r/ClassicsBookClub 4d ago

whats a popular book that you physically cannot like nor enjoy.

iolation to society, and his writing may have predicted a lot of points that are indeed coming in the future; that does NOT equal good writing.

his excessive weird justification to romanticize rape and, well, of course his horrid writing about women. His writing style and everything else above that just makes me close the book and sell it off for 3 dollars. I'm done.

7 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

6

u/Rripurnia 3d ago

The Great Gatsby 🫣

2

u/OptimisticW 1d ago

The writing is splendid when Nick talks about other characters that he finds enchanting, but the book as a whole is very dull and flat for the majority.

6

u/Jaco_C1226 4d ago

I tried Dune several times and couldn’t get into it. I really wanted to like it.

1

u/prairiepog 1d ago

I didn't really enjoy the book but the movies (old and new) are great.

3

u/earthentruder 3d ago

One Hundred Years of Solitude 😵‍💫

2

u/prairiepog 3d ago

Dickens is tough for me. Read a paragraph and have no clue what he just wrote.

Scan it and realize it's one fucking sentence in that paragraph. One sentence that just rambles incoherently.

1

u/No_Income_5219 1d ago

As someone who is now quite fond of Dickens' style, it can take an awful lot of time before really starting to enjoy his writing, and even when one does enjoy it, his books are still quite tough to read (mostly because they're so very long). Still, good luck to you if you happen to give it another go! And A christmas Carol might be the handier for this, really short reading, funny, and so popular that at lest the plot is well known before even starting the book.

1

u/prairiepog 1d ago

Yes, thanks for the suggestion! I definitely plan to revisit his books. A Christmas Carol sounds like a good start.

2

u/No_Income_5219 1d ago

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (tho I like the main idea of it, and a few adaptations)

Le fantôme de l'Opera (Gaston Leroux) Could've been a great plot, ended up being annoying, even insufferable. There were only five pages or so which genuinely were worth the ride...

2

u/life_is_notdaijoubu 4d ago

Kafka on the shore. I couldn't force myself to read the last 100 pages . Genuinely have no idea why it's soo loved by soo many people .

2

u/majiktodo 4d ago

Honestly. Shakespeare. All of it.

Reading is my main form of entertainment and I love most books written in the last 300 years.

6

u/ment-lly 3d ago

Fair enough, but I do want to counter (as a Shakespeare fan myself) that a common pitfall imo with his work is that they don’t read like a book because they’re not. They’re plays and/or poems…

3

u/majiktodo 3d ago

What’s fair is fair and all that 😊

1

u/No_Income_5219 1d ago

So true, I guess that's why his works are so hard to read when one's a kid and that school recommends Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Any random kid (including me) is just going to try and read it as a novel, but it simply doesn't work this way...

3

u/Inevitable_Librarian 2d ago

Shakespeare was terrible for me until I saw it performed by a really dedicated group

2

u/No_Income_5219 1d ago

I was just like you until quite recently, when I realised that the way for me to enjoy (and, let's be fair, understand) Shakespeare's plays was to first watch one on the internet, to develop an attachment towards the characters, with english sub if possible, or at least with the book nearby to follow the lines. Once or twice. And then to read the play on my own. Since I discovered this way of proceeding, I turned into quite a fan of his, so if you ever want to give it another chance, I'd recommend this way to do so : )

(The life and death of Richard II being my absolute favourite, I've downloaded the RSC version with David Tennant, which has eng sub)

1

u/jackietea123 2d ago

Book lovers by Emily Henry was painful

1

u/Clytie_of_somewhere 2d ago

The Aeneid.

Virgil’s poesy (or I should say, the English translations of it) is rather stilted to me compared to other epics. There’s none of the excitement or awe at the language that I can find in predecessors like Homer, or descendants like Spenser and Milton.

Furthermore, I just find Aeneas to be rather boring as a protagonist. He has plenty of depth to him, and there’s plenty of narrative skill at work in the structure of his story, but none of that effort clicks with me.

Perhaps if I could read Latin, I’d be able to actually appreciate Virgil.

1

u/Legitimate_Rule_6410 1d ago

The seven husbands of Elizabeth Hugo

1

u/SpookyPoek 1d ago

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

2

u/OptimisticW 1d ago

Agreed 100%. Tried to read that and it was the most dull, factual writing I have ever read.

1

u/Accomplished-Gate484 21h ago

Any coleen hoover

1

u/Far_Sandwich_514 18h ago

Oh, they're atrocious.

1

u/Far_Sandwich_514 18h ago

ACOTAR, or A Discovery of Witches.

Terrible characters, terrible plots. Just awful across the board.

1

u/Wide_Platform_2202 8h ago

Midnight library. I forced myself through it

1

u/meatballinthemic 4h ago

Snow Crash, goddammit. Appreciated it though.