Favourite books you love to hate

32 posts / 0 new

Thu, 2013-07-11 17:18

Kaitlin McNabb Kaitlin McNabb's picture

Going through my goodreads (I know, but I like it) got to wondering what are books that either you love or others love that are hated by either you or the others.

More clearly:

you love = others hate

others love = you hate

Don't even put Catcher in the Rye in the comments (I'm side-eyeing at you Catchfire because I have a feeling). That is unoriginal and everyone knows that it is soooo overplayed.

[and I'm given us all credit that we don't need to put Twilight or 50 shades or such in here]

Issues Pages:

Arts & Culture

Thu, 2013-07-11 17:20

Kaitlin McNabb Kaitlin McNabb's picture

Here's one of mine:

The Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Seriously. No.

I read the whole thing just so I could be more informed about my complaining and given my slow reading pace and that it is a million pages THAT is saying something.

But this book was nominated for a Pulitzer. 30 year old dudes LOVE it.

I found it not funny or witty and just whiny and "oh woe is me" tripe. Too strong an opinion. Well, I just don't like it.

Thu, 2013-07-11 22:49

Unionist

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Cien años de soledad

Fri, 2013-07-12 00:23

Catchfire

I can't believe you prohibit Catcher in the Rye and then go ahead and name Eggers. Talk about six of one, half a twentysomething of the other...

I don't know, I hate most books. The Great Gatsby, I guess. Except I also love it for reals.

Fri, 2013-07-12 00:38

6079_Smith_W

Jack Chick tracts

Fri, 2013-07-12 02:39

Timebandit Timebandit's picture

Kaitlin - YES. I wanted to kick Eggars' narrator in the ass all through that dreary, wanky mess of a book.

The most annoying thing about it was that it was good prose. Eggars actually has talent. I just hated the main character, most of the supporting characters and the narrative itself SUCKED. It's true that very young men love it (my partner's nephew recommended the misbegotten thing), but only the ones who haven't grown up yet and probably need a boot in the posterior to speed the maturation. (Nephew has since grown up nicely, thank goodness)

I haven't been able to warm up to Eggars since, either. He always leaves me feeling like I want to punch someone. Probably him.

Fri, 2013-07-12 07:33

Caissa

I'm currently reading Silas Marner and it just might end up falling into this category.

Fri, 2013-07-12 09:43

infracaninophile $infracaninophile's picture$

Caissa wrote:

I'm currently reading Silas Marner and it just might end up falling into this category.

I don't know that I'd go so far as to "hate" it, but it doesn't hold a candle to George Eliot's other works, especially Middlemarch (a masterpiece IMO) and the less-appreciated Daniel Deronda. I think it is more widely prescribed in schools because it is shorter (similar to Great Expectorations in that regard -- while GE similarly can't compete in value with Dickens' Bleak House)

Fri, 2013-07-12 11:59

kropotkin1951

Life of Pi is a best seller that I couldn't even finish. My wife read it and regretted the time she spent doing it, "stupid book". Never saw the movie because watching paint dry has never been one of my recreational pursuits.

Fri, 2013-07-12 12:20

#10

6079_Smith_W

Lotsa dislikes here. I still haven't seen too many guilty pleasures. Come on.... Who has a copy of People hidden inside their Canadian Dimension?

Fri, 2013-07-12 14:00

#11

Catchfire

Timebandit wrote:
I wanted to kick Eggars' narrator in the ass all through that dreary, wanky mess of a book. The most annoying thing about it was that it was good prose. Eggars actually has talent. I just hated the main character, most of the supporting characters and the narrative itself SUCKED.

This was pretty much my exact response to it -- it came out when I was in my twenties and all white men of my age were loving it, finding it lifechanging, etc. I was like, who is this wanker?

I had somehwat of a similar feeling to Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which, along with Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, makes up that early 2000s swath of writers-white-millennial-boys-in-their-twenties-like. I actually loved the first half of the book where he talks about his childhood, but in the second he drifts into what-it-means-to-me-now territory and trying to make Great Truths about middle-class white male angst (all part of the ancestry from Young Werther to Moby Dick to Catcher in the Rye, basically).

Oh, I've talked about this before and my favourite author to hate -- in that I really, really enjoy making fun of him, is James Fenimore Cooper. He is often cited as one of the fathers of American Literature, but he is sooooo awful. And his books are sooooo loooong. Mark Twain (the real ground zero of AmLit, imo) writes a killer takedown of the man here:

Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

Hahahahaha.

Anyway, as for guilty pleasures, I used to love reading my sisters' Sweet Valley High novels and whenever I'm home I read as much of the Uncle John Bathroom Reader series as I can.

Fri, 2013-07-12 14:39

#12

lagatta

I don't like People or its ilk - there is a whole local industry based on the lives of Québécois vedettes. In terms of silly consumerist porn, for me it is food magazines and a certain kind of decorating magazine. Not huge mansions or anything, but fantasy apartments in the heart of Paris (for example) that aren't necessarily any bigger than mine but infused with a quiet and solemn beauty.

Oh, nobody I know in Paris lives in places like that either - real life gets in the way.

Fri, 2013-07-12 14:40

#13

Caissa

I like Michael Chabon. Thanks for dropping 20 years off my age, Catchfire.

Fri, 2013-07-12 14:52

#14

Catchfire

I think Chabon is the best of that bunch, with Lethem close behind (and also clearly the only one who could maintain a career as an out-and-out novelist), but just like Nirvana spawned Silverchair, so too does Chabon spawn the Eggers of the hipster literary set.

Eggers is a pretty great editor though, I think it should be said. Just kind of insufferably privileged when it comes to novels.

Fri, 2013-07-12 17:36

#15

infracaninophile $infracaninophile's picture$

Catchfire wrote:
Oh, I've talked about this before and my favourite author to hate -- in that I really, really enjoy making fun of him, is James Fenimore Cooper. He is often cited as one of the fathers of American Literature, but he is sooooo awful. And his books are sooooo loooong. .

Ah, Catchfire, I feel better. I made a serious effort to read Last of the Mohicans and gave up after approximately 100 pages -- turgid, prolix and boring. I hardly ever give up on a book, but I did on this one. Thanks for the Mark Twain piece -- hilarious.

Now I must check out the Bathroom Readers. I never heard of them before, but if Wikipedia is anything to go by they sound right up my alley. I love obscure facts and useless information, not to mention palindromes, anagrams, hoaxes and urban legends.;-)

Fri, 2013-07-12 17:41

#16

Catchfire

Oh God infracaninophile, if you think Mohicans is bad, you should try The Deerslayer (no, you really shouldn't). It's even longer and less interesting than its famous counterpart. Still the same hero: Natty Bumpo aka Hawkeye aka Deerslayer aka Leatherstocking aka The Pigeon, etc. etc. It's a wonder with so many aliases Cooper couldn't find one that doesn't suck.

The most exciting moment in that 600+ page mudbucket is when the main characters find a box of clothes. True story.

Fri, 2013-07-12 21:02

#17

Mórríghain

6079_Smith_W wrote:
Who has a copy of People hidden inside their Canadian Dimension?

I've never liked People and I've never read Canadian Dimension but does reading Vogue for twenty years count?

Fri, 2013-07-12 21:39

#18

6079_Smith_W

Yup. That'll do it.

Sat, 2013-07-13 02:38

#19

Mórríghain

A couple of 19th century writers been dug up and beaten up pretty badly here, but why? Our current crop of authors boasts a fine collection of pillory-worthy typists. For example I recently finished Inferno by Dan Brown and although I doubt tis the worst book ever written tis the worst book I've read this century.

Sat, 2013-07-13 11:11

#20

mersh

I sometimes fall into completism and gobble up every bit ever published by a particular author. I did this more than 20 years ago with Philip K Dick's stuff. A lot of fun ideas, but more often than not, a ton of dreck. Also, a good dose of misogyny in some of his really terrible writing (he wrote a short story about a future in which abortion is mandatory, thanks to feminism, for Pete's sake!). Very few of his novels really hold together, and were sometimes the product of grafting one story into another (he got paid by the word for much of his life, after all). But I loved A Scanner Darkly, Ubik, and a few of the really goofy post-apocalyptic books.

I'm now doing this with Roberto Bolano's work - and although I've read reviews that pan some of his posthumous publications (some of it "for completists only") I appreciate them in a different light. There is a lot of repetition and recycling (or just practice for some of 2666 or Savage Detectives), but they are also fascinating and devastatingly funny. I've also spent way too much time googling his obscure literary references to see what's real and what's made up.

Sat, 2013-07-13 12:13

#21

voice of the damned

We studied TLOTM in one of my AmLit classes at university, and the prof bascially admitted that it was a lousy book, but important for enunciating themes that were later prominent in the development of American literature. What those themes might have been, I am not sure, since I never read the book, nor many of the other novels assigned. Probably something to do with lost innocence in the promised land or something, but I am speculating.

Sat, 2013-07-13 18:06

#22

bagkitty

Mórríghain wrote:

[...] and although I doubt tis the worst book ever written tis the worst book I've read this century.

I am glad you qualified that Mórríghain, not least because I own a copy of the worst book (novel) ever written - and I refrain from mentioning the title and author's name only out of concern that he is still teaching English at a Canadian university and that one of his students might run across this reference. Trust me that it is an absolute horror of a novel, and that the noble option would have been to perish rather than publish. I guess there is truth to the saying that those who cannot write are condemned to teaching about writing.

Sun, 2013-07-14 09:34

#23

Kaitlin McNabb Kaitlin McNabb's picture

Catchfire wrote:

I can't believe you prohibit Catcher in the Rye and then go ahead and name Eggers. Talk about six of one, half a twentysomething of the other...

All right, all right. I'll open the Catcher in the Rye flood gates.

The reasons I barred it are two fold:

(1) I actually like Catcher in the Rye (the shame! the horror!) because -- and I'm gonna get a little personal on ya here -- when I went to high school I had move a million provinces away and had no friends because I "talked weird". Apparently some people don't find my rural southern ontario accent charming -- WHATEVER. Anyways, it was the first book I was assigned in english class and since I had nothing to do in the rainy, gloomy city that will remain unnamed, I just read this book and as an angsty 14 year old with no friends in a strange city, it rekindled my love of reading and writing (that as a 14 year old in summer you forget about) and I started to read everything again.

I have fond memories of reading that book.

(2) I actually like J.D. Salinger as a writer. I'm a sucker for reoccuring characters and stories with essentially no plots at first glance.

So, go ahead. Hate on CITR, but imagine a small crying KM with her only friend, her cat, Chandler, sitting by her side.

Boom. McNabb out.

Wed, 2013-07-17 15:19

#24

Kaitlin McNabb Kaitlin McNabb's picture

Timebandit wrote:
Kaitlin - YES. I wanted to kick Eggars' narrator in the ass all through that dreary, wanky mess of a book. The most annoying thing about it was that it was good prose. Eggars actually has talent. I just hated the main character, most of the supporting characters and the narrative itself SUCKED. It's true that very young men love it (my partner's nephew recommended the misbegotten thing), but only the ones who haven't grown up yet and probably need a boot in the posterior to speed the maturation. (Nephew has since grown up nicely, thank goodness) I haven't been able to warm up to Eggars since, either. He always leaves me feeling like I want to punch someone. Probably him.

Ya Eggers is the worst to me, and does fall in line with the 1990s white male voice in his 30s who tries to victimize himself without really realizing that he himself is the problem.

Bold statement, but I hate that book and the voice the narrator chose.

And ya, Chabon, Frazen are all in that category of 1990s dude for sure BUT I can stomach them.

I'm curious to see people's feelings on Chabon's "Adventures of Kavlier and Clay", which I quite enjoy, but feel it will have the same rep as a hated fav? I have read a few others of Chabons' book, and really not had the same reaction to them as the aforementioned.

Franzen I love to hate as a person for so, so many reasons, but he is a terrific writer for the most part. His book of essays "alone" is phenomenal to the point I was really emotionally rattled after reading it.

I think he seems like a bit of a d-bag of a person though -- the whole Oprah book club thing?! The still mocking DFW after his suicide thing?! Just his general entitlement and snobbiness?! ugh.

Wed, 2013-07-17 17:46

#25

Mórríghain

bagkitty wrote:
... I guess there is truth to the saying that those who cannot write are condemned to teaching about writing.

I've heard that, or did I read that? Hmm... well, you know.

Thu, 2013-07-18 07:26

#26

Caissa

I loved Kavalier and Clay although I felt it was slow moving at times. My favourite by Chabon is The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen%27s_Union

Thu, 2013-07-18 13:57

#27

Catchfire

Yes! So good. Have you read Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, Caissa? I bet you'd like that if you like Yiddish.

Thu, 2013-07-18 14:10

#28

Caissa

I haven't read it Catchfire. Thanks for the recommendation.

ETA: The local library has it.

Fri, 2013-07-19 01:26

#29

Bacchus

infracaninophile wrote:

Catchfire wrote:
Oh, I've talked about this before and my favourite author to hate -- in that I really, really enjoy making fun of him, is James Fenimore Cooper. He is often cited as one of the fathers of American Literature, but he is sooooo awful. And his books are sooooo loooong. .

Ah, Catchfire, I feel better. I made a serious effort to read Last of the Mohicans and gave up after approximately 100 pages -- turgid, prolix and boring. I hardly ever give up on a book, but I did on this one. Thanks for the Mark Twain piece -- hilarious.

Now I must check out the Bathroom Readers. I never heard of them before, but if Wikipedia is anything to go by they sound right up my alley. I love obscure facts and useless information, not to mention palindromes, anagrams, hoaxes and urban legends.;-)

They are awesome with articles of the right size for whatever time frame you will be spending in the bathroom

My secret pleasure is Regency Romances

Fri, 2013-07-26 07:18

#30

Caissa

Finished Silas Marner and found myself liking it more than I expected. I am Now reading Mother less Brooklyn. Thanks for the recommendation, Catchfire.

Fri, 2013-07-26 17:24

#31

Catchfire

Silas Marner! People still read that? Bully.

Hope you like it, Caissa. It was a fave of mine back in the day. Beautiful description of Tourettes in the first couple of pages, according to my memory.

Mon, 2013-07-29 07:45

#32

Caissa

I have 80 pages to go so should finish it this evening. I am thoroughly enjoying it.