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Catch 22 - I liked it the first time, but not the second time and certainly not the third time. And then I realised I was only a third of the way through the book. Gravity's Rainbow - Some funny ideas, great visuals, fantastic characters, but good god it's difficult to read. I'm savomg this for when I get a really good reading chair. The Crucible - My drama teacher talked my ear off about how wonderful it is, and I failed to enjoy it. To be honest, I prefer the modern McCarthy witch-hunt over the metaphorical olde thymes one. LooseChanj posted:The Hunchback of Notre DAme. What an unreadable pile of poo poo. Seriously, two paragraphs of story in between a hundred pages of "And the bottom brick on 23 Rue De Merde was slightly off-gray, and when the sun shone on it just right you might see the grain. The brick above that..." Les Miserables is a lot like that, only Hunchback is 500 pages while Les Miserables is 1,200 pages. I plowed through all of them, but yeah, it's a lot like that. The worst transgression was when Valjean descends into the sewers and Hugo descends into a chapter called "The Entrails Of The Monster", which starts as a history and detailed description of the Paris sewers, and then turns into an essay about Hugo's idea to set up nets to catch the poo poo that floats out and use it to fertilize the fields. 
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May 9, 2008 20:10
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Dr. Capco posted:Also, when i saw the trailer for There Will be Blood I ran out and bought Oil! to read before the movie came out. I stopped reading halfway through when the story goes to absolute poo poo and gets incredibly predictable. If anyone's finished this I'd appreciate knowing whether the book is worth finishing soon or if leaving it to collect dust would be a better idea. Upton Sinclair is a somewhat mediocre author who happened to cause a revolution in the meat-packing industry while trying to get everyone on the socialism train. It doesn't help that There Will Be Blood is a pretty loose adaptation of Oil!, either.
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Jun 9, 2008 19:39
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EvilUrchin posted:Oh God, totally forgot about the several books high school English killed for me to the extent that I simply dropped them then and there. This list includes: That's really too bad. It's actually one of my favorite novels, but high school teachers tend to miss the forest for the trees with it. They do that with a lot of books; my 11th grade teacher spent a week on the titular chapter in Catcher In The Rye, but had absolutely no idea that Holden is an unreliable narrator until I pointed it out. What're they teaching these teachers?
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Jul 24, 2008 06:34
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stray posted:Exactly. I can't get through Foucault's Pendulum. It's so close to being awesome, but it's also so infuriating that I just can't make it through the book. I also think that if someone were serious, this could make for an incredible movie. I really pushed through the tough part, where it's like a textbook on the history of secret societies, and the rest of the book is barely interesting enough to justify all that. I agree, it'd make for a terrific movie. Just condense the ridiculous history passages. It's defenitely better than Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, though.
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Aug 19, 2008 22:20
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I failed to make it all the way through Duma Key. I got just past the big showing of all of his paintings where the old lady flips out and just gave up. Honestly, half of it was that damned Wireman and his muchachos, and apparently it gets really good in the last third, but god I completely failed to give a poo poo.
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Dec 4, 2008 20:02
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