Overrated books/authors

Plowman

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K4t

Jane Austen. Pointless, never-ending drivel. Have no interest whatsoever in her or her writings. Boring.

Plowman

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Red Hand

J K Rowling...I still haven't managed to finish the potter book I was reading 2 years ago.

Though it may not be literature!

foxy06

Dan Brown. His books are enjoyable but some people go overboard about him.

Osgoodisgood

Colin Forbes.
The man wrote the same novel 25 times!

A murder in East Anglia. Mysterious billionaire lives nearby. Pointless trips to Zurich. Murderer turns out to be..................the billionaire! But wait! What about the 40 year old blonde with the crush on Tweed? Yeah, she had nothing to do with it.

Denerick

I always thought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was terrifically over-rated (Still a good read though)

As for under-rated (and unread), I think Umberto Eco should be in the hall of the greats in terms of his abilities with the written language, but I don't think he's all that well read in the English speaking world. Granted there is a fanbase there, but if he was a natural English writer I think he would be much more famous than he is.

sold

foxy06 wrote: »

Dan Brown. His books are enjoyable but some people go overboard about him.

Totally overated! He really only became famous with the Davinici code, bit like the satanic versus, gets your name in the paper quick when you hit at religion.

Plowman

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Denerick

Plowman wrote: »

Don't get me started! I love Umberto Eco. According to Wikipedia he has sold 50 million copies of The Name of the Rose alone, so he might not be that under-read.

I stand corrected! Though I am now drunk, after getting back from town. My humility is all yours, sir.

kraggy

James Patterson. Unrealistic, far-fetched.

Page-turners yes but often you find yourself shaking your head and saying "for feck's sake".

DarkRaven

After running a teenage writing forum for almost a year now, I'd say that the two worst young adult series to hit the shelves have to be the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini and the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer.

Paolini's books are completely and utterly unoriginal. On top of that they are brimming with purple prose ([url].http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose[/url]) The characters' speech is totally overdone:

“Why did Galbatorix countenance my father’s torture?” - Eragon.

Keep in mind that Eragon is a peasant farmboy who only recently learned to read. A nobleman may speak like that, but a peasant farmboy - not a chance.

Meyer's novels are more original than Paolini's - their plot is not stolen directly from Star Wars, but they are brimming in literary sin. Bella is a total Mary Sue. (Wikipedia: Mary Sue) The whole series is filled with purple prose and unrealistic dialogue.

Both of those series should never have been printed, simple as that. How they have a massive fanbase is beyond my comprehension.


On the ''grown up'' front, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. She's done almost everything I've been told not to do while writing - from massive expositionary passages (some of them 60 pages long) to dragging explanations of character’s morals, sexualities, and stoicism against emotional trauma. On top of that it's a long sucker - 1168 pages. I'm not going to get into Rand's insane views - they are insane, enough said. Really, it's a headache of a book and I highly recommend you avoid it if you do not want to be bored to tears.

There is a reason why it's one of the bestselling books of all time, I'm sure - it just completely and utterly escapes me.

eclectichoney

I find Kerouac (with the possible exception of Big Sur) incredibly overrated. I can tell I'm gonna get lambasted for this one :pac::pac:

Eliot Rosewater

I wouldnt call Ayn "I hate poor people" Rands ideas insane, but her way of portraying them is. Ive only read the Fountainhead and it was a lesson in self-indulgence: she said less in 700 pages than most authors do in half that. A lot of repetition.

I watched Twilight the other night (please dont judge me) and assuming the general plot is similar to that of the book I cant give it any credit. The second half of it (the chase) is in no way a natural product of the first half, so the plot doesn't flow at all. That baseball scene with the arrival of the vampires was constructed solely to elongate the book and was not in line with the rest of the plot. The girl had only met the family once and the evil vampires were never seen before that.

I add a +1 to Kerouac, with the large caveat that Ive only read On The Road. Yes, its an exiting book. But its no where near as good as the novels its usually put alongside in peoples tastes, such as A Clockwork Orange.

Personally I think Dracula is way way overrated.

Pipz

I completely agree that Stephenie Meyers books, the Twilight Series, are completely over rated.

The plot is very flawed, and the writing is terrible. They only became so popular because it's the age of the 'emo', and every single teenage girl, emo or not, loves the idea of the perfect guy, which is what Edward is supposed to be. It makes it all the better for them with the gothicness of vampires, and the added forbidden love, and then once again even better because she introduces the male best friend as competition.

However, going through the book, the amount of grammar and spelling mistakes is really bad. Those books would have gone nowhere if they were released about 5-10 years ago.

Good idea, bad writer IMO.

In saying all of that, I did like the story (being a teenage girl), but I just hate the huge fanbase she's gotten. I like them, but they're just not that good. She's now among the rich list, and listed with the top authors of the past decade, when personally, I dont think she deserves it.

Rant over.

Blush_01

Plowman wrote: »

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See, I found Atonement quite compulsive, and The Cement Garden was pretty interesting too. Perhaps I like self indulgence though!

Notorious

I think Heller's Catch-22 is massively overrated. I couldn't understand the hype behind it at all and it's one of the few books I started to read that I never finished. I thought it was boring and the odd characters didn't interest me in the slightest. Though I've promised the OH that I'd get back and give it another go.

Denerick

Notorious wrote: »

I think Heller's Catch-22 is massively overrated. I couldn't understand the hype behind it at all and it's one of the few books I started to read that I never finished. I thought it was boring and the odd characters didn't interest me in the slightest. Though I've promised the OH that I'd get back and give it another go.

Catch 22 depends on your personality style. Its written in a particular style, and if you don't have that kind of sense of humour you won't enjoy it. I love all of his inverse paradox's and absurdities, its just the kind of humour I'd love to be able to master. The thing about it is that it will never be regarded as an objectively brilliant book because it relies so heavily on humour to put its point across; if you don't enjoy that humour then his message becomes redundant.

Catch 22 is easily in my top 3 of favourite all time books, but I can also see why others mightn't like it.

Eliot Rosewater

I found Catch 22 moderately enjoyable; I wouldn't rank it as high as Denerick does. It was certainly funny and a little wacky. I think the chapter about how one of the characters buys and sells products to himself so as to create an illusion that hes selling them to the Army below cost is hilarious.

I dont rank it well as a war book though. They are in effect flying planes and thus never really in the nitty gritty of war (which is one of the themes of the book I know). I think A Farewell To Arms and Slaughterhouse 5 would be much better war books, personally.

Denerick

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I found Catch 22 moderately enjoyable; I wouldn't rank it as high as Denerick does. It was certainly funny and a little wacky. I think the chapter about how one of the characters buys and sells products to himself so as to create an illusion that hes selling them to the Army below cost is hilarious.

I dont rank it well as a war book though. They are in effect flying planes and thus never really in the nitty gritty of war (which is one of the themes of the book I know). I think A Farewell To Arms and Slaughterhouse 5 would be much better war books, personally.

I don't regard it as a war book either. Its a satire about authority, buraucracy and an incredibly cynical work showing how absurd the world really is. The war element is pretty much in the background, as it should be.

gogo

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I watched Twilight the other night (please dont judge me) and assuming the general plot is similar to that of the book I cant give it any credit. The second half of it (the chase) is in no way a natural product of the first half, so the plot doesn't flow at all. That baseball scene with the arrival of the vampires was constructed solely to elongate the book and was not in line with the rest of the plot. The girl had only met the family once and the evil vampires were never seen before that.

Did you actually read them?? You cant judge a book by the film version of it, and the film is rubbish by the way.
But saying that I do think its totally overrated, I spent last christmas glued to these books and im old enough to know better, it was only after I finished that i copped it was a week of my life I'd never get back. But when reading them i couldnt put them down ... weird.

jaffa20

Cecelia Ahern.

L1984

The Hobbit. Just not for me, I should probably have given it a miss anyway as i love horror but tend to gloss over when it comes to anything sci-fi or fantasy related.

Although I realise that will rankle with many people here!

Hermy

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I add a +1 to Kerouc, with the large caveat that Ive only read The Road. Yes, its an exiting book. But its no where near as good as the novels its usually put alongside in peoples tastes, such as A Clockwork Orange

Who is this Kerouc you speak of?
And didn't Cormac McCarthy write The Road?;)

I've read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald once and I fail to see why it is so highly regarded.
Has anyone else thought so too only to change their mind on rereading it?

Colpriz

da vinci code..drivel..film was even worse

sceptre

Hermy wrote: »

Who is this Kerouc you speak of?
And didn't Cormac McCarthy write The Road?;)

I think it's pretty obvious to even the blind that he's referring to Kerouac and On The Road.

Aside, McCarthy's The Road is horribly over-rated. I blame Oprah as she's a convenient scapegoat.

Snobby and all as I can be (as I've previously mentioned, I once went up to a woman buying a Cecilia Ahern book and said "er, you know if you keep buying them she''ll keep writing them?"), people like Cecilia Ahern and Dan Brown don't write good "literature" books and people who read good books know they don't. Brown in particular writes yarns and they can at least be a good read if people don't pretend they're world-changing or anything near. They're filling a gap in the market and I'm not sure it's even fair to regard airport fiction as overrated. Here's the snobby part: if there aren't writers of books like that, people won't read something different, they just won't read anything. Brown writes thrillers. The kind of thrillers where it's convenient to tear the pages out as you go so you can remember your page. There's nothing wrong with that: that kind of reading can be very entertaining indeed.

Cecilia Ahern on the other hand is a piss-poor Maeve Binchy. Actually she's a piss-poor Deirdre Purcell who in turn is a piss-poor Maeve Binchy. And I'm not a Maeve Binchy fan. She even uses short words for no particular reason. That's not good. But kudos to her for getting a book deal because no-one else can really figure out how that happened (please take note: this is not the Politics forum). Now Brown on the other hand deserved his book deal, even if you don't enjoy his stuff all that much.

But overrated? Of course they are. Both of them.

Plowman

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Denerick

I think Cormac Mc Carthy's 'The Road' is a brilliant book, which only suffers from the quality of its advocates.

The basic fact remains that if the Road had a cult following and not a mass following, it would be regarded as one of the greatest books of the noughties.

/controversy

Denerick

L1984 wrote: »

The Hobbit. Just not for me, I should probably have given it a miss anyway as i love horror but tend to gloss over when it comes to anything sci-fi or fantasy related.

Although I realise that will rankle with many people here!

I love Lord of the Rings with a passion only an anorak nerd can sympathise with (re-read the trilogy recently) but I do agree somewhat with your opinion of the hobbit. People have to remember that its a childrens book, and therefore rather limited.

Amazotheamazing

DarkRaven wrote: »

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On the ''grown up'' front, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. She's done almost everything I've been told not to do while writing - from massive expositionary passages (some of them 60 pages long) to dragging explanations of character’s morals, sexualities, and stoicism against emotional trauma. On top of that it's a long sucker - 1168 pages. I'm not going to get into Rand's insane views - they are insane, enough said. Really, it's a headache of a book and I highly recommend you avoid it if you do not want to be bored to tears.

There is a reason why it's one of the bestselling books of all time, I'm sure - it just completely and utterly escapes me.

I've only read the Fountainhead, but I find it interesting you say she's does things you've been told not to do. Isn't that part of her point, that to be an individual means doing what you want, if you think thats what you need to do? So what if she breaks the rules someone's taught you, as long as the work stands on it's own merit?

I don't think her views are insane either, just outdated and formed in a time when totalitarian forces were destroying her homeland and most of Europe. You have to remember what she would have experienced fleeing from St. Petersburg as a teenager to understand where she's coming from.

Earthhorse

eclectichoney wrote: »

I find Kerouac (with the possible exception of Big Sur) incredibly overrated. I can tell I'm gonna get lambasted for this one :pac::pac:

Only ever read On the Road and I certainly thought that was overrated.

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Personally I think Dracula is way way overrated.

Yes. Would agree. One of the few books I couldn't finish. But I think it's the idea more than anything that has made it such a big seller.

Hermy wrote: »

I've read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald once and I fail to see why it is so highly regarded.

Another I would agree with. Not as bad as the others, not even bad at all actually, just not a masterpiece, classic or other superlative.

Denerick wrote: »

I love Lord of the Rings with a passion only an anorak nerd can sympathise with (re-read the trilogy recently) but I do agree somewhat with your opinion of the hobbit. People have to remember that its a childrens book, and therefore rather limited.

I don't remember reading this post but somehow I have ended up quoting it!

In the other "overrated" thread I mentioned Tolkien along with Pratchett. Neither can write particularly well, in my opinion.

sceptre wrote: »

Snobby and all as I can be (as I've previously mentioned, I once went up to a woman buying a Cecilia Ahern book and said "er, you know if you keep buying them she''ll keep writing them?"), people like Cecilia Ahern and Dan Brown don't write good "literature" books and people who read good books know they don't.

Wow. That is pretty snobby, dude.

Haven't read anything by either of them but my understanding is that Ahern does come up with some nice ideas for plots.

But to make my own contribution to this thread I read John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" last year and spent the entire time wondering where this satirical masterpiece I'd been promised had vanished to. If I was a publisher and the manuscript had been submitted to me, I'd have rejected it too.