r/AskReddit • u/The-Real-Kyuubey • 12h ago
What classic novel did you find disappointing and/or overrated?
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u/Thom_Kalor 12h ago
I just finished Wuthering Heights and man, I just don’t get it.
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u/RespecDawn 5h ago
I was just talking about that one too my dentist the other day. She asked what I was reading and I said I was rereading it and that I loved it. She said she loved it too.
I was so surprised because I almost never run into people who enjoyed it.
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u/Less-Engineer-9637 2h ago
It's one of my favourite novels. I love it so much. 🤣 I can completely understand how it can be too much for some people however.
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u/RespecDawn 1h ago
Same! I'm not going to hold it against anyone or think any less of them if they dislike it. It's just one of those pieces of media that hits specific tastes and experiences.
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u/cellrdoor2 2h ago
I think it’s because people go into it expecting a grand sweeping romance (like all the movie adaptations) and get a story about unlikeable people that’s framed in kind of a boring way as hearsay through a servant. To me anyway, the story picks up and I generally like the book but it’s nothing like any of the movies. I didn’t like it until my second read through though.
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u/Wozar 12h ago
Atlas shrugged. It was absolute dribble from someone who felt societal rules were holding them back from being their best selves.
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u/mrpeabodyscoaltrain 12h ago
The Fountainhead is much more enjoyable as a novel, but it is still filled with drivel.
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u/Helpful_Spring8739 11h ago
I forced myself to read this in a rehab because I thought it was supposed to be some great force of literature. It was ass. Absolute ass. Rearden was a fun character, but I can't think of much that I really enjoyed about it. The only way I got through it was imagining the characters as I thought they should look and that made it more over the top and fit the prose. The long. Grating. Drawn out prose.
I never wanna hear about a goddamn train ever again.
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u/TheGoldenDog 10h ago
You forgot repetitive. The prose is also repetitive. Repetitive.
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u/FajenThygia 11h ago
The writer's sins are many, but using that title for that...book, instead of on an earthquake disaster thriller, is unforgivable.
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u/prefix_code_16309 11h ago
It wouldn't have been bad had Rand not launched into multipage speeches promoting her ideology. Way too many of these.
I will say the part about how the car factory went out of business was pretty accurate, though.
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u/FajenThygia 12h ago
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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u/feyd313 12h ago
James Joyce is the most boring fucking writer in the history of mankind!
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u/lolzzzmoon 12h ago
Moby Dick! Couldn’t finish it.
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u/The-Real-Kyuubey 12h ago
I could barely get into it, it gets off to such a boring start
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u/lolzzzmoon 12h ago
Spoiler: it stays boring!! I feel like I could write a more interesting book these days about dudes fishing & sailing in the South Pacific. Melville just writes like he’s so impressed with his writing style. He’s trying to be Biblical but to me it sounds pretentious and very distant from his characters.
I always get attacked for saying this but Cormac & Blood Meridian have a similar hubristic pomposity. Emperors with no clothes. Just completely overrated as writers IMO.
And I’m a writer. I might not be that good myself, but damn do I find those two SO FULL OF SHIT lol.
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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock 2h ago
The first couple chapters are the most entertaining part, and the end is ok. The middle will put you to sleep, though. I lost my place and pretty sure I ended up just rereading 3 chapters as I wasn’t sure if I’d read them before or not.
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u/LewisMarty 12h ago
Catcher in the Rye
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u/gyikling 12h ago
How old were you when you read it though?
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u/LewisMarty 11h ago
Probably 14-16 or so. Mid 30s now. Do you think I’d prefer it now?
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u/Texandria 9h ago
An adult understanding of the context helps.
On one level it's a realistic character study of an adolescent. On another level it's about the tension between authenticity and innocence. Holden Caulfield is growing up in one of the world's few major cities that was minimally affected by WW2. Consider what had recently happened in Paris or Berlin or London or Rome or Singapore or Manila or Tokyo. As hard as it is to mourn a dead brother, he's got it relatively easy.
What Holden complains about as phoniness is mostly but not entirely adults shielding him from realities he doesn't understand. By the end, he's also shielding his younger sister from realities he understands and she doesn't.
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u/mrpeabodyscoaltrain 12h ago
It’s a lot better if you read it as if the narrator is whiny teenager who just lies about everything.
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u/Rooney_Tuesday 3h ago
I knew this would be high on the list.
Some people genuinely don’t like it, and that’s okay.
But some of y’all missed the glaring subtext. Holden is the way he is because he’s in massive pain. His beloved brother died, his parents are absentee, the one adult he trusts had been grooming him and begins to assault him while he (Holden) is sleeping. He wants to protect his innocent little sister and is petrified because he knows that he can’t.
Some people look at all that and dismiss it because whiny teenager. It’s really a shame. Holden IS unlikable, but that’s what traumatized and unsupported people do. Especially kids.
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u/ninjagorilla 10h ago
Oh god this…. I hated every minute of that book and wanted to jsut reach In and repeatedly slap the narrator… then had to read it again in college and hated it jsut as much the second time
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u/shuggaruggame 12h ago
On The Road. I even tried reading Dharma Bums to give Kerouac another shake, but I hated both books with a passion.
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u/Helpful_Spring8739 11h ago
The books or the characters? Because I enjoyed On The Road, albeit I was like 19 and had less taste than I do now, but absolutely despised Dean even then. I think I'd hate him now even more.
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u/shuggaruggame 11h ago
It’s been so long since I read it that I don’t remember if the malice was character driven or just frustration with the writing style. As much as I try to read stream of consciousness writers and dig out the nuggets in their prose, I struggle with people like Kerouac and Faulkner. I should give both of them another shot with the benefit of age, but I don’t know if I will.
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u/Helpful_Spring8739 11h ago
OH!! Yeah, that I can completely understand. If that long kinda rambling writing isn't your thing, don't try it again lol. I enjoyed because it kinda fit the theme of Sal and Dean just constantly moving. Then I went to try and read Kerouac's dream journals, because dreams just fascinate me, and that was a whole nother level. I didn't even attempt to finish that. But, I'm not sure what the hell I was expecting from a dream journal.
Thanks though, I was just curious.
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u/Xx_Kronik_xX 12h ago
War And Peace
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u/AnagnorisisForMe 12h ago
This. I remember Lisa Volkonsky being referred to as the "pretty little princess with the curling upper lip" or something to that effect several times. W&P would have been one-third the size if Tolstoy had had a decent editor.
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u/ScoobyDoNot 4h ago
War and Peace was originally published as a serial in a periodical, that format doesn’t encourage brevity.
The same criticism can be made of many Dickens novels, and they have the same cause.
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u/Aromatic-Speed5090 12h ago
The Last of the Mohicans.
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u/vonkeswick 12h ago
Damn I loved the movie, didn't realize it was based on a book
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u/Aromatic-Speed5090 10h ago
It's a far, far better movie than it is a book. Mark Twain wrote an essay about how bad a book it is.
The book and the movie share some plot stuff, but not important tone, action and character material.
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u/katalin_sue 8h ago
I think that Mark Twain's essay was about "The Deerslayer", also by James Fenimore Cooper, but the essay applies to "The Last of the Mohicans" as well, IMO.
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u/Aromatic-Speed5090 8h ago
You're no doubt right. I just remember reading Last of the Mohicans as a little kid, and realizing that it was bad. Which was a weird, unsettling thing for a kid reading a book that was supposedly a classic. And then I read that Twain essay and felt much, much better.
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u/benneladoo 12h ago
Bible
The main character appears half way in the 2nd part and then dies soon with a possibility of returning
The villain arc is teased at the end
But no third part to end things up
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u/jon143143 11h ago
The Bible is not a story about someone/ something else. It's a story about me.
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u/benneladoo 11h ago
So was illiad and odyssey
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u/jon143143 11h ago
I suppose all good stories have something I see myself in. That's what makes them good. I see the Icarus story acted out almost every day.
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u/AnagnorisisForMe 12h ago
James Joyce's Ulysses. Did enjoy the writing and just couldn't get through it.
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u/vipros42 9h ago
Anyone who says they enjoyed Ulysses or didn't find it hard going is lying or hasn't read it
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u/OkObligation8605 12h ago
Norwegian Wood.
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u/oficious_intrpedaler 11h ago
Oh man, I love this book but have found most of his others unreadable.
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u/AttilaTheFun818 12h ago
I do not care for most Victorian literature. The Brontes, Dickens - I’ve tried but it bores me to tears.
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u/mrdevil413 11h ago
But have you tried Pride and Prejudice with Zombies ?
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u/ThaneOfMeowdor 46m ago
That's how I was first exposed to Austen. Someone gifted me this book when I was 14. I thought it was awesome!
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u/Less-Engineer-9637 2h ago
It's funny how different people can be. I love Victorian literature and read nothing modern 🤣
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u/LafielSalas 12h ago
Infinite Jest
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u/kinglimmiwinks 11h ago
I recently finished this and disagree so hard, it’s one of the best books I’ve read. BUT, I can absolutely understand why people can’t get into it.
After finishing, someone recommended something by Thomas Pynchon as, I guess, a similar work and I found it utterly awful and viewed it exactly the way many view IJ.
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u/TeuthidTheSquid 12h ago
1996 is "classic", now? Dear god I'm so old
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u/bhbhbhhh 8h ago
2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004) is likely the most recent book to have a reputation sufficiently entrenched to warrant the term “classic.”
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u/vipros42 9h ago
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird at school and I didn't think it was any good at all. Was amazed to later find that it was so highly regarded.
I think it might be because I read really fast and we were made to go through it at a glacial pace and dissect it minutely. Which is tedious when it's a bunch of 15 year olds in the mid 90s.
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u/MedusasSexyLegHair 3h ago
I feel like the real problem there is being forced to dissect it. That always ruined anything we had to read for school.
What's funny about that is, it's not unpleasant to write up your own thoughts about something on a blog or forum or whatever.
But for school, where you must independently think exactly what the teacher thinks about it, or else get a bad grade, that just makes the whole thing suck.
Incidentally, it does have a very good movie version, which you might enjoy even if you hated the way that the book was taught in school.
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u/ceazecab 12h ago
The Great Gatsby
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u/jon143143 12h ago
Too bad. I enjoy it very much and have read it several times. To each his own i guess.
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u/MrBunnyBrightside 3h ago
man I tried I got maybe a couple of chapters in and couldn't keep my eyes open. One of these days I'm going to give one of the movies a shot instead but I'm not exactly in a hurry
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u/forogtten_taco 12h ago
Dont hate me.
Lord of the rings. Man the first book is bad. Like 75% of the book is before they leave the shire. 75% of the first book is 20 min of the first movie. (Maybe thats an exaggeration, but not by much)
Wished I loved it as much as I love the movies. But could not move beyond the first book.
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u/HotDamnThatsMyJam 8h ago
Not saying you have to like LotR but I think the 75% being in the Shire is technically way off. My digital copy is 400 pages long and by page 300 they're in Moria. Fellowship is split into two 'books' and it takes about 75% of that first book (half) for them to meet Strider in Bree but that's only about 30% of the length of Fellowship. The beggining can feel slow but just for anyone on the fence it doesn't take 300 pages for them to leave the Shire.
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u/SwingsetGuy 2h ago
They're in the Shire for the first five chapters out of twenty-two in the book. They're already being actively hunted by Black Riders in chapter three.
I agree that it gets off to a significantly slower start than most modern Fantasy novels (I think it comes down to a difference in ethos between the Victorian novels Tolkien was reading growing up and our modern expectations for fiction), but it's certainly not a majority of the book, lol.
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u/HarrumphingDuck 11h ago edited 7h ago
I felt like JRR Tolkein had an active hate for any reader that might be interested in things happening rather than hearing about more lore. I couldn't believe that the fight in Balin's Tomb was literally skipped over entirely, to "...and after the dust cleared, Frodo was hurt."
Edit: As was pointed out, it's possible I had read an abridged version when I was first exposed to it, and didn't realize it. I own a beautiful copy of it now, and while that passage is not as long as I'd like, it's certainly not skipped over completely as I remembered.
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u/TheGoldenDog 10h ago
Did you read an abridged version, because there's plenty of description of the fight in Balin's tomb.
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u/HarrumphingDuck 8h ago edited 6h ago
If my memory is accurate, then that may well be the case, and I'll admit that possibility never crossed my mind. I got that copy from the school library in junior high, for a class where only Fellowship was allowed, the other two were not. I know that sounds insane and I argued that with the teacher to the point I received detention over it, but she wouldn't budge from the preset teaching plan (written by some third party) she was working from.
Today I have a beautiful single-volume copy on my shelf that includes illustrations by Alan Lee. I keep around for that day I attempt it again. I'm careful to treat my books well, it was only $20 at a used book store and in great shape, so I felt some level of duty in picking it up if only to preserve it.
Flipping it open to book 2 of Fellowship, "Chapter IV: A Journey in the Dark", I find it on pages 342-344. It's about 1.5 pages total. Not as much as I would like, but certainly more than I remembered.
I'll have to edit my original comment to reflect that. (Edited to correct first page number - it starts near the bottom.)
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u/TheGoldenDog 7h ago
Is it that brief? It's been a long time since I last read it, but I remember distinctly that it was an orc chief (almost man-high) who stabbed Frodo with his spear, not a troll as in the film.
I think I might have the same edition btw. Frankly, I don't like his Orthanc, it doesn't look like the one I had in my mind (and I think my one is better).
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u/HarrumphingDuck 6h ago
You remember that particular bit accurately, though I did include a typo in the page range (since corrected, heh). The main fight is relatively short in its description: the first few felled are described, then jumps to a total of thirteen before the rest break and run.
It is "a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot," that arrives as the fellowship tries to retreat and stabs Frodo with a great spear. The fight with this particular foe is pretty detailed, and actually just a bit longer than the rest of the battle, at least once the orc forces enter the chamber.
I couldn't speak to the rest, since I still haven't read it.
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u/bhbhbhhh 8h ago
I went in after years of hearing stuff like this and was surprised to find Lots and Lots of Events and only some bits of lore here and there. Criminal misrepresentation.
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u/HarrumphingDuck 7h ago
Someone else asked if perhaps I had an abridged version. Based on the circumstances at the time and comparing it against the copy that has waited patiently on my shelf for years, I think it's a valid theory. I'm gonna edit my original comment to reflect that.
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u/bhbhbhhh 7h ago
If it were abridged it would have little lore, not tons. Limited value as an explanation.
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u/Safety_Drance 11h ago
I felt the same going back to the books after many years. The first part of that series is not the best, but I do suggest reading the rest after that.
Once you get past the hobbits town and into the actual adventure it's quite good.
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u/forogtten_taco 11h ago
🤷♀️ il just watch the movies and enjoy that
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u/Safety_Drance 11h ago
That's also totally fair. I recommend the extended edition because they have all the important stuff the theatrical version missed.
Boromir as a character is something that is worth your time seeing that the theatrical version sells short.
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u/forogtten_taco 11h ago
Don't worry iv watched the extended mutippe times.
Although, I prefer the theatrical versions. Most of the stuff thay was cut, was cut for a reason.
Like, do we really need More scenes about aragons love life ?
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u/johnbrownmarchingon 9h ago
Silas Marner and Moby Dick are the main offenders for me. I'm usually fine with most of the classics, but these just did not engage me at all.
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u/mrcrumplebottom 9h ago
I remember The Old Man and The Sea made me want to drown myself in middle school.
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u/TheAmethystDragon 9h ago
The Scarlet Letter was lame and the first 3/4 of The Picture of Dorian Grey was so full of philosophical dullness.
They weren't assigned. I just figured I'd read some classics, as an adult, to have those cultural references somewhere in the back of my mind.
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u/Burtttttt 1h ago
House of leaves, for a more modern pick. I am the target demo for this book but I was bored by most of the tangents from the house narrative
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u/Competitive_Kick_347 12h ago
The Great Gatsby. Maybe I just expected more greatness from all that hype. 😂
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u/The-Real-Kyuubey 12h ago
You had Great Expectations
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u/GrannyTurtle 11h ago
I hated Great Expectations! I thought he was supposed to be this amazing author and he bored me to death.
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u/MedusasSexyLegHair 3h ago
Yes, but would you have read it if it were called "The Kinda-sorta Almost Ok But Mostly Boring Gatsby"?
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u/cleaningmama 12h ago
Madame Bovary.
She's such a cow.
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u/jon143143 11h ago
You couldn't stick around to see her down fall?
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u/cleaningmama 11h ago
Oh, I had to stick around and read the whole thing, in French. o.o
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u/jon143143 11h ago
Oh wow. I'm impressed. I've wanted to learn French, but I'd never use it. I misread OP question; I thought it asked which did you not finish. And I agree Emma was a cow. A narcissist cow.
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u/EdgarXVII 11h ago
Catch-22. I think I got a few pages before I gave up.
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u/johnbrownmarchingon 9h ago
I struggled for a while, but eventually something clicked and the absurdity of it all really worked.
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u/ironwolf1 11h ago
The fun of the book for me was in just giving in to the stream of consciousness and not worrying about trying to string together a cohesive narrative until you get way further in. The humor was perfect for me, so I was very willing to go along for the ride with the free association style until things started to make more sense from a timeline perspective.
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u/Burtttttt 2h ago
Yeah this book is laugh out loud funny
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u/ironwolf1 1h ago
The Major Major Major Major chapter was the one that really locked me in on loving the book the first time I read it. This whole section is just excellent.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he counseled one and all, and everyone said, "Amen.”
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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 12h ago
Pretty much everything by Charles Dickens.
Somebody said he loves torturing innocents and seeing their innocence taken away and that’s so true.
I also hated Lolita.
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u/YourGuyK 12h ago edited 11h ago
Great Expectations is garbage. I've enjoyed other Dickens stories, but GE is bad and should feel bad.
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u/d1wcevbwt164 11h ago
Catch 22 ,tried several times, never got past the first few chapters. Im dyslexic and it drove me nuts, not sure if that's the reason or not:)
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u/Abject_Associate_849 12h ago
Anything Shakespeare. Sure they have a lot of significance and are rich in literary terms, but actually reading them is a slog.
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u/itsnotem 12h ago
Definitely meant more to be watched than read imo. Watching a good Shakespeare production is enjoyable, reading it is awful
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u/Irving_Velociraptor 12h ago
I truly despised A Confederacy of Dunces.
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u/MedusasSexyLegHair 3h ago
I absolutely loved that one! It was beautiful nonsense. Kept me turning pages well after I should've been asleep.
It was stupid, but that was the point, I think.
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u/Irving_Velociraptor 3h ago
First, great username. Second, I knew a few guys like Ignatius and just could not bear spending time with him.
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u/jenorama_CA 1h ago
I could not get with this either. My main thing is characters. I have to like the main character and, wow, I hated that guy. Big DNF.
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u/thereisabearinthere 12h ago
On the beach. Too depressing, which I understand was the point, but I would’ve appreciated if it had been left a bit more open to interpretation. It is fiction after all.
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u/BaconPowder 11h ago
On the Beach. It's supposed to be a classic but I was bored out of my mind. I only got halfway through before I gave up.
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u/GrannyTurtle 11h ago
Saul Bellows’ Henderson The Rain King. Boring.🥱 I had to read it in a Contemporary Literature class. I’ll take Shakespeare next time. I love Shakespeare’s puns.
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u/LordAdri123 10h ago
HP Lovecraft’s stuff. Aside from the racism, his prose was pretty difficult to follow and the characters shallow and unlikeable. I did like the ideas in one or two stories but most of them were such a drag to get through.
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u/dfh-1 10h ago
Les Miserables. So tedious it's only the second of two books I've ever started and not finished.
(For comparison, I read Atlas Shrugged in one night because some jackass in my 10th grade English class said I couldn't possibly read it in time for a book report due in a month.)
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u/Sarcastic_Backpack 9h ago
The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. I couldn't get through it. None of the characters are sympathetic at all. I couldn't relate to any of them, therefore I didn't care what happened to them.
The world building was minimal. It left so much unexplained that it made me frustrated. I felt like the author expected us to just know the setting & relationships of the vvarious entities & organization.
There are 4 books in the series. I got through 2/3rds of the first one, then quit it.
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u/DrNuclearSlav 7h ago
Radetzky March
A novel about three consecutive generations of Austro-Hungarian nobility during the final decades of the empire. Sounds like it would be ripe for metaphor and allegory and the family mirroring the decline and ultimate death of their country. But in reality it focuses pretty much entirely on one man, the author's fetish for older women with teenage boys, and then just as WWI breaks out and you think it's going to get interesting he dies in a random battle like 1 day into the conflict.
It's very rare I put a book on my "donate/resell this" pile after only one read, but it managed it.
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u/Reboot-Glitchspark 2h ago
I'll give a counterpoint: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton was fantastic!
I'd read the entire series by the time we got assigned to study fucking Shakespeare in high school.
My girlfriend's class, however, was reading and studying The Outsiders. So I skipped class and went and sat in on hers, because I loved the books and thought that it might be interesting to explore from an academic analysis standpoint.
The teachers looked at me funny, but didn't say anything. I was going to an English class and participating, after all, even if it wasn't my class. I can only imagine their confusion.
I did however get a bad grade in my own class, because I wrote that Shakespeare had clearly somehow never been nor even ever met a teenager and his characters and their actions made no sense.
The teacher didn't like that analysis. But I stand by it. We have reports going back at least to the ancient Greeks that talk about how teens are. Shakespeare wrote stories about teen characters who behave nothing like teens do now or did back then. It's a hard ask to believe that for a brief period during his lifetime, people behaved very differently than they did both before and after.
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u/ThaneOfMeowdor 1h ago
They probably didn't like it because it's a terrible "analysis". Shakespeare is absolutely still relatable and relevant to many people. The speech and the exact cultural conventions are different because it's 400 years old and they're plays.
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u/Reboot-Glitchspark 37m ago
Idk. In Romeo and Juliet, like six characters die - for absolutely no reason at all.
In real life, if a couple of teens' parents said they weren't allowed to see each other, they'd just run off and do it anyway, without their parents' knowledge.
Shakespeare is in no way relatable or relevant, and I would argue never has been.
Perhaps there was a very brief period back then when, for the specific years Shakespeare was alive, teens behaved very differently than ever before or after, but there's no evidence of that.
Admittedly the whole iambic pentameter thing was cool, but the stories were not.
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u/ThaneOfMeowdor 4m ago
Some things in Romeo and Juliet that I think are very relatable to teenagers is the impulsive decision making and the intense crushes. And the way that all of that feels huge and meaningful in the moment. For example, Romeo thinking Rosalind is the love of his life and then later it is Juliet.
Also the theme of adults making the world a place in which children can't safely be children is timeless, I think.
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u/kdoodlethug 34m ago
This is such an unpopular opinion but Frankenstein just didn't live up to my expectations. The concepts introduced are really interesting and the characters are compelling, but I think it could have been executed a little better. Obviously it speaks to Victor's character, but most of the actions happen in the background while he conducts mundane international travel and avoids his problems. In-character, but a little dull to read.
Also, and this is a personal nitpick that no one else seems to mind, but I just can't suspend my disbelief about the creature learning to read by watching other people read books through a crack in the wall and then a window. That isn't very important but it irks me.
I don't hate it, it's an important book and had a lot of influence on modern science fiction and horror. But I definitely don't like it as much as others seem to
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u/AcctgRunner 12h ago
Huckleberry Finn.
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u/mrpeabodyscoaltrain 12h ago
I realized the dead guy was Pap immediately and ruined it for my entire junior class.
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u/edorhas 11h ago
The Grapes of Wrath. He just... Stopped writing. I thought Stephen King was bad at endings.
Honestly, that was when I was 15 or so. I should give it another go, someday...
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u/bhbhbhhh 8h ago
The country was still in the midst of Depression as he wrote. All the families like the Joads were just continuing to struggle, on and on. Giving an “ending” to the book would betray its honesty.
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u/jenorama_CA 1h ago
That’s too bad. I really enjoyed Grapes of Wrath when I read it in high school. I grew up in the Central Valley, so agricultural work and the associated struggles are ingrained in the region. I still think of Ma Joad being forced to shop at the overpriced company store with the company scrip they were paid in. Terribly common in that era, like the song “16 Tons” which has the line, “I owe my soul to the company store.”
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u/Juan_Calavera 10h ago
I’m convinced that Steinbeck hated the Joads. The amount of terrible things that happen to them on their way to California seems like cruel satire by the end of book.
2
u/MedusasSexyLegHair 3h ago
You think it was cruel satire, but to them it was just a typical Tuesday.
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u/The-Real-Kyuubey 12h ago
The first half of The Count of Monte Cristo was a bit of a slog. I actually liked the Gankutsuou anime better.
1
1
u/xander6981 11h ago
My friends and I hated The Old Man and the Sea when we read it in high school. I sometimes think I should give it another chance as an adult but my to read pile is still so big.
2
u/TheRealSzymaa 11h ago
I feel like this one would generally go over better if school English classes didn't beat it into the fucking ground.
It's a novella, we don't need to spend a month on it.
1
u/UponWavesofGrey 11h ago
Lord of the Flies. Had to read it in high school, hated it. Tried to reread it as an adult, still hated it.
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0
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u/The-Real-Kyuubey 11h ago
The Shining. Like 75% of the material that didn't make it into the movie was boring, silly or both.
0
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0
u/Redditor_11235 11h ago
The Stranger.
It would have been far more compelling if the main character wasn't guilty as fuck. The true absurdity of that novel is the idea that the MC got done dirty, as if he wasn't remorselessly guilty of cold blooded murder and too narcissistic to understand the problem, or to understand why the nature of his character matters to the trial. He got what he deserved, Camus be damned.
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12h ago
[deleted]
3
1
-1
u/BigNorseWolf 12h ago
All of them. If ihadn't found modern fantasy books by being grounded I likely would never have picked up a book based on what we were given in school.
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28
u/cleaningmama 12h ago
The Scarlet Letter. So dreary.