<p>Clicking the “like” button, mantori. Have no intention of looking to diss something you like! :)</p>
<p>I also could never get through Walden…and I’ve tried at least a couple of times.</p>
<p>The Kite Runner. I tried but it was so boring.</p>
<p>Oh god, how I hated The Kite Runner. I had forgotten how much I hated it.</p>
<p>The Bible…</p>
<p>Definitely “The Alchemist.” I was forced to read that book in the eighth grade and didn’t understand it. I hated it so much that I’ve never forced myself to reread it.</p>
<p>Also “Twilight” has to be on the list. I wanted to burn the book halfway through. Nothing that terrible should ever be hyped about.</p>
<p>I really disliked “The Alchemist.” Just seemed like an author trying to be “mystical” to disguise one hot mess of a novel. I can’t believe this book is required summer reading for our high school’s freshman English classes. My kids both suffered through it.</p>
<p>Also, just could not get in to “Interview with the Vampire.” I just did not LIKE any of those characters.</p>
<p>I never imagined any of them were meant to be liked. But not liking any of the characters is certainly a high sawhorse to hurdle.</p>
<p>It occurs to me that the Bible ought not be treated as a book so much as an anthology, albeit one in which most of the books are bad.</p>
<p>I hated Kite Runner, too.
And was very disappointed by Cutting for Stone. And I really love anything with a medical theme-- that one seemed like the author was just waiting for a call from Hollywood and the convenient coinky-dink plot line – sigh.</p>
<p>Hated great expectations, liked Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness.</p>
<p>I never finish a book I don’t like. I give it 50 pages max and if I’m not hooked I’d rather not waste the time. Too many other books I’ll never otherwise get to…</p>
<p>The discussion between mantori and garland reminded me of a book I read this year: Pierre, or the Ambiguities, by Herman Melville. I like Melville, but this was the worst brilliant, not to mention outrageous, book I have ever read. It’s like a train wreck, except the trains aren’t moving. Apparently, he wrote this in a fever, and it destroyed his reputation (and some say, his mind). It has a creepy mother/son love relationship, brother-sister incest, boy love, a long-lost love child of a dead father…the worst melodrama you can imagine, yet some hail it as the first post-modern novel. The writing is brilliant, mad, awful, unbelievably purple, and dense dense dense. </p>
<p>It’s exactly the kind of book that mantori would probably hate, and rightly so: it really is inaccessible and tortured, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It changed my idea of what a book <em>should</em> be.
Sometimes, conventional ideas of what makes a good novel are just that: conventional.</p>
<p>I hate The Little Prince.</p>
<p>Excuse me, Le Petit Prince.</p>
<p>^Are you my first year French teacher? She hated the ending and actually used to send us to a different teacher to discuss the last chapter!</p>
<p>mousegray, you’ve piqued my interest in Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. I doubt that I will read it, but I’m certainly going to find out more about it. I liked Moby-Dick, but it doesn’t sound as though these books have much in common.</p>
<p>Can someone explain metamorphosis. I am in shambles. </p>
<p>Sent from my LG-P509 using CC App</p>
<p>So glad to see so many people mention Heart of Darkness. My 20th Century American Lit professor held it as almost the Holy Grail of American literature and I never understood why I didn’t “get it”. He did introduce me to Walker Percy and John Barth so he wasn’t all bad. </p>
<p>Agree on The Alchemist it was the one reading group selection that really made me work to plod through. Just felt he was trying to hard.</p>
<p>South of Broad is not Conroy’s best work; * Beach Music* is still my favorite of his books. You can practically “smell” the food cooking and “hear” the streets of Italy, I had a hard time putting it down. If you really want to give him a try, start with it.</p>
<p>I thoroughly enjoyed his latest non-fiction book, My Reading Life, and recommend it highly to anyone who really loves to read.</p>
<p>I tried reading “The Life of Pi” several times. The only time it was any good was if I needed to fall asleep fast.</p>
<p>Hated the alchemist
Also for some reason I couldn’t stand the secret life of bees. I thought it was contrived.</p>
<p>^^^It is another one of those “victimized white woman redeemed by her relationship with saintly oppressed women of color” books. They seem to be all the rage right now.</p>
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<p>I pretty much do the same for a writer who is new to me … however for authors with a proven track record (for me) I give them a lot more leash … often truding all the way to end waiting “for the good part” that never arrives.</p>