Highly regarded but overrated in your opinion....

The_Minister

manicmonoliths wrote: »

For me I can’t understand the high regard for 1984, I saw nothing novel or unique in it, just a typical political-dystopian story which many have done better.

Name them, because I would love to read them.

candlegrease

Anything by Cormac Mccarthy. Horrible style with ridiculous descriptions.

Tin Foil Hat

candlegrease wrote: »

Anything by Cormac Mccarthy. Horrible style with ridiculous descriptions.

I'm half way through 'The Road' at the moment. It's probably the best book I've ever read, although it's massively emotionally draining.

I had read No Country For Old Men before. I could take it or leave it.
It did get me used to his style though. I don't think I would enjoy The Road as much as I am enjoying it if it was the first book of his that I'd read.

ThirdMan

candlegrease wrote: »

Anything by Cormac Mccarthy. Horrible style with ridiculous descriptions.

:eek:

Blood Meridian is a stunning novel. His use of figurative language is, in my opinion, unsurpassed in modern literature.

But to each their own. Who would rank amongst your favourite novelists? (I'm asking this in good faith)

ThirdMan

Another vote for The Catcher In The Rye, and (dis)honourable mentions for Brave New World & The Shadow In The Wind.

ThirdMan

jonsnow wrote: »

Great Expectations

It wasn,t what I had hoped for

candlegrease

ThirdMan wrote: »

:eek:

Blood Meridian is a stunning novel. His use of figurative language is, in my opinion, unsurpassed in modern literature.

But to each their own. Who would rank amongst your favourite novelists? (I'm asking this in good faith)

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Edgar Allan Poe
Axelandar Dumas
George RR Martin
Fyodor Dostoevesky

These are the writers who spring to mind right now.

Kinski

candlegrease wrote: »

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Edgar Allan Poe
Axelandar Dumas
George RR Martin
Fyodor Dostoevesky

Spot the odd one out...;)

ThirdMan

candlegrease wrote: »

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Edgar Allan Poe
Axelandar Dumas
George RR Martin
Fyodor Dostoevesky

These are the writers who spring to mind right now.

My intention was to contrast and compare, and then come to some sort of conclusion as to why we disagree. But guess what, I'm full of ****.

But all is not lost, we agree on something. Dostoevsky is my favourite novelist (although I probably only understand a quarter of what he achieves in each of his works).

candlegrease

ThirdMan wrote: »

candlegrease wrote: »

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Edgar Allan Poe
Axelandar Dumas
George RR Martin
Fyodor Dostoevesky

These are the writers who spring to mind right now.

My intention was to contrast and compare, and then come to some sort of conclusion as to why we disagree. But guess what, I'm full of ****.

But all is not lost, we agree on something. Dostoevsky is my favourite novelist (although I probably only understand a quarter of what he achieves in each of his works).

Do you like any of the others I mentioned?

jcf

MagicMarker wrote: »

Was just wondering what highly regarded books readers thought were vastly overrated? After seeing recommendations everywhere I decided to read Brave New World by Huxley and I have to say I was really really let down. I thought the writing was average, the character development almost non existent and worst of all it was sloooooooooww. I got past the midway point and had to stop, having realised that nothing of note had happened at all.

Now maybe it picks up in the 2nd half, but I just couldn't push on, and I find it hard to believe what comes in the latter half could make up for the abysmal first half!

Yeah brave new world was a letdown , so was 1984 .... Animal Farm far superior to either...

ThirdMan

candlegrease wrote: »

Do you like any of the others I mentioned?

The only other person there that I've read is Joyce. I quiet enjoyed Dubliners, but I struggled with Ulysses. It felt good voicing his words, but I wasn't quiet sure what was going on.

I'm always threatening to tackle Hemingway. I quiet like Steinbeck, and I've been told more than once that he's a poor man's Hemingway (probably opening a can of worms here), so hopefully I'll find him enjoyable.

I'm actually relatively new to fiction, and only became familiar with Dostoevsky because of how often he is referred to in the non-fiction that I read.

I probably sounded like a proper literary buff earlier when I asked for your favourite authors. I'm not. I was just working off a hunch, that you prefferred something more literal over something highly figurative, like McCarthy. But that doesn't seem to be the case, especially with George RR Martin in there.

Slattsy

Highly regarded....maybe, or maybe not...but I'll go for it anyhoo.

Flann O'Briens The Third Policeman.
I simply found it weird, I didn't get it at all. It's raved about by boardsies, but it was lost on me.

Also, Catch 22 is amazing, how people didn't like that is beyong me. Each to their own

Tin Foil Hat

Tin Foil Hat wrote: »

I'm half way through 'The Road' at the moment. It's probably the best book I've ever read, although it's massively emotionally draining.

I have to say, I was horribly disappointed in The Road. It was recommended to me by a few people, and it sounds in summary like exactly the type of thing I'd like, but I just found it boring. I barely rooted for the characters at all, there were only two points in the whole book where I felt anything (they were

the bit in the basement and the bit with the pregnant woman

), and by the time it finished, I thought the ending was terrible but wasn't even involved in the book enough to feel let down by the lack of a good ending.

The most overrated books in my opinion? I don't know if they'd be classed as highly regarded, but they're certainly the most widely loved books I've come across - the Harry Potter books. I read the first four when I was younger, grew out of it, and to be honest I now regard them as mildly entertaining children's books. While I do think they're imaginative, they're so hugely overrated that I have very little time to appreciate their actual value because I'm so annoyed by all the hype surrounding them.

ThirdMan

true-or-false wrote: »

I have to say, I was horribly disappointed in The Road. It was recommended to me by a few people, and it sounds in summary like exactly the type of thing I'd like, but I just found it boring. I barely rooted for the characters at all, there were only two points in the whole book where I felt anything (they were

the bit in the basement and the bit with the pregnant woman

), and by the time it finished, I thought the ending was terrible but wasn't even involved in the book enough to feel let down by the lack of a good ending.

Have you seen the movie adaptation. The 'spoiler' scene you referred to is captured brilliantly.

Sea Filly

'On the Road'.

Dull, and awful character names.

Grievous

The Road is overrated. I'm not even sure how well rated the novel is, but it seems to me the least literary of all McCarthy's novels.

Blood Meridian is his best work. Even at that, I wouldn't put him in my top 50 writers.

Grievous

Monkeybonkers wrote: »

Who decides what's 'highly regarded'? Highly regarded by some can be viewed as rubbish by others.

Celia Ahern's books are rubbish chick lit without any literary value.

ThirdMan

ThirdMan wrote: »

Have you seen the movie adaptation. The 'spoiler' scene you referred to is captured brilliantly.

To be honest I thought the movie was even worse unfortunately.

Queen-Mise

Couldn't stand The Catcher in the Rye - god-damn awful book. Some of the others mentioned I read in my impressionable teens & loved them but never re-read since like Catch-22, Brave New World, Animal Farm.

The appeal of Wuthering Heights - I just don't understand, whiny, moany, miserable tripe. Probably loads more I think are over-rated but can't think of any more.

Giselle

Queen-Mise wrote: »

The appeal of Wuthering Heights - I just don't understand, whiny, moany, miserable tripe.

I detest that book. A never ending tale of misery, monotony and hardship, with added misery on top.

Queen-Mise

oh another one I don't like. Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice. It is up there with Dracula on vampires books - well it shouldnt be. It is goddamn awful.

I had to read it for an elective in college at one point, just couldn't do, got the audio and listened instead.

MagicMarker

I started this evening on "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro, I must have gotten to around the 40 page mark before I 'returned for a refund' on Amazon.

PurpleBee

Giselle wrote: »

I detest that book. A never ending tale of misery, monotony and hardship, with added misery on top.

Misery can be beautiful and in Wuthering Heights it is.

BrendanCro

Can't understand the appeal of John Updike. Rabbitt Run made me cry trying to read the prose and is the 1st book I ever quit on and just didn't want to finish.

Would agree with comments about Catcher in the Rye - but its definitely a product of its time and place. Read it as a teenager but really didn't find it anything special.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another I didn't get the appeal of. Very poor compared to On the Road (which in itself is arguably overrated). Maybe I just haven't done enough drugs!

Giselle

PurpleBee wrote: »

Misery can be beautiful and in Wuthering Heights it is.

Misery is rarely anything other than miserable

MagicMarker

Wuthering Heights got a big fat meh from me, it's practically the same story told twice in the same book, one for each generation.

MagicMarker

Blood Meridian

Can someone please inform me as to why this is so highly regarded? I'm 4 chapters in and it's absolutely excruciating. I can't think of a single good thing about this book.

indough

MagicMarker wrote: »

Blood Meridian

Can someone please inform me as to why this is so highly regarded? I'm 4 chapters in and it's absolutely excruciating. I can't think of a single good thing about this book.

i didnt really like it either, found it a real chore to finish mostly due to the language used. people talk about the judge character being great and memorable but i just didn't see it. it reminded me a little bit of moby dick for some reason, written artfully but at the expense of all entertainment value. i prefer my reading a bit more balanced in that regard.

Slattsy

MagicMarker wrote: »

Blood Meridian

Can someone please inform me as to why this is so highly regarded? I'm 4 chapters in and it's absolutely excruciating. I can't think of a single good thing about this book.

You got further than me. Awful stuff.

fionav3

Shocked at the amount of people who have mentioned Catcher in the Rye and Wuthering Heights as they're two of my top ten and I've reread them countless times. But I guess reading is subjective and that's the purpose of this thread.

For me the books that I found to be incredibly over-rated are:

At-swim-two-birds by Flann O'Brien
Ulysses by James Joyce (oh god, how much I hate that book!)
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (total snooze fest, took me months to get through)

fionav3

Oh, and can I just add Great Expectations to the list. I finished it a few days ago and was massively disappointed as I normally love Dickens.

norrie rugger

I loved GE. One of the first "grown up books" that I read as a kid and it caused me to have several Dickens books read by the time I hit secondary school.

Just on the opinions of people here, did you read the books for pleasure or for school/college? I always found that "having" to read a book always made me dislike it.

ThatsAWrap

I was really disappointed by Annabel by Kathleen Winter. Really really ponderous, but got great reviews

fionav3

norrie rugger wrote: »

I loved GE. One of the first "grown up books" that I read as a kid and it caused me to have several Dickens books read by the time I hit secondary school.

Just on the opinions of people here, did you read the books for pleasure or for school/college? I always found that "having" to read a book always made me dislike it.

Pleasure. I love the classics and Dickens is one of my favourites but this one really disappointed me.

Sir Gallagher

I always though Brave New World was highly regarded because of it's ideas rather than the story/writing. Anyway i'll just put this pic here as BNW and 1984 have been mentioned a few times.

ViveLaVie

I'm halfway through 'A Farewell to Arms' by Hemingway and I find it really uninteresting and dull. I don't have to read it for college but I am being forced to finish it by a friend ( I made him read Wuthering Heights) so maybe that's taking away some of the enjoyment.

Also I find Pride and Prejudice really over-rated. It's formulaic and predictable.

Nody

ViveLaVie wrote: »

I'm halfway through 'A Farewell to Arms' by Hemingway and I find it really uninteresting and dull. I don't have to read it for college but I am being forced to finish it by a friend ( I made him read Wuthering Heights) so maybe that's taking away some of the enjoyment.

Also I find Pride and Prejudice really over-rated. It's formulaic and predictable.

Read the & Zombies version instead; that spices things up a bit :pac:.

GunRunner

1984
Lord of The Flies
For Whom The Bell Tolls

Slattsy

GunRunner wrote: »

1984
Lord of The Flies
For Whom The Bell Tolls

Lord of Flies ?? Really ??!!
No way man, you're crazy

norrie rugger

Slattsy wrote: »

Lord of Flies ?? Really ??!!
No way man, you're crazy

Hate when people just throw out titles and no explinations

--Kaiser--

MagicMarker wrote: »

Blood Meridian

Can someone please inform me as to why this is so highly regarded? I'm 4 chapters in and it's absolutely excruciating. I can't think of a single good thing about this book.

I can totally understand why someone woud hate this book, the long sentences, the lack of punctuation and quotation marks, the archaic words, the long stretches of descriptive text, the horrendous violence.

But this is my favourite book, as I read it I wrote on a bookmark the pages where there were particularly amazing pieces of writing. By the time I finished I had written down about 50 page numbers. Then I read it again and added even more. Some of the passages I found literally breathtaking, some samples:

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that there numbers are no less.

The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

The dust of that party raised and was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he’s a wry and grinning tradesmen good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they’ve gone to hide from God.


The imagery and atmosphere evoked throughout the book is simply magnificent. He describes the desert landscape of the US/Mexico so well I almost feel I've been there. The prose exudes gravitas, it reads like it wasn't scribbled or typed but rather hewn from stone.

While descriptions of events and surroundings are given plenty of room, the space allocated to the characters is puny by comparison. This a dark tale of dark men, what characters they have must be eked out from the sparse dialogue assigned to them. With one exception, ‘the judge’, the most compelling and cryptic of characters, both impossibly erudite and almost unimaginably vile. He dominates the proceedings when he is present and is never far from your thoughts when he is absent. Think of a conflation of Captain Ahab, Colonol Kurtz and Milton's Satan and you're nearly there.

(I do go on but you did ask......)

ThirdMan

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

I can totally understand why someone woud hate this book, the long sentences, the lack of punctuation and quotation marks, the archaic words, the long stretches of descriptive text, the horrendous violence.

But this is my favourite book, as I read it I wrote on a bookmark the pages where there were particularly amazing pieces of writing. By the time I finished I had written down about 50 page numbers. Then I read it again and added even more. Some of the passages I found literally breathtaking, some samples:

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that there numbers are no less.

The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

The dust of that party raised and was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he’s a wry and grinning tradesmen good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they’ve gone to hide from God.


The imagery and atmosphere evoked throughout the book is simply magnificent. He describes the desert landscape of the US/Mexico so well I almost feel I've been there. The prose exudes gravitas, it reads like it wasn't scribbled or typed but rather hewn from stone.

While descriptions of events and surroundings are given plenty of room, the space allocated to the characters is puny by comparison. This a dark tale of dark men, what characters they have must be eked out from the sparse dialogue assigned to them. With one exception, ‘the judge’, the most compelling and cryptic of characters, both impossibly erudite and almost unimaginably vile. He dominates the proceedings when he is present and is never far from your thoughts when he is absent. Think of a conflation of Captain Ahab, Colonol Kurtz and Milton's Satan and you're nearly there.

(I do go on but you did ask......)

There are books that I can imagine having written. Not because I'm a good writer (in fact I'm not a writer at all), but because being a human of average intelligence, it is at least possible that I could dream up something worth publishing. But books like Blood Meridian... you know instantly that no amount of trying, no amount of education, no amount of anything could help you generate something like that. It's a sublime piece of work.

apsalar

Struggled with Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf all last week - don't get it at all. Her particular stream-of-consciousness style was very overbearing, and I just couldn't get into the story at all. Might give it another shot in about a month. My first Woolf novel. Disappointed.

--Kaiser--

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle
Side-splittingly funny in some places and heart-rendingly sad in others, but it’s just sorta potters along aimlessly and ends abruptly. The way he writes as a ten-year old boy with ten-year old boy thoughts is convincing but it doesn’t really make a great novel.

Mardy Bum

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle
Side-splittingly funny in some places and heart-rendingly sad in others, but it’s just sorta potters along aimlessly and ends abruptly. The way he writes as a ten-year old boy with ten-year old boy thoughts is convincing but it doesn’t really make a great novel.

Similar to a ten year old's nature? Otherwise the narrative would be disingenuous.

GunRunner

Slattsy wrote: »

Lord of Flies ?? Really ??!!
No way man, you're crazy

I liked the story, and the themes were interesting but I just didn't like the way it was written at all. I just found it sort of tedious to read.

--Kaiser--

GunRunner wrote: »

I liked the story, and the themes were interesting but I just didn't like the way it was written at all. I just found it sort of tedious to read.

I agree. I remember two sections in that book which were particularly well written, the rest of the book is fairly dull

JayRoc

The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice...both because I found so many of the characters to be without any redeeming qualities and impossible to relate to on any level, whatsoever, and just as bad, they were totally uninteresting.

Two Irish ones; Finnegans's Wake (I always found Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist much more enjoyable, Finnegan's Wake just seemed to me to be the ultimate self-indulgence) and The Gathering by Anne Enright, where nothing happened yet it was applauded as "holding a mirror up to Irish society" or some such ****e.