It’s a question inspired by this post https://www.reddit.com/r/books/s/s2jK2DzFrA by u/oh_sneezeus
Is there any book that is considered a classic or regularly shows up on the “100 books to read before you die” lists and such, you had high expectations before reading and then you ended up absolutey detesting?
For me it’s Blindness by José Saramago, it started off good and then page after page it was becoming more unbearable for me to read, I hated the characters, the things they were doing and the conclusions of the book. I was really disappointed because the plot seemed really good and all I ended up with was frustration.
Is there a book that did the same to you?
This really depends on what it takes to qualify as a “classic”. I’ve respected all of the really well-known classics I’ve read, but I’ve come across a few stinkers on the long tail :P
My most recent disappointment was The Magus by John Fowles—pretentious pseudo-profound wank that takes itself far too seriously. And yet it’s made it onto seemingly serious “top 100” lists? Rather uncharitably, it strikes me as the worst sort of middlebrow book that dull people read to seem intelligent.
When I bother to write reviews on Goodreads I usually try to substantiate my criticism, but I didn’t bother in this case:
It’s a long book that self-consciously exhibits all the superficial signifiers of “serious literature” without the substance to back it up. The characters are flat, the relationships between them are strained, the plot is contrived, the war flashbacks—a rare part of the book that had potential—are nothing more than flat, cliche moral plays. The psychological babble towards the end seems to be played straight but is self-parodyingly bad, too condescending and insufficiently earnest to get into “so bad it’s good” territory.
The craziest thing is that this is the sort of book I usually like! I’m a total sucker for postmodern books that are twice as long as they have to be and go all over the place. I’m totally willing to forgive poor characterization and an incoherent plot if the writing is strong and the ideas are interesting. The Magus had to fail on every dimension for me to dislike it.
Maybe that’s the point of the book and I missed it. But the fundamental problem is that you can’t critique or satirize poor writing and poor thinking just by writing poorly and thinking poorly yourself. You can absolutely write something incredible that seems crazy at the surface—one of my favorite reads this year was Pale Fire and that’s what it does—but you have to execute it in a way that works on multiple levels. Making bad writing good is really hard. Even if that’s what The Magus was trying—and, frankly, I am not convinced it was—it ended up an abject failure.
I should probably just take this whole comment and put it up as my review on Goodreads :P