Classic books that you HATED

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  • jaxCarrie
    jaxCarrie Posts: 214 Member
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    Not a huge Hemmingway fan. And Bewoulf.....painful.
  • WifeNMama
    WifeNMama Posts: 2,876 Member
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    A Tale of Two Cities by Charles D ickens

    Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

    Bam.
  • superpapa16
    superpapa16 Posts: 244 Member
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    I'd second (or third) the hate for Tolkein. I read The Hobbit in like 8th grade and hated every minute of it. Had to read The Scarlet Letter in HS hated it too, although I did enjoy some of Hawthorne's short stories (i.e. Young Goodman Brown). Also read Romeo & Juliet in HS and I was the only kid in class who was glad they were both dead at the end. A few years ago a good friend gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and it's just awful. I still have the book only because it was a going-away gift otherwise I would have pitched it years ago.
  • Danielle_2013
    Danielle_2013 Posts: 806 Member
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    Compliments of an English degree I learned to hate anything by Faulkner.. and came close to burning my copy of Catch 22 (Heller).
  • Shannon2714
    Shannon2714 Posts: 843 Member
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    I LOVED reading the novels we were assigned in HS....the only book I remember truly hating....1984 by George Orwell
  • UsedToBeHusky
    UsedToBeHusky Posts: 15,229 Member
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    A Tale of Two Cities by Charles ****inson

    The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck



    Both were serious snooze-fests for me! :yawn:


    Ha ha, they blanked out ****inson.

    at least know the name of the author you're going to rip on. :huh:

    Yeah, I realized after I posted that I screwed that up. I was just too lazy to go back and fix it.

    Chill out! Several of my favorites made this list.
  • ingalynn
    ingalynn Posts: 136 Member
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    Wow...a lot of what was mentioned I loved! All Quiet on the Western Front, Tolkein, Wuthering Heights, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hawthorne. I must be a little weird.

    Plodding through Moby Dlck now just bc I never read it before ( haven't missed much, really)
    Wasn't crazy about Catcher in the Rye, but now that I am older, I might try it again.

    The worst for me was Sound and Fury :yawn: . That was another I read bc I had never read it before. Looks like a nice quick read bc it doesn't have many pages, but oh boy! Took me forever to get through!
  • Danielle_2013
    Danielle_2013 Posts: 806 Member
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    The worst for me was Sound and Fury :yawn: . That was another I read bc I had never read it before. Looks like a nice quick read bc it doesn't have many pages, but oh boy! Took me forever to get through!

    Faulkner... confusing and yet boring all at the same time.. and you know he's just doing it to be difficult. I HATED this book too. :wink:
  • MostlyWater
    MostlyWater Posts: 4,294 Member
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    i'm a huge reader but hated all the books we had to read in school.
  • BaconMD
    BaconMD Posts: 1,165 Member
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    First of all, as a kid I read Lord of the Flies before seeing any movie, and it was absolutely riveting and I still hold it as one of the greatest books of all time. There, now that is settled.

    On the other hand, Great Expectations was most certainly not great, nor did it live up to my expectations. It's not even worth the 49 cents or whatever it cost for the paper it was printed on.
  • TheDreadPirateRoberts
    TheDreadPirateRoberts Posts: 225 Member
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    Moby bloody ****... 20 chapters before they even saw a boat, 100+ before they saw a whale. Scores of chapters about types of ropes and classifications of leviathan. Just a bloody, bloody boring book. Back in its day it was a flop...there was a reason.

    Also... Sons & Lovers.... miserable pile of crap. The sons really needed to grow a pair. Havinf read up on it, I realise its an autobiography and that the author had...issues.

    Oh and Vanity Fair.... how any book can dwell for so long in the tedium of social chit chat for so long and yet avoid any significant coverage of the Napoleonic wars is beyond me. It was like an English "War and Peace". but without the war and with more "attacks of the vapours". I was significantly bored with the whole lot of them by the end and I couldn't give a stuff what happened to any of them.

    Bookes I struggled with and overcame second tim eround and appreciated: War and Peace. Lord of the Rings.

    Easy way to read the classics: Go to Librivox.org and download them for free. I'm starting Don Quixote tomorrow. Heaven help me.
  • tomomatic
    tomomatic Posts: 1,794 Member
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    Crime and Punishment.

    Anything by Virginia Wolf - It's like reading brain farts. Lots of them.

    Madam Bovary <--- I hated the main character and only finished to book to make sure she died.

    Moby Dork <---- because the dictionary def for dork is whale dong.
  • PixieGoddess
    PixieGoddess Posts: 1,833 Member
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    My least favorite thing I have been forced to read? The Crucible. Now THAT was terrible to read. Especially when you were tested on knowing EACH AND EVERY CHARACTER.

    Aww, I LOVED The Crucible!! Of course, I'm also a theatre geek and thoroughly enjoyed reading Abigail's part in class :devil:
    Haha I did my A Level English Lit coursework on Jane Austen novels. The most irritating was Sense And Sensibility. If the characters in that had come to life I'd have given them a slap!

    Agreed! I liked Pride and Prejudice in high school, so I thought I'd read some more Jane Austen on my own - I HATED Sense and Sensibility! And I gotta say, didn't much care for Emma either - little brat needs to get a life!

    To comment on others from the thread:
    Liked: To Kill A Mockingbird. Most Shakespeare, but not Romeo and Juliet. (Favorite = A Midsummer Night's Dream)
    Okay: Lord of the Flies. The Yellow Wallpaper (I just love that she went thoroughly insane by the end.)
    Hated: The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness. I could never remember just what the hell I was reading about, even right after I read them in high school.

    I also hated one that I can't remember the name or most of the book, but it was a dull boring thing about a Victorian woman who ends up committing suicide by just walking into the ocean at the end....exciting as such a scenario might sound, the author still managed to make it as dull as watching grass grow. :yawn:
  • livs_mom
    livs_mom Posts: 37
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    to kill a mockingbird, the grapes of wrath (though i only got through the first few chapters so maybe that's why?), the metamorphosis, thousand pieces of gold. and i'm sure there are more that i've blocked from my memory.
  • LauraMacNCheese
    LauraMacNCheese Posts: 7,198 Member
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    Catcher in the Rye - I want to punch Holden Caulfied in the face, repeatedly

    Fahrenheit 451 - could not get past the first chapter
  • beckajw
    beckajw Posts: 1,738 Member
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    Anna Karinina

    The Metamorphosis

    Lord of the Flies

    The Crucible
  • beckajw
    beckajw Posts: 1,738 Member
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    Compliments of an English degree I learned to hate anything by Faulkner.. and came close to burning my copy of Catch 22 (Heller).

    Oh no! I loved Catch 22.
  • AuddAlise
    AuddAlise Posts: 723 Member
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    A seperate peace
    Tom Sawyer only because we had to read it out loud as a class. I finished it in a few days and it took us MONTHS in class.
  • LauraMacNCheese
    LauraMacNCheese Posts: 7,198 Member
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    Beowulf; but only because we had to memorize a couple of passages in Old English...
  • geonbaeLeilee
    geonbaeLeilee Posts: 606 Member
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    1. Great Expectation-- Charles ****ens
    2. Main Street-- Sinclair Lewis
    3. To Kill a Mockingbird-- Harper Lee
    4. Grapes of Wrath-- John Steinbeck
    5. Great Gatsby- - F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Anything by Hemingway, Shakespeare (except A Midsummer Night's Dream), Austen, and Melville are boring to me.

    Edited to say that I have two English Literature degrees. Sad. :(

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