post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

The Great Gatsby was brilliant but I reached a point when I couldn't be arsed reading it so I never finished it.

I’m not sure if these count but I borrowed DM’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales (brothers Grimm), dear god, some of those are graphic and dark. Wouldn’t read those to a child! I read about 10 of them and then returned it to DM.

In tandem with some other posts -

that 'easy reading' books are disposable, worthless and 'easy writing'. Including Mills & Boon and chick lit books in that.

It takes just as long to write an 'easy to read' book as it does to write a Booker prize winner. It just gets less recognition.

I did Gatsby for an A level evening class. I didn’t like him or the other characters at all, the film wasn’t much better. Distinctly underwhelmed by it.

As I recall, all of those happen as incidental background things in the boring conversations he has endlessly trotting round from one boring place to another.

The plot was - he arrives at college as a boring blank canvas person from a small town. He observes things while he walks from one part of campus to another. He hears about things that happen to other people which he has boring long debates about with other boring characters. I think he shags a boring girl and she gets bored of him. Then he drives home.

I appreciate that. Imitating the style of Norse mythology and indeed Wagner’s Ring Cycle although deliberate, I personally find irritating and plagiaristic. Cannot be compared to The Iliad or indeed Virgil’s Aeneid in any shape or form.
Posted as I realise this might be an unpopular opinion, each to their own!

@GonnaGetGoingReturns , what happens in the last quarter of the (short) book?

Tender is the Night by SF was even more tedious, another A level text

@MerryChristmasToYou if you mean after Gatsby gets murdered, well “Gatsby’s dad turns up for the funeral and decides that the others were Midwesterners unsuited to eastern life. Nick meets Tom but refuses to shake his hand, Tom admits he was the one who told George that Gatsby owned the car which killed Myrtle.” There’s then a scene where Nick looks out on the bay to view G’s mansion.

The above is taken from the Wiki plot summary.

To be honest I recall most about it from the film, not the book. I found the book incredibly hard and boring to read, the way the characters (especially Daisy) were portrayed made it hard to like much about them and empathise with them and therefore to read the book.

@greengreengrass25 - DB and SIL gave me this for Christmas after I’d done the A level with Gatsby. I attempted it to be nice but it went off to the charity shop.

Thanks. He got killed!

I hate being given books as presents. They're usually something worthy that I have no inclination to read.

I’ve tried several times to read Middlemarch and never made it past Chapter 3.

I spent way too much time studying that book for A-level English and had completely forgotten he gets killed.

Which probably says it all about the book tbh.

I'm so late to this thread.
I like a lot of YA that MNers sneer at, I'm really not too fussy. That said,
Saturday by Ian McEwan is ludicrous tripe.
Always astonishes me when I hear any praise about McEwan.

Atonement is a really imaginatively crafted book.

Basically yes!

I was reading about Gitzgerald’s life after posting here, very sad life, alcoholic who died in mid 40s, had love affair with “Daisy” whose family wouldn’t let her marry him as he wasn’t rich enough for their socialite daughter. He enlisted in WW2 army hoping to get killed as he was so upset at being ditched by “Daisy”. His wife was a schizophrenic who died young too.

F Scott Fitzgerald was an unpleasant alcoholic who seemed to thrive on creating horrible characters. The Beautiful and the Damned is the prime example

The Great Gatsby suffers from the fact that people who read it without paying attention think it’s supposed to represent something glamorous and desirable, as the films also present it.

All Fitzgerald's novels (and there's only 5 ) are about moral corruption and decadence

I have to love or hate (as in love to hate) characters, but if I am indifferent I give up reading

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow and yet in every single book the plucky heroine tames the troubled but wealthy man using nothing but her good character. You don't need to have read much history to realise what a fantasy this is - it's basically Cinderella with a few moral lessons thrown in for the middle classes

The men Austen's heroines marry aren't troubled, they spend a lot of time avoiding those sorts. They marry the decent men. She write about how women have to balance financial security with emotional security.

Anne Elliot doesn't marry the very wealthy Mr Elliot, she marries the not so wealthy Captain Wentworth because he's a better man. Elizabeth refuses her father's heir because she thinks he's a fool and the wealthy Darcy and until he saves her sister and her family from disgrace. Charlotte realises Mr Collins is harmless and marries him knowing he can provide for her and willtreat her well. Elinor marries the rather dull but decent Edward and Marianne is saved from disgrace (after how she behaved over Willoughby) by marrying the decent Colonel Brandon.

This is one I agree with whole-heartedly. I hated the "twist", which was an almost offensively unrealistic portrayal of mental illness. Oh, I've been imagining my mean mother all along and now I've remembered she's dead, I'm magically cured.

I tried being charatible and thinking of it as being a metaphor for carrying around trauma or something, but then it's still offensive because it makes it seem like getting over trauma isn't hard work over a long period of time and it's just having some sudden realisation.