I can’t remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn’t get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.
Maybe if I read it now it’ll be different but I dun wanna!
Interesting. Loved that book!
I enjoy reading unreliable narrators, and so while you’re totally correct. Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world. That’s what made the book fun for me, at a certain point his self serving lies and his cringe attempts to act like an adult are just funny.
I’ve found it’s a good litnus test for people, just like Fight Club or Rick and Morty. You’re absolutely allowed to like these pieces, but if you think those charcters are admiral than it’s a super duper red flag.
Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world
While that is true, you do have to consider that he is
Tap for spoiler
still devastated from his brother Allie dying.
Well it’s a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn’t be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.
Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.
It’s been years and I’m still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.
Agreed- the series is massively overrated
It’s not just that characters make stupid decisions, the same characters keep making the same mistakes and nobody ever learns from those mistakes or grows as a character. It’s so extremely frustrating.
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
Yeah, I recommend people don’t read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I’ve ever encountered, the rest of the book… you can skip it.
Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?
I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
LOL. I had read it before we were taught it in school.
One of the three spirits is described as “An armed head” and the teacher was like “Yeah, nobody really knows what that description means, is a head in a helmet or what it’s supposed to be…”
So I raised my hand… “I hope I’m not giving away the ending or anything, but Macbeth is beheaded at the end… it’s an arm holding up a severed head. Each spirit is foreshadowing what’s going to happen. Armed head, bloody child, king holding a tree.”
At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.
Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.
It’s just a terrible reading experience. Don’t know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart…
Fighting through it at the moment, it just feels like I don’t even get half of what is written.
Just stop reading. It should be a nice and relaxing experience, not some sort of accomplishment. I know, school teaches otherwise…
THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.
Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.
I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.
But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.
You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.
This was, oh, a decade ago or more. Was reading a book on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I can’t remember the title, but it was one of the early “big” books on the topic.
It actually made me angry. Not because of the topic, I’m fine with the topic or I wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place.
But the author said such STUPID shit like “There’s no such thing as a ‘reverse gangbang’.” And I’m like “Well, shit, man, your search engine must suck!”
I made me angry that he took an important topic and got it so thoroughly and completely wrong. And that people held it up as like this “Important” work on the topic.
Some books are not to be set aside lightly, they are to be thrown with great force.
My search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?
“CFNM” ;)
The Stone Angel.
It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.
And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.
Hagar was an OG, she would have argued with your teacher in class. The only major theme is ‘I do what I want’.
I’ve really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I’ve never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I’ve given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I’m reading and then I start missing things and have to go back… That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can’t make it through.
Man, that’s one of the most intense parts of that book too! “Go then, there are other worlds than these…”
I heard from quinn’s ideas is you have to be a pretty big reader of king’s other works in order to read the dark tower.
I’ve only attempted it once and can’t remember much of it except for those fucking tunnels being the reason I gave up also
I honestly despise King’s longer novels. The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced.
It’s like he set a goal of some ridiculous book length, thought he needed a bunch of padding to get there, hit the mark and abruptly ends it.
Give me Salem’s Lot, Carrie, Pet Semetary, etc all day but I can’t with Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced
Probably in part because of the time span over which it was written.
Took me about 3 attempts to finish the first book. Skip it if you can’t finish it, that series is by far the best series I’ve ever read and nothing will top it
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
… username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It’s a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
120 Days of Sodom was a tough read. I don’t think it’s satire despite what the critics say. Marquis de Sade was literally a rapist but for some reason it is taken as being a meta-commentary on contemporary French society.
He was just a crazy sadist but he’s French so let’s call him a philosopher
I didn’t know people take it as satire. It clearly isn’t. It does have some solid social criticism but Sade is in for all the dirty he writes first and foremost - any social commentary is just an afterthought.
Mein Kampf - it’s borderline unreadable.
So you’re saying reading it is a struggle?
Haha, yes. And I gave up half way through. Early part about his past in Vienna was coherent, the rest was not
A bold statement…
I don’t remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn’t seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.
I am more of a naturalist and walked into a tree
I guess that would be fucking Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that used to give me what I believe was some sort of physical panic. I couldn’t finish it, great book.
I think it was called “the horror of remson high” or something like that, that we had to read in high-school. Imagine being a teen, already struggling with the changes of one’s own body and then reading a book about tentacle aliens coming out of the pimples of the students, to wreak havoc in the town. It even started with one alien killing the family’s dog and growing to its size… Didn’t even bother finishing it and gladly accepted a bad grade for doing so.
Seveneves. Halfway through when they don’t kill that monster on sight. A rare point when I’ve been nearly stopped a book midway and thrown it away. And it just kept getting worse, so maybe I should have.
The Wheel of Time series.
Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks…
Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book’s quality.
There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon’s Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).
Same! I loved Matt once he started becoming a master general and strategist. But the other 999 characters were not worth suffering through to get to his chapters.
