For me, it's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, just for the awful, awful moral lessons. Roald Dahl's Guide To Morally Sick Individuals: Spoiled kids, their parents, kids who watch TV, kids who chew gum, and especially overweight kids with eating disorders (the very most despicable and disgusting of the lot). It gets sort of less and less logical and then jumps right into "Whoa wait, WHAT?"
Roald Dahl is that old-fashioned person who lists off things wrong with the new generation—"lack of respect, internet addiction, impatience"—and then, just as an aside at the end, "also all the tolerance for fat people*. Those are just bad people, son."
I like some of his work, and there's definite creativity to Chocolate Factory, but it just makes me shudder nowadays. I can't even watch Gene Wilder's version anymore. Wonka was a pretty awful guy.
*Or whatever poorly-treated demographic you prefer.
The rowers are not slowing, so the danger must be growing.
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The Hobbit.
Everything J.k. Rowling ever wrote.
I must be a tragic hipster or something, because I have not read any of J.K.R.'s works, because I keep waiting for the hype to die down and every time it's just about to and I'm about to start at the beginning of that Hogwash stuff, there's either a movie or a prequel or a 'Where are they now' thing going on.
Kinda kills it for me.
But other books that just left me going... bleh...
I had a hard time with parts of the Belgariad and Malloreon because *bleep* that was some sexist stuff.
I couldn't stand 'Oliver Twist' when we were required to read it in school, nor 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (mandatory racial awareness project in that one, to boot).
Come to think of it, pretty much every *required* reading thing I still can't stand all that much, even years after the fact, but all the 'side' reading I did still clicks with me, except for the above mention of Eddings works...
Everything J.k. Rowling ever wrote.
Ehrmagherd. Damn straight Cap, damn straight.
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Game of Thrones.
I find them Ok at best. Certainly not worth the rabid fanaticism that they inspire, and certainly not worth the wait inbetween. I read the first three, now I'm pretty much done.
MAY give it a try again when it's finished... but feeling overall 'meh' about the experience.
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Harry Potter. Name one thing Harry did himself that he wasn't manipulated into doing. Why did they keep him around if all he was going to do was argue, get into relationship problems, and rebel? He might have been necessary to stop Voldemort but they should've stopped heralding him as the saviour.
Divergent. If I read dystopian books, I want an exploration of dystopia. Not a whiney teenage girl having relationship problems for the entire book. And she only preventing bad stuff through being 'special'.
The Hunger Games. Similar to Divergent. Except with more violence. What was interesting was that it appeared to be a book about people fighting against fighting for sport, and yet a lot of people wanted to read it for the violent parts. Infer what you will from that.
One of my greatest problems with fiction is that books tend to either have intriguing 3-dimensional characters or a really interesting setting. The two are mostly mutually exclusive. Which sucks, because I like interesting settings but can't read a book if I hate all the main characters.
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How can people be talking about bad popular books and not mention Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code was the most tiresome, infantile, piece of literary bilge it has been my misfortune to read.
It seemed as though every other chapter ended with a cliffhanger based around the a flashback to the female characters childhood. about 20 chapters all ending the same way, until the big mreveal, she walked in on her grandparents having sex. big fricking deal.
The religious conspiracy was half baked and the crackedest of pots. The depth of character of the hero (some sort of action historian with a handy background in cryptography) is slightly less than a previous story I read about a man who beat his wife and small child, was chased by a police man, and eventually eaten by a crocodile. and the ending was just ridiculous.
Obviously, just my opinion.
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Twilight. I... Lack words. Offensive, simplistic tripe is just the first line of why this is a soul-destroying paean to suck. Moving on.
El in hell is truly atrociously horrid. Despite some of his other books being decent. It is not what I would call a classic. :-)
Brave new world. It was a long time ago now, but... Euh. It paints up a shitty world, but that isn't really it. Parts of it are classic for a reason. No, what ruins it is that it really is two stories, with two different protagonists. Both these stories end stupidly. It fails simply for not being much of a story. Personally, I have to add the stupid view the book has on nature vs nurture.
Fifty shades of Grey: Why is it impossible to describe a functioning power exchange relationship? Why does it always have to be explained by "because horrible stuff in background"? Why does it surprise me that FANFICTION of Twilight above stinks...?
Tolkien and GRR Martin.
I'm not sure Twilight really counts given that just as much people love to hate it as legitimately love it ;)
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Twilight taught me how to get in touch with my feelings, and look at me, so sparkly!
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The Harry Potter series. Gaiman did it first and better.
Anything by Ed Greenwood starring Elminster. Because he is the ultimate wish fulfillment character, and the wishes he fulfills sometimes count as statutory.
Anything by Salvatore starring Drizzt. For similar, less statutory reasons.
Yeah, I haven't read Dan Brown to begin with, nor seen the movies based on the books.
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Isn't that where they get trapped inside the museum all night and find out Robin Williams is a freemason.
Or is it the one where Nicolas Cage tracks down his Nosferatu relations responsible for the bill of rights.
Agreed. Foucalt's Pendulum was awesome. Took me three reads to get through it and a crap-ton of alternate research to get the side-references, but well worth it.
As for awfulness... Harry Potter probably still tops my list. As I explained to someone yesterday you can't agree with a book on a fundamental level when its main point is "hard work isn't important compared to raw talent".
I also can't stand Robert Jordan, the Twilight Series, the Hunger Games, most of Turtledove in retrospect, Dan Brown and the Divergent series. I've stayed far away from Game of Thrones simply because what I've heard would probably lump that work into this group as well.
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Foucault's Pendulum = awesome. Though perhaps not quite as awesome as Michel Foucault, who really has nothing to do with the book. (I had gone in expecting it to be related to his post-structuralist theory and it wasn't, though it is slightly related in that there are the traditional Eco-ian concerns with semiotics).
I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights when I read it as a teenager, but years later I learned it was intended as satire and it completely changed my view of the novel.
The only book I ever really had a hate on for was Humans by Donald E. Westlake. I threw that book across the room and enjoyed the smacking sound it made as it hit the wall. Too bad it was a library book.
It's been many years since I read The Eye of the World (and got about 200 pages into The Great Hunt) so I don't remember the details, but people keep bringing up The Wheel of Time, so here are my gripes.
First of all, it's stretched out with repetition. The main "Dark Lord" character taunts Rand in his dreams. Then he does it a second time, and a third. Rand and his party meet with agents of that dark lord who try to recruit him, saying "You can't avoid us forever! You must join us eventually!" Then they meet MORE such agents, and it happens again, and again. And so on.
To be sure, there's a certain charm in repetition. It gives the readers a feeling like they understand the story, and the world in which it's set. I wouldn't complain if that were the only problem. But also, the excessively long descriptions stretch out the book to about three times the length it should be. Combine that with the triplication of the events, and the result is a book NINE times its ideal length.
And I keep hearing people who like the early WoT books complain that the later books are too stretched out! Those books must be REALLY bad!
Also, the book seems unconvincing. For instance, the bad guy apparently has some magical control over crows, using them to attack the heroes. But for some reason, whenever I read such a scene, it didn't seem exciting nor suspenseful at all. Something about the description makes the crows seem pathetic, not dangerous at all.
Or for another example, Perrin starts turning into some kind of wolf-man. Jordan seems to try to make this look scary, yet the descriptions just made Perrin look silly to me, like a kid with dog-like features. And there's the whole "I don't want this to happen to me!" stuff, when obviously, the author is just giving Perrin some useful abilities to serve him later in the series.
I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights when I read it as a teenager, but years later I learned it was intended as satire and it completely changed my view of the novel.
Now I'm curious. How was Wuthering Heights a satire?
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Mentions Larry Turtledove...
Gregory Feely has a great essay about alternative history and its discontents in his introduction to his short story "The Crab Lice" in Nebula Awards 33. "The Crab Lice" is about the impossibility of alt-hist fiction and the role of the author to effect change. "The Crab Lice" is one of my favorite short stories! Anyway, you aren't the only one who can't stand Harry Turtledove.
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I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights when I read it as a teenager, but years later I learned it was intended as satire and it completely changed my view of the novel.Now I'm curious. How was Wuthering Heights a satire?
I tried to go back to my undergrad notes and realized the computer they were on was stolen years ago! I think the text I read this in was "The Origins of the Gothic" but it could have been any number of books. Literary Women maybe? WH was written in a Gothic style while not being strictly (or actually) a gothic novel (it's a Victorian novel). The actions taken by the characters ape the extreme psychology and cluelessness of those in Ann Radcliff (which Jane Austen also mimics/satirizes in Northanger Abbey, and which Charlotte Bronte takes more seriously in her themes in Jane Ayre, though that story is partly biographical). I think that's the sum of it.
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Oops. Nevermind. It was a far far far more recent article in Bustle (though I did write a bunch of essays on the Gothic mode in college). Link: 8 things you didn't know about Wuthering Heights.
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Thank you. That was interesting.
I've tried and failed to read Jane Austin
I've tried and failed to read the Thomas Covenant books, which everyone else seemed into when I was at University (longer ago than I care to think about).
How can people be talking about bad popular books and not mention Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code was the most tiresome, infantile, piece of literary bilge it has been my misfortune to read.
It seemed as though every other chapter ended with a cliffhanger based around the a flashback to the female characters childhood. about 20 chapters all ending the same way, until the big mreveal, she walked in on her grandparents having sex. big fricking deal.
The religious conspiracy was half baked and the crackedest of pots. The depth of character of the hero (some sort of action historian with a handy background in cryptography) is slightly less than a previous story I read about a man who beat his wife and small child, was chased by a police man, and eventually eaten by a crocodile. and the ending was just ridiculous.
Obviously, just my opinion.
I fully agree, though I think the movie is a pretty good fun dumb movie. It bugs me when people call relatively emotionally complex movies like Avengers "fun dumb movies" specifically because those movies are much, much smarter than this one.
I fully agree, though I think the movie is a pretty good fun dumb movie. It bugs me when people call relatively emotionally complex movies like Avengers "fun dumb movies" specifically because those movies are much, much smarter than this one.How can people be talking about bad popular books and not mention Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code was the most tiresome, infantile, piece of literary bilge it has been my misfortune to read.
It seemed as though every other chapter ended with a cliffhanger based around the a flashback to the female characters childhood. about 20 chapters all ending the same way, until the big mreveal, she walked in on her grandparents having sex. big fricking deal.
The religious conspiracy was half baked and the crackedest of pots. The depth of character of the hero (some sort of action historian with a handy background in cryptography) is slightly less than a previous story I read about a man who beat his wife and small child, was chased by a police man, and eventually eaten by a crocodile. and the ending was just ridiculous.
Obviously, just my opinion.
wut.
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Oh man, there are more than I can count, really. Turns out popular opinion is often fairly dumb.
The one that immediately came to mind though, was George Orwel''s "1984". One of the absolute worst books I've ever read. It had a couple of nifty ideas and a clear political agenda, but on every other possible front it's just a terrible book. Extremely boring characters, no real story to speak of (and what little plot there actually is to be found happens to be one gigantic and moronic inconsistency that I'll mention in the spoiler) and overly long. At one point a character reads a political manifesto that's like 20 pages long and as I read it I thought to myself, "ha, this is an interesting, if overly simplified, view of history. I wish I just read this instead of the entire book." And that's the problem - it's a book that really isn't meant to do anything other than convey a political concept, but it masquerades as actual fiction.
But... why would they go through this entire convoluted process? They are the army in a totalitarian regime. They can just grab anyone from the street and do anything to them. They don't need proof. There's no point in investing time and resources to get Winston *more* prone to resist the government only to break him later. Just grab him, send him to reeducation and be done with it. Essentially, there's no actual reason that any of the events in the book would ever take place in the kind of conditions that it attempts to convey. In that way, the little scraps of story that are actually there just go against what the rest of the book is trying to do.
wut.I fully agree, though I think the movie is a pretty good fun dumb movie. It bugs me when people call relatively emotionally complex movies like Avengers "fun dumb movies" specifically because those movies are much, much smarter than this one.How can people be talking about bad popular books and not mention Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code was the most tiresome, infantile, piece of literary bilge it has been my misfortune to read.
It seemed as though every other chapter ended with a cliffhanger based around the a flashback to the female characters childhood. about 20 chapters all ending the same way, until the big mreveal, she walked in on her grandparents having sex. big fricking deal.
The religious conspiracy was half baked and the crackedest of pots. The depth of character of the hero (some sort of action historian with a handy background in cryptography) is slightly less than a previous story I read about a man who beat his wife and small child, was chased by a police man, and eventually eaten by a crocodile. and the ending was just ridiculous.
Obviously, just my opinion.
1. Da Vinci Code, as a movie, is very stupid and pretty fun.
2. Action movies have a tendency to be called "fun dumb movies" just by virtue of being action movies, even if they aren't that dumb. I believe the title should be reserved for really mindless fun stuff, like Independence Day or Avatar. Or Da Vinci Code.
Forgot this one...
"The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath", by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
It's situational, of course, I read it after coming off a 24-hour duty, with the last twelve hours a single watch. The amount of caffiene consumed to keep me aware was... insane, and it didn't wear off right away.
When it did, I fell into a deep slumber with horrific images and the like... and I *couldn't wake up* through them.
Eventually when I *did* wake up screaming, the berthing area was dark... and I was the only one there.
*shudder*
Put me on the anti-Wheel of Time list as well.
It drives me bonkers because I really did like the first couple of books, and Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors of all time so I'm very curious how he wrapped up the gigantic mess it turned into. But I can't bring myself to slog through all the books between, and I don't remember enough of the plot to just jump straight to Sanderson's closing trilogy.
The Da Vinci Code. "Oh, look! The BBEG just happens to be the very guy they run to for help. And the girl just happens to be the descendant the entire conspiracy is about. And the guy never guesses wrong on all of the (overly used) Easter egg 'tests'!"
The Celestine Prophecy. I stopped at chapter 3.
The Wheel of Time series. I read the first book, and - meh. He wrote how many in the series? And they kept being NY Times best-sellers?!
Well, can't fault them for their financial successes. But I do not understand them.
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Anything and everything Harry Potter- The worldbuilding is almost terminally lazy, the characters are mostly cardboard cut-outs, and on,and on, and on... Many of my friends are huge fans. I try to forgive them.
Most of George Orwell's fiction (Animal Farm, 1984, looking at you). A cynic literate in history finds these about as informative and surprising as a stock Bollywood romance.
Dan Brown's entire body of work is rife with "Oh, look! The BBEG just happens to be the very guy they run to for help," as Otherwhere put it.
The Grapes of Wrath. I love most of Steinbeck's work- Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men.... But mother of god, Grapes is sour. It is very hard to enjoy anything about a novel when the author pauses roughly every other page to wag his finger at the reader and shout about how angry the real-world situation behind the novel is making him. Of Mice and Men pulls it off by being very, very brief and by narrowing its focus so we actually think it' about characters, rather than archetypes. Grapesbotches this utterly.
The Great Gatsby. Not noticeably popular from what I've seen, but a declared "classic." And just like Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath, it's really one of the worst, most tone-deaf writings from an otherwise solid author.
Select works of William Shakespeare- I love King Lear, Henry V, Richard III, Macbeth, The Tempest, and many more of the Bard's plays. But some of them? Some of them are awful. Looking at you, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet...
Never got into the Wheel of Time.
Hipster time: Was into A Song of Ice and Fire long before it was a TV show... and have basically gotten off now. G.R.R. Martin has left me at a point where I honestly don't care how the story ends.
A Tale of Two Cities maybe, since I never got past the second page.
ROFL!!!
Reminds of a Third Rock from the Sun episode, where Dick tries to read 'a classic'
/Opens cover.
"It was the best of times... it was the worst of times..."
/throws book behind him.
"Well if he can't make up his mind in the first sentence, i'm not going any farther!!'
I'll throw my hat in for Wheel of Time. I had friends who loved it..and even talked us into playing the D20 game, so I burned through the first ten books just to know the setting.
I hated them. I think Robert Jordan SUCKS as a writer. Now, I had no problem with the STORY... but the actual telling of it was BORING. It took 3 books to tell what could have been done in 1 and 11 books for a decent trilogy. Five at most... I remember one book that was just huge, that only covered a day or two in-world...
Way too stretched out.
It also didn't help that he split the party so far... and there were only one or two subgroups I liked. So lots of reading about characers I couldn't care less about.
Never did finish that story.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I enjoyed the old BBC televised version and the movie, but I didn't really care for the books.
Add another to the no thank you for the Wheel of Time stuff. Not a fan of the Game of Thrones books or The White Gold Wielder stuff. Just a big pile of nope for me.
Actually, pretty much anything by Lovecraft is on my don't like list. I love his settings, and I love the mythos that is based on his works.
But I can't stand reading any of his stories because of the rabid racism and bigotry in every one of his stories.
+ 1...I also find them boring and the opposite of scary. But others have done interesting things with his ideas...
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Select works of William Shakespeare- I love King Lear, Henry V, Richard III, [REDACTED], The Tempest, and many more of the Bard's plays. But some of them? Some of them are awful. Looking at you, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet...
Dear gods Romeo and Juliet is terrible. Everyone in that book/play dumped wis and int down to the ground and every conflict is a result of them being stupid.
(Also what are you doing naming the Scottish play you idiot?! Are you trying to kill us all?!)
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(Also what are you doing naming the Scottish play you idiot?! Are you trying to kill us all?!)
I played Seyton. I am immune.
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Galapagos, considered by some to be 'classic' sci-fi. I had to read it for some sci-fi class. So, so boring. Also A Canticle for Leibowitz. Ugh. Much of Asimov's beloved Foundation stuff is also kind of dull for me, which is odd, because I've read anthologies of stories that Asimov selected from among his favorites, and his taste in stories seems to be *exactly* like mine, even if he didn't write anything like that...
Much of Asimov's beloved Foundation stuff is also kind of dull for me, which is odd, because I've read anthologies of stories that Asimov selected from among his favorites, and his taste in stories seems to be *exactly* like mine, even if he didn't write anything like that...
There were some things he did for humor in some of the old sci-fi mags way back in the day, and some short stories that weren't so bad, but admittedly, Foundation required a lot of 'buy-in' and it was hard to do that, even with borrowing books from the library to read...
I couldn't get past page 2 of Dacre Stoker's & Ian Holt's supposed sequel to Dracula. Is it so much to ask that people actually READ the book they are trying to make a sequel to?
And as for Frederick Forsyth's Phantom book- I've lost all respect for him.
And I must be the only person willing to admit they hate Alan Moore's Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
Not only was Watchmen an insult to the "Architects of Fear", but it also became the "ultimate take on the superhero", much to its detriment. ( I preferred Marvel's first Squadron Supreme limited series, which I believe came out about the same time). I also have serious issues with Doctor Manhattan. Not the loss of humanity plotline. the story takes place in an alternate universe- yet if Doctor Manhattan's precognition works as described, there can be no alternate universes.
And as for LXG, I really hate the tendency most modern writers have for breaking up married couples. It's especially annoying when done prior to modern divorce laws. Not only does breaking up the Harkers wreck the novel's happy ending, its clearly an excuse to set Mina up with Quatermain. Has Moore actually READ Dracula?
(And Mina's injuries don't make sense. Granted, I haven't read the original comics in years, but from what I remember, if Lucy & Mina had received those sorts of injuries in Dracula, Lucy & Mina would both have bled out without medical aid).
And my version of Captain Nemo looks like Freddie Mercury, not some refugee from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum!
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I've heard it argued that Watchmen, while important for its time, really doesn't hold up anymore. I tend to agree.