i agree, hemmingway and pratchett blow.
and that sisterhood of the traveling pants bullshit, what the fuck.
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Anonymous2007-06-03 2:13 ID:0N3eDpsX
The Scarlet Letter
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Anonymous2007-06-03 3:46 ID:XcOfmi8X
Emma by Jane Austen
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Anonymous2007-06-03 12:32 ID:6rgnH2Bl
Fucking pride and predjudice.
Here is a synopsis.
***WARNING TEXT BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS***
Nothing happens. The end.
***END OF SPOILERS***
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Anonymous2007-06-03 13:52 ID:Qdwe/2+E
Eh, I love Jane Austen.
I don't care at all for Hemingway and his misogynistic bullshit, or for Rand's beating-you-over-the-head style, though. I wouldn't say they're the worst, but then, it's hard for me to name any certain book as "worst ever" because I'll usually just give up if it's that bad (unless it's for a class).
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Anonymous2007-06-03 16:42 ID:8RGM7q08
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
seriously, read this if you ever start questioning whether or not to stop thinking for yourself. After all, Nietzsche is one of the GREATEST MINDS OF ALL TIME!!!!!!
No way, I had to read Emma in high school, I couldn't bare to even read 2 chapters of it (I then proceeded to write an essay on it, and passed. Me 1, Jane Austen 0).
I also hate that old gay pedo man Bryce Courtney, his stuff sucks.
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Anonymous2007-06-03 19:58 ID:nZ0jUHLm
the awakening by kate chopin.
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Anonymous2007-06-03 20:02 ID:Qdwe/2+E
>>12
Emma is one of my favorites, but then it's not for all tastes (read: it doesn't appeal to men). Same goes for Chopin.
Your blanket sexual discrimination against men is irrelevant and insulting.
My favorite movie is Dirty Dancing, so i'm sure I'm not *totally* out of touch with my ability to enjoy allegedly-female-oriented media.
Rather, my dislike of Emma stems from my dislike of pointless waffle that does nothing to further the story line - saying nothing, but saying it constantly - or as a poster above said, "nothing happens".
Seriously, what sort of garbage book spends an entire chapter describing how "handsome" a meaningless letter from one poncy character to another is?
Absolute twaddle.
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Anonymous2007-06-04 2:52 ID:ohT5eFBZ
>>15
People who discriminate against men on the internet: men who think they're the only ones who don't match hulking apes. They drown their sorrows in yuri.
Not to say that's so bad. Me too, but I'm not so deluded by it all as to put on a front of sexism.
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Anonymous2007-06-05 7:01 ID:UIGiUJb4
the scarlet letter
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Anonymous2007-06-05 10:59 ID:rqdHfY04
Battlefield Earth. Or, indeed, anything by L. Ron Hubbard.
He should have stuck to the cult business and stayed well away from writing.
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Anonymous2007-06-05 13:14 ID:8HTBW5v6
Probably The Catcher in the Rye for me. All the main character does is whine through the whole thing about how he has the social skills of a plank of wood, how everyone is phony (which is possibly the most nerve-grating word in the English language), and about how everyone hates him because he's a fucking moron. Seriously, the modern day equivalent could be found on Myspace in the time it takes your computer to load a page, only this time the subject material will be about how they lost their goddam iPod.
I think books like that should be banned for inadvertently causing illiteracy in this country. That's the only kind of crap schools have kids read, so they think that all books are that terrible. Or it could just be MTV and shows like "pimp my ride."
...Or the Bible. Not only has it made a disturbingly large portion of the world into mindless idiots and contributed to a large number of the wars that've occured throughout history, but we'd be at least two-hundred years more technologically advanced if it weren't for it. But I suppose its redeeming quality is that it's a good laugh.
>>19
Hahaha, I used to LOVE Holden Caufield when i read Catcher as an early teenager. Later on, when we were forced to study the book, I was shown how much of a mentally-ill whinger he actually was, and it totally ruined the book for me.
That being said, what Holden says about the funeral director who comes to speak at their school is one of the funniest things I have ever read in the world. Quote:
>...he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down on his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God - talk to Him and all - whenever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving in his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.
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Anonymous2007-06-06 19:07 ID:qqUMdqMM
I've always hated Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. It just oozes pathetic bubblegum pop hypertolerance and presents an overaccepting culture concerning homosexuality to the point of being unrealistically sweet. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm gay myself and much enjoy something dealing with the subject, but if the culture you created for your work eventually leads to the creation of the word "Gaystafarian" and characters so blatantly one-dimensional as Infinite Darline, the homecoming queen/star quarterback, I'm not stomaching it past chapter 1.
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Anonymous2007-06-07 13:36 ID:wD1ZcrI0
Catcher in the Rye wasn't so bad, but Salinger's Glass Family short stories were alot better.
>>15
As a word in my defense, I had intended to say that it *generally* doesn't appeal to men. Perhaps more accurately, I should have said that it has more appeal towards women than men. I know men who adore her work, and women who can't stand it, but I quite often find that the opposite is more likely. But then (as you said), that's probably neither here nor there.
Your criticisms are fair enough, I suppose, though I attribute the "vapidness" to the fact that Emma is a flirtatious, privileged young women who, frankly, has never really had anything much to worry about. In ways, she's can be quite unlikeable, though part of the novel's essence is her transformation by the end of the novel (so I would argue against the "nothing happens" bit).
>>32
Funny, I liked this book for all the wrong reasons. I think the whites in Belgian Congo are positive role models. Mr Kurtz just tells it like it is, unclouded by petty morality.
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Anonymous2007-06-12 4:23 ID:uE1jyUH3
ERAGAY
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Anonymous2007-06-12 4:46 ID:0w6Rgiqd
Wuthering Heights
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Anonymous2007-06-12 10:38 ID:RBTcCnt1
bi...ble..?
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Anonymous2007-06-15 6:55 ID:T1P7/mdC
the autobiography of miss jane pittman
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Anonymous2007-06-15 7:34 ID:zjrH3tr1
Harry Potter. All of them.
JR Tolkien. Just plain bad.
CS Lewis
Pratchett
Bible
Come to think of it, the whole corpus of the science fiction and fantasy genres suck with one or two exceptions - Bradbury and Le Guin spring ro mind. The rest of it sucks big time, writing and idea-wise.
>>34
Adolf, you must stop posting to these forums. You'll be caught.
When I complain that my textbooks aren't amusing, my teachers never seem to take my complaints seriously.
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Anonymous2007-06-19 14:52 ID:k39txq9M
Other than the Bible and Catcher in the Rye, the Black Jewels trilogy is pretty shitty.
I read the first one and after about twenty pages wanted to vomit. It's like Gray's Anatomy in a fantasy setting with the whole, "look at me, I'm a total fucking whore and I have to sleep with anything that moves to advance the plot because the writer has the mentality of a horny fourteen-year-old and can't think of anything better." Not only that but it seems as though it tries to rip off the whole drow culture thing by making it a matriarchal society with all of the leaders being sexist bitches who view men as objects, only this lacks any sort of explanation as to why their society is so different.
Oh, and on top of that, the names of some of the most prominent characters are Daemon, Saetan, Lucivar, and Surreal. Come on, what the fuck sort of high-skool-drama-obsessed-role-playing-goth/emo-weeabo shit is that? What pissed me off even more was that the author goes on about how the main characters have all these extraordinary abilities and yet they're trapped in problems that are far too mundane to fit the description. If someone can do things like vaporize someone with a gesture, they shouldn't be forced to uphold any sort of social obligation or norm that they don't want to.
I also couldn't stand how so many of the characters overreact to all of these situations they're put in, practically fainting when a certain character who is supposed to have all these various powers does something "amazing," as their character type would predictably dictate. The whole thing read like one of those moronic internet role-playing sessions.
Anne Bishop shames every female author and the entire fantasy genre with that load of crap.
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Anonymous2007-06-19 15:56 ID:Uezbttma
That doesn't sound as bad as that one book.
What's it called? Something like "The Lord of the Rings?"
Like what kind of crap is that?
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Anonymous2007-06-20 16:49 ID:qr1e02W+
>>39
Philip Dick is good.
Also Dhalgren is supposed to be pretty great, and it's science fiction.
For me it's probably Ulysses by James Joyce. The first 30 pages are such a jumble you have to read it 10 times over to even understand whats going on. Or maybe i'm just an idiot with cant understand stream of consciousness.
I love most of Bradbury, but the one thing I can never get my head around is Tolstoy. Fucking Ruskie. Everyone circle-jerks to his War and Peace bullshit because it's thick enough to kill a person if you hit them with it, but inside it's utterly dry literature. I got no soul reaction from that book at all.