Hey there everyone! I finished reading Saramago’s ‘Blindness’ a while ago and… I have to admit that I had to push myself through to finish it, much to the bafflement of many people who consider it a ‘masterpiece’. When I wrote its review, I pointed out how the written style was blocky and nearly a headache to read due to the lack of proper punctuation, paragraphs and so on.
But now I’m sort of curious, what sort of book you thought was ‘overrated’ and why?
The Devil in the White City
In Cold Blood
I really hated Devil in the White City. I hated that it was promoted as a true crime book but it was actually 75% World’s Fair history and 25% murder. I wanted all murder!
Oh glad I’m not the only one! I had a vague knowledge about h.h. Holmes so I was looking forward to learning more. I got more out of reading his Wiki page than this book.
The Lovely Bones. I read 90% of it and had to put it down. Didn’t even Google the ending. Did not care what happened. 🫤
I first thought of The Lovely Bones. The writer seemed like she started off wanting to write a story where the ghost helps people catch the killer, then turned it into a mood piece about people grieving and coping, and then got to the end and realized “Oh yeah, I have to wrap this up, I’ll caught ‘death by icicle’ so at least there’s some karma.”
Any Colleen Hoover book.
Is she actually popular? I’ve only ever read negative things about her
I see her books everywhere in Costco/Sam’s club/target
Kafka’s Metamorphisis. Story could have been a third of the lenght.
Unfortunately, All the Pretty Horses. I’ve read it three times now and I just don’t get much from the experience.
I’m a huge fan of McCarthy’s first five novels, but after Blood Meridian, his style changes pretty drastically and loses a lot of its depth.
The last time I read ATPH, I was reading through McCarthy’s first 10 books (in anticipation of The Passenger/Stella Maris). Going straight from Blood Meridian to ATPH makes ATPH almost read like parody.
Why 3 times? Have you ready his other book even more times, and you were just being fair?
ATPH is the only one I’ve read, and I liked it a lot, so this makes me think I should bump the other ones up in my queue!
That’s odd because I love ATPH but can’t get through Blood Meridian.
All the light we cannot see. Pretty much anything that wins a Pulitzer.
It’s a good book, but I liked his follow up, Cloud Cuckoo Land, much more. It has a similar narrative structure to All the Light We Cannot See, but it goes across a couple more timelines and has a more compelling story across all of them.
Yeah, I liked it fine enough, but wouldn’t have strongly recommended it to anyone.
Richard Powers’ The Overstory. I was so bored for almost the entire book, and the characters were so plain and caricatured.
Edit: Also completely agree with you on Blindness. I just was not inspired at all.
So tired of these fucking posts every day and the same answers. Blocked.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. What a misguided attempt
Anxious People was very overrated
50 shades of grey. Not hot or sexy at all. Ridiculous and unintetionally funny.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It was like someone asked chat gpt to “write me a novel in the style of a 10 year old writing fan fiction to someone else’s fan fiction.”
Wheel of Time - I read almost exclusively fantasy and sci-fi, and it’s so beloved that I should love it as well…I made it to about half thru book 4 and called it quits. Felt like such a slog & I didn’t find myself caring about any of the characters. I’ll probably give it another go in a couple years but man I was disappointed that I couldn’t get into the series that most of my friends consider the best series they’ve read.
“The Brothers Karamazov.”
I read it in school first, dismissed it, and then revisited it years later on the recommendation of my co-religionists (the book is, for reasons not fully understood even by Dostoevsky’s compatriots, well-loved by English-speaking Catholics).
I actually found it even worse on the second reading, because, after reading, in the intervening years, about all the Tsarist crimes against religious minorities that they conquered (the Old Believers, Ukrainian Catholics, Polish Catholics, Circassian Muslims, pogroms against Jews, etc.), the entire “Grand Inquisitor” sequence, which is so famous and oft-cited for this book…just comes off as hypocritical tripe. I prefer Gogol–at least he wears his bigotry on his sleeve and doesn’t cloak it in nonsense about “universal love”.
And, frankly, I don’t find Dostoevsky’s psychological “insights” particularly groundbreaking. Ivan, who is so often mentioned as a Christian believer’s attempt to steel-man atheism, is just laughable to me–‘if God, why bad thing?!’ is the most coherent argument he can come up with, and it’s just sentimentalism, not actual philosophy.
On the plus side, the lifelong hatred of Dostoevsky I gained turned me on to other writers who also hated Dostoevsky. Like Joseph Conrad. And one of these days I’ll read Lolita for the same reason. And I tried Tolstoy because someone told me that people who hate Dostoevsky tend to like him, and I did enjoy War and Peace.
Dishonorable mentions:
Ethan Frome. Yes, I get it, the pickle-and-donut meal is innuendo. That doesn’t make it appealing.
Cat’s Cradle. I just don’t like Vonnegut’s sense of humor, or his nihilistic tendencies. He was basically an early-2010s Redditor.
The House in the Cerulean Sea. It wasn’t a BAD book by any stretch of the imagination, but considering how many folks raved about it to me, I was pretty underwhelmed. Based on reports from other readers, I was expecting something beautiful and moving, but ultimately it was just kind of… twee, I guess. Maybe I’m just a robot?