What's good about these books?

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Following on from the overrated books thread, I realised there are some books that I really want to like, but can't help thinking they are a bit shite really. Am I being fick? If you like them please help me see the light.

Explanations of why I am spectacularly missing the point, or contributions of other seemingly shite books welcome.

So...

Villette - seems to be about a woman dripping around in France, pointlessly.

Metamorphosis - man turns into a beetle and gets pissed off then dies.

What am I missing?

Lawrence deserved to buggered with a poker. But that is just my opinion.

Like EM Forster. Like George Eliot. Can't remember much about the Magus.... was a loong time ago.

Iam McEwan - nope! I tried to like him but can't. Saturday made me want to poke my eyes out. DH loves him.

Villette is interesting - I always reckoned it was a nudge to the reader not to be so trusting of the narrative voice. If you go back over certain bits of the book she lies, and adapts the memory of certain things to suit her current needs or did she tell the truth in the first place?....Rather as some people tend to in real life so should we be so trusting of a narrator, just because they are "in charge" of the story?

On my bookshelf, I may read it again but equally likely not as there's only so much enjoyment to be got from the "sneaky little cow!" type revalations, unfortunatley I can't think of any....

Never got past go with Metamorph, I'm with you on the WHY??? Suspect drugs must have been involved, surely?

I keep failing horribly with Madame Bovary. I just can't get on with it. To my deep shame, 15 year old dd has read and loved it but I Just Can't Do It.

Officially less intelligent than one's child emoticon.

Does anyone like anything about any book by Martin Amis? Can't bear self-important 'look at me manipulating you the lowly reader cos I'm so clever' literature.

And incidentally, Wuthering Heights is an earth-shatteringly tremendous read. It has made me what I still am to this day - a hopelessly romantic drama queen who can't quite cope with grown-up (boring) relationships.

Metamorphosis would appear to be about man's inhumanity to man in which the beetle is just a device to express Gregor's otherness. I think.

I have failed so many times to get into Middlemarch. I just can't get past what seem to be 300 pages of people sitting in a drawing room boring one another. I have a sneaking feeling that my mate who says it's her favourite book only picked it because she knows I'm not quite bright enough for it.

Persuasion on the other hand is marvellous. And the BBC adaptation is brilliant too.

Pennie I liked London Fields for a little while but I fear that this may have been because I was quite shallow and insubstantial myself.

Isn't Vilette based on what really happened to Charlotte Bronte? As are most of her novels, she was originally identified because a) everyone knew which school was the basis for Lowood in JE and b) the dialect made it obvious which part of Yorkshire she was from.

I really didn't like Brick Lane, the central character seemed so pathetic. And I have a hatred of novels that try and be too contemporary, they have a tendency to be very very dated after five years or so.

Middlemarch I loved when I read it (about 20 years ago), also love Persuasion but think Pride and Prejudice is spoilt by all the chicklit that copies the plot and makes it feel cliched.

I crashed and burned with Midnights Children although I really really wanted to read it. So many characters I kept forgetting who was who. Any tips for that one?

Loved Midnight's Children. In fact all of Rushdie's apart from the one whose name I can't think of.... Don't worry too much about the chacracters. Just persist and it will make sense in the end.

yyyy - loved midnight's children. you do have to just go with it and not worry tooo much about following a thread.

londonfields - if you don't like a story, it's best not to have your undergraduate mates make a play of it and then go and watch it and then not be able to say "I was utterly underwhelmed, what were you all thinking?"... I wish someone had said that to me 15 years ago!