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Great books you don't like??

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Tyler:
100 Years of Solitude was an amazing book. Probably one of my all time favorites. The mix of history with magical surrealism with his captivating style. Spectacular.

I really was bored by Ethan Frome, however.

fish across face:
I've read Love In The Time Of Cholera and 100 Years Of Solitude and found them both pretty enjoyable.  Y Tu Mama Tambien is still his best, though.  (to flagrantly knick E. Spaceman's joke)

Along the magic realism lines, I was bored shitless by Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which won the Booker of Bookers prize or whatever (the prize for being the best of the first 25 years of prize-winners...).  Something a bit too cozy about it, and generally just way too waffly.

Not sure I like the style of most Bookers candidates much at all, despite them being what I read a lot after I finished studying, cos I wasn't sure how to find contemporary goodness.  Actually I do really love some Ian McEwan books, but that's an exception rather than the rule.  And I also just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and that was really good.

I thought everyone ever bitched about the Da Vinci Code, maybe it was highly popular but never highly rated?

Only John Fowles I've read was The French Lieutenant's Woman and it was awful.  Almost wilfully middlebrow.. it's like if you're going to try to break from classical form then fucking go for it, go the whole modernist hog, be as ornery as Joyce or whoever.  Clever little anachronisms and breaking the fourth wall and all that other po-mo shit don't cut it IMO.

Am slogging my way through Gravity's Rainbow now.  It's hard going so far, so I'm oh so looking forward to the constipation bit.   :-P

I have to admit a lot of books mentioned here are "greats" that I always avoided because I thought they looked bloody hard work.  Maybe I should dip in to some of them.  I would like to read some Conrad, for example.

TheFuriousWombat:

--- Quote from: Tyler on 15 Jan 2007, 10:46 ---100 Years of Solitude was an amazing book. Probably one of my all time favorites. The mix of history with magical surrealism with his captivating style. Spectacular.

I really was bored by Ethan Frome, however.


--- End quote ---

couldn't have said it better myself. wharton bores the hell out of me in general, short stories and all. as for marquez, he's great and 100 years of solitude is flat out brilliant.

Barmymoo:
I don't think it's fair to compare JK Rowling and Dan Brown to Chaucer... they're completely different. I wouldn't put any of them down as my favourite authors (JK Rowling in particular writes books that are like rare truffles coated in a very cheap chocolate) but they're too different to be classed together.

Chaucer is a bit dated for me; I'm ashamed of it rather but I gave up trying to read through the Canterbury Tales because it took too long to piece it together with modern life. It was a while back though, and I'm older (and hopefully wiser) now so I might have another go.

One book I forced my way through was Portrait of a Lady. I hated that book. It had some tremendous description that was about twenty times too convoluted, it had some interesting and in-depth characters who were all inexplicably obsessed with a dull cardboard cut-out of a heroine, and it had a carefully developed plot which chugged its way to the top of the story and fell rapidly to a predictably cliched doom almost immediately.

Having said that, it at the very least managed to sustain my interest. There are many books out there that I pick up and think "I've read this before..." then flick to the end to see if I finished it, and realised I gave up half way through so many times that the first chapter is imprinted on my brain and the last page is totally new to me.

And just to demonstrate my lack of years, a series that's popular amongst my peers but makes me laugh it's so bad is the one that's got titles like "I Fell Over my Hugely Large Breasts" and "He's a Sex God and he Hates Me" or whatever they are. All about some girl who keeps falling in love with guys who don't like her. She never does anything interesting and she speaks like a moron. It's teenage fiction that gives us a bad name, not teenage behaviour. We're not really like that. I hope.

TheFuriousWombat:
i wish i could agree with you on that last point. i'd say it is most definetly teen behavior that gives us a bad reputation, not teen fiction. i think the former is infintely more detrimental to us than the latter in 99% of cases.

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