Books I Hated
Submitted by evildonut on Wed, 08/04/2004 - 06:07
Tags:
- The Fermata (Nicholson Baker) - Great sci-fi concept, bad porn execution.
- The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) - Boring N.H. and freakin' stupid prejudicial concept. Again, required high school reading. I hated junior English.
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips (?) - another high school read. We had to do a mock trial based on this. can't even remember the book, something about an accidental death at a prep school ... just lame, in general, is what I remember.
- Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - Hate is perhaps too strong for this. I found it pretty boring in general, but plodded all the way through because I felt I needed to read this important author. I guess after investing all that time, I didn't want to admit that I really didn't like it. I just didn't like the characters, and you pretty much had to admire/sympathize with the main character (which I didn't) since it was all about him ... I'm just glad that I didn't read the one of his that was on Oprah's list.
- The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - blech.
- Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs) - tried to read this for book club, gave up because it was just stupid. Normally, I like bio/autobios ...
- A Separate Peace - oops, I think this is the one that I described as Goodbye, Mr. Chips above. Either way, I pretty much didn't like sophomore English. But we did read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that year, which I did like ... hmm.
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - I felt the same way about 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' - it felt like a hundred years trying to plod through it.
I also very vaguely remember some years back trying to sit through a film based on one of his books which seemed to have a good review, but was pretty tedious, althouogh good photography I seem to recall. It was 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' - I couldn't even remember the title without checking it on IMDB.
I have to completely disagree about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I love magical realism, and this is the best example I know of the genre (much better than Like Water for Chocolate, although admittedly I've only seen the film adaptation). It's like dreaming and then waking up to reality, over and over again.
I agree; maybe 50 years of solitude what have sufficed?