@arabrab, compared to Fifty Shades, the prose in Twilight is absolutely Shakespearean. That book (Fifty Shades) was the worst book I’ve ever read in my life, and I have read some bad books (as a teen, I devoured the historical romances @InfinityMan has marveled at). If not for the subject matter, I would have thought it was written by a breathless, poorly educated 15 year old girl. Stupid, stupid, stupid in every way.
Don’t worry, the plot twists that come later just give you additional reasons to hate them.
Anything by Hemingway.
My daughter agrees with me. For one of her college essays she needed to write about a book or other work of art that had a profound impact on her and why. She choose to write about how much she hated The Sun Also Rises.
She got accepted.
^Ha. I bet that was something that made an exhausted admissions rep laugh.
ALL - I do not like to read at all, I just force myself to read during my vacations. I do not hate them, they are just boring, even the ones that used to be my big favorites!
I remember getting out of a “required” lit class in college because it would involve reading Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway. It was worth the fight. I had a very low tolerance level for macho jerks.
BUT–I later met Miller in LA in 1979 just before he passed in 1980. (my room mate was taking care of him) He was very sweet and polite. I just didn’t see what Anais Nin saw.
@mom23travelers : DS, who was an aspiring writer in high school, couldn’t figure out why all of his female friends were so enamored with Twilight. So he read it and posted a (rather amusing, IMO) chapter-by-chapter critique to a web site devoted to such things. A shorter version became a college essay. He got in, and the admissions counselor even wrote him a note and said his intellectual discourse on Twilight was one of his favorite essays that year.
My list of books, in no particular order
-Any of the gothic romances, Jane Eyre, but especially Wuthering Heights yuck
-Great expectations. I think Dickens was a great writer as a writer, but his characters all turned me off, for a variety of reasons
-Gone with the Wind, which besides glorifying stupid people, was just so badly written it was ludicrous
-anything by Ayn Rand, besides the fact she couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag, the content was basically morally bankrupt, self involved whining.
-War and Piece, put me to sleep about a quarter in
-Les Miserables
-Gone Girl (I read it, and wanted to throw it against the wall, but I had borrowed it)
Dan Brown is okay, the writing isn’t great, but they are fun books, anyone who can make CERN a bad guy can’t be all that bad lol…
As far as 50 shades of gray go, I am torn. It is not well written, and the story has its troubling elements to it, Christian is creepy, and what bothers me is that people take this to be about BD/SM, which it isn’t, and certain elements use it to tie real life BD/SM to abuse, because in some ways Christian is abusive (Christian’s shrink in the story pretty much says that he is not representative of those into that kind of thing, that he uses it because of his background). On the other hand, if the book did as it seems to have done, woke some people up to the idea that sex can be fun, that there are a lot of different ways to express it, I can’t totally trash it.
“I do not like to read at all, I just force myself to read during my vacations.”
This is one of the saddest things I’ve read today.
@motherbear332, is your son’s critique still available online? I’d love to read it. 
“I just force myself to read during my vacations” WHY?
Du Maupassant. Anything utterly depressing, like Dostoyevsky.
Funny thing about Dan Brown- everyone I knew who read his books sucked them up in a matter of a few days (and nights,) then promptly forgot them. Inferno? An old trick of stuffing in misc info to add length. When it’s so obvious, I call fail.
Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons ran near DH’s specialty in history. I kept saying…? And he’d shake his head and say, No…
Gawd, I hated the hobbit, too. Only made it through part of the first book of Lord of the Rings.
Leonardo was my area of expertise. (thank you Elmer Belt Library at UCLA) The very idea that a scholar would even call him “Da Vinci” is ludicrous.
I’ve found that ebook loans from the library have changed my reading habits. I used to always finish a book I started. Now I’ll check out almost anything but if I haven’t finished it by the time it is automatically returned in 3 weeks I almost never bother to recheck it out.
I’ve read many of the books listed in this thread, and there are a couple I can’t remember at all. I know I read them, but that’s as far as my brain is taking me.
That’s funny. I was chatting with my brother last night and he asked about what I was reading. “You know, that book by that guy about that boat”. Since it’s on my tablet I don’t have the cover with the name of the book or the author staring at me.
btw it’s Dead Wake by Erik Larson (but that took me a while :-S )
What I remember is this: stuffing the tracking device into the soap and throwing it out the Louvre window, which I thought was clever. And that he never slept with the women.
If his knowledge on sex approximates his knowledge on Leonardo…be thankful.
Brown’s books are an extreme version of the Idiot Plot, in which the characters must act stupidly in order for the plot to progress. Although I still liked them, the Harry Potter books also had this flaw (as when Harry, for no sensible reason, declines to tell adults about various problems he is having).
When The Da Vinci Code first came out, I saw a TV interview with Brown where he kept reminding the interviewer that the book was just fiction, and kind of chuckling. Later he seemed to just kind of go with the flow.