That's the big problem with Shakespeare. We've been dissecting those works in classrooms and reading them page by page like novels, when they were never meant to be treated that way. :nope:

I'm not a fan of anything by Charles dikeens.

And I can't stand Alice in Wonderland. Even as a "children's story" (I hate that label with a passion...), it just svcks. I will never understand how it came to be a classic.

It makes it so tedious and annoying.

Really? I loved Alice in Wonderland, as an advlt. I thought it was creative and funny. Maybe it's a matter of the "frame of mind" in which you read it.

By the way, since some "nonfiction" where mentioned above, I think many (but not all) philosophical works are tedious, muddled and pretentious.

EDIT: Oh, and Shakespeare can be tedious at times, but I kind of liked reading some of his plays in High School, like Macbeth, Mid Summers Night Dream, Julius Caesar. But I didn't read anywhere near all of his works (not even Hamlet).

A Song of Ice and Fire. Don't get me wrong it is okay but the way it was hyped I expected something much much better. Over-hype+not living up to the hype=disgruntled reader. Maybe I should finish the series first. I think I am on the 2nd book. I like it but just not THAT much. The Legend of Drizzt series is much better and so are a number of other books. But that is my opinion.

Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Had to read that back in secondary school and hated every page of it.

It may still be useful though - sometimes I endure reading terrible dross as a learning tool, so I know what to avoid when it comes to my own writing.



Seconded. Plays rarely leap off the page the same way prose does, even if the dialogue is on fire. I thought Much Ado to be very overrated though - it's early 16th century 'Friends' and nothing more.

I also think more should be made of historical context to Shakespeare's work. Macbeth was written in an age of deep-rooted suspicion of witches and witchcraft, while an overly paranoid monarch fanned the flames of fear. That play would have been very disturbing for audiences at the time, yet no mention of it was made when I studied it at school.

To be fair, I've not read it, but I love Stephen King's appraisal: "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."
I also got a kick out of all the digs The Vampire Diaries TV series makes at Twilight: "You're going out?" "Yeah, I'm not one of those really pathetic girls whose worlds stop turning just because of some guy."


I think someone's been trolling the reader votes there.


I hated Romeo and Juliet until I saw the Leo DiCaprio/Claire Danes "modern" version, which I thought was very good at making you actually care what these idiotic brats are up to.
To enjoy Hamlet, you really need to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAxeLiaHmIg.
My favourite Shakespeares are Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, the events of which are mostly covered in the HBO series Rome.

I saw a Midsummer Night's Dream at a local open air theatre for one of my anniversaries a few years back. The backdrop was a real forest, with a few fake trees that the actors could crawl up inside and it was amazing. We saw the last showing when it was just hitting sunset and it was really beautiful (there was even a little mouse that ended up onstage :happy:).
When I was at school we'd watch the Royal Shakespeare productions of plays on the TV. Othello will always be my favourite - Iago is the best villain ever!

Unfortunately I read all the Twilight books. I was at Uni studying English and Sociology, and one of my classmates wouldn't stop raving about them. Her speciality was Victorian lit - especially dikeens, so having not really heard much about them (apart from being successful) I thought they would have that kind of feel, particularly because I knew it was about vampires. I bought all of the books in a set so seeing as I'd already bought them all I felt I had to read them.
Thing was, the classmate (who was in her 40s btw) transferred to somewhere else, so I never saw her again. I think I got trolled.

I think for me it was one of Raymond Feist's books: the book itself was forgettable, so much so that I've forgotten its name, but it was a rather sad end to his enjoyable Riftwar etc saga. Granted, the quality of the books gradually declined somewhat from the original Magician, which I thought was a fantastic book, but he got caught up in this idea that his RPG playing meant that the books could almost write themselves, so we got hundreds of pages of "they did this. And then they did that. And then they did the other." Absolutely dreadfully written rubbish, and I was so sad to see him fall so far.

As for LotR, I rather liked the books, though I do agree that in parts they did degenerate into quite a lot of waffle and there are still sections I haven't read fully. I still prefer them to Jackson's bloody awful films, though (well okay, they're not completely bloody awful, but they're not LotR, at least not for me.)

I hate my math book with a burning passion.

The performance I saw had Brian Blessed. Brian Blessed can do no wrong.

(It also had Keanu Reeves, but it's not like I said it was perfect )


I haven't seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and it's actually something I would like to see eventually.

Yes, I did. And corrected all of them with red pen as I read.

I hated Romeo + Juliet, the only person who was any good in it was Pete Postlethwaite. The Shakespeare dialogue being spoken by annoying teenagers in Rio de Janeiro(for some bizarre reason) felt like a disease that was slowly dissolving my liver.
I realize this isn't the "movie you hate with a passion" thread, but I had to get my feelings out.

I'm with you on The Road. I read about half of it because I'd paid for it, but regret the time now. I should have dropped it after the first page.

I was an English major and love reading, but one of my gripes with modern literature is that it often tries so dang hard to be "literary," and obfuscation seems to be a big turn on for these types of writers. That's why I love genre fiction -- genre writers try to tell a great story first and foremost.

Honestly I hate books that lack description. My friend told me to check out Hunger Games, I thoguht it was alright. ButI think the author focused it at a younger crowd so seemed to be missingf a bit IMO. It was still alright to read but there were parts that i just rolled my eyes at.

Yes, so true! Dostoevsky is so engaging and to the point, even across 1000 pages like in The Brothers Karamazov, and only one chapter that I recall that was explicitly a vehicle for philosophical exposition (nothing against these sorts of ideas, but if you're going to tell a story, make it work in that context!) I read War and Peace hoping for a similar thrill, and it started out well enough, but as you go on the narrative starts to become more and more sparse, and the historical and philosophical expositions start to become more and more dense, slogging through the same arguments over and over again; by the end, the book is barely readable, but I somehow finished it. Ugh.

Other books I have not particularly cared for are Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Charles dikeens' A Tale of Two Cities, and Thoreau's Walden. Too bad my high school didn't assign stuff like Thomas Hardy, Oliver Goldsmith, and Oscar Wilde.

edit: Oh, yeah... Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I understand that it's historically significant and did some good from a journalistic standpoint, but as a novel... ouch. The protagonist deals with so much tragedy that it's beyond unbelievable and just becomes funny, and then at the end finds salvation through Socialism... right. It's just, again, so terribly expository that it is immersion-breaking (to use a term we all love so much) and awfully written; political bias is not my issue here, I assure you.

Many people I know have this reaction to it, myself included. This was one of those rare instances for me where a film actually did justice to a confounding piece of period literature. After seeing the movie Apocalypse Now by Coppola, I reread the book and was completely engrossed by the... I don't know, "real time" narrative style (which I also loved about Bram Stoker) with the senses of a profane man in a surreal and macabre/gothic world of an Imperialist Era. But what I most lacked in appreciation of his work was the simple fact that English was not Conrad's native language.

Another example of my point is his short story The Duel, made a movie by Ridley Scott (The Duelist). :thumbsup: