post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

I agree. Self indulgent twaddle. Best read by moony teens

I think Agatha Chrsitie is actually underrated as a writer. Yes, some of her prodigious output is dross but the best of her novels are worthy of comparison with male writers who get far more credit (Wilkie Collins, Poe, Raymond Chandler etc)

I agree. I genuinely don't get the love for it.

Rials Dahl write fantastic books for children

1 Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is unnecessarily gratuitous and really disgusting. Aside from those bits it's a banal, fairly tedious read, and its author isn't so hot on women's rights, either. I keep thinking of more. Re. dystopian women's stuff, Octavia Butler beats Atwood's speclative fiction hands down. Her 'Parable' novel pairing is brilliant.

2 Likewise, 1984 is more journalistic/propagandist than literary. Kafka is far better.

3 Shakespeare was the middlebrow playwright of his day. His plots are repetitious, his characters often two-dimensional, but the plays are so witty, funny and entertaining they're a rollicking good watch from start to finish. Erudite, cultured, and making their watchers look 'clever?' No. They were the soap/middlebrow noevl of their day (NB. nothing at all wrong with middlebrow, despite Virginia Woolf's snobbish dismissal!)

4 Agree on Dickens. I do like Bleak House, but understand why other people don't.

5 Ethel Lina White is fab. She should take her rightful place among the Agatha Christies and P D Jameses of the detective fiction genre (and a lot of James's characters are thoroughly unlikeable, not least the morose, judgemental Adam Dalgliesh).

6 Agree with the comment upthread that George Eliot is amongst the better Victorian writers. And although Wilkie Collins was lambasted as a lightweight, his books are readable, fun and entertaining: preferable any time to Dickens.

7 Long live cyberpunk.

8 Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and May Sinclair are the best modernist women writers.

9 Books should not be banned because their authors have opinions some people don't happen to like. Don't like, don't read. Others can make similar judgements for themselves.

Of Mice and Men, and Lord of the Flies are both crap. I truly cannot understand why of all the incredible books that have been written in the English language these are the two that pretty much all school children are expected to read

I'm truly grateful that i never had to read these at school. Ditto The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird (the latter I read in lockdown and is bloody brilliant). OTOH if I never read 1984 again (A level text) it'll be too soon.

Haha, was going to post the same! Had to read Never Let Me Go for a book group and felt like throwing it across the room at the end. I cannot understand why people love it, it was completely obvious what was happening from the beginning and it was just so flat and dull.

Me neither. Very overrated IMO.

Bloody hell! I'd echo this post down to its last letter.

I like Wuthering Heights, but why it's portrayed as a romance beats me. It's very Gothic and very strange. Also Heathcliff is vile. Compelling read, though.
I've found every Jane Austen book to be dull, and don't find them witty at all..

Contemporary middle- to low-brow British female fiction is shite compared to its American equivalent.

Click-bait tag lines ("a twist you won't see coming", "unputdownable") mean only disappointment.

Now it is. But some of the early 20th century middlebrow women's writing is fantastic. The British Library women writers' series has some great titles.

Oh and another one that probably won't go down well here: Terry Pratchett books are utterly dreadful. The literary equivalent of sad, pretentious male students quoting Monty Python in a pub while everyone else looks on in mild pity.

I’m sure that books like Catcher in the Rye only seem good if you read them at a very, very specific moment in time at the right age.

Wuthering Heights is fab, but because it’s such an awful story of horrible people, not romance.

I love a good intelligent book BUT on my deathbed I’m going to take a pile of Jilly Cooper and Bernard Cornwell’s with me because there’s nothing better than a bit of fun in a book, and I’ll stand by my live for these two forever.

Some of Marian Keyes earlier books are fantastic and if they had not been bunged in the 'chick-lit' category would be winning all sorts of prizes.

Gosh this has really stopped me in my tracks! Could you elaborate? I think I agree with you but would love to hear more.

Ha ha ha ha! Reading this thread I've been watching my brain fall apart and reconstruct itself. And then my own contribution came to me, and it's this - reading mumsnet every day is way, waaaaaayyyyyy more interesting and lively than reading books, almost any damn books.
I wish t'were otherwise, but sadly, t'aint. 😳

I disagree. You book makes second place, but the undoubted winner of the dingo's kidneys is A little Life.

Mr Rochester, hell yes I would, mad wife in the attic or not. We would move abroad though, Italy maybe.

I recently read the wiki precis of Of Mice and Men (no intention of reading it despite it being a Must Read Before You Die, according to some people). If I'd read THAT at 16 God knows what it would have done to my teenage angst.

The first three Harry Potter books were great.

The subsequent four were increasingly too long, with too much exposition, digression & general waffle. The plots often slacked or became confused. They would have benefited from ruthless pruning by a good editor, which by that stage JKR presumably had the power to veto.

The reading of it, or the writing?

The poet who instantly leaps into my head is W B Yeats. His later writing is full of anxiety on that very point. 'This is no country for old men ...'

And T S Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock! Maybe the anxiety about this very issue makes for some good poetry?

Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is infuriating - so complacent, she needs shaking.
Also, Where the Crawdads Sing - it was OK, but not worth all the fuss.

I didn't get Wuthering Heights when I read it at school....and I occasionally wonder about trying it again. But I think it's best read by lovestruck hormonal teenagers.

Couldn't read Harry Potter - it plods - but she's obviously got something right.

I find Virginia Woolf impenetrable.

James Joyce - hard and no point getting a headache reading a book.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - yes....to "Terry Pratchett books are utterly dreadful. The literary equivalent of sad, pretentious male students quoting Monty Python in a pub while everyone else looks on in mild pity." But I still love their humanity and the way they look at the world.

Agree 100%. I love the series as a whole though.