Badmovies.org Forum

inspired by my most hated movie thread

I hate Moby Dick, had to read it for a college class

same goes for Heart of Darkness

There's a James Rollins novel, Map of Bones.  At the end, the "hero" has a potential cure for his father's Alzheimer's.  Instead of giving it to his father, he pours it down the drain.  Why?  As I recall, the "hero" decided he shouldn't attempt to cheat fate and should instead enjoy whatever time he and his dad had le --- NO!  f**k YOU, BOOK!  THAT'S BULLs**t!

I've had a few family members die from Alzheimer's.  It is one of the worst ways to go imaginable.  If you withhold a potential cure from anyone who has the disease, especially if it's your father, even more especially if you have enough reason to believe it will work as the "hero" did, you are a monster.  A complete monster.  I wonder what the "hero's" mother would think if she found out what he did?  "Well, Ma, I'm sorry Dad died a nightmarish death and that you had to go through that hell right alongside him but if I'd given him the m-state gold, that would have been cheating fate and the time we had before he got really bad wouldn't have been as precious."

That is the only book I've ever read that made me angry enough to take it outside and burn it.

The Yearling- I had to read this over the summer for a school class.  I like reading, regardless of summer or not.  Just found the books selected to be quite a bit boring, this included.  I may still have it laying around somewhere.  Haven't touched it since 1998, and that says a lot.

Moby Dick...man, he needed an editor.
-Ed

Slaughterhouse 5 is one the worst books I've ever read. It's only about 200 pages long, yet it took me over two weeks to read. Paragraph after paragraph of some geeky guy jumping from WWII to some futuristic alien zoo through a series of dull events with the phrase "So it goes" repeated about 1,000,000 times on every page.

Crap.

Really?

Man, I really dug Slughterhouse 5.

Most of the most hated literary pieces came from stuff my school assigned me to read. They were all the same in the sense they were almost all downers (Damn Newbery Medal awards.  All death and depression!) like Island of the Blue Dolphins, Bridge to Terabithia, The Giver, A Taste of Blackberries, On My Honor, and so on.  There not bad in a poorly written sense (Bridge to Terabithia's death was just crowbarred in and makes me groan now, while A Taste of Blackberries was just annoying), they are bad to me because I had to deal so much amount of deary and sad story telling.  If it wasn't for the Baily School Kids and Goosebumps, I would not enjoy reading at all.

For something I truly hate, I despise MW.  A comic, sure, but damn is it bad.  Mary Sue Villians (A villian who always wins over and over and over), complete and utter pointless to most plot points, chapters and characters that serve no purpose, unlikeable characters, every female character is useless, extremely distrubing rape scenes (One of which made the female characters fall in love with the villian.  Insert puking here), messages and morals completely lost or glossed over for more shock value, religious subtext that adds nothing (your attempt to be deep and profound fails), and an ending you could easily see coming a mile away once a certian character is introduced.  Utter, complete garbage.  Hard to believe the same man created Astro Boy and one of my favorite series, Black Jack.

Had to read Old Yeller when I was a little kid in grade school.  Being a huge animal lover, I mean, the poor doggie!  Give me a f***ing break, I was like 8 years old.  Damn nuns couldn't think of enough ways to display their hatred for children.

Lord of the Flies, If you've read it, you would know why.

I've read it.  I like the story, but my major problem with is the same problem I have with Red Badge of Courage, I can barely tell what is going on half of the time.  The way it is written and what is told of what is going on is very... strange.  It is a very complicated thing to read and unless I read a summary, I'm not going to figure out what happened. (I assume that's your problem with it as well)

It's a real shame because my all time favorite manga, The Drifting Classroom, takes a lot of influence from it and I see a lot of similiar elements in it.  I... I just can't enjoy Lord of the Flies like I want to.  It's really sad.

I never thought of it before, but most of the Newberry Award winners ARE major downers.  Not the best strategy for encouraging kids to read......

I hate everything by John Steinbeck, especially Grapes of Wrath and the Red Pony.
I don't remember how long it actually took me to get through The Old Man and the Sea, but it felt like months.
I've never understood how Wuthering Heights came to be regarded as The Greatest Romantic Novel EVER; Cathy's a brat, Heathcliff's a sadist and their obnoxious codependent relationship destroys their lives and the lives of everyone around them.  Also it employs that stupid "tell everything in flashbacks" method of narrative.

And I'm defining literature pretty loosely with this one, but My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult is one of the most exploitative, precious, repulsive things I've ever read. 

This masterpiece of KURT VONNEGUT's is about "coming unstuck in time" (or, "losing it").  Did you know KURT VONNEGUT was there, a POW, during the firebombing of Dresden?  You just don't get it.  Everything that you think or feel about humanity is expressed in that book, though you didn't notice apparently, and that novel is more so the voice of the counter-culture than even Catcher In The Rye. 

And the little birdy say: poo-tee-weet?  

The Picture of Dorian Gray- I never liked the main guy, the 'victim' of being a vain ass, Top lofty pansy SOB. He deserved to be killed by his own arrogance
.

Apparently, depressing things equals kids enjoying reading.  There must be some sort of math equation that makes that thought process make sense.

So not fan of My Sister's Keeper?  How does it make you feel that there exists a movie adaption of it?

Skip to 0:34
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5_3_DhVn5o

Eh, not that surprised.  The book was a huge bestseller.  Bad books p**s me off more than bad movies, to tell the truth, since they waste more of your time.  (Or I resent their success, being a wannabe writer.) 

I've had to read "The Great Gatsby" three freakin' times in my scholastic life - once in high school, once in college, and a 3rd time when I took some extra credit courses at a local community college. Never again!!

Back when Metallica was causing much whoop-de-doo with their video for the song "One," which incorporated footage from the film version of "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo, I found a copy of the book at the library and read it... wished I hadn't. Good Lord, what drawn-out, depressing-as-hell book that was.

More recently (and I'm not even sure if this would qualify as "literature" but what the hell) I read Steven Tyler's "Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?" about a month ago and it was a really tough slog. Unfortunately Steven writes the way he talks - i.e., lots of stream-of-consciousness rambling, going off topic for pages at a time, etc., etc. -- which after a while started to remind me of the homeless people I'd see babbling to themselves in the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Also, by the end of Tyler's book you'll feel like you should have earned a degree in Pharmacology. In addition to all the, ahem, "usual suspects" (i.e. cocaine, weed, speed, etc.) that dude used drugs I'd never even heard of, and lots of'em, and goes into great detail about each and every one of'em!!

I've got second "the great gatsby". Gatsby was not great. If Gatsby had a lick of intelligence he would have ditched that numbnutted broad Daisy to the curb and went out and found a woman worth a damn.  Come on Gatsby, lots of fish in the sea there buddy.

I would also vote for most works by Hemmingway, before you condemn understand by highschool Lit teacher had a crush on Hemmingway and our class suffered for it. In my book anyone as obsessed with being manly as Hemmingway was has to be gay. A few of his short stories have redeeming qualities though such as good pacing etc.

Hemingway is highly annoying to read, for sure.   But if you google "best of bad Hemingway" and read what you find therein... that, that is good reading, take my word for it.

Most hated works?  Hmm.  Yeah.  Most everything I read in Literary Theory class in college was 100% pure mental masturbation, and was as hateful and obnoxious as some of the lit theory grad students in that class.  _Hamletmachine_ reigns supreme in that regard... it's pure twaddle.

_Ulysses_ seems fairly hated though I have never read it.

I thought _Catcher in the Rye_ was a really annoying book, although I can't use the word "hate" for my reaction to it. 

And you have to admit, Michael Moorcock's writing style is really obnoxious too.  A crucifix piledriver to the next person who says "insouciant!"

Tess of the D'urbervilles, I could never get into it and had to read it for a class. 

I also hated Dracula it is far more boring then movies would have you believe. 

Sometimes, I like verbose Victorian literature but at times I can't relate and have trouble getting into the feel. 

Allow me to say I found Mary Shelley far more entertaining than Bram Stoker. 

I generally loathe poetry and I hated it in school.  Especially the ridiculous amount of time we spent in class trying to figure out what two roads in the woods symbolize.  To me poetry is a fancy term for fragmented sentences. 

There was a book I was forced to read in school, Hatchet, about a kid who gets lost in the woods and is forced to survive. It was the most boring thing I'd ever read. Also Stephen King's The Girl who loved Tom Gordon, which had basically the same plot.

Also, any school summer reading assignment, including Steinbeck's The Pearl, Black Beauty, The adventures of Tom Sawyer (god awful) and anything else im not thinking of. Granted, most of it was read in the last two weeks before school started, so its not like I really got much out of it anyway, but the fact that I was being forced to read it, and the fact that it was something i never would have picked up on my own, poisoned whatever positive qualities they may have had.

Right on!  Poetry is always the most uninteresting subject for me in school (My Creative Writing course will be hitting soon.  Ugh.).  The most WTF poem I ever read was this:


What the hell did I just read?!


Hey!  I think I read that one too.  Man, it was so forgettable I just rememeber after nearly a decade that I actually read it.  Damn that's bad when A Taste of Blackberries was far more memorable for me.

Man, you guys are hitting some stuff which is great.

For example, Ulysses and Moby D**k (gotta' love that filter). I'll agree that those are difficult works, but if you're willing to put the work in they are incredibly rewarding. Why should literature be easy? Then again, this is from the guy who thinks Gravity's Rainbow is one of the best things he's ever read.

But I'm befuddled you found Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies underwhelming. Those are the books you need to read as a teenager, because you'll never find them as effective at any other point in life. (Well, maybe you were smarter than I was a kid.) It's like that Japanese movie "Battle Royale." If I would have watched that when I was fifteen I probably would have thought it was brilliant.

I will agree that Slaughterhouse-5 is underwhelming. But that's because I'm familiar with the rest of Vonnegut's catalog, and I don't think that book is among his best, even if others say it is so. So it goes.

For classics I was forced to read, I will say that I think "The Scarlet Letter" deserves none of the accolades it gets. Boring book with less to say than people think it does.

Maybe you guys are right. I read a lot of books that people think are fantastic because I think I should, and a lot of them are garbage.

The worst example is this book, Auto-da-Fe by Elias Canetti. I read this boring book, which is four hundred odd pages of the most one-sided characters you've ever been exposed to. The only reason this book exists is to prove to its author, Canetti, that all people are vain and venal fools, who above all care only about money and are unable to truly communicate with their fellow humans.

I thought it was garbage with nothing to say, unless you already agree with the idea that everybody you meet is nothing less than human filth with nothing to say. Just garbage. But here's the kicker about that book: Every discussion I see about it online thinks its genius. Pessimistic garbage, but lauded for its brilliance. I don't agree that the only thing humanity can be is one-sided, stupid, and shallow. If you agree, you might think its great. If you agree, you're lazy and not somebody I want to know.

I majored in English in college and therefore was required to take a Poetry class one semester, which was torture for me. Not only because I'm not terribly fond of poetry (unless you're talking dirty limericks), but also because I was surrounded by a room full of the most pretentious motherF'ers on campus for half a year.

By the end of that course I particularly hated e.e. cummings, who was a favorite of our professor. If that guy wasn't already dead I swear I would've hunted him down and killed him myself for his crimes against punctuation.

I haven't read Lord of the Flies, but Heart of Darkness is my least favorite book I have finished.  It is as if it was written to be as difficult to understand as possible.  I mean, a DOUBLE first person perspective?  REALLY?  Page long paragraphs?  REALLY?   :hatred:

Oh, and it's racist. 

Did not like one thing about it.

I going with Joyce -- Portrait of an artist, one of only a hanful of books i just couldnt finish.

My favorite book, which I've probably read 6 or 7 times (I just reread it last year). 

:lookingup:

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

"Gatsby" isn't a bad book in and of itself, but three times was more than enough for me, thanx. :teddyr:

Okay, I'll chime in here. I have my M.A. in Creative Writing and Literature, so I've taken a lot of lit courses. Not that taking those courses gives me lots of authority, but it is supposed to be my area of expertise.

Some of the comments made here, I can understand: Steinbeck is too bleak for my taste, and Melville's tale of Captain Ahab and company (I'll avoid the filters) would have been much more readable without the middle 100 chapters, which were simply lessons on whaling. I would disagree with Circus' comments about Slaughterhouse 5.  I didn't care for it the first time I read it, but I gave it another chance later on and loved it. I will agree with Mofo Rising, though, that it is not Vonnegut's best work. Hemingway is indeed depressing, but he is an excellent writer who can convey multiple levels of emotion and characterization with very few words. He wrote my very favorite short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which packs more characterization into three pages than many novels. The Great Gatsby didn't really do much for me. A better alternative along the same lines is Nathanael West's Day of the Locust. West's novel just works better on more levels, portraying the same type of bleak outlook while maintaining a fuller sense of humanity than Gatsby manages. Oh, and I love Withering Heights. And Lord of the Flies remains the scariest book I have ever read, and one of the scariest movies as well.

For all you poetry haters: I'm sorry your teachers killed a wonderful thing for you. In my experience, people that hate poetry do so mostly because their teachers have told them that poems have "secret meanings" and must be "interpreted" correctly in order to appreciate them. Horse hockey. A good poem is one that can be enjoyed on the first reading and again and again on every subsequent reading, often sparking thoughts that deepen with enjoyment. The Williams poem that was quoted, "The Red Wheelbarrow," is NOT an example of a good poem. I don't really consider it a poem, but I know many that love it. I don't know why. Frost is probably my favorite poet overall: He manages to include poetic rhythms so subtly and naturally that you don't realize he is writing in meter until you go back and count syllables. And his images are generally vivid and meaningful. He's an example of a consummate poet.

As for my own most hated work of Classic Literature: Almost any novel by Faulkner. I acknowledge him as a fine and innovative writer. I just find all of his characters to be despicable and unlikable. And his outlook on humanity is terribly depressing. Plus I generally hate stream of consciousness.

Sorry for the long post. This is, I guess, my thing. I'm not the most well read person on the planet, but I do love thought-provoking, well-written books.

It's not that the book is bad to me or anything, it is just that it just very complicated to read and really hard to get what is going on most of the time.  I want to like it since my favorite manga series takes a lot of inspiration from it (It also predates Battle Royale).

my main issue with both Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick is the same in that they bored the living crap out of me

I was like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0_f5fkrCTA

Here goes. I know this is going to come across as snobby and condescending, but WTF? Great literature is great literature. If you don't want to read great literate, then don't. I don't care much for the socio-political nature of the works of Dickens or Steinbeck, but I would never say their work was crap. If one is bored by great literature, then I suggest comic books and video games.

I tried to read a book by Anne Rice once. Nothing happened for several hundred pages, my friend informed me it would be several hundred MORE pages till something happened and I put it down.

books are just like movies in that just because something is deemed a classic does not mean that everyone has to like it, in fact one can loath it if they despise it that much

I read Lord of the Flies back in 9th grade and hated it. I'm going to read Heart of Darkness later in the school year, so may be it'll be different?... :lookingup:

Anne Rice is a terrible writer.
I tried the Lord of the Rings books. Yuck.

Ditto. I gave "Interview with the Vampire" a shot years ago (probably around the time the movie came out) just to see what all the whoop-de-doo was about, and it bored the man-titties off of me. I gave up about half way through.

Well, that wasn't really my point. If one doesn't care for a piece of classic literature, that's fine. Some people can't stand reading Shakespeare or watching Shakespeare. I've got no problem with that. I'm just saying that many of the posts talk about them as if they are crap. They aren't crap. They wouldn't be classics if they were. They were influential works that deserve respect, whether you liked them or not. In that respect they ARE just like movies. Not everyone likes Citizen Kane. I don't care for it, in fact. I don't call it crap, though.

So, anybody can do anything they want. Freewill and all that. I just think it's kind of ignorant to trash significant works of art as crap.

We can still say crap then...  :wink:

I'm flattered that you would await my permission, but yes.

 :bouncegiggle:

* GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.  The first 1/3 of the book was interesting and often funny.  After that, it got really repetitive and seemed to go on and on pointlessly.  It took me almost a year to read it . . . mostly because I kept putting off reading the last 30 or so pages.  Finally, I just said, "Let me finish this sucker."  I'm glad it's over.

* MOBY DICK.  I'm willing to bet not more than 25 - 30% of this novel is devoted to the actual story.  The rest is chapter after chapter of information about whales and the whaling industry.  It's more like a text book than a novel.  Very, very dry.  Although, the actual story parts (which are few and far between) are good.

I agree with that sentiment. Great literature is great literature. There is no reason it should be easy to understand. Some of the greatest books take an inordinate amount of work to understand. Ulysses is a prime example.

However, not every piece of literature that is presented as great deserves that role. I think the perennial high school favorite The Scarlet Letter is garbage. I do think it is crap, but it is forced on millions of unwitting high school sophomores. "Great literature."

It's not, it just has the force of history behind it.

But why so angry about comics and video games? Seems an easy target, but some of the most jaw-dropping works of art in the past twenty years have manifested themselves in those two mediums.

Art. It takes you unawares.

This whole conversation reminds me of an exchange between an American tourist and a French curator at the Louvre:

American:  "I must say I don't think much of these so-called great works of art you got here!"

Frenchman:  "What you think about these artworks, sir, says very little about them.  On the other hand, it says a great deal about you."

I'm reading Moby Dick now and loving it...

Great stuff.

Of course, I've lived on a boat for almost three years, which may change my perspective.

The Great Gatsby.  If you can stay awake through this one, you deserve a medal.

Lair of the White Worm.  Skip the confusing and (most likely) poorly edited book.  Watch the movie. 

Lord of the Rings.  I respect the material and imagination of Tolkien, but the need to constantly linger on every goddamn rock, bird, passing township, and plant drives me up the wall.

Anything Gregory MacGuire.  Can this be considered literary?  It seems like his stories go something like this: character has goals, character attempts goals, boring scenes ensue, character says, "f**k it, I quit," or fails and their attempts at such goals are never mentioned again.  It's like you're reading the life of a interesting character turned mediocre.  Wicked?  Pah!  The Broadway musical was 1000000 times better.

Well, technically it's a play, but reading Waiting for Godot was an incredibly painful experience.
I understand what Becket was trying to say.
It still sucks.

Maybe it translates better on stage.

That's a fair question. I don't hate comic books or video games as it may seem. What I was trying to say was that it seems most aversions to great literature tend toward the "it's boring" vain. I guess to some, if it's not entertaining on a shorter-attention-span level, then it's crap. In that particular light, I simply recommend comic books and video games. I see where that could be taken as anger, but there is no anger or hatred intended. I think the derision was aimed more at short attention span than the particular media mentioned.

I suppose I should expand... My complaint about Moby Dick is that is 30% stort 70% Whaling, and somewhat innacurate whaling too.  The problem is that peopel didn't know HOW to make this sort of book in those days.  I recently learned that people in the 19th century hated Moby Dick for the opposite reason...it was too modern in its presentaion.  I like th "sory" part, and got hugely sick of the "science" part. 

I once signed up for a class focusing on the writings of Mark Twain. The professor was taken ill and instead, after I'd signed up, the course was changed to a survey of the writings of E.M. Forster. He wrote stuff like Howard's End and Passage to India, which spent alot of time exploring the irreconcilability of class differences. Yee-Haw!! Reading this stuff was like trying to breathe mud. I realize that was years ago and I might think differently of his work now, manny years and experiences later. But I don't really want to find out.

 

One thing that depends upon the wheel barrow is the work that needs to be done.  Another thing dependent upon the wheel barrow is the reader’s understanding of the poem.  Though seemingly a simple, plain description, like a snapshot, the poem paints a memorable image and afterthought.  It’s personal.  Its refinement is razor sharp.  How much depends upon a red wheel barrow?   If you’re the poet, everything. 

Hey AHD!! We been missing you! Welcome back! :bouncegiggle:

Yeah, the film version of Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm" is definitely better than the novel. Maybe because the only similiarity between the two is the title.

I have had good friends who have read the novel and declared it to be not only bad, but the worst book, they have ever read.

Though, to be fair to Stoker, he was ailing when he wrote it. Though, there is some argument as what he was ailing from. Some say Bright's Disease and others say the last stages of syphilis.

And the book, which is set in the 1860s, does have one of the great snafus in literature. Stoker has one of his characters throw a switch and turn on the electric lights, some twenty years before the electric light was invented.

No, if you have read his "Dracula," which is great novel, and want to read something else by him, then stay away from his other novels. None of which compare to "Dracula," and read his short story collection "Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories," which was compiled by his wife after his death.

Actually, "Dracula's Guest" was to be the opening chapter to "Dracula," before it was excised from the novel at his publisher's request.

As for Mark Twain, one of my professors in college wrote his thesis on the complete writings of Mark Twain, and he said that was the greatest mistake he ever made in school. While Twain wrote some of the greatest American novels ever written, he also wrote alot of stuff that was pure drivel, which my professor had to read.

Apparently, including a comical essay on the pleasures of masturbation. My professor never did say where that fell in Twain's writings. Where it should be included as one of Twain's great writings or included in Twain's drivel.

I do'nt think I mentioned The Old Man and the Sea yet

I had to read this for a class in highschool it just bored the hell out of me

Absolutely anything by Ernest Hemingway. Most over-rated writer in American history.

BUMP
Not gonna lie, I really haven't been reading books lately because well, I'm a visual aided type of person, meaning that the text just doesn't cut it with me.



Feel asleep while trying to read it.