Highly regarded but overrated in your opinion....

candlegrease wrote: »

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Edgar Allan Poe
Axelandar Dumas
George RR Martin
Fyodor Dostoevesky

These are the writers who spring to mind right now.

true-or-false wrote: »

I have to say, I was horribly disappointed in The Road. It was recommended to me by a few people, and it sounds in summary like exactly the type of thing I'd like, but I just found it boring. I barely rooted for the characters at all, there were only two points in the whole book where I felt anything (they were

the bit in the basement and the bit with the pregnant woman

), and by the time it finished, I thought the ending was terrible but wasn't even involved in the book enough to feel let down by the lack of a good ending.

Queen-Mise wrote: »

The appeal of Wuthering Heights - I just don't understand, whiny, moany, miserable tripe.

Slattsy wrote: »

Lord of Flies ?? Really ??!!
No way man, you're crazy

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

I can totally understand why someone woud hate this book, the long sentences, the lack of punctuation and quotation marks, the archaic words, the long stretches of descriptive text, the horrendous violence.

But this is my favourite book, as I read it I wrote on a bookmark the pages where there were particularly amazing pieces of writing. By the time I finished I had written down about 50 page numbers. Then I read it again and added even more. Some of the passages I found literally breathtaking, some samples:

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that there numbers are no less.

The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

The dust of that party raised and was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he’s a wry and grinning tradesmen good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they’ve gone to hide from God.


The imagery and atmosphere evoked throughout the book is simply magnificent. He describes the desert landscape of the US/Mexico so well I almost feel I've been there. The prose exudes gravitas, it reads like it wasn't scribbled or typed but rather hewn from stone.

While descriptions of events and surroundings are given plenty of room, the space allocated to the characters is puny by comparison. This a dark tale of dark men, what characters they have must be eked out from the sparse dialogue assigned to them. With one exception, ‘the judge’, the most compelling and cryptic of characters, both impossibly erudite and almost unimaginably vile. He dominates the proceedings when he is present and is never far from your thoughts when he is absent. Think of a conflation of Captain Ahab, Colonol Kurtz and Milton's Satan and you're nearly there.

(I do go on but you did ask......)