Have you ever read a classic that is probably one of the greatest books of all time but you found it to be very poor written, borring and uninteresting. And you just can’t understand what is the big deal about it. yet you kept your opinion secret because people are going to loose their mind. Well share it now. Which book? And why?
by thedaydreamerst
32 Comments
Well I’ve never kept it a secret but Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir was just one of those books like its so highly acclaimed and still studied so many years later and all I could think of it was “This is crap”.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was bland porridge of a book. Others surely disagree, but I just couldn’t get into it.
Not really thought it was bad, but The Trial by Franz Kafka. It was well, good. But I didn’t find it as intriguing as Crime and Punishment, which heavily influenced the novel in question (as far as I have heard).
Not really much to say why, yea it was a flawed system where the main character is shown to be a criminal for no reason and how his case was operated behind the scenes with knowledge to him. It is just that, I never felt a human connection to Josef. Like in Crime in Punishment I could feel the main character was another human struggling to distinguish right from wrong. Here, things never really felt human to me.
The only part I liked about the book was when the other client of the lawyer had to bow down and kiss the lawyer’s fingers just to be able to talk to him, really showed how people can misuse power.
Anyways, I hope no France Kafka super fan comes to kill me, it was decent book, but not what had I expected.
Dracula. The characters were both annoying and incompetent, I didn’t like how women were written, and it was rather bland overall. I do appreciate what it did for the genre, though.
*The Great Gatsby*
The work of someone straining without inspiration to write an Important Novel™. The average church sermon is more entertaining and less heavy-handed.
Romeo and Juliet.
I’ve read a few more overrated ones, but this one wins 1st place in my list.
Candide was also a classic I couldn’t stand. I get what it’s trying to do, but no, I can’t.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I can completely understand why it was popular when it was written, but to me it was predictable, over the top, unnecessarily wordy (the chapter A Bird’s Eye View of Paris was probably the most uninteresting part of any book I have ever read), and it read like a stage play. That last one in particular is what I disliked. Again, I can see the appeal for the time but to me it was such a snooze fest.
I don’t like the Great Gatsby, I think the symbolism is contrived and the plot didn’t blow me away.
Tale of Two Cities. The story of how one guy rolls Nat 1s so often, he might as well kill himself, and the story of a guy who falls ass-backwards into fortune so often, a guy he barely associates with volunteers to take his place in an execution. Something something France and England.
This seems destined to be fighting words on Reddit, where this book appears to be universally loved, but……. The Count of Monte Cristo was a plodding snoozefest.
There. I’ve said it.
The Scarlet Letter. The description of nature and the trees were beautiful but the book was boring everywhere else.
The brothers Karamasov
The philosophy: uninspired and outdated
The murder mystery: not really exciting, almost boring.
Its value is purely historical. A book that is many things but certainly not timeless.
It’s still a great book, but I’ve always been perplexed by Crime and Punishment being the default Dostoevsky book, while Brothers Karamazov are so much more intriguing and complex. I enjoyed even The Idiot more than Crime and Punishment, though I’ve read it so long ago I probably wouldn’t be able to make a good case for it.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was plodding and uninteresting. Angela’s Ashes told a similar tale about growing up in Ireland but was infinitely more engaging, heart wrenching and funny.
Of all the classics in the Western Canon that I’ve read, the only one that I didn’t get anything out of was ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Iliad’.
I’ve tried to read “Wuthering Heights’ three or four times now and never get farther than 50 pages in or so before I DNF it.
I’ve actually read through ‘Iliad’ twice in the past two years and it feels like its mostly descriptions of battles and the gory deaths of participants in said battles.
Moby Dick for me. I appreciate that it’s well written, but Melville’s style was too stuffy for me. Too many details, not enough plot.
The Catcher In The Rye. Such a whiny, boring main character. I haven’t read it since high school but I remember finding Holden an incredibly annoying character.
This entire thread makes me wanna face palm so hard.
I wish people understood the difference between “overrated” and “i didn’t like it”.
R/books and its contempt for classics is just…disheartening.
Why is this so downvoted am I missing something lol
Moby dick
A lot of classics were groundbreaking in their day but have become trite to modern eyes on first reading because they have been copied or rigged upon so much since they first came on the scene.
Just inviting the shittiest takes of all-time with this post
The Alchemist.
I just didn’t get it. It was slow, boring, and pointless.
These threads are just the worst… reddit takes on classics are dubious to say the least.
the heart of darkness
You guys have horrible taste
Yawn. This question pops up every once in a while, and it’s always Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye that people rag on. This is dumb, and reeks of anti- intellectualism.
“DAE the books they made us read in high school sucked? 🤪”
Does Knaussgaard’s “My Struggle” count yet? Because Knaussgaard’s “My Struggle”. When he gets to the point, he’s very good. But a lot of the time he just goes on and on and on for pages upon pages about how he picks up his cup, puts it down, looks at the computer screen, stands up, goes to the other end of the room, walks around, sits down, picks the cup back up again… The fact that this gets compared to Proust makes me wanna scream.
I feel the same way about Henry Miller, but him I get because he was ahead of his time (and also miles better than KOK).
Lmao why does Reddit hate classics? I love a good classic.
Idk I don’t think any of them are “overrated” like I can understand why they’re so highly regarded and used to teach people the basics of how to become a good reader. There are definitely a few that I personally didn’t enjoy but I think of many classics less like pieces of media for me to enjoy and more like guides on the fundamentals of literature.
1984. Never could get into it.
Need to put together a bingo card that I can re-share every time one of these threads is made.