Books : Most Overrated Novel?

Most Overrated Novel?

What's Your Vote For Most Annoyingly Overrated Novel?

Most people I know read this in high school (required reading), but it was not, in my high school:
"Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger.
Some loved it, some hated it in the reviews...and since so much fuss was made over it, I found a used copy....expecting it to be decent.

UGH.....I should have listened to some of the negative reviews! What a labored tale! The novel was more wordy than Henry James!
Unreadable. I tried several times....then gave up.

What novel gets your vote for Most Overrated?




I'd say this cloud is Cumulo Nimbus.
Didn't he discover America?
Penfold, shush.

Re: Most Overrated Novel?

A lot of American short novels that people read at school, stop reading forever as a result and then inexplicably list those same books as their favourites - To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, etc.

I also find Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell to be eternally overpraised.

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Anybody who dislikes To Kill a Mockingbird has a screw loose.

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Why? It's a book for children with a very simplistic message.

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It's not a book for children.

Earth without art is just "eh."

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Adolescents, then. It's on the school curriculum. It's not exactly Joyce, is it?

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Actually, with the possible exception of the Dubliners, it's better than Joyce, IMO. Talk about overrated...

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Anything not Joyce is for children is a childish thing to say.

It's simple, but not for kids. There's a difference. I would agree though, that's it's probably one of the most overrated books. It's great, but not remotely deserving to be ranked among the best.

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Obnoxious much?

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It's not exactly Joyce, is it?


What a ridiculous way to defend your point.

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To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men ARE my favorites to read and re-read. Maybe because I never HAD to read them at school and have them torn apart and over-analyzed. Discovered them on my own and they are fantastic books for readers of many ages.

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JerryCornelius, your comment on 1984 interests me. Have you read Brave New World? If so, what did you think?

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I have. I think Huxley was best described by the avant garde novelist Stewart Home:


I don't agree with the hyping up of Huxley as a 'giant' - just a typically confused and mediocre English writer with a privileged public school and Oxbridge 'education' that left him unable to think clearly but with the connections to make a splash in the cultural realm (where his bourgeois views posed no threat to the establishment.)
Although strangely enough, I also recently stumbled across something from T.S. Eliot that had Aldous Huxley pegged:


Mr Huxley is one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, and has a certain natural - but little developed - aptitude for seriousness. Unfortunately, this aptitude is hampered by a talent for the rapid assimilation of all that isn't essential and by a gift for chic. Now, the gift for chic, combined with the desire for seriousness, produces a frightful monster: a chic religiosity. It is at this point one should fear for Mr Huxley. In his last long novel, Those Barren Leaves, the adolescent self-analysis, in its scathing caricature, seemed as though it had been written under the influence of some momentary mystical or ascetic impulse although it was only the lyrical outcry of a destitute heart.

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Tolstoy's War and Peace

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All that Tolkien shíte.

Must agree that Catcher in the Rye was a major let down. It probably was fresh and innovative at the time it was written.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich. Why did AS pick such a shítty day to write about!


You're my wife now.

Re: Most Overrated Novel?


One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich. Why did AS pick such a shítty day to write about!

Yeah, it's too bad he didn't write about one of those fun & exciting days that Ivan must have had in the concentration camp.

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I did have my tongue in my cheek a bit!

Although I wasn't kidding about not liking the book.



You're my wife now.

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Didn't they get some extra food? That had to make it a red-letter day!

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Anna Karenina
Infinite Jest

Not that I've got anything against long novels (War & Peace is wicked, innit), but those two are held as high-points of classic and modern literature, and are both tedious in their own special ways.

Rusty chains and armoured pillows stuffed with silver pins

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Anna Karenina


tedious in their own special ways.


I think we briefly discussed it on the February or March reading threads... and yes, I quite agree. I didn't hate it but I was definitely underwhelmed. And bored.


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Moby Dick is one that benefits from Classic Comic Books. I suppose they don't make those anymore.

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Now they're known as Graphic Novels.

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Moby Dick.

I love history, whaling history and literature, but that was the most tedious thing I've ever attempted to read. I say attempted because I've never been able to get more than 25 pages in.

Don't call me Ishmael!



"Leave the gun, take the cannoli"

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A Clockwork Orange.

Dreadful book. I've tried to read it 3x - gotten more than half way through it, even. But I just can't bring myself to care. Life is short - don't finish bad books =P

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"A Clockwork Orange"

The first time I picked this one up, I agree with you your sentiment. After it won a Hugo award, I picked it up again. When I realized Anthony Burgess was a professional linguist, I paid closer attention. My copy of the book, when it was first published, contained a glossary at the back of the book which made reading tedious because you had to look up terms created by Burgess. It is now one of my favorite sci fi novels. But I understand your opinion.

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Fair enough.

This is also why I try to reread it periodically. So far ... no joy.

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a glossary at the back of the book
Thankfully the UK edition didn't have that, so you just had to pick up the lingo naturally instead of flipping back and forwards.

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Real horrorshow.

Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.

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I think of Catcher in the Rye as a book for teenagers. I was fourteen when I read it and have never wanted to read it again. I say this as a defense of the book, though it could be seen as a dismissal of it!

The first hundred pages of The Great Gatsby are wonderful but it becomes an episode of Dynasty or Dallas. Great last few paragraphs, though.


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Another vote for Moby Dick. It bored me to tears!

------------------

"Gimmee eat" - Major -- de Coverley

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I guess I'll also have to say Moby Dick. I'm glad I read it, but it's at least 100 chapters too long (yes, that's chapters, not pages).

Catcher in the Rye gets dishonorable mention, though.
I'll also add Doctor Zhivago, which was dull all the way through, and sometimes excruciatingly preachy.

Earth without art is just "eh."

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I agree with the disparaging remarks about Catcher in the Rye. I was about 20 when I read it and it did nothing for me. By the late 80's it was old hat and not shocking at all.

Same with The Great Gatsby. Predictable romance about a rich guy rum runner. Yawn.

I still have my hate for The Mambo Kings Sings Songs of Love. Soft core porn with about as much character development and plot. Somehow it won the Pulitzer prize and they made a movie of it. Ugh.

A Canticle for Liebowitz. Not a novel although it is listed as one. It's a collection of short stories which are merely average surrounding a single theme. Why it keeps coming up on "Best of Sci-Fi" lists confuses me.

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A Canticle for Liebowitz. Not a novel although it is listed as one. It's a collection of short stories which are merely average surrounding a single theme. Why it keeps coming up on "Best of Sci-Fi" lists confuses me.


I forgot about this one, possibly on purpose. But I wouldn't call it a collection of stories centering around one theme. It's really a chronological series of stories (or novellas) set in a post-apocalyptic world. I was quite disappointed when I read it; it was described to me as being very different (and much more interesting) than it actually is.

Earth without art is just "eh."

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Anything by Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse was dismal and horrible

I did finish Moby Dick with the help of the audiobook, but I completely understand that choice.

I just can't with Henry James.

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You can't get through Henry James' novels or you don't understand why people think he's wordy??

I kept hearing how wordy he is, so I decided to order one of his *better* novels from Amazon: The Turn of the Screw.
So I'll see how that goes.


I'd say this cloud is Cumulo Nimbus.
Didn't he discover America?
Penfold, shush.

Re: Most Overrated Novel?

I love Henry James, but I absolutely get why people have trouble with him. He absolutely is wordy. His short stories are the best way to get into him though. Beast in the Jungle and Jolly Corner were personal favorites from when I started in on him. I had read The Master by Colm Toibin first actually, a fictionalized biography of sorts, and knowing some of James' life story actually informed pretty meaningfully on the stories.

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Anything by Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse was dismal and horrible


I didn't like To the Lighthouse, but I enjoyed Mrs. Dalloway and the Years (although, the latter could have been torn in half down the spine and I would not have noticed the second half was missing).

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Someone mentioning Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina as possibly most overrated. I get that art including literature is largely a matter of taste, but I sure have to disagree with these choices. True, I love Russian literature from the romantic era so I can be biased towards these books, but to me they are truly two of the greats and deserving of the high praise they get.

Can't seem to think of a classic that I find overrated. If I have to mention something I guess I would choose Hugo's Les Miserables and Sinclair's The Jungle. I've struggled through these, but have regretted it ever since.

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I never got that Holden was mentally ill -- in fact, I don't think that's a common analysis whatsoever.


I've got to disagree with you there, and a quick google search will show that it's a very common interpretation indeed. It's been a long, long time since I read the book, but doesn't the text itself refer to Holden being institutionalized?

Re: Most Overrated Novel?

Moby Dick was impossible to read. Vanity Fair was a crashing bore. Tess of the D'Urbervilles made me want to shoot Hardy, if time-travelling were possible. These are leading candidates, but there are others.

OK, maybe Tess.

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Every single person in my AP English 12 class, and the class the other semester, and the classes above us, absolutely loathed Tess. It is the second worst novel I have ever read in my entire life.

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With trenches full of poets,
The ragged army, fixing bayonets to fight the other line

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I read Tess after I'd seen the movie by Polanski. I fell in love with the story and the characters, and reading it (very close to the movie) I visualized Polanski's actors. It's still one of my favorite late Victorian novels.

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I would immediately think of "The Catcher in the Rye".

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...Ulysses...

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I thought "Catcher in the Rye" was so-so. It just caught on because Salinger was a recluse, and all this killers started carrying the book around. But it didn't pique my interest at all.

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Before I even read your opinion I was going to say 'Catcher in the Rye' as well as 'Moby Dick'.

At least Catcher wasn't a huge novel. Moby Dick was at least twice as long as Catcher.


Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?

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I've never been able to figure out if Holden was intentionally an unreliable narrator, or if Salinger was a doofus. So much of the book dwells on how "phony" everything and everyone is, but the narrator is the only character turning his nose up at anything. It almost seems like satire. I haven't read it since high school (late '90s), so I may be forgetting a lot of key things, but I wasn't too impressed then.

My Most Overrated Book, though? A Brave New World. The book itself wasn't a bad read, but the last 15 pages when Huxley's intent/message becomes clear undermine everything.

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You say you haven't read it in high school, so did you read it for school? If so, and if your teacher didn't explain that Holden was mentally ill, then your teacher shouldn't be teaching.

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if your teacher didn't explain that Holden was mentally ill, then your teacher shouldn't be teaching.


I read it in high school, and my teacher never even hinted that Holden was mentally ill.

Earth without art is just "eh."

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Catcher is 'wordy'? What isn't wordy then?
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