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Most overrated book?
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i hate thomas hardy - nothing good ever happens so no matter how well it is written i am shouting at the charactersa ll the time for being such drips
and i enjoyed gullivers travels
and have read little women about 20 times - at least 20 - marmee
The Koran and The Bible.
More wars are the result of religion, than any other cause.
but what about as works of literature?
+1 for Captain Correlli's Mandolin - the only character I liked was the Pine Martin
On the other hand I loved Atonement, Birdsong, the Blind Assassin and the Millennium Trilogy.
One of the few books I've failed to finish is "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marqeuz. Too much detail, I don't need to know the life story of every character's grandparents FFS!
Just like to add that I too read the Da Vinci Code after hearing from everyone that it was good and it’s one of the most disappointing books I’ve ever read.
Do like the birdsong as well. Favourite books the magician, Life of pi, the regeneration trilogy, tale of two cities, and both homer books. The oderssy is pure class! Oh and anything by Ian Banks or Ian M Banks, some of his books are better than other’s but he haven’t made a done a bad one yet!"The Greek Seaman" by Jacqueline Howett came out to universal critical acclaim and is an undoubted commercial success.
However, I found it difficult to get into. The language was, at times, rather too direct and ruined what could have been an hypnotic reading experience.
I do hope it does not win the Man Booker prize, which many critics see as a distinct possibility.
Jude the Obscure
Anything else by Hardy - I'd heard so many people raving about him that I read loads of his novels in the hope of finding a good one. I didn't.
Agree with all Harry Potter books being completely overrated. Didn't like Wuthering Heights one bit, but must read it again because I'd just started reading books in English and it might be that I didn't understand it fully.
Anyone read Catch 22? I love it but it is a marmite book. I went on a big family get together holiday to a nice part of France to the NE of Nice and took two books. One was highly rated by the Sunday TImes and the other (Birdsong) by the god awful married TV presenters who get on my wick (should have been reason enough to throw it away). Anyway I started on Birdsong and decided to give it a good go so I read and read and read but couldn't get into it. Then I switched to the Catch 22 book and couldn't put it down. Still haven't finished Bridsong yet.
I can't get into that Ruiz guy's book shadow of the wind or something. I have tried to read it many times. I only get throug about 10 pages at a time then get totally bored. So far I think I am up to about page 80 or 90! That one was heavily hyped by those two presenters of daytime tv who were trying to do a sad, pathetic copy of the Oprah WInfrey book recommendation thingy.
Word of advice, avoid anything recommended by daytime TV presenters. They are self important pricks who don't have any idea of there own!
BTW I prefer to buy books not get them from a library. That means I have a bit of a library going on. Trouble is I waste a bit of money from time to time. So far I have a collection of about 30 books bought that I just cannot get into. I have learnt that if you can't get into a book by about 80 pages or so (or less than a third of the way through) just put it down and get another book. It really is not worth making the effort to read something that gives you no pleasure or you have no interest in the characters or the story.
I got a free JG Ballard Empire of the sun with a paper once. Is it any good? I only flicked through it a bit to see if I liked the writing so I'd like to know if it is worth reading.
Catch 22 has been stalking me for a year and currently turns up everywhere I go, told a friend when on the underground about the stalking and three guys turns out to be reading it when we looked at what people were reading. Have just started reading it after finally getting it yesterday, so far I really like it.
Overrated books:
1. Birdsong. So many things to dislike, but it was the lazy inaccurate vagueness of pre-war Amiens and of the war scenes that were worst of all, contrasting oddly with the vivid, moving clarity of the visit to Thiepval memorial. He has a tendency to focus on detail to try and distract from the wider lack of real sense of time or place. I have a long list of gripes, but in particular the idea that she met an Austrian soldier fighting on the Western front in Amiens (eh?), and travelled to Vienna for a dirty weekend with him. Errr... right.... How did he see anything to do all that stuff trapped underground all that time? Where were they standing to witness seemingly the whole Battle of the Somme? Drove me nuts. And entirely unsympathetic characters - I felt no interest at all in any of the main ones.
2. The Life of Pi. I liked the intro section, but the bits in the lifeboat were terribly repetitive and the bit on the weird island was just ridiculous. Three unrelated stories cobbled together for no real reason
3. Huckleberry Finn. I loved Tom Sawyer, but I never managed to get through this one at all, oddly. I keep meaning to try again.
5. The (later) Chronicles of Narnia. I was an uncritical, voracious reader as a kid, and even I never made it through the Dawn Treader.
I'm with you on Catch-22, Lanky Lad, which is perhaps the best (English language) novel I've read. Desperately moving and at times eye-wateringly funny.
Blimey Catch 22 read that years ago, good book in my opinion
Books that are over rated hmm lets see..well I haven't read any thing popular for years but was subjected toThomas Hardy for A level English Lit.....Boring Boring well I thoughts so at the time.
Shakespear was ok
Little women
Other than that I guess I have heard of the Da Vinchi Code and the Girl with tattoos but I find as soon as the popular media think its great it usally isn't.
I read a lot of books but most people would not have heard of the authors as I go for off the wall humor Stuff.
Interesting to see Shantaram quoted there - a brave choice. That struck me as a little like Birdsong, in that it's embarassingly obvious which bits are based on real-life experience (Mumbai) and which clearly weren't - the Afghanistan bit was what I imagine it must be like, not having been there either.
Oh yeah - Passage to India. An A-level text, but still. Dreary.
I loved much of Shantaram, but the daft Afghanistan bit was ludicrous (he could at least have read Flashman or played Call of Duty to get some kind of sense for it), and some of the gangster stuff was deeply unconvincing.
I agree. And extremely annoying for those of us who see autism up close every day. A summary of every irritating cliche of what people think autism is like, but in reality isn't. I dislike those deliberately cutely wordy titles too, which is what's always kept me away from those Tractors in Ukrainian books.
To be fair to "Curious ..." it was read at the time as if it was a novel about aspergers/autism. The book club here spent a lot of time discussing autism. But it was never intended to be a text about autism. When I read it I reacted more to the story of the family breakdown - but the breakdown could have come from something other than autism. If the autism was extracted and replaced by depression or cancer or some other condition, you could still have a largely similar book. The writer didnt mention aspergers, that was a marketing decision.
Also I dont think it was overly cliched about autism - this was a family that didnt cope, and probably never could. It could have gone in a rainman/hollywood direction, but it didnt.
Haddon said this (in an interview he gave about a play he wrote called Polar Bears):
" For me, Curious was a book about reading and books, and how people fill in the gaps when they read something on the page. But everyone said it was about Asperger's. I suspect this is what will happen with Polar Bears too – people will say it's all about bipolar disorder. Actually, it's not. It's about theatre and what you can do on stage. "
Most Victorian novelists (Stevenson and Wilde excepted).
And like many on here was unimpressed by The Kite Runner and Birdsong.
Interesting how many people have 'hate' texts from school. Mine was The Bell by Iris Murdoch, and my husband's is Streetcar Named Desire.
I normally read books really quickly, but i've been on catch 22 for about 2/3 months now. Really struggling to get into, am anout 100 pages in and still waiting to get hooked.
Oh .. Ian McEwan. One of his was that boring I'd forgotten I'd already read it so read it again.
I used to be a floor manager at Ottakar's Bookstore and I've read some real stinkers.
However, across the industry, The Horse Whisperer is the book by which all other terrible books are judged.
I'd like to give an honourable mention to "Land of Painted Caves" by Jean Auel. I read her first three books when I was in college, absolutely adored them, bought my own copies, which disintegrated and eventually I replaced them.
Book 4, Plains of Passage came out in 1989-ish. I bought it in paperback, read it, and again loved it.
Book 5, Shelters of Stone came out in 2000. I bought it in hardback, read it, but felt vaguely dissatisfied. I've read it a few more times, but nowhere near as much as the first 4. I'm now on my 3rd copies of all of them.
Book 6 came out last Tuesday. Frankly, I'm not sure I'll ever read it again. It's very hard going, not enough dialogue, too much description, little character development and repeating long passages from earlier books.
And what annoys me more than anything? I waited 21 years for these final 2 books. I've read better fan fiction...dammit even my nanowrimo was better (in parts...there's a couple of sentences I'm still pleased with, and a dashed fine semi colon
)
edit: grammar counts, even when you're angry!
Just on this page alone I've seen so many that I hate!
Obviously, anything by Dan Brown - I confess, it was a desperate *on the way to France asnd forgotten the books!* service station stop and has never been repeated! My ex husband and then 12yo daughter thought he was great...nuff said
Little Women - totally didn't get the loviness. Hated it all.
Huck Finn - adore everything Mark Twain (with no real sanity, all things considered) but just couldn't like the characters.
That Edinburgh based detective bloke - utter dross
Newtons Principia....defined the laws governing the physical universe but cant explain why eventually all pairs of socks become one sock.
Oh, and Clockwork Orange - reading in another language doesn't really bother me until it becomes completely predictable guff.
Catcher in the Rye - I WANNA BE ANGRY. I WANNA BE ANGRY. I WANNA....... but I'm actually a bit flacid.
Anything by Nigella Lawson, Pimpmistress.