Inspired by a comment on another post, PG is moved to ask for nominations for a list titled, “Great Literature That Nobody Likes”.
He’s posted before concerning Amazon’s revelations about bestsellers that nobody reads, but this list may be a bit different because it might include school or college assignments for which students are required to write a paper.
The list might include discarded children’s books. PG remembers seeing an item that says nobody reads, Little Men anymore. He remembers liking Little Men, but liking Little Women better.
(Perhaps that set a pattern. He also liked College Women better than College Men.)
What about Les Miserables or Ulysses or The Mayor of Casterbridge?
Frankenstein, Mrs. Dalloway, or Ethan Frome?
The works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Virgil, Cicero or Pliny the Elder or Younger?
PG, I liked Little Men too, but I think I liked Jo’s Boys even better. But I think they’re harder to find these days than Little Women. Maybe that’s why no one reads it anymore.
The only book I remember really hating was Catcher in the Rye. It was the first book I never finished because it annoyed me so much.
Catcher in the Rye was one big belly laugh for me. It actually left me rolling on the floor in stitches.
My impression from these comments is that American school systems sets out to destroy pupils’ enjoyment in reading by forcing “great literature” on them. Is this a fair description or am I inferring too much from the complaints?
My British school was severely academic and all the maths and science – to say nothing of the Latin and French – left little time over for the humanities and almost no assigned reading of fiction. So I read a lot but got to choose what I read and never really acquired a list of great books I dislike (as I never started them or gave up very quickly).
It’s a fair description. We’re given reading lists of books teachers think we should like because they’re great literature.
That said, the western classics have been thrown off many reading lists in favor of things like The Life of Pi. My nephew loves it. I can’t stand that book. I stopped reading it. I think it’s a horrible thing to force kids to read.
That’s the American school system in a nutshell, Mike.
When I homeschooled, I had a list of books for my son to choose from. We alternated weeks with one book from my list and one pleasure book that he wanted.
For me, it was Ulysses. I still think Joyce was playing a practical joke on the literary world.
Ah, James Joyce. I’d…forgotten about him. -wince-
Ah, Joyce’s Ulysses! I’d forgotten that snoozer. I bought it in college and didn’t get around to reading it until I was in my sixties, and I couldn’t have been more disappointed. Bombastic claptrap. A practical joke makes sense.
Two books and films thereof I loathe: The Man in the Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Christo. I didn’t mind Lord of the Flies. Why are literary works so depressing? Or do you write misery and it’s regarded as literary? If so, as a writer I’m sunk. OTOH I had King Solomon’s Mines as required reading at high school, liking it enough to read everything H. Rider Haggard wrote about Allan Quatermain. Where does The Satanic Verses fit on the scale? I tried but couldn’t make any sense of it.
Oh…I read The Count of Monte Christo in the French and loved it. 🙁
I read it in English and loved it, too. 🙂
Man, that breaks my heart. The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite novel of all time.
I’ll agree with you on King Solomon’s Mines, though. Really fun, breezy read.
Satanic Verses was bloody awful. Having not developed any intense dislike for anything I had to read in junior high and high school, in first year university I read, or attempted to read, Satanic Verses. (It had come out recently and was all the rage because of the fatwa).
Now, the previous year I had, in my english survey course, read Beowulf in old English, Morte d’Arthur in middle english, Chaucer, Paradise Lost (frankly a slog) so I wasn’t a complete idiot. But OMG I could not make it through the first chapter of Satanic Verses.
The sentences just went on and on and on and were full of supposedly clever literary references by Rushdie, the whole thing seemed to be written to prove how clever Rushdie was, and I think the first three chapters was these two people or gods or whatever, falling.
It was so dull, and all I could think was that I had mad respect for the Islamic fundamentalists who’d actually managed to read the thing in the first place.
Nobody nominated ULYSSES?
Was I the only one here required to read James Joyce in College?
The Red Badge of Courage
The Great Gatsby
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Look Homeward, Angel
I owned Look Homeward, Angel for decades before I got around to reading it and was sorely disappointed. It took its adolescent protagonist much too seriously. If Hemingway can be faulted for being too minimalistic, Wolfe can be faulted for being to florid and whiney.
I was assigned Look Homeward, Angel in high school (1976) and hated just the opening bit so much that I begged the teacher to let me read something else. Since I was her top student, she said, “Sure,” and gave me a list with choices. I chose BRAVE NEW WORLD and loved it. And that was when I went looking for more sci-fi and a fan was born. So, I’m grateful to LH,A for being such a slog that I detoured into my fave genre (spec fic).
Of things I was required to read in school, “The Book of Job” tops the list, probably followed by Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
Of those I read on my own, well, several – “Atlas Shrugged” is horribly written (although not a “classic” to most, it was very influential).
Thucydides I had to take in small bites. Unless I really needed to get to sleep.
The Russian “classics” I have managed to avoid. Mostly thanks to people that have read them. Friends have advised me to avoid them, not so friends tell me that I must read them…
I got off so easy with required reading. The only “classics” I had to read in school were Romeo and Juliet and A Tale of Two Cities. Neither lit a fire under me (though I love the first line of the latter.)
A few of those mentioned by others I’ve chosen to read. Catcher in the Rye bored me to tears as did The Stranger by Camus.
Les Miserables was an interesting read. It’s a long book but the library also carried two condensed versions of various lengths. I started with the mid-length version but switched to the full length when I decided I was missing some story lines. I did skip a large section however that detailed the Battle of Waterloo. (PG, you might find that historically interesting.)
The best “classic” I’ve ever read was The Three Musketeers. I’d seen a film adaption (1973 version) and thought they had to have invented some of the funnier scenes. I was wrong. Dumas wrote those scenes pretty much the way they filmed them.
It’s hard to beat the Battle of Waterloo for excitement, Suzie.
I probably should go back and read it. It’s rare to find something like that related by a contemporary of the event. I did skim it and made a note to myself that if I ever had to write a big battle scene that it was something go back to and to read closely.
Oh! I’d forgotten that one. I had to read it in French for French class, and I loathed it!
Ugh! I need to go back to forgetting it. Apparently 40 years of brain bleach wasn’t enough! Not that I’d even be able to read it in French now. 40 years has also bleached a lot of the French language from my brain. But the strong distaste I felt for L’Étranger still lingers.
I didn’t get around to reading Dumas until I was in my fifties and loved The Three Musketeers to much that I went on to read The Count of Monte Cristo, which remains one of my favorite books of all time.
Love Les Miserables on stage, but the book is hard to read…
Years ago I tried to read Grapes of Wrath and was blown away by his one-page(?) chapter on a turtle crossing the road, but I couldn’t make it much past that. Haven’t tried again.
I guess it really is “to each his own,” because I LOVED Siddartha. But I’m also like many others in that I think Hemingway’s novels are mostly boring (except for The Old Man and the Sea which is really a novella, I think, and is his masterpiece).
I’m re-reading The Scarlet Letter for my current writing, and it’s so overly written and SLOW, I’m barely making it through the book.
And I agree with Meryl re The Sound & The Fury. Barely made it through a few pages and put it down.
It really is a case of “to each his own.” I was bored by Siddhartha and loved Grapes of Wrath.
As to Hemingway, I was 13 when I first read The Sun Also Rises, and at the time I thought it was only the bare bones of a novel that needed a lot more description to draw me in. To be told that they were riding down Boulevard Montparnasse without describing it was an affront to a curious boy who wanted to know what Paris looked like. Having reread it a couple times since, after several trips to Paris, I can appreciate the stylistic exercise and the minimalist prose, but I still find the lack of description a flaw.
I’ve always thought Hemingway’s shorts stories were much better than his novels.
Two that I particularly hated in high school were The Scarlet Letter and (as mentioned above) The Sound and the Fury. But I try not to be either solipsistic enough to assume that because I hate something, EVERYONE must hate it, or uncharitable enough to tell myself that all the people who claim to like something I hate are lying for the sake of pretentiousness points or some such.
I’ve actually come, with maturity, enjoy Hawthorne’s short stories, even if the Scarlet Letter is forever tainted for me. And one of my favorite, undeniably popular and accessible authors, Stephen King, is a huge Faulkner fan. I read his stuff, and then try to read Faulkner, and I’m like, “How???” But I take him at his word…
I’m with everyone who listed the titles read in high school. I despised all of them, to the point they put me off “literature” for decades.
Ironic that I ended up a professional fiction editor! (However, the literature bad taste still lingers, so that I only edit non-tragic genre novels.)
My main complaint about school reading was that with the exception of Mark Twain, all of it was so dang depressing. Why did we have to see humanity only at its worst?
The Grapes of Wrath was the book I most disliked that fell in the depressing category.
Other than that, I hated Ivanhoe. The writing style was a slog to get through. By the time you finished reading a sentence, you forgot what it was about because each sentence was a page long and filled with clauses of all kinds.
I had a very progressive high school. After sophomore year, you could choose a year-long regular English class, or you could pick college-like classes that were one and two semesters long. That’s how I got to read Tolkien in high school (had already read it; aced the course) and “Comedy in Literature,” which had lots of Thurber, parts of The Once and Future King, and other funny stories and novels.
That may be why I like more of the classics than most. I got to choose which ones to read. I still like Moby Dick but I haven’t read it in ages. I tell everyone to skip the interchapters on whaling. There’s no need to learn how to cut up a whale for lamp oil.
I was so heartily sick of the depressing stuff we had to read that when we were given a choice of authors for a critical analysis thesis, I chose Thurber.
There was tons to analyze in his stories. Did you read “The War Between Men and Women?”
Yes. And looked at a lot of his cartoons. I still remember that he lost an eye and most of his vision in his other eye to a childhood “William Tell” accident.
Thank you for reminding me exactly why I loathe Moby Dick so much. 🙁
Ivanhoe: Walter Scott’s prose has aged poorly. He was wildly popular in his day. I’m talking Harry Potter popular. The thing is, popular prose rarely holds up well. Popular fiction from fifty years ago often feels to me very dated, based just on the writing style. Literary prose requires more effort from the reader, but it holds up better over the long haul.
Picture of Dorian Grey (I distinctly remember thinking it would have made a suitable short story of about 15-20 pages)
Moby Dick (just… no)
I loved The Picture of Dorian Gray, lo, those many years ago. I need to find a copy and go through again.
I battled through Moby Dick, but I don’t remember much.
Most of the books on this thread are free on Project Gutenberg.
a list up above:
Lord of the Flies — liked but scary
A Separate Peace — never heard of it
Catcher in the Rye — so deep I had trouble with it.
Siddhartha — not assigned; never read.
The Red Pony — is that gradeschool?
The Pearl — definitely a sleeping pill.
All Quiet on the Western Front — I liked.
I liked All Quiet as well, but it was never assigned reading and I enjoy military history.
I liked All Quiet also, even though it was assigned reading. 😀
The Red Pony sounds like a grade school chapter book, but most definitely isn’t. None of Steinbeck is aimed at children and IMO kids shouldn’t read it. A Separate Peace was very popular as a/s/s/i/g/n/e/d forced reading in school during my days there.
Do you mean actually good books that don’t get read much anymore? Or works often called and treated as “great literature” but which most people don’t actually like? It seems like people are offering examples of the latter.
Part of the problem is that most of the examples I can think of, people here have already said are super great books. That said:
I actually quite enjoyed Frankenstein when I read it over a decade ago.
I also really enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels.
I liked Of Mice and Men, and I think it’s very well-written.
Jeckyll and Hyde had a very interesting concept, but the structure was atrocious.
Dracula didn’t grab me at all on my first attempt, but I really liked it when I listened to the Audible production.
I really liked The Return of the Native, entirely because of one delightful character.
Lord of the Flies … Eh. I didn’t like it, but I can see why it’s important in the literary history sense, and I’m glad I can understand the reference.
I hated The Great Gatsby.
I couldn’t get very far into Moby Dick or Don Quixote. (Too boring.)
Heart of Darkness was so bad it kind of made me angry.
I just cannot get into Lovecraft.
The End of the Affair was awful.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s was infuriatingly stupid.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I kind of hate everything I’ve ever read by Dickens or Twain.
And I’m not a fan of Shakespeare. (The guy could string words together and convey ideas like a boss, but his storytelling skills were, IMO, horrible.)
I agree with Moby Dick (the asides were a hundred pages long). Ditto The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which includes a treatise on the architecture of Paris. I could never finish Les Miserables because the characters were either too stupid or too depraved or both.
Other slogs have been Pound’s Cantos, Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Styron? Heresy! *Lie Down in Darkness* somehow pulled tears from the bottom of my heart.
Ayn Rand’s still at the top of my list, however, as impenetrably annoying. Was she first and foremost really a writer, though? More like a thinker who hit on narrative as a good gimmick to get icky ideas across.
No question delivering the polemic was her main goal, not entertaining.
But the same is true of Orwell.
And whatever you may think of her writing (I found it typical for a 50’s midlist SF writer. Hardly offensive by the standards of the day. No Heinlein or Anderson but adequate.) her world building was spot on. To a large extent we are living in the populist anti-excellence world she forsaw.
Her prescription might be wonky but her diagnosis was accurate. Few midlist SF writers of her day (or any day) did that well.
And the core story in ATLAS is actually pretty good, diatribe aside. The movie version ranges from pretty good (part 1) to merely decent (part 3) but it’s because of the recasting, not the story per se.
Lovecraft was a terrible writer (as well as a terrible person). Where he shined was in his world building. The Cthulhu mythos is absolutely brilliant. If only the writing wasn’t so terrible…
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis was the most boring book ever. I read it at 16; maybe I was too young for it.
The Great Gatsby bored me, too, 45 years ago and 5 years ago.
Billy Budd depressed me no end. Years have bleached it out of my brain, thank goodness.
Gatsby TOTALLY boring. Assigned reading in College………. .
How about the film? Better?
I reread Gatsby recently and was pretty disappointed with it. I used to love it.
I actually enjoyed Gatsby, but it was never assigned reading for me.
The Great Gatsby is made great by the last couple of pages, which are as elegiac as any prose ever written, and elevate the story to mythical proportions. But Daisy and Tom are a boring couple and their dialogue vapid.
To each his own, I suppose. Gatsby is one of my favorite books – right up there with Catcher. I didn’t get the personal conflict when I read them as a youngster and totally missed the humor in both books.
Any of Hemingway’s novels. I think I may have somewhat liked one or two of his short stories. Maybe.
And I second everything Deb wrote.
Add The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner to the list. I never managed to get through it, and I am not sorry.
I forgot about Faulkner. TS&TF was a hard slog.
Thirded. I read it, disliked it, and then ten years later, decided to try Absolom, Absolom, in case it was just the book or my being college age. Nope. It was Faulkner. I like his short stories, but the novels are too much.
I loved The Sound and the Fury. It requires a slow and immersive mindset, but it’s a fascinating book. Unlike so many novels that are designed to entertain, this one ignores the usual structure and expectations, putting the reader directly into the neurotic minds living in a warped family.
“putting the reader directly into the neurotic minds living in a warped family.”
ugh. no thanks.
I love Faulkner but, in my middle age, he is too exhausting for me.
Hemingway may have been a necessary paving stone in the American literary path but those sentences drove me nuts. On the other hand, he makes great satire material and everyone knows instantly what you are poking your shtick at.
Bleak House
The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
Gargantua and Pantagruel
And the Cambridge Medieval Histories for a guaranteed cure for insomnia. The section on Diocletian bureaucracy is absolutely riveting.
I second Bleak House. It was really bleak.
I third it.
I hereby nominate “Wuthering Heights”. Had to slog through that work twice in high school.
Ditto! That’s another one I detested and wanted brain bleach for. I understand that some readers love it, and I am glad the book exists for them. But reading it was sheer torture for me.
I don’t get the love story. Heathcliff was an abusive bastard. The movie made him out to be a lot better than he was.
I’ve always loved George Orwell as a literary critic. He had the stones to call Wuthering Heights ‘perverse and morbid’. Orwell was always at his best when pointing out that the Emperor was buck naked.
Wuthering Heights is my favourite all time novel. But it isn’t really a love story – or not in any romantic sense. It’s about madness and obsession and like nothing else before or since. I reread it every year. I know dozens of people who feel the same about it. You pays your penny as they say.
I second the undying love for Wuthering Heights. I reread it every October. It’s a weird book, more like a fevered dream.
Many people have dismissed it as nothing more than a womany love story, a wish fulfillment fantasy, but Wuthering Heights remains a enduring classic, in all its incandescent perversity and morbidity.
I hear there are a lot of people that like it, but I’m in the process of reading Frankenstein, and I’m really not caring much for it.
Raises hand. 🙂
I enjoyed FRANKENSTEIN.
DRACULA, too.
Now, Dracula I really enjoyed and have reread.
I liked the story in Frankenstein, but it was hard to read. Took a bit of concentration…
I forced myself to read — and finish — Dracula. It was excruciating. Glacial and ponderous pacing, overly wordy, and a flabby, boring writing style… a very Victorian novel.
Didn’t care for *Frankenstein* when I was young but now I teach it together with the gazillion films derived from it and my students love it all! It’s more relevant today than when it was first published.
Oh, quite a list. Almost everything we were required to read in high school (edited: *I* did not like these books. They may have been your total cup of tea):
Lord of the Flies
A Separate Peace
Catcher in the Rye
Siddhartha
The Red Pony
The Pearl
All Quiet on the Western Front
Later, Der Zauberberg in the original German. I felt like I might need some sort of therapy to wake up my spirit after I finished that piece of boredom.
We were not assigned Little Women or any novel IIRC written by a female. I read Little Women anyway, and Daybreak, 2250 A.D., and Stranger in a Strange Land. Except for the short story All Summer in a Day, we were assigned no science fiction and no romance.
I remember the guys in my classes being as bored as I was.
“Catcher in the Rye” seems to be one of those “love it or hate it” books. I’ve seen people who really identify with Holden Caufield and feel that this book gets them in a way that no other piece of literature does. And then I’ve seen people who think Holden is a whiny brat who needs to be slapped upside the head and told to grow up.
I’m in the second group, but for the people in the first group, I’m glad they found something so meaningful to them.
Oh! I remember I detested Lord of the Flies (required reading in one of my high school English classes). As I recall, I wanted brain bleach afterward. Fortunately, the passing of more than four decades since I read the book has acted as an admirable brain bleach. Yay!
Have to agree about Lord of the Flies. You should have been given the option of Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky instead. Same idea but better kids …
But then I’m the guy who if asked to read a book about a fictitious religious dictatorship will pick Revolt in 2100 over The Handmaid’s Tale.
Second both nominations.
Nehemiah Scudder could still happen.
He *has* happened in other countries. “One man, one vote–once.”
We only had to read Siddharta in religion class in college. I have zero memory of it, so it probably wasn’t good. The others, no. I feel lucky now. I did read the Lord of the Flies on my own, but I mainly pondered what becomes of those boys after they’re rescued. What does the rest of their lives look like, knowing they’ve got blood on their hands?
I just looked at the Wikipedia summary of The Pearl. No. Just no. You have my sympathies.
I think people react poorly to Lord of the Flies because they were forced to read it while too young. It has kids in it, so therefore it must be a kid’s book, right? Wrong! I re-read it in my thirties and found it much better than I had when forced to read it in school.
I agree. For me, the same can be said for many of the classics we were required to read in high school, including Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, just about anything written by Shakespeare.
I’ve gone back in my “old age” and reread many of the classics and found that I liked them for the most part. There were still a few I thought sucked, but not nearly as many as when I was a teenager and only interesting in sports and girls.
Even if we limit our discussion to teens who are recreational readers, they are more attracted to plot than to character, much less abstract themes. The education system does no one a favor by trying to force such things on them.
Moby Dick is my go-to example. A plot synopsis sounds pretty exciting. This is what gets into the comic-book version. The actual book is something of a shock to the system for the unwary reader.
For a more recent example, I know any number of people who react the same way to The Lord of the Rings. They go in expecting an adventure story, and they find a bunch of Themes and Stuff just like they had foisted off on them in high school English class.
Surprisingly my kids liked some of the books they read. Maybe it’s because they had good teachers. And maybe “appreciated” is a more accurate word than “liked.” But they didn’t mind THE GREAT GATSBY or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The senior sort of liked THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY as well. Didn’t like most of the Shakespeare he read. Or Beowulf.