post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

agree with that. I enjoyed them as stories, but the writing is overdone. Same with the Strike novels, the plots are ok. Some of the characters are good. but the writing is not fabulous.

But as a night-time read when i can't sleep? enjoyable

1 - Normal People by Sally Rooney is utterly boring. Oh my god I didn't care. Boring self-obsessed fuckers.

2 - Virginia Woolf is also extremely boring.

3 - But I bloody hate it when people have this expectation that they should 'like' characters and that good should always triumph. Bad things and bad people exist! A book is not there to coddle you. (I appreciate that this probably makes me a hypocrite, as I have just complained that I hated the characters in Normal People.)

I think if you're lovestruck and emotional, you won't get Wuthering Heights at all.
It's not a romance.

Yup. Hideous books.

Jilly Cooper is one of our best descriptive writers when it comes to writing about the English countryside or gardens.

3rd year lit student here. Avid reader all my life, hence studying it at uni as a very mature student.

The periods known as renaissance to revolution and romance to modernism are shite, pure shite. Why they are taught in such depth and with such emphasis (compulsory modules) on lit courses annoys me. There is so much cool modern and contemporary stuff that warrents further study that is cool as fuck. Also I love poetry but not traditional stuff.

Wuthering Heights only makes sense if you read it as a very black comedy. No one seems to agree with me on this.

Most books by living male writers are pretentious self aggrandising crap.

The amount of murder, violence, rape and gore that there is appetite for in fiction is seriously concerning.

You can't beat Jeffrey Archer as a storyteller!

Interesting. The bit at the beginning of WH where the narrator mistakes a cat for a muff (or possibly the other way round - it's been a while) is genuinely funny.

Middlemarch doesn’t need to be as long

She’s also great on plotting, character and pov. Very underrated, like a lot of commercial fiction aimed at women.

Heathcliff is violent towards women.

Clive James was an excellent author.

I have an English lit degree and love reading but I struggle to get through an Austen or Dickens book 🙈..Austen is slightly better and I love the storylines of P and P and Sense and Sensibility but the prose sometimes sends me to sleep 😴…I feel awful saying that!

Most literary books are overwritten.

Enough with the clever similes, get on with the plot. Oh there isn’t one.

To add, I love Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights!

I rolled my eyes when Jane says, “Reader, I married him.”

Colleen Hoover is the greatest writer to ever live.

David Walliams’ children’s books are only suitable for a bin. Badly written, and full of ridiculous stereotypes and tropes. It makes me despair how many genuinely brilliant children’s authors will be overlooked because they’re not a mediocre celebrity first.

I do find Dickens absolutely hilarious. But I admit to being very mid/low-brow

I agree with you!

@Hollyhead completely agree…I am so nostalgic for children’s books of my youth - Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, E Nesbit, Phillipa Pearce, Penelope Lively, The Worst Witch….could go on. Rather than the tripe that gets published these days! DW is a creep. Another unpopular opinion, I’m not a massive fan of R. Dahl…for the same reasons, full of nasty stereotypes!

There will never be a better fictional teenager than Adrian Mole.

According to this thread, my love for Ishiguro is controvesial! 😂