The Catcher in the Rye
discussion
The Most Overrated Books
In the case of Dosteyovsky (two of whose translated novels I have read) my criticism goes beyond literary style to the pretentious nonsense spoken about his work. If he could listen to some of the garbage that is peddled about his books he'd be dumbfounded, disgusted and amused, all at once.
Dave wrote: "In the case of Dosteyovsky (two of whose translated novels I have read) my criticism goes beyond literary style to the pretentious nonsense spoken about his work. If he could listen to some of the ..."But the topic is about overrated books, not overrated criticism. Anyway, I did think you were being ironic.
Maureen wrote: "A Clockwork OrangeThe Executioner's Song"
It's been a while, but I was impressed by Mailer's self-restraint in E.S. given his penchant for sticking himself at the center of the action all the time. This was straight journalism … compared to say Armies of the Night.
'Catcher in the Rye' was the most boring book I've every read. Nothing happened. I just couldn't get into 'Moby Dick'. I think the huge dense sentences beat me. 'The Da Vinci' code was OK, but a bit predictable. I had high hopes for 'Twilight', but it turned out to be chick-lit, which is OK if you want to read about romantic angst, which is simple not my taste. I haven't read the others.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS is so much overrated. I hated all the characters to the point I rather preferred them to die than to keep their story going. It doesn't happen anything just horrible plot.
Timothy wrote: "Richard wrote: "'Catcher in the Rye' was the most boring book I've every read. Nothing happened. I just couldn't get into 'Moby Dick'. I think the huge dense sentences beat me. 'The Da Vinci' code ..."So, what's the poor taste in reading equivalent for Chick lit for men? I don't believe there is one, though examples abound. I can think of a term, and it rhymes.
I don't think 'Chick-Lit' necessarily means poor taste, it just refers to books female readers enjoy, but don't interest men. There's nothing wrong with the genre just because it's marketed for women in the same way YA books target a young demographic. Having said that I've read and enjoyed all Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum stories.
Richard wrote: "I don't think 'Chick-Lit' necessarily means poor taste, it just refers to books female readers enjoy, but don't interest men. There's nothing wrong with the genre just because it's marketed for wom..."Agreed. I will note that I was once interviewed because I was a member of a Georgette Heyer listserve. Just because a book is oriented towards women or to young adults or to boys or to outdoorsmen doesn't mean others wouldn't enjoy them.
Timothy wrote: "Oh, has anyone mentioned Animal Farm for being head-scratchingly overrated? I found it to be heavy handed and overly obvious, clumsy allegory when I was 17! I mean, sure, its fine for HS Sociology ..."Lots of stuff written a while back gets a bit dated because we're all so sophisticated and urbane today. I didn't mind 'Animal Farm' when I read years ago, dunno what I'd make of it today.
Timothy wrote: "S.W. wrote: "Just finished Oliver Twist and was shocked at the anti-Semitic and misogyny. I know it’s a classic and that we shouldn’t judge by today’s standards, but I was still taken aback. If Co..."Dickens is like most 18th-19th Century writers — just too dense and long-winded to bother with it. Who wants to wade through an eighty word sentence riddled with semi-colons? Political correctness has made us soft and dumbed down our emotions to a point where we're offended by just about everything. The trouble with modern historical fiction is some authors feel they must write using 21st nanny-state standards to stories set decades or even centuries ago. Times were tough back then.
Richard wrote: "I don't think 'Chick-Lit' necessarily means poor taste, it just refers to books female readers enjoy, but don't interest men. There's nothing wrong with the genre just because it's marketed for wom..."Yeah, right. Too bad this thread degenerated further. Enjoy yourselves.
Rick wrote: "Huckleberry FinnTender is the Night
The Ginger Man"
Huckleberry Finn, as the greatest American novel. At least that's how I feel, and don't understand how anyone can disagree. Anyway, I am so glad he wrote it. Life On The Mississippi, was pretty fantastic too. It is the book that started me reading Twain.
Richard wrote: "Timothy wrote: "Oh, has anyone mentioned Animal Farm for being head-scratchingly overrated? I found it to be heavy handed and overly obvious, clumsy allegory when I was 17! I mean, sure, its fine f..."The underlying point is the important bit in Animal Farm. Of course it is not a particularly well written book. It didn't have to be. The guy had something to say and he did. His book certainly attracted a lot of attention.
Marianella wrote: "WUTHERING HEIGHTS is so much overrated. I hated all the characters to the point I rather preferred them to die than to keep their story going. It doesn't happen anything just horrible plot."Your strong reaction. Isn't that the point? "I hated all the characters." You got to know them well. There is a lot to be said for your response. I have not read th book, I just liked your response to your reading of it. And I'm not sure I will get around to it, not as long as there are writers like Balzac and Zola to read.
George wrote: "I've only read Ayn Rand's Anthem but if that is a true but admittedly small sampling of her work I'd just as soon skip a larger tome like Atlas Shrugged."I've found that people who are fans of Ayn Rand aren't fans of literature. They just want a book to confirm their political leanings. She really is a terrible writer once you separate her politics from her prose.
LongShanks wrote: "I've found that people who are fans of Ayn Rand aren't fans of literature. They just want a book to confirm their political leanings."That's an interesting observation, and though I hadn't given much thought to it, there does appear to be a real correlation there in my personal experience of her readers. Those I've known who loved (even worshipped) Rand's work and philosophy have inevitably been... well, shallow thinkers isn't entirely fair—but not inaccurate, really. Not deep, shall we say?
Rand seems to me to be almost entirely engaged in a rebranding of ideas expressed variously by other, generally debunked philosophical constructs. If she does anything new, it's that she post-rationalizes post-rationalization itself, creating a vast, empty shell of ideas culled from other writers and tweaked a bit to give them a new veneer, but her real target is decency itself. There is only self-interest, and if that means stealing (both ideas and materially) from those who believe differently then, well, that's all good because altruism is just someone volunteering to be destroyed. And it's all based on the absolute, narcissistic conclusion that the Randian believer is mentally (if not in every way) superior to those destroyed in some vaguely re-defined social Darwinian sense.
Yet, I've never actually met a supporter of Rand's ideas who I thought would survive more than a few weeks, maybe even days, in a world that actually was like the one they seem to want to create.... If society actually did operate the way they say it should, they'd find themselves very alone, very fast, and even the advantages they have (which were inevitably given to them by the circumstances of their birth or as part of some other social process they claim to despise) would last them only a short time before they "found their level" as it were.
I picture the biggest audience for Rand to be who I was when I read Atlas Shrugged—teen-age boys whose fantasies can fit. But we grow up.
Howard wrote: "I picture the biggest audience for Rand to be who I was when I read Atlas Shrugged—teen-age boys whose fantasies can fit. But we grow up."Probably. That would seem to be the "indoctrination" point for Randians. There's variations, of course, and plenty of folks happy to cater to the demographic, but middle to lower-upper class surburban white boys whose IQs hover around 105-115. Smart enough to think they're smarter than average, but not quite smart enough to realize they're not that smart, and with all the angsty teenage self-delusion and sublimated envy that goes with it.
And not all of them grow out of it....
Paul Ryan, anyone?
Sam wrote: "I'd also add Analects, The Diary of a Young Girl and The Alchemist to that list."I'd disagree on the Diary of a Young Girl. It definitely illustrates how a victim of the Holocaust would feel at the deepest level, which is important to keep in curriculums. Otherwise, more books like the Boy in the Striped Pajamas will make their way in instead, with the phony, emotionally manipulating plot points and crap characters.
This argument is odd.The ratings of novels to which we’re referring reflect the consensus of hundreds of readers chosen for the breadth and depth of their reading. To whatever extent there are “experts” on the subject of great novels, these women and men are the experts.
Now, one by one, readers here are arguing that these experts, in many cases, are wrong, because that reader disagrees with the expert consensus assessment.
“The experts are wrong,” each of you is saying, “because I disagree with them.”
But that doesn’t mean the book is overrated. It just means you didn’t appreciate the book as much as the voters did.
Many of us mistakenly judge each novel without fully understanding the time and place in which it was written. No books had the impact, both in England and in this country, as those written by Dickens, as an example; he was a global superstar. By that measure, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities have to be considered among the most loved books of all time.
Many of us don’t appreciate Dickens as much today, partly because we live in a different time and place, and partly because thousands of novelists (e.g., John Irving) have tried to copy him and, in doing that, have made his style more familiar to us, Irving just brings Dickens into a time and place more familiar to us. (Not as well, perhaps, but that’s immaterial.) Some readers think Donna Tartt does some of this, too, while writing this time and this place, two things to which we can relate instantly; it's not foreign to us.
Catcher in the Rye, 1984, and To Kill A Mockingbird seem three more good examples here. Catcher is familiar, now—overfamiliar, perhaps, given how often it has been copied. 1984 and Mockingbird are very very old news, too. Madame Bovary was startling in its time, as was Anna Karenin (not a typo) and for similar reasons. Throw in A Doll’s House, of course, which today is unreadable as a book and unwatchable as a play, You have to consider those books in their time and place. Otherwise, you are blaming them for the fact that time and place changed.
One more thought: I see criticism of Gatsby that seems to reduce to a criticism of the characters--of how they lived and the values they held. That’s a fair criticism of them as human beings, perhaps, but seems to have nothing to do with the quality of the writing, characterization, and story telling. And thanks to Maxwell Perkins, Gatsby is a very cleverly told and structured story even if you appreciate nothing else. (Think of the book as a mystery, “Who is Gatsby:" and then consider the quality of Fitzgerald's story telling and the pacing of the information. It’s terrific in that sense, brilliant perhaps. ) And it's notable, too, for what Fitzgerald does not say, such as just exactly how was Gatsby making all this money.
That’s more than enough, I’d’ve made this much shorter but I ran out of time. . .
Hear, hear!
Harry wrote: "This argument is odd.The ratings of novels to which we’re referring reflect the consensus of hundreds of readers chosen for the breadth and depth of their reading. To whatever extent there are “e..."
Well said. I also think it's odd when people can't enjoy a good period novel/novelist as a way of learning about that time and place. Must every novel reflect our era and sensibility before we can 'relate' to it? If so, seems pathetic to limit oneself that way. The basic problems of being humans in society have not changed.
I regularly sruggle with "the ancient style" of writing. To my modern taste--somewhere between Hemingway and who knows?--they require so much effort I often have to get up for a snack. And my guess is that many current American readers simply cannot do it, and then dismiss these books. But for insight into human behavior and character, Tolstoy is remarkable and seems far more useful, insightful, and accurate than Freud, Maslow, name him or her. Dostoevsky was brilliant at this, too. For description, Flaubert seems as good as it could get, but I am sure he describes too much for many modern tastes, and also seems overwrought, especially to Americans.
I do struggle with Henry James, but he generally doesn't crack the top 20.. And damn, how many modern American authors write nearly as well?
And to whom are we comparing these now-dead famous authors--Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt? John Updike? Seriously?
I'll agree with everyone who said the Alchemist and am gonna say the Art of Racing in the Rain! I think I'd rather endure a Hallmark movie than attempt to read that again
I can't believe no one has added "Art of the Deal". Perhaps because no one reads it.
Shakespeares' plays were not written to be read. They were written to be performed.. If you read them as you read a novel, as 95% of readers do, with good reason, you end up disappointed, not least of all because they are entirely dialogue. A book written in entirely dialogue would drive almost every reader mad.So the relatively low ratings for Shakespeare plays are not surprising, and does not suggest to me that Goodreads is overrun with rubes.
His plays are not great novels. But they are, of course, remarkable plays,
Timothy wrote: "Thus, the common refrain from modern americans on how boring or slow CITR or how Holden is a snotty little whiner is glaring proof that its all but impossible to appreciate or even understand a novel written in a setting you know nothing about. "All but impossible unless you are interested in other times and places and give yourself time, as a reader, to get used to a voice out of the past, with its particular diction and language.
In the case of Catcher, how bad can the most copied novel in American history be? Hell, Updike ripped it off for a short story.I'd also commend it for how brilliantly Salinger stays in character. You try doing that for 100 pages!.
Harry wrote: "This argument is odd.The ratings of novels to which we’re referring reflect the consensus of hundreds of readers chosen for the breadth and depth of their reading. To whatever extent there are “e..."
Really good observation, Harry. I'd agree with you here. Everyone has different tastes.
You cannot say the book is overrated. All you can legitimately say is "I disagree with the consensus of the voters."
Divergent! Please don't hate me. I just don't think it's all that. There were some nicely written action scenes but it's just too...cool, in a very basic way, like anyone who doesn't jump off trains wearing leather trousers is worthless. Roth definitely has it in her head that that's what teens consider to be cool nowadays.Also, those flipping Warrior Cats books... I used to like them, but the older I get the more I notice just how bad the writing is. Maybe it's just because the fanbase absolutely worships them!
Lottie wrote: "Divergent! Please don't hate me. I just don't think it's all that. There were some nicely written action scenes but it's just too...cool, in a very basic way, like anyone who doesn't jump off train..."I don't hate you. I liked it fine but as you say it wasn't all that. I don't think it is overrated because I don't think it is rated as "all that". No one is going to be teaching Divergent in schools or colleges. Still fun read.
I agree that Atlas Shrugged is over-rated. The Catcher in the Rye? You need to read it mid-teens, then you'll love it. Tolstoy's Anna: I was bored. I felt sorry for her. Again, there are some books that are better read at some ages. This is good for late teens, early twenties, when yu believe the world well lost for love. I'm 77, and my favorite writer nowdays is Alan Hollinghurst. I also like genre books, which almost always have a happy ending. I like happy endings; one reason for preferring fiction to fact.
Agreed. I read Catcher for this the first time in my mid-60's, aand enjoyed it. If you read it carefully, Holden's hurt, and its source, becomes clear.
Timothy wrote:Yeah...and just how is Divergent not a Hunger Games ripoff again? LOL ..."
I don't know. How?
"Art of the Deal"
Nobody’s overrating that book!
Divergent sucksss. Can’t disagree there. It fails at even the most basic elements.
cj wrote: "Divergent sucksss. Can’t disagree there. It fails at even the most basic elements."The most basic elements are sales.
cj wrote: "Divergent sucksss. Can’t disagree there. It fails at even the most basic elements."Along with having some of the worst worldbuilding I've ever seen in a book, my god.
I'm sure this has been said and it might be against the rules to mention a book more than once, but I can't stand Catcher In The Rye oh my god.
Wenonah wrote: "I agree that Atlas Shrugged is over-rated. The Catcher in the Rye? You need to read it mid-teens, then you'll love it. Tolstoy's Anna: I was bored. I felt sorry for her. Again, there are some books..."Gonna have to disagree with you there; I read CATR when I WAS in my teens and still disliked it.
No good book is for everyone. If you write for everyone, you are writing for no one. Again, there is no such thing as an overrated book. All you can say is that you do not share the consensus view of the book. I'm sure thousand of movie fans do not consider Shawshank Redemption, Raging Bull, It's A Wonderful Life, and The African Queen worthy of being listed among the 100 Best Movies ever made.
I didn't love Anna Karenin either, or anything written by Henry James.
Maybe the question instead should be, "Which widely acclaimed novels do you dislike/did not enjoy?"
Harry wrote: "No good book is for everyone. If you write for everyone, you are writing for no one. Again, there is no such thing as an overrated book. All you can say is that you do not share the consensus vie..."
Of course a book can be overrated. You seem to be arguing more against words and definitions which is a bit paradoxical for a literature fan.
If a small subset of readers don't enjoy a widely acclaimed book then to that smaller group said book is overrated. Certainly in the opinion of the large group the accolades are merited.
To the contrary, I am arguing for words and their definitions, not against.
Harry wrote: "To the contrary, I am arguing for words and their definitions, not against."But if something can't be overrated then the word ceases to have any meaning.
Melanie wrote: "I'm sure this has been said and it might be against the rules to mention a book more than once, but I can't stand Catcher In The Rye oh my god."It is a so so book that reads more like the author's own diary circa 16 years old. My point is that is is vastly OVERRATED.
Harry wrote: "No good book is for everyone. If you write for everyone, you are writing for no one. Again, there is no such thing as an overrated book. All you can say is that you do not share the consensus vie..."
Yes, that would be a better question that might elicit more interesting criticisms.
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Kallie wrote: "Dave wrote: "Petergiaquinta wrote: "Possibly...but that's a bit of a false equivalence.
The thing that will ultimately doom Dickens will be the inability of the general public to be able to read a..."