Most Overrated Novels of All-time?

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

Indeed, I read "The Catcher in the rye" as an adult and thought, he's just a whiny little bitch. 

Had the same thought when I read "The sorrows of young Werther".

[Velocity_Boy]

20 hours ago, Endy0816 said:

Try the 'The Metamorphosis'. Weird yet thought provoking.

You beat me to the punch!

12 hours ago, MigL said:

A book has to 'connect' with the reader. The novel needs to immerse the reader in its world for it to be enjoyable.
IOW it needs to be read in the right circumstances ( such as age ).

I was fortunate to read 'classics' like Animal Farm and The Catcher In The Rye when I was in high school, and they were very hard to put down.
At that point in my life Orwell's 1984 would not have had the same effect on me as Animal Farm did.

I read Moby Dick as a teenager and found it boring, but II re-read it about 15 yrs ago, when Star Trek-First Contact came out ( Jean Luc Picard quotes Moby Dick's Capt. Ahab while discussing the Borg ) and found it excellent and certainly deserving to be called 'classic'.

Tried reading the Harry Potter stuff, even bought the Blu-ray movies, but to no avail.
Still haven't read, or watched, them.

Mostly read science fiction, but I've gone from the simplistic stuff of the 30s-50s 'pulp' , to more complex, thought provoking stuff.
The only ones I've kept ( nostalgia I suppose ) are Andre Norton's works; which are by no means 'classics'.
He was actually a she, when women didn't write science fiction.
And  she had cats ( and included them in her stories ), so she couldn't be bad.

Catcher is my all time favorite novel. I first read it as a teenager of course but since then I try to re-read it once ever couple years or so.

Thus....prolly read it about fifteen times so far.

Which reminds me......I'm about due........

21 hours ago, nevim said:

Hi Velocity Boy

I was hoping for a suggestion on something by Franz Kafka as the short story I read I didn’t think much of. 

Have to agree with Harry Potter comments. Long ago I attempted the first but abandoned it after a couple of chapters.

 

Hey Nevster.....

 

Well...of course Kafka is most known for The Metamorphosis, which some say is the granddaddy of absurdism. I myself read it in junior high in English and thought it was Uber cool then....but read it again in college and it struck me as sort of silly and somehow sterile. Unfinished in it's attempted message, perhaps. Hard to explain. At any rate I was nonplussed.

You might try his novel The Trial...which contains my favorite short story of his......A Little Fable.

For stand alone short stories....try The Penal Colony or maybe The Hunger Artist.

Edited May 10, 2018 by Velocity_Boy

[nevim]

Thanks Velocity Boy.

Going to try Metamorphosis next, as suggested by you and Endy0816, and then probably The Trial. A Hunger Artist is the one I read recently but kind of regretted losing an hour of life to...

Anyway, cheers for the tips :-).

[KallLexintong]

On 5/7/2018 at 10:19 PM, hypervalent_iodine said:

The Picture of Dorian Grey. I have never been made so bored by a book in my entire life. 

It's a good book but... I'm agree with you. I got a little bored reading it...

[de gieter]

Joyce, Beckett, O'Brian, Sartre, Camus, Cendrars, Vuillard, D'Annunzio, Waugh, Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Hesse, Mann, Kafka, Bloch, Nabokov, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Twain, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Eliot, Hardy, Pynchon, Wallace, Goethe, Novalis, Kleist et alii

 

[naitche]

Dan Browns Davinci Code, if we aren't just talking classic.

I liked Catch 22, once I stopped trying to figure it out,  and let it play out instead.

Edited April 26, 2019 by naitche

[Intrigued]

On 5/8/2018 at 7:30 PM, Phi for All said:

The first 50 pages expose the history and politics of Herbert's universe like an intro level course lecture given by a professor in a monotone. In that way, Herbert is like a mortgage lender who wants the interest paid before you start in on the principal.

I guess, if true, this means I like monotonic, introductory lectures and always insist on paying up front! As others have observed fiction, like marmite and durians, is definitely a matter of personal taste.

[Prometheus]

Not a novel, but i feel i need to warn people:

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Hugely popular pop science, staggeringly awful for the plaudits it has received.

[dimreepr]

12 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

Not a novel, but i feel i need to warn people:

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Hugely popular pop science, staggeringly awful for the plaudits it has received.

Never heard of it, but thanks... 

[Curious layman]

On 5/8/2018 at 12:13 AM, Velocity_Boy said:

Hey guys.....

In some recent conversations here, I made an offhand remark about how I thought a classic well-known novel mentioned in a post was hugely Overrated. Just my two cents, of course. But it started a bit of an exchange on the topic of Overrated books. I've always found this subject to be hugely entertaining and providing for some spirited discussions in the past.

Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes! Your crazy! I want to fight you.... one of my favourite books, can't believe you don't like it

Finnegans wake - James Joyce

thought I'd start reading serious novels instead of magazines to make myself more interesting. Won't make that mistake again. Would of been easier to learn Chinese than to try an understand that.

[waive15]

On 5/8/2018 at 2:13 AM, Velocity_Boy said:

Hey guys.....

In some recent conversations here, I made an offhand remark about how I thought a classic well-known novel mentioned in a post was hugely Overrated. Just my two cents, of course. But it started a bit of an exchange on the topic of Overrated books. I've always found this subject to be hugely entertaining and providing for some spirited discussions in the past.

So how about it? What allegedly classic Novels do you feel got way too much kudos or acclaim? What Novels come to mind for you when you hear the term Overrated?

Allow me to throw in first......

 

The Great Gatsby.....F Scott Fitzgerald

100 Years of Solitude.... Gabriel Marquez Garcia

The Scarlet Letter

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...... Robert Pirsig. (I'm not sure this was a novel...in fact I don't think it was. But so profound was my utter dismay upon reading it...being a lifelong motorcycle devotee...and given the absurd amount of accolades it received over decades...I just have to list it.

Confederacy of Dunces.... John Kennedy O'Toole

Angela's Ashes

Moby Dick.... Herman Melville

 

Your turn.

Thanks.

Hi Velocity_Boy,

I have read 100 Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I like them. It's hard to read enough for itself, so I don't read book-reviews.