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Most overrated book

paulanthony

What is the most overrated book you have read and why?

For me it has to be Beatlebone by Kevin Barry.

I don't know if it is the worst book I have ever read (it may be) but I say overrated as it has won awards and garnered a lot of praise.

It strikes me as the literary version of the recent taping a banana to a wall in an art gallery or a blank canvas with one dot in the middle where everyone stands around and says it's amazing as they are all afraid of being branded a philistine by saying is this not just a load of ****?

I thought it was a self-indulgent load of nonsense - the kind of "modern literary" book someone might write as a joke to see how many awards it might win. The chapter towards the end about the writing process really took the biscuit too.

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8kczg9v0swrydm

Harry Potter. Awful stuff.

Camus, de Beauvoir - struggled to get through, the message was terrible.

To School through the Fields - some bits were ok, though did not appreciate the preachy tone and the constant 'my childhood was so much better than today'.

Rodin

Catch 22.
Didn't even finish it.

Yossarian was one hateful so and so.

Ulysses Gaze

Rodin wrote: »

Catch 22.
Didn't even finish it.

Yossarian was one hateful so and so.

Same here.
Lots of people I know raved about it, but I thought it was woeful.

s7ryf3925pivug

The White Feather wrote: »

I have a few that come to mind straight away!

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger - A tedious read about a whiny teenager

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson - Complete drivel that I abandoned

The Old man and the sea by Ernest Hemingway - Old guy goes fishing in a boat. The End. zzzzzzzzz

I liked all of these.

I find the status of The Catcher in the Rye surprising all the same. Perhaps I would understand if I reread it as an adult.

I'm going to say that you didn't get The Old Man and the Sea.

magicbastarder

CrankyHaus wrote: »

The latter.

if i think the book is **** and not worth my time, i'm saying it's overrated. there's not much more to it than that. saying to someone 'it's not overrated, you just didn't like it' is either snobbish or misses the point.

s7ryf3925pivug

Wabbit Ears wrote: »

Magician by Feist. It was young adult fantasy back when that genre was actually mainly read by young adults. Many people really loved the book and its always on every fantasy reading list. Problem is its muck. The magic system makes no sense and everything is completely contrived. Grand if you're a teenager but its adults recommending it to other adults based solely on nostalgia and the fact we had limted access to this genre In ireland at the time it came out.

Yeah that one.

CrankyHaus

magicbastarder wrote: »

if i think the book is **** and not worth my time, i'm saying it's overrated. there's not much more to it than that. saying to someone 'it's not overrated, you just didn't like it' is either snobbish or misses the point.

I disagree. There are lots of things I don't like that I can appreciate may have some merit.

People raised the example of Cormac McCarthy's books earlier. Apart from All the Pretty Horses I did not enjoy his books. However many, including many on this Thread, feel differently.

I have enough respect for those people's opinions to accept that his books have some qualities.

You call this snobbery? If anything the snobbery is in thinking that any book you do not like is objectively bad, and if well regarded it must be "overrated".

The OP gave a good example of a book that may be overrated. The "rating" in that case comes from an industry, and a commentariat beholden to it, that is really just trying to shift books and is often guilty of "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome.
Most of the Thread since has just been people saying they didn't enjoy Ulysses or whatever, therefore it must be overrated.

magicbastarder

CrankyHaus wrote: »

Most of the Thread since has just been people saying they didn't enjoy Ulysses or whatever, therefore it must be overrated.

that's the point. they didn't like it, so they think it's overrated. it's that simple.

s7ryf3925pivug

magicbastarder wrote: »

that's the point. they didn't like it, so they think it's overrated. it's that simple.

You can separate your enjoyment of something from your ideas about its literary merits.

magicbastarder

anyway, back on topic, there was a book i was recommended a few years back, by several people, as a 'must read' which i read and i hated it so much, i have blotted the title out of my mind. it was about some **** hot american intelligence agent chasing down a criminal mastermind hell bent on releasing some awful biological agent on the world.
weirdly, i managed to finish it.

i managed the same with 'angels and demons' by dan brown, but to be fair, i didn't go in expecting anything much.
what i didn't expect was in the opening pages, that there would be a useless, eye wateringly pointless, detail about CERN owning a mach 25 plane, which does not advance the plot in any way except to make the reader wonder 'was the guy who wrote this a 12 year old?'

r93kaey5p2izun

Jana Prickly Seascape wrote: »

You can separate your enjoyment of something from your ideas about its literary merits.

Yes, it works both ways. I enjoyed Catcher In the Rye. Still think it's massively overrated. Did not enjoy anything by Tolkien, but don't think he's overrated.

looksee

Dare I say 'A Game of Thrones'? I am a fantasy fan (I like Magician btw) but I have tried GOT several times and haven't managed to get past the bit where the dogs are introduced. I haven't seen the tv series.

Shapey Fiend

I absolutely hated Catcher in the Rye but I think I finished it cos I was maybe 13 and I was hoping there'd be riding. Had a read of a chapter of it more recently still found it maddening.

Loved the Old Man and the Sea I think I read it twice.

Catch 22 I really wanted to like cos I'd just finished Slaughterhouse 5 and wanted more wartime black humour but I really didn't find it funny. May need to revisit.

If I'm going to be controversial I suppose I really didn't like Lord of the Rings. I only finished the first book but by god I found it a drag. The Hobbit a bit less so but I didn't like it either. My preference in terms of fantasy books as a kid was the Wizard of Earthsea series which sort of defined what the limitations of magic were so it felt more grounded.

The first Game of Thrones book is a bit of a drag until you're 200 pages in. It's got a slightly grating American tries to write ye olde english dialogue aspect to it. After that I was completely hooked though. The last book wasn't quite as strong as the preceding ones.

Mick McGraw

I hated Catch 22.

I gave up on it after about 100 pages as I couldn't take any more of it. Reading it felt like having to endure a really annoying obnoxious individual continually shouting the same joke at you and elbowing you in the side and saying "Funny, isn't it. It's funny this is isn't it" .

magicbastarder

Speaking of slaughterhouse 5, I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. Much preferred 'bluebeard'.

Joe_ Public

Is there anybody who thinks Catch 22 was...merely ok. It's one of my all time favourites but seems a kind of ultimate marmite book. Love or hate.

s7ryf3925pivug

Mick McGraw wrote: »

I hated Catch 22.

I gave up on it after about 100 pages as I couldn't take any more of it. Reading it felt like having to endure a really annoying obnoxious individual continually shouting the same joke at you and elbowing you in the side and saying "Funny, isn't it. It's funny this is isn't it" .

I liked it.

I read some other books by Joseph Heller. I disliked Good as Gold and Something Happened. He also did a sequel to Catch-22, which I don't remember very well.

Something Happened is a guy talking about how much he hates everything in his very mundane life for an entire book. Then at the end something happens. It's an extraordinarily bleak book. I feel a little depressed just thinking of it.

The only thing in his life that brings him any joy is his son. At the end his son is involved in a car accident. He is distraught and holds him very tightly. It is subtly revealed that the boy was not badly hurt in the crash, but was in fact smothered to death by his father holding him. The narrator doesn't let anyone know that this is what happened and just continues his life in a state of utter despair.

So it has literary merit but is also a horrible read.

magicbastarder

'something happened' is brilliantly written; it's an awful downbeat slog though, but the last few pages are some of the best pages i've read in a book.
that said, i'm not in any rush to reread it.

mc25

Atonement

Didn't much like the movie either!

Madeoface

The Power of Now. Could it even be classed as a book? One idea that could have been 2 pages long.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown(trout). I had started a new job and a colleague gave it to me as people ranted and raved about it in the canteen....being new i couldn't say how ****e I thought it was, that anything Kipper did in my kids 12 page books had more intrigue. It was google maps with a plot stitched on.

(I liked Slaughterhouse 5 - Catch 22 ok, over-rated perhaps).

growleaves

I loved Catch 22 but later realised its a rip-off of Céline to some extent, especially 'Journey to the End of the Night', a truly great and strange book (though one which is disliked by many people). Céline's sense of humour is even darker and grislier.

georgina...c

Mick McGraw wrote: »

I hated Catch 22.

I gave up on it after about 100 pages as I couldn't take any more of it. Reading it felt like having to endure a really annoying obnoxious individual continually shouting the same joke at you and elbowing you in the side and saying "Funny, isn't it. It's funny this is isn't it" .

Oh god nothing worse. I endured that in real life.

Hated Catch22 too.

Jimbob1977

Catcher in the Rye became "cool and edgy" because Mark Chapman (murdered John Lennon) read the book and thought that he was the embodiment of Holden Caulfield. South Park have a very good parody of it.

It's a good book.

Hercule Poirot

PowerToWait wrote: »

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was simply massively overrated.

I completely disagree with this. The fact it became so popular hurt it because it's a much better book if you know nothing about the plot before you read it but I wouldn't say it's overrated.

JustAThought

I wonder whether ‘THE CLASSICS’ are ever revisited and reevaluated or are just ignored snd left as ‘ the classics’ because nobody actually rereads them or has visited them in decades.The likes of the old must haves on the shelf -Dickens/David Copperfield/Robinsoe Crusoe/Middleton/Northanger Abbey/Emma etc. Charity shops are littered with them.

Idle Passerby

JustAThought wrote: »

I wonder whether ‘THE CLASSICS’ are ever revisited and reevaluated or are just ignored snd left as ‘ the classics’ because nobody actually rereads them or has visited them in decades.The likes of the old must haves on the shelf -Dickens/David Copperfield/Robinsoe Crusoe/Middleton/Northanger Abbey/Emma etc. Charity shops are littered with them.

Charity shops are full of them because they are on school curriculums.

New Home

..and because you can often get them new in bookshops at 3 for a tenner, so they're easy to buy, you don't have to invest as much in them as you would in a hardback.

CrankyHaus

Idle Passerby wrote: »

Charity shops are full of them because they are on school curriculums.

Are they?
Here's the current LC prescribed list of novels/memoirs:

ADICHIE, Ngozi Chimimanda Americanah
ATKINSON, Kate Behind the Scenes at the Museum
ATWOOD, Margaret The Handmaid’s Tale
AUSTEN, Jane Persuasion
BARRY, Sebastian Days Without End
BRONTË, Emily Wuthering Heights
DOERR, Anthony All the Light We Cannot See
DONOGHUE, Emma Room
ELIOT, George Silas Marner
FITZMAURICE, Simon It’s Not Yet Dark
ISHIGURO, Kazuo Never Let Me Go
LEVI, Primo If This Is A Man
O’CONNOR, Joseph Star of the Sea
ORWELL, George 1984
PEACE, David The Damned Utd.
RYAN, Donal The Spinning Heart
SATRAPI, Marjane Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and
The Story of a Return (Graphic Memoir)
TAYLOR, Sara The Lauras
WALLACE, Jason Out of Shadows
WILDE, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891 version)

magicbastarder

that's a decent list. 'if this is a man' is some book.

CrankyHaus

I was surprised to see The Damned United in there. Apparently it had to be published here with a non-factual disclaimer because of it's portrayal of Johnny Giles.