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Hated The Old Man & the Sea when I read it in eighth grade. Read A Farewell to Arms in eleventh grade and liked it.
Hated The Great Gatsby in high school, re-read it in college and had a new-found appreciation for the novel.
Go figure...
A lot of the Jazz Age stuff doesn't scan well when you're young, I think. I thought Faulkner was tedious the first time I read some in high school, but it (or I) improved quite a bit on later readings. Likewise James Joyce's Dubliners did, although Ulysses will always be amongst my least favorite books on earth.
Raymond Carver took me a couple of attempts to really appreciate, too.
Last edited by PNW-type-gal; 03-15-2009 at 08:38 PM..
I went through an F. Scott Fitzgerald phase in high school, then discovered in my early twenties that perhaps the reason all his female characters are crazy and/or idiotic is that he's a completely misogynistic Freud-lover.
My single worst book was My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox. You know that old saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" - I should have listened to it. I picked up this book in an airport book store because I was attracted to the cover - bad decision. My Little Blue Dress begins as a memoir of a 100 year old woman but is actually a contrived memoir written by a sex crazed male author. About a third of the way through the book - after scratching your head about all of the historical inaccuracies like open toed sandals on this Victorian era young woman or sexual encounters at the village picnic - you begin to pick up on the understory of a rushed author who has commited to write a "memoir" of someone he is not. I know, it sounds like a clever premise, but it did not work - at all! I shoved it in the seat back pocket and left it there. It was a very, very long flight with only Sky Mall as my reading material.
Also, the only thing more dreadful than reading Nicholas Sparks is listening to six hours of it on audiotape read in a fake Southern accent.
A lot of the Jazz Age stuff doesn't scan well when you're young, I think. I thought Faulkner was tedious the first time I read some in high school, but it (or I) improved quite a bit on later readings. Likewise James Joyce's Dubliners did, although Ulysses will always be amongst my least favorite books on earth.
Raymond Carver took me a couple of attempts to really appreciate, too.
Really liked Raymond Carver the first time I read Short Cuts as a junior in high school.
Despised Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a high school senior. Faulkner's still..."meh" to me, but I've always liked Tennessee Williams' plays.
After reading "The Magus", which was quite good, I went on to read other books by John Fowles, and came to the conclusion that he was the worst writer in the world.
As for "Lord of the Rings", I read it twice---the second time out loud to my 7 year old son. It was a wonderful read for both of us.
Have you read Fowles "The Collector"? Pretty dark/disturbing, but I thought it was interesting watching the two main characters match wits with one another.
I bought Pillars of the Earth on Friday because I've been out of reading material for a while and it's been highly recommended on here. I read about a 100 pages and couldn't keep going. Geez Louise--how is this guy a best-selling author? Very early on he's describing Tom and his wife, Agnes, and writes, "She was his soul mate." As if that weren't schlocky enough, SPOILER ALERT, she dies about 50 pages later and within 24 hours a mysterious woman appears out of no where to have sex with him and about 6 hours after that he's telling her he wants to marry her. WTF?
Since the author is making the story up, why bother describing the first woman as his "soul mate" if within 2 days of his death he's proposing to another woman?????? Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is just one example, but I thought overall the dialogue was wooden and the characters reminded me of characters in a comic book.
Sorry to all the Pillars lovers out there! I know from this thread (one of my favorites, BTW) that I've loved some books you've hated too....
Last edited by Marlow; 03-30-2009 at 10:08 AM..
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