoy, since reading anything generally is time well spent in my eyes. Then I remembered Love in the Time of Cholera. I have been "reading" it for no less than five years. By reading I mean it sits on my bathroom sink gathering dust and reminding me that I hate the sight of that book sitting there mocking me. I have never quit a novel before, no matter how boring it has been, but for the love of God, I cannot pick up that book again, i just could not care less about the people. Everyone else seems to like it, why can't I.

I don't get Twilight, and I know that reading the books won't help.

Ethan Frome. Thought it sucked.

"Unlikeable protagonists are fine by me; but fucking use them well."

This is an excellent point, Soulless Merchant of Fear. I hadn't thought of it that way.

I'm also noticing that most of the hate here is related to books we've been forced to read as part of courses. I wonder how many of those books we'd really hate if we went back to them now. Don Quixote was a book I hated for years because I'd been made to read it in the 10th grade. Then I went back to it. Well, all right: I STILL hate it, but not so much because it's not a good novel (it is, though really it's several novels rolled into one) but because the fucker defeated me with its arcane, old-fashioned Renaissance Spanish and its ungodly length.

ehem...sorry, I lost my composure there for a second...

Brave New World is only passably good if it was intended for a young adult audience. It is so simplistic yet clearly thinks it's so clever. I spent that entire book rolling my eyes and wishing I had just reread 1984 instead.

I tried to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in high school for a "book report". I don't remember much about it, but I stopped about 30 pages in because how much I hated it was making me feel violent. I ended up finding a summary on the internet and cobbling together a paper from that. I got an A-, if I remember correctly.

Also going to throw my support (lack of) for Catcher in the Rye. My dad was so excited to have me read it so we could bond over it, it was his favorite book. He even had a first edition. He gave it to me and waited for the father/daughter bonding. Unfortunately like many of you, I wanted to kick Holden. Did like it when his sister told him off though.

Oh, thank God. I HATED Confederacy of Dunces... whew, it feels good to say that out loud. The man at the bookestore just went on and on when I picked it up - I couldn't get past page 50. It's been my secret shame for years.

"It surprised me not at all that the man committed suicide."

androstarr,
I believe Hemingway was severely mentally ill at the time. He was Catholic and was allowed burial in, uh, consecrated(?) ground even though he committed suicide. The only way for that to happen is for the Church to decide that he wasn't responsible for his actions. Of course, maybe it was because he was famous.

Also, dude put the shotgun on his fucking forehead!

@kayla -- The Harry Potter novels are hardly "classics", so you can relax. They're children's fiction, fairly well-written for the genre, with interesting plot lines and characters, as well as a unique hook in the whole "wizards living alongside normal people in secret" thing which totally buys into the wish-fantasy world of young kids to be different from all the other kids.

But they're the literary equivalent of Cheetos -- they're a tasty, light snack, hard to resist, easy to consume, and they stain your fingers orange.

A lot of novels mentioned in this thread fall into this category, and saying you don't get them is like saying you don't get "General Hospital".

Tolkien, for example, is only worth reading if you're an über-geek (especially The Silmarillion); otherwise LOTR was always a book waiting for the technology to do it right as a movie. Jackson's version gets most of it right (the extended versions, anyway) with some glaring, typically Hollywood weaknesses.

Also, mothy, I'm with you. This is pretty much an orgy of negativity, which gives the site kind of a Jerry Springer air sometimes.

I tried very very hard to like Henry Miller but I can't. I like his writing style, I think I just don't like the bits of HIM that shine through in his stories.
I don't like anything by Dickens either. I know he was paid by the word and that's why he ran on the way he does, but it's maudlin crap that never seems to end.
After reading The Garden of Eden I haven't been able to read anything else by Hemingway. It's not that I didn't like it, it's that it hit me really really hard.

I also really liked Brave New World, but understand if someone wouldn't. It's a bit...new wave? I don't know, but I thought it was very interesting.

I read BNW and another really good book, Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, for a philosophy class in college.

I really loved Siddhartha but when I later picked up Daemon by Hesse I could not get into it. I don't even remember why, but the story wasn't interesting to me at the time.

Confederacy of Dunces has suffered, I think, from the years of gushing by all those that surround us. It took me two years to get through, because I would always get sidetracked by something else. I never get sidetracked when I am reading a book, but there just wasn't enough to grab hold of me.

Here's the secret to reading The Grapes of Wrath: skip the fucking turtle chapters. If you see anything about a turtle, just move on. It turns into a much shorter, much better book when you do that!

Huckleberry Finn. I don't give a shit if Twain is the master of Americana, that book put me to sleep. Literally. The vernacular was so difficult to understand that I had to read each paragraph 3 times, and the book went fucking nowhere. I almost failed American Lit because of that piece of garbage.

Anything by Hemingway. Also fell asleep reading A Farewell to Arms.

Count me in the "Catcher in the Rye is overrated camp."
Wanted to love it, but I just don't see the big deal.

And y'all know you're supposed to dislike Holden Caufield, correct?

I might agree that “On The Road” has not held up well over time since it owes so much to place and time, chronicling an America that no longer exists and the “Beat” subculture that spawned the hippy era some years later. It was ground-breaking enough at the time to require a heavily toned-down edition for publication. Read the earlier draft referred to as “The Scroll” for a more raw experience.

It may be true that Hemingway and others lapse into over-wrought passages from time to time. “Old Man” stands shakily as a poor-man’s Moby Dick at times. But I don’t agree that authors like Hemingway should be judged on their weaker moments. The entire body of work needs to be weighed.

As with other forms of art, our likes and dislikes for authors/books is a subjective matter. I would rather view each volume as a distinct plate of food where the totality ingested forms a Feast of sorts, broadening you along the way. Or as Hemingway might say, a moveable feast.

I'm not interested in when you DIDN'T get Catch-22. I'm interested in when you DID get Catch-22 (and anyone who did get it knows what to say next).

It seems silly to have to point this out to the nose-in-the-air few who are piping up from time to time, but everyone here doesn't hate everything being mentioned. Each of us hates what we each mention. Do you understand the difference?

i wouldn't call it a classic, but a critically acclaimed book that all of my friends raved about was "the corrections" which I couldn't get into to save my life. Oh wow, a dysfunctional family, never read about that before *yawn!* Got to almost a hundred pages and still didn't care about anyone or anything happening and it just made me mad that I wasted my time. But I like Bret Easton Ellis and AM Homes so you have to go really dark to impress me.
Also, never read the book(and I know you'll all turn on me for this) but the major classic I have never been able to get into was the Godfather movie. Bored me to tears.

Thank you samantha.... I am surprised by how many people either hold holden caulfield as their golden god... or hate his guts and think salinger did a terrible job... He's supposed to be a little jerk.

Personally... I love Pynchon.. The Crying of Lot 49 was one of my defining books. I love the confusion and the whole "i have no flipping idea which way is up or down or what is real" business that is going on in it. I think it is, honestly, masterfully written... But Pynchon does take a lot of concentration...

I'll reiterate a lot of what has been mentioned before. The Bronte girls.. Dickens... by and large and I haven't come to appreciate them at this point in my life...

While not surprised to see Grapes of Wrath on here, I will have to say I actually liked it. Thought Catch-22 was hilarious and I can see how it inspired the tv show MASH. That said, I still haven't finished it. Right now I am working my way through Catcher in the Rye, and am not really a fan, but I wouldn't nominate it for this list. Yes, Holden is a pretentious ass that I really want to kick in the teeth, but he is not the worst I have read.
The worst I have read I would have to say is Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. I decided at Borders one day to pick up the Idiot because the name amused me, and I liked Notes from Underground (get the name wrong half to time). Big mistake, it was a long and very boring read. Took me years of returning to it, but I finally finished, and then a friend got me Crime and Punishment because she knew I had been reading works by the author. Decided to give it a shot, and about 3 years later I still haven't finished. It is punishment for me every time I sit down to read it!

That may be the only book that I will not ever read to the end. Wuthering Heights used to occupy that spot, but I bought a version with translations for Joseph, and ended up loving it, despite hating Heathcliff and Cathy. Whenever I see these romanticized versions of them I wonder if we read the same book.

V-anything by Pynchon, really. Has this man ever actually talked to a woman BEFORE he fucked her?

Fahrenheit 451. Hated it because it had absolutely nothing to do with censorship. It was over-commercialization of our society, like a forerunner to Wall-E. It's the greatest mind fuck of a lie that it's about anything else.

On that note, "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." JFK's talking about communism and ratting out your neighbors. Egad.

im really late to the party and i am unsure if anyone else has made this point or if it really makes a difference but...

i didn't like a confederacy of dunces the first time i read it. i can't exactly say why i didn't, just that the spark didn't grab me.

and then i moved to new orleans, lived there for several years, and read it again. and really truly got it. it's a love and hate letter to this silly strange city that is filled with silly and strange people. and new orleans itself is enough to drive anyone with half a mind to kill themselves once you start thinking on why you're here and what you're doing and what you're surrounded with.

well = we all

Ohh, yeah, Kristen you reminded me. I hated Their Eyes Were Watching God. It reminds me of Gatsby in that it was really well written in parts, but take a step back and the whole story is just utterly lame to me. The only parts I liked were the mule and the talky balcony scenes. Anything having to do with the main characters was too delicate and measured for me.

One of the books that I spent a summer reading for an IB summer assignment and absolutely LOVED was Great Expectations. One of my favorite books. I read it in two days. I was so attached to it that I actually read it during marching band camp... while marching (I have amazing peripheral vision). When school started everyone was asked what they thought of the book and they all moaned about how awful and boring it was. I couldn't believe it. How can you not love Great Expectations?!

I ate lunch in the library too.

Only one other person notes Shakespeare? The stories themselves are fine, but I can't stand having to translate every other sentence. Maybe I need to try again as 20 years have passed. I love the Russian classics and they can be very similar but I find them satisfyingly worth the plodding.

The only book I haven't finished was my favorite as a youngun. It was a miniature version of Robinson Crusoe and it was freakin awesome. So I recently picked up the real version and I'm wondering, does he ever actually get on a freakin boat? I got bored and never found out.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS AWESOME

That being said I have no love for Catch 22. Fucking boring as hell. Yes. Irony. I get it.

The big one for me though is Flaubert. I've read Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education and...nothing.

Funny tangent, when they made that god awful movie version of Count of Monte Cristo, the studio sent mini-posters to Blockbusters around the country announcing the DVD release date calling it the 'The Count of Monte Crisco', I shit you not. I have one.

Groovekiller, that explains so much to me about that movie. I have never seen a movie that shat on the original to the extent that that one did. What a revolting waste of some pretty, pretty actors.