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Discussion: Sometimes the majority is wrong ver. Books

AmorRoark

AmorRoark

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Sometimes the majority is wrong ver. Books

The Notebook - I had heard rave reviews from my roommate and my mom. Granted, my roommate doesn't know what she's talking about but I 'd consider my mom a "well-read" person. Anyway, I read it and couldn't make it over 1/2 through. Nicholas Sparks' writing is TERRIBLE! How could anyone consider that underdeveloped, senimental trash quality?

Les Miserables - I bought this book in middle school because I knew it to be a classic. I started reading, and though I enjoyed it and understood why people hold it in such high regard.. I thought the majority of the book was a waste of words. :o


What other books, which people have told you were well-written, turned out to be trash?
 
This is why I never pay too much attention to reviews...what is an entertaining read for one person might be a total bore for another.

I honestly am the type of person to like much more things than I dislike..so Ive like most of the books Ive read. There is probably one or two that I didnt..if I think of one Ill come back and post.
 
Pretty much anything by Dan Brown!! I mean he's all over the best seller list these days and he can't write for crap. His ideas are derivative and under developed and he writes at a painfully low level... i.e. no compound clauses or interesting sentence structure... just awful.
That said... nobody actually told me his stuff was written well.

David... I think AmorRoark was referring to books that are not written well as opposed to your personal preferences on the content. You may not like LOTR, and many don't, but you can't say, with any validity, that they're written badly.
 
art is subjective.

i consider most of the titles on the New York Times "Best Sellers" list to be garbage. but i have a very particular taste in literature.
 
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yea, sorry, typo.

but i do think that good writing can still be subjective to a large extent. i was kicked out of an advanced placement writing class in high school and was told by the instructor that i had no chance of passing the AP exam, but I did anyways, and I scored higher on it than some of the students whom she considered better writers than me--even without having taken the class.

that particular instructor may have had some innate prejudices against me, but she definitely considered my writing to be incompetent, and gave me all sorts of criticisms(mostly saying that i was committing plagarism by not properly citing population figures and what-not) as to why i deserved F's on all of my papers. but on the subject A exam, which is administered by the University of California, I scored exceedingly well, well above average and placed in the top 5% of the AP/honors core that year(which I was no longer a part of).

i can give all sorts of reasons why i think steinbeck's writing is crappy and inferior to my favorite authors, but that doesn't make my criticisms official or universal. what consitute "good writing" is largely individual preferences of style. i write, the way i that prefer to see other people write(translate: the way authors i like to read tend to write), and it may have its good and bad qualities. as long as it meets certain basic criterias for english composition, it's hard to say what's good or bad.

really poor writing is easy to agree on, and sometimes extremely good writing is easy for most to agree on, but there's a lot of dispute on all the grey stuff in the middle.
 
nowonmai said:
David... I think AmorRoark was referring to books that are not written well as opposed to your personal preferences on the content. You may not like LOTR, and many don't, but you can't say, with any validity, that they're written badly.
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shit, there goes my suggestion - 'everything by Forster'.

;) :D
 
amy... sparks' writing is terrible, but his story telling is magnificent. that is why the notebook as a MOVIE is much better than the notebook as a BOOK. have you seen the movie? i haven't heard one person badmouth it-- not even the guys.
 
nowonmai said:
Pretty much anything by Dan Brown!! I mean he's all over the best seller list these days and he can't write for crap. His ideas are derivative and under developed and he writes at a painfully low level... i.e. no compound clauses or interesting sentence structure... just awful.
That said... nobody actually told me his stuff was written well.
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I really wanna kick that guy in the nuts, and i haven't even read one of his books (i started one of them and the first fifty pages were tribe so i ditched it)! :X
 
Originally posted by faithfully dangerous
amy... sparks' writing is terrible, but his story telling is magnificent. that is why the notebook as a MOVIE is much better than the notebook as a BOOK. have you seen the movie? i haven't heard one person badmouth it-- not even the guys.
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Yeah the movie was good but reading that book tainted my view of the movie a bit.. :\
 
im sure it did--- which is why i didnt even bother wasting my time reading the book.

there are MUCH better movies out there, for sure, but sometimes us girls need a little lifetime-sappiness.
 
David said:
I'll probably get hanged for this one, but all of the Lord of the Rings stories sucked IMHO.:p
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I second that, most bored I have ever been in my life. For me good writing should be above all interesting, nothing else matters.
 
faithfully dangerous said:
im sure it did--- which is why i didnt even bother wasting my time reading the book.

there are MUCH better movies out there, for sure, but sometimes us girls need a little lifetime-sappiness.
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You're so right on this.. but I perfer the Lifetime tragedy stories :)

like
228737.jpg

Amy Jo Johnson!


::goes back on topic::
 
^Werd.

I've tried to read Hemingway any number of times. The man just cannot resolve a story (ie. Old Man and the Sea).
 
^ Fuck you Hemingway is great :)

I'm going to put in another vote for Dan Brown. I haven't actually attempted to read any of his works but if so many people like them they must be retarded. And even if they are great books I'm going to boycott them anyways...

Just like I did with Titanic. I'm going to be one of the only people in the western world who dies without having seen that stupid movie. Why? Well I don't know why...
 
I've met several people who swore up and down by Frank Herbert's Dune series, but I tried to read the first book, and simply couldn't get through about a third of it. None of the characters or plot points grabbed me.
 
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