Just goes to show, etc, etc, half the books mentioned here are amongst my favourites!

Am still amazed that we continue to force kids to read completely unsuitable books at school:
Cider with Rosie can only be appreciated when looking back at childhood from an adults perspective. Similarly, I was forced to read The Pearl by Steinbeck as a kid and hated it. Re-read it as an adult with lots of life experience and loved it.
School put me of Thomas Hardy as well – making a young lad read Far From The Madding Crowd is tantamount to abuse in my opinion. I’ll try and re read it this year!

I can’t grasp why Cathcer in the Rye is best read at a stage in a persons life. Cna anyone explian? I’m genuinely interested.

Cheers

it’s a coming of age sort of effort which angsty teenagers can relate to

I read it, and it didn’t do anything for my spelling……

Mugsy, think it resonates with teenagers best as they may be experiencing the exact same feelings/emotions as Mr Caufield, the fear of the transition from childhood to adulthood etc.

Can be read in a nostalgic, yearning for lost youth way by adults, but you’ll never get that ‘YES HE’S SPEAKING TO ME!’ surge of identification that I imagine makes the book such a hit with adolescents.

Was originally written as a book for adults BTW, but quickly adopted by younger readers.

Actually I think I’m getting confused between ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’. What’s the outline of Catcher in the Rye?

Also I’ve read the Time Travellers Wife, can anyone remind me of that was about? I remember it being trashy easy reading, but not tooooo bad, but nothing to write home about.

Rancid Aluminium by James Hawes – doo doo of the highest order

A Prayer For Owen Meany.

It never fails to astound me that so many people like this book. Turgid, prose, dull narrator, utterly predictable conclusion and an over-dose of quasi-religious nonsense.

Of Mice & Men …. was written as a play and so is more of a short story. Farm workers in America’s Wheat Belt during the Great Depression. Bad Lenny the retard. Soft hands for the Mrs. Bang! The End.
Does that help?

I read Of Mice and Men as my GCSE book and loved it! Maybe not if I read it now though, who knows.

Right just finished Perfume, the lat 40 pages were brilliant, why couldn’t the whole book be like that! But having to read the preceeding 220 pages just to get to the last 40 doesn’t make it worth it .. .shame!

IanMunro – Member
I just bought the Heart of Darkness.
I’ll put it on the bottom of the pile

Definitely worth reading it – especially if you’ve enjoyed Apocalypse Now and the film about the making of Apoc Now (forget the title – Hearts of Darkness?) Fantastic quotes on every page, and lots to think about if you are reading carefully.

So many of the authors/books mentioned are poor because they are aimed at a mass market rather than a knowledgable audience. Why would you expect a Dan Brown book to be a great book – they are literary bubble gum, same as Clive Cussler, Nick Hornby etc. No great thought or research goes into them and the writers are at best entertaining. The best that I can think about Harry Potter is that kids might enjoy better books once they’ve read those derivative best sellers.

I’m always disappointed when I read so-called classics and find them to be terrible. I threw ‘Death in the afternoon’ by Hemingway across the room swearing at it because it was written so badly.

I’d agree that Ia(i)n Banks is mostly excellent – reading Matter at the mo. I’ve only read a few that I didn’t enjoy. (The Steep Approach to Garbadale was very poor, though.)

it is indeed superb if you read it when you’re 16 – as I did – but I read it again recently and found myself just wanting to forcibly drown the narrator in a vat of his own wee.

You know I’m so glad that it isn’t just me that thinks that.

I thoroughly enjoyed Matter once you get into it (takes about 200 pages!)

Also, anything by Hardy

I’m always disappointed when I read so-called classics and find them to be terrible. I threw ‘Death in the afternoon’ by Hemingway across the room swearing at it because it was written so badly.

What do you mean by “badly” ?? If you don’t like Hemingway – and that seems strange to me, but there ya go – then fair enough, but to say he wrote “badly” is just perverse.

Yeah, DrJ. Other Hemingways I’ve read have been great – this one irritated me no end. I read it (half way through) a couple of years ago, and vaguely remember getting really mad about the fact that he kept repeating himself. The rest has just disappeared out of my head.

I was brought up to think that books are almost sacred, so to throw a book is a terrible ‘sin’. I think I tried ripping it in half as well. 😯

Feel free to tell me that I’m thinking of a different book……..

to say he wrote “badly” is just perverse.

have you heard about when he was challenged to write a story of six words?

“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

Awesome. 🙂

Not sure about all this trashing of the “classics” going on here. You might not be able to relate to a book in any way, shape or form but that doesn’t mean it’s rubbish. It’s also not a good idea to dive in with the weightiest book a person has written. I did find Moby Dick to be very hard going but Melville’s short stories are great – “Bartleby” in particular is a proper one off.

Without Warning by Oliver Sudden

Feel free to tell me that I’m thinking of a different book……..

Maybe Death in the Afternoon by Dan Brown? That would certainly deserve throwing across the room.

On the subject of Dan Brown, who can possibly say that DVC is a rip-off of Foucault’s Pendulum? You may as well say that Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep is a rip off of Beethoven’s 9th.

And breathe ….

Also, anything by Hardy

You jest – anything that makes me think of Nastassia Kinski’s mouth has got to be good.

I went on a 2 week jungle trip in Borneo and took Robert Twigger’s ‘Big Snake’ with me, thinking it may be useful (his first book, ‘Angry White Pyjamas’, was very good indeed). ‘Big Snake’ was so dreadful that the only useful thing it provided was extra toilet paper when I succumbed to dysentery.

A short history of Time…..it’s soooo long

The Silmarillion (Tolkein) – uh!

I remember ‘Organization Behaviour’ being a particularly dull too.

(Hi-Fidelity is okay, as was ‘Prayer For Owen Meaney’ although there are far better books by John Irving (including W.A.T Garp))

Angry White Pyjamas is one of my top 10 books ever. Big Snake was OK, but not a patch on AWP. His later stuff has been a bit patchy – Voyageur (I think) was OK though.

Sadly Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. One of the great disappointments of my life. After eight years of trying I still haven’t got more than two thirds through.

Too true the post about making kids at school reading inapproriate books. No wonder so many people never read once they leave.

I’m with Case. Gravity’s Rainbow? Postmodernism my arse. Lazy ugly bollocks. I believe my brother actually went so far as to nail his copy shut. Gharrrrstley.

The Magus.

Oh, and Paradiso. Dante starts well enough, but you just end up wanting to thump bloody Beatrice after a few pages of Purgatorio and by Paradiso she’s utterly unbearable.

Salman Rushdie – Satanic Verses

Tried and tried again and …. gave up. I’ll issue a wotsitsname just for wasting my time. Won loads of prizes, even got knighted – why? Talentless

Er Satanic Verses? OK I haven’t read it, but by all accounts it’s one of the towering works of genius from the last century.

I think we need to discriminate between books that we thought were dreadful, i.e. badly written and those that we just didn’t enjoy/couldn’t understand/didn’t appear etc.

I couldn’t for the life of me get on with anything penned by Dickens but he is still one of the greatest authors that ever lived.

Er Satanic Verses? OK I haven’t read it, but by all accounts it’s one of the towering works of genius from the last century.

Read it!

Bet you can’t!

Ok so I couldn’t say Catcher in the Rye was poorly written and I obviously read it at too late a stage of life, it did however in the words of Tenmen leave me ‘wanting to forcibly drown the narrator in a vat of his own wee’ therefore I didn’t enjoy it as I had hoped I would.

Perhaps that’s an issue with my scattergun approach to trying to improve my knowledge of classics, ie randomly buying something in the bookshop.

Most have been great, but that was the one that really stood out as being a disappointment.

The Magus wasn’t dreadful, but I did get the feeling the author was trying too hard for his own good.

Bonfire of the Vanities and The World According to Garp were both pretty awful, gave up half way through in both cases.

Mid Life – I will give it a go but I suspect it won’t appeal to me; it’s a matter of taste, relevance, interest etc. At least one person on this thread has said they found they couldn’t put The Da Vinci code down but acknowledged that it was a dreadful work of literature. On the other hand, the chap who thought Foucault’s Pendulum was turgid, pretentious nonsense might have a point but it doesn’t detract from the clearly intellectual basis of its construction.

You end up in the age old debate of what constitutes ‘good’ with regard to literature. Most people can agree on a few headlines – plot structure, narrative voice, character development etc. Personally what I really look for is insight into the human condition, a book that really tells us something about ourselves as people. The Da Vinci code fails to really do that but it’s a great read nevertheless, whereas something like Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, while almost impenetrably difficult for the average reader, will nevertheless yield glorious, tragic and heart wrenching insights into the human condition if persevered with.

Personally I think the biggest problem with this question of what constitutes a great book/terrible book, is the that it has almost nothing to do with whether it’s an enjoyable read or not. The very best books are the ones that are both but that quality has almost universal rarity; Dickens’s books would be a very good example of this quality as would Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy etc. These are not difficult books to read and for many people they are simply . The subject becomes deeply contentious when people feel that a book that hugely popular must therefore be saying something important about life thereby establishing a set of values that are almost imposed on us, whether we have read and liked the book or not. It’s a bit like reading the Sunday papers and becoming vexed with the constant barrage of messages that we should all be aspiring to fabulous life style of fashion, cool chic, property, cars, clothes etc. I hate those values, which is why I don’t read the Sunday papers, but clearly a lot of people do.

For me Chocolat was a dreadful book not because it was a bad story so much as because I felt it was just plain wrong in its values; it struck me as being almost a socialist/liberal polemic that described a world that just didn’t exist. But that is not the same thing as saying that it couldn’t ever be enjoyed by a wider audience than just me. Ultimately though history will be the judge of its quality; complexity and depth will almost always win out over facile superficiality in literature and books like Chocolat will probably never make it onto the syllabus of anything other than a ‘popular fiction’ sub unit of a second class cultural studies degree.

DrJ – Member

Feel free to tell me that I’m thinking of a different book……..

Maybe Death in the Afternoon by Dan Brown? That would certainly deserve throwing across the room.

Ouch, my literary confidence disappeared with the click of your ENTER button. 🙂