Great Literature That Nobody Likes

by
This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

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?

Click to Tweet/Email/Share This Post

109 thoughts on “Great Literature That Nobody Likes”

  1. Thanks to everyone who posted. Before this, I’d always thought maybe I was just dumber than a box of bolts because I didn’t “get it” like other people “got it” with the “great” literature. I’ve hated most all of that crap since forever. And I was an English major, with, thank God, a second major, in accounting, which stood me in good stead the forty years I practiced law. Try arguing Moby Dick to a jury box filled with today’s voters who usually don’t read anything more challenging than their kids’ diaries.

  2. I enjoyed everything I had to read in school — some more than others — with three exceptions:

    Lord of the Flies
    Nineteen Eighty-Four
    The Edible Woman.

  3. The comments here prove that tastes vary. There is something someone will like in almost any book, and also something someone will loathe. The miracle is that we have so much to choose from.

  4. I read War and Peace last year, for fun. I can now maybe officially say I read it, but I skipped all the boring parts.

  5. Any of the Greek tragedies should be added to this list — they might have great stories (and might not; I had to read “Oedipus Rex” half a dozen times in school and college), but they’re always translated into very dry reading.

    A Tale of Genji, as a historical document, is fascinating; as literature, it’s dull, depressing, and… well, unsettling in a bad way.

    I see a lot of people mentioning Moby Dick. I think that book’s placement on this list depends on whether or not you’re reading it unabridged — my first introduction to the book was via one of the abridged versions, and it was a GOOD book; the kind of story you’d expect it to be. When I realized I had read the abridged version I thought “Wow, you mean there’s more of this?” and tracked down an unabridged version. Uh… yikes! A better example of an abridged novel being better than the original would be hard to find.

    Conrad’s Heart of Darkness bored the tears out of me. One of the Deans of English in my college loved it, and insisted that every English class in the 100-200 level read it one year, thus requiring it in five classes I was taking. Fortunately, he left before that semester was over, and all but one of the teachers in his department dropped that book, first thing. Still had to read that dreck, though.

    If you can find a good translation, the FIRST part of Don Quixote is a fantastic story. The SECOND part, however, just ruins the whole thing no matter how its translated.

    I hate every single Newberry Award-Winning Book in which the dog dies… (so, all of them?) Seriously, what is with this award’s dead dog fetish?

    I’ll second (or third, or fourth, or whateverth) many of the High School assignments such as Catcher in the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, and SOME of the Twain (I liked Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but in school the only Twain we were assigned were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which I found dreadfully dull).

    The High School-assigned short story that sticks out to me the most, in a negative way, was “The Lottery.” Bleh.

    My high school English teacher occasionally complained about the books that she was required to teach. She hated Lord of the Flies so much that, instead of having us read the book, she took a few days off and had her substitute teacher show us the movie. The movie did NOT encourage me to go out and read the book.

    Most of what I was assigned to read in High School was completely unmemorable. The few “good” (in relative terms) examples I can think of are Twelve Angry Men, 1984, and (just barely making this list) To Kill a Mockingbird. And that’s IT. Everything else I was assigned, from Grade School to College, was at BEST unmemorable.

    I don’t like any of the Hemmingway novels, but I somethings think I might like abridged forms of them. I keep trying them because I’ve read (or heard quoted) passages that seem really interesting, but whenever I try to read the novel that accompanies that selection I can’t slog my way through them (rarely even making it to the part with the selections that draw my attention).

    I am willing to admit that I want to condemn some books I’ve never read, because I’m never going to and I know why I’m not going to. When even the people who are advocating that a particular book be read make that book sound like a miserable slog, I know to stay away… (looking at you, The Scarlett Letter, The Sound and the Fury, most of the so-called “Russian Classics,” and anything by James Joyce).

  7. I’m a Civil Engineer, and at work a friend of mine who is also a Civil Engineer decided to get a Master in English. (A woman was involved with that decision, but she was gone long before he got his Masters. He also started a Rock Band because of a different woman, they now have two girls, one is at University, the other soon to be, but I digress.)

    I had a standing bet with him. That if he could tell me that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a “good read” that I would buy him lunch. While he was getting the Masters in English he was insufferable about his choice of “Literature” sneering at the books I would mention. A few years after he was done — during his ‘Rock Star’ phase — he started asking me what SF titles were good, and I am happy to say that he is now reading books that he can actually enjoy.

    BTW, He finally admitted that he read the CliffsNotes(tm) on Ulysses to pass the course. HA!

  8. I never understood the point of reading plays in school. Plays are written to be performed and WATCHED, not read like a book. Reading them gives nothing of an actor’s interpretation or a vision of the sets. You might as well assign students to read scripts from movies or TV shows. A play is a recipe for a performance. It’s like looking at blueprints or a set of instructions and claiming you ‘built’ a house or assembled a pickup truck.
    That said, I did enjoy the Cliffs Notes annotated Shakespeare editions (Hamlet and Othello) which contained the text of the play with historical notes, sidebars, and analysis. I also enjoyed the filmed versions of Hamlet and Macbeth we watched in senior English.

  9. I read (and enjoyed) Les Miserables.

    (And I liked Little Men, too — though not as much as Little Women.)

    I can’t imagine why anyone voluntarily reads Madame Bovary, but I’m sure someone out there has somehow managed to like that one as well.

  10. I can’t think of a single literary classic that I didn’t appreciate, even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I thought Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a literary root canal but I admired it, nonetheless.

    What I don’t understand are the readers who think because they don’t particularly enjoy Shakespeare or Dickens (for example) – Shakespeare and Dickens are therefore bad storytellers.

    I mean – the hell?

  11. I took Science Fiction as my High School lit, so while I didn’t LOVE all the stories (the one about the Holocaust not being real is more disturbing every time I think of it). But I had to read Joyce in college. Joyce! So. Boring. Who cares about the symbolism of window blinds. I did like the Chekov play though. And the fact that I can’t remember any of the other books I had to read should tell you something.

    • You must be a lot younger than I am. Back in the day, you didn’t dare admit you read that “trash.” I remember going into a high school class and hearing two boys discussing an SF novel. My reaction was, “I’m not the only one!” Of course, I didn’t join their conversation. Heaven forbid I knew what they were talking about.

      • One of the english reading textbooks when I was in grade school had THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH. It was a while back.

        In spanish class we had to read EL QUIJOTE.
        The teacher focused on the comedy and parody aspects to make the literary analysis bearable.

        • I should read “Green Hills!” In my singing group, we have a beautiful piece that encompasses Heinlein’s words to a lovely tune. We sing it only at cons because nobody in our usual audiences would get the allusion.

            • Heinlein’s. The Wiki is correct in that the lyrics fit a number of different tunes (this is known as “scansion” and is much used by filkers). Ours is a tune by Mark Bernstein and includes a verse in Esperanto. We sing it four-part a capella. It is not included on Court and Country’s current CD but will be on our next one, in progress. It’s a beautiful piece.

              And thanks PG for the shameless promo.

  13. great question

    tale of two cities
    proust
    little women
    little men
    little monkeys
    little bacterium

    anything by franzen
    phillip roth
    moby dick
    anything by bret easton ellis
    anything by hemingway
    anything by joyce carol oates
    anything by screeching people who think they can write polemics
    the oz books beyond the most pop one
    anne of green gables, beyond the inaugural one
    the bobbsey twins
    the nancy drew, hardy boys, trixie belden claptrap
    dick and jane [yeah, Im really old, lol]

    poorly translated OT and NT with more than a whiff of corrupted text
    Most poetry before people talked like reg people, in instead sounded like they were holding a porcelain teacup between their knees.

    Anything by ayn rand, and her spiritual sidekick, l ron hubbard

    Most newage sewage esp by louise hay who claimed she cured herself of cancer, but uh, her doc died and records destroyed, and she made literally millions on her claim, leading truly ill people down the wrong path.

    I am surprised by my own aversion to many books, and there are many more to list.

    Just as a positive: OED. I could have it in its long multi vols version, be my only reading for life. Also, most anything that is written in reasoned language about many aspects of physics, and most anything about open road and blue sky and whatever freedoms we can manage

  14. I’ve read a lot of so-called boring classics in my time but only one defeated me to the point where I could not even finish it. That book was Moby Dick. It should have been exciting. Instead, it was the single most boring book I have ever [attempted to] read. 🙁

Comments are closed.