Heretical stars: everyone else gave 4-5, you gave 1.

[Ryl]

The Catcher in the Rye
The Known World
Lord of the Flies
How to Be Good

[Pam]

Jane Eyre -- the first sections were excellent, but when she got to Thornfield, I lost interest and could barely finish the book

Wuthering Heights -- is it universally adored? I'm not sure. I wanted to read this but the punctuation defeated me. All those unnecessary semicolons and commas -- it was like my first attempt at driving a stick shift. Stop. Start. Shudder. Die.

[Tracey]

Off the top of my head - A Prayer for Owen Meany just didn't do it for me. Whiny protagonist and SPEAKING IN ALL CAPS - meh.

[Dora]

Also not a Wuthering Heights or Catcher in the Rye fan. Haven't read Jane Eyre in a while; it was one of my favorites when I was a teen. I re-read it in grad school and still liked it, but I'm pretty sure it would disappoint me if I read it again.

Also, Lord of the Rings doesn't do anything for me. I attempted the first book a few months before the first movie came out and couldn't get into it. (Didn't like the movie either.)

[bup]

I'm undecided about "Wuthering Heights" - I feel a little intimidated about it (it's so literate!), but I gotta admit our narrator is so ineffective he really deserves to be slapped. Plus, Heathcliff - um, is his character, maybe, just, perhaps, a victim of racism? Like I say, I'm intimidated because I've never 'studied' it - I just read it unguided - maybe there's a great argument for why Heathcliff is so dark, and so evil.

The one I hate that everyone else seems to like is THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

It's racist (dwarves are like THIS, elves are like THIS, orcs are like THIS, men from the south are like THIS), it's simplistic (and then the good guys ran out from the secret entrance to the tower, slew 80 bad orcs, and then got back into the secret entrance to the tower unscathed. Oh, also Gandalf died, but then he got better), and it's dull (evil. good. what more motive do you WANT, man!?).

The only part I liked was the last 50 pages of The Return of the King, when the hobbits finally had to face a challenge for themselves - good GOD it's about time they grew up - and the people who no longer belonged in a nonmagic middle-Earth had to leave. That was actually touching.

But yeah, I hated LotR.

Oh, and can I get a witness for everything Nathaniel Hawthorne ever wrote? The word is "person," not "personage," unless you're referring to their office, and even then it's pretentious. And "face" is more clear and less jerky than "aspect." And stop referring to yourself while telling a story.

[Scareyfaerie]

I'm not a huge fan of Catcher in the Rye, in fact I struggled to find a point to the whole thing and work out what all the fuss was about.

LotR didn't do much for me as a book either, there were large sections that I felt I could just skip and not really feel I'd missed anything.

Anything by John Fowles (he wrote the French Lieutenant's Woman) leaves me cold. My reading club voted for The Magus a while back and I really had a hard time getting past the first chapter!

John Irving has a similar effect on me, sight of his books could send me running for the hills.

[Jodi]

I LOATHED "The Davinci Code", I thought it was overwrought, silly, and boring. I also did not care for "The Corrections," just couldn't see what the Big Deal was about it.

[[deleted user]]

I second AuntiePam's mention of Jane Eyre. I read it for class, but it was a struggle. It just seemed to not hold my interest either. I think I ended the book more angry at the characters than anything else.

[Red]

I despised The Davinci Code so intensely that I had to join this group just to vent about that utterly awful overwritten, overblown, overhyped, and over-acted pile of recyclable paper. It amazes me that anyone could like it. I hasten to say the religious gobblygook didn't bother me in the least, the story is basically silly anyway.
I was stunned when I finally watched the movie when it arrived on TV - God knows I wasn't going to the trouble to go see it or pay to see it at home - that Tom Hanks would let himself be drawn into acting the part of the idiot lead. predictably he was unbelievable and wooden, but then so was the character he was playing...maybe he did a good job after all.

Red Evans author On Ice
What a horrid book!

[Dora]

Glad I'm not the only one not fond of LotR.

I hadn't even thought of the DaVinci Code as something to mention here. It's the type of contemporary writing I generally refuse to read because chances are there's a 19th century German novel or any practitioner of magical realism who did a better job of writing a similar story.

GT

[Bluepard]

There definitely are large sections you can skip in LotR and not miss anything. I tend to recommend to people who want to read it to skip the entire first book, which I can't stand.

[Ryl]

I was cleaning up my "This Sucked" shelf and I found a couple that are even more heretical than the ones I mentioned upthread:

Flowers for Algernon--made me want to kill myself
HP & the Sorceror's Stone--struck me as warmed-over Roald Dahl

[Laura]

One big one and one lesser one for me. The big one: East of Eden. God, how I loathe that book. I didn't care for it when I read it when I was 13 and I've grown to detest it more as I got older. The lesser one: The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Tried to read it four times, found it dull, and put it aside, but I've scarely met anyone who read it who didn't go on and on and ON with the superlatives about how it was enthralling, a miracle, the best book they've read in the past ten years, ad nauseam.

Some of the stuff that's mentioned here I don't regard as "universally adored," btw. The DaVinci Code? The Ruins? Bestsellers, sure, but hardly universally adored, by the critics or anyone else. Both those books had large and vocal choruses of detractors.

[Laura]

Do it! Take a stand! If I haven't been run out for hating East of Eden, no one ever will be. That stupid book has an average rating of around 6.2 stars on a scale of 5, and I'm sitting there going, "It sucks! You're all nuts!" and everyone just sort of nods at me the way you nod at an idiot. Which I don't necessarily take issue with, but anyway.