post your unpopular literature opinions?

[MrShannon385]

Curly was the best character in mice an men

😂

Sorry, my fourth post on this thread.... I have so many unpopular literature opinions 😅

I don't (generally) read books by men because I find them comparatively poorly-written, gratuitous and there's always always low-level sexism baked in there somewhere.
I make exceptions for Benjamin Myers and Kazuo Ishiguro (sorry, I loved Remains of the Day)

IMO if you want to read Birdsong, don't bother. Read All Quiet On The Western Front and Madame Bovary both at the same time. (turn and turn about)

Same story, much better books.

Yeah. I found Book 1 unreadable and never ventured further.

I love JK Rowling with a fierceness... but I can't read the books.

Kazuo. ❤

Sadly agree with Richard osman

My most controversial literature opinion is that Twilight is a good book. Sorry, folk.

Also Tom Bombadil is an excellent charater and that whole sequence rules.

Remains of the Day is wonderful and heartbreaking.

Richard Osman’s novels are entertaining with great characters.

Lord of the Flies is one of the most beautifully written novels there is and understands humanity perfectly.

The Handmaid’s Tale is extraordinary.

Loved 'Handmaid's Tale' but everything else by Attwood is shit with a capital S H I T.

A Little Life is a terrible book in every way and only loved by emo wannabes who think it's high brow and that liking it makes them look smart.

A Little Life is repetitive, self-indulgent misery porn and the characters are completely one dimensional. I only finished it because I was hate reading it to the end

@Leafmealone1 haha cross posted with you!

I agree her books are unreadable as an adult but I have huge admiration for how many children she has got reading.

Enid Blyton did the same for me as a child. All the teacher/parent-approved books for 7 year olds were soooooooo boring. Reading the Famous Five was like a light going on.

The end of The Miniaturist had my so confused and I felt like I'd wasted my time reading it. But others thought it good enough to turn into a TV series...

100% agree about Normal People – it was so, so self-aware and I just don't get the hype around it at all

I don’t disagree, @Brefugee , that both those books are much better. And @Catscatscatscatscatscats and @Maireas I concur sadly. I like Richard Osman very much as a quiz host, but not as an author.

Re: Richard Osman, I can't decide if he is shaping his writing to appeal to a particular demographic, or is it that he can't write any better? Agree, he seems a nice guy.

This thread is cathartic.

Anyone setting out to write “literature” rather than a story needs their writing privileges revoked.

Most Jacqueline Wilson books are basically misery porn for kids.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a brilliant book (and tonnes better than Birdsong I agree).

I found the structure of Birdsong quite funny - shagging, shagging, WAR WAR WAR.

I think Rooney's popularity is mainly driven by millenials. That's not meant as a disparaging remark, I am one. She's seen by a lot as the first "major" millenial author capturing a lot of that zeitgeist anxiety of the generation.

I don't know where I sit with the book personally. I finished it in a day, which I don't often do, but then when I was done I just sort of didn't know what to think. I did think the deep sense of dissatisfaction or at least complacency to the ending was kind of the point (the whole millenial thing) but I don't know. I genuinely don't know if I thought it was very astute and perceptive or if it was just dross? And that's such a weird thing to be unsure of. I've never ready anything else of hers

I did actively hate the depression sub-plot though which was utterly anemic and did the topic no justice as the guy's experiences were reduced to "not wanting to do anything" and none of the actual anguish.

Ian McEwan has a weird preoccupation with child abuse/sexual assault.

In A Bouquet of Barbed Wire there is a passage in which the father (who is the head of a publishing company) muses on this very thing. What is it about the English language, he wonders, that makes it fair game for people who think they have a book inside them? that just because they speak the language adequately, they think that they can write it so that people wan to read it? I always remember this bit when I see a novel by a TV personality/former politician/actor.

‘Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.’

https://interestingliterature.com/2015/04/who-said-everyone-has-a-book-in-them/

Normal People seemed like the ramblings of a woman re-imagining her childhood as if she wasn't a complete loser at school, and living that through her unrealistic, one-dimensional characters and plots.

Boring, badly-written tosh.

C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are the ramblings of an elderly religious nut.