I think I got through the first two pages of “The Name of the Rose”.
^^ Just goes to show how different we all are. SAGN is one of my all-time favorites and I loved the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
Hated “Foucault’s Pendulum”. But loved “The Name of the Rose”. 
I really have liked most of the books mentioned, except davinci code. Also hate anything by Jody picoult and can’t get through any books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (life in the time of cholera and hundred years of solitude…)
Nietzsche writes that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
He might as well have written that when you judge a book, the book also judges you.
Just sayin
I am perfectly fine with being judged by 50 Shades. 
I managed to fake my way through the high school assignment of the Iliad and did not actually read it until my daughter was in middle school or so. Jeez Louise – is that a violent book! The video games that my then-teenaged nephews were playing around that time had nothing on that book!! Imagine if a contemporary writer had that many scenes involving spears inserted into one end of the anatomy and coming out another – doubt we’d be forcing our teenagers to read it. 
(Can I mention something I like though? An incredibly lovely version of the Iliad is Alice Oswald’s Memorial. She extracts all the action sequences involving the main characters and is left with the descriptions of the dead minor characters. It reads like a listing of those killed in a contemporary tragedy (like 9/11 or something). Strangely moving.)
Also, a suggestion for those who haven’t yet found a way into Ulysses – listen to it on audio! Seriously, so good. There’s only a couple of chapters you have to skip to make it bearable. The rest is great!
Loved, loved, loved Name of the Rose. Especially first 50 pages.
@alh – have you read “The Dead”? That will turn most people into a Joyce fan. I don’t think a single person on earth has actually finished Finnegan’s wake.
I liked The Dead. But Ulysses was an endless slog… 265,000 words about Bloom’s day and I did not care in the least about it from the start. I crawled across the finish line (had to read for class in college), but it completely turned me off from being an English major. My prof was enamored with it. Ugh.
I loved Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist, and the Dead. But I never got past the first page of Finnegan’s Wake, and never will.
I love Henry James too, but couldn’t get through any of his late, long, and difficult novels like the Ambassadors and the Golden Bowl. Obviously I’m not smart enough to understand them!.
I started Moby Dick about three times and never was able to finish it. I always got bogged down in those excruciatingly boring chapters about ceteology!
Same with Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. Ugh.
Two books I finished that I hated; both were equally repellent: American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, and Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates.
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson. But I think everybody hates that one!
Any Ayn Rand, but especially Anthem and - spoiler alert - I have to ask how anyone could not hate a book about power of the individual, becoming “I”, yada yada yada, with such a totally subservient female lead. When the Golden One says “Thy will be done,” I seriously want to take a match to it.
Crime and Punishment was just so painful. Is there really a book entitled Love in the Time of Cholera?
Yes! And I could not get through it…
Do all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sentences have to be a page or two long? Or does it feel that way. I’m with others. Tried several times to read his stuff and always quit 50 pages in.
I actually like Marquez. What I don’t like, however, are those idiotic 1970’s “bodice rippers”. Filled with vapid, subservient, previously “willfull” wenches that are tamed by “alpha heroes” who make Ted Nugent seem like a charming, kind gentleman. The Flame and the Flower remains the only book I have ever thrown across the room. I don’t know what I was thinking picking it up (I usually avoid romance like the plague). Ladies, the hero in this book makes Christian Grey look like the ultimate symbol of compassion (and no, I’m not exaggerating. ). The only book I have ever hated more was this absolute piece of crap called Stormfire(I won’t write about that one because just thinking about it makes me livid. I actually almost burned it). Here’s a few quotes from Flame that I hope will act as a deterrant to the adventerous souls on this thread:
Just blech.
This is a fun thread. I like a number of the books that other people have said they hated, but also I can think of a few books that have disappointed me severely. A couple of them I would have abandoned if they had not been book club books:
Prince of Tides
The Glass Room
Bel Canto
Let the Great World Spin
Little Bee
The Orchardist
The Sparrow
Norwegian Wood
InfinityMan, it’s odd that a guy would be reading such books … And have them on hand to quote from!
Another thumbs down for “Ulysses” We were forced to read it in high school and all I remember is gobbledygook.
I’ve started reading “The Wealth of Nations” three times, and never made it more than 25% of the way through.
It took me about 20 years to finally read all the way through “Moby Dick”. In the end it was a pretty good book.
Loved “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” books.
For all of you reading Heart of Darkness to help out your kids and hating it, next time just use Thug Notes, haha! Search YouTube for Thug Notes Heart of Darkness
(am I allowed to post YouTube links??)