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Anything by Rand. Anything by Steinbeck, but especially Of Mice And Men.

Amen to Zen and Moby Dick.

To this I will add. Anything by. Ernest Hemingway. Boring. Short. Needs commas. Like white elephants.

He's like Rudyard Kipling without the modernity or the talent.

Now if it's popular, as opposed to "critically acclaimed," I'll go with Sahara by Clive Cussler. Good god that was bad. When I saw Matthew McCaughahay (I don't care how he spells his name, because he sucks) had done the movie version, I knew his career was over. A shark. A ramp. And an idling motorcycle.

Two great disappointments immediately spring to mind.

Fiction:

Spanking the Maid, by I forget the author. My brother informed me that this book was in the library of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and I took a look. It was a slim volume that aspired to the ranks of serious literature, as a character study or something. Very little actually happened in the book. I don't even remember any spanking. The title raised certain expectations; the book did not deliver.

(It may only have been "popular" only in a very local sense; I suspect that every UM-St. Louis student who saw it on the shelf probably took a look through it.)

Nonfiction:

Unusual Sexual Behavior: The Standard Deviations. I stumbled across this in the library of Saint Louis University. An amazingly dry and dull academic treatise, considering the subject matter and the rather clever title.

(Again, probably "popular" in a limited sense, but somebody looked through it and tore most of the photographs out.)

These disappointments have rankled at me for years, and I had to vent. I'll go away now.

I'll second that. I mean, I vaguely remember thinking The Old Man and The Sea was ok, but Farewell to Arms was hella boring, according to my former high school aged self.

I was actually just bitching about Ernest Hemingway at lunch today. Oh sure, it's easy to spend hours at a bar every day poring over a single, simple sentence when your writing isn't paying the bills or putting food on the table. Arrogant rich kid. I find it irksome from a lower middle class standpoint that some of the so-called "great" artists just happened to be born into the wealthy lifestyle that allowed for that kind of leisure activity. (Obviously, that complaint isn't very applicable to modern writers -- nowadays one doesn't need to be wealthy to write for leisure).

BTW Dune is the greatest tome ever assembled in the English language (first book that is, forget the rest).

Beloved by Toni Morrison. I can not stand that piece of shit book. One of my friends almost got suspended for nailing his copy of the book to his wall and making a video of it.

Did they make you wear a skirt and forbid reading Catcher In The Rye?

JD -
I've tried reading "Lord of the Rings" several times. Just couldn't get into it. Not really a fantasy person.
"The Corrections" was this hyper-praised novel from 2000 AD or thereabouts. Got thru' about a hundred pages and gave up. It was so popular that a Simpsons's episode had a cameo of the author getting into a fight at a book festival.

JD, I think you and I should do anti-recommendations: I'll tell you what books I hated, and you can read them. I loved Dickens (Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, a 1000-page rant about how much lawyers suck), but absolutely hated A Confederacy of Dunces. Also Catcher in the Rye sucks spectacularly.

Ditto Gibson, except I didn't even like Neuromancer all that much.

I'm going to stick up for both Steinbeck and Hemingway. I think in both cases there is a deceptive ease to the prose. I admire Papa's ability to convey with few words, actually.

I would rather read Hemingway backwards than a single word of Faulkner's. Don't like the slimy, humid subject matter and don't like to too-clever-by-half execution.

Don't like Gravity's Rainbow. I liked The Crying of Lot 49 a lot, but after that, I began to suspect that Pynchon spent most of his time erecting elaborate barriers to prevent the reader from viewing an empty room.

The first four Harry Potter books. I plodded through the boxed set on the recommendation of a few different people waiting for it to start getting good. UHG! Just more crap on top of crap.

Confederacy of Dunces has left me cold. It's humerous, I suppose, but not uproariously so. Sort of like Flannery O'Connor trying to do a piece for Rolling Stone.

I liked the first bit of Zen + Motorcycle Maintenance, but it's only mildly awesome. If you never studied philosophy, you'd probably like it. I read it my junior year of college and felt that the first third was a pretty good pop-culture version of scientific/technical existentialism. The idea of letting go of preconceived notions of what something is 'for' and seeing what it can be is fairly interesting and useful, if you haven't seen it elsewhere.

For myself, I'm just not in the Dune fanclub. I guess it's kind of cool, and there are some neat story elements in there, but for the most part I just thought it was space opera, with a little too much emphasis on the opera.

I don't like Faulkner, but I don't hate him. I'd much rather work through the purple prose than suffer through Papa Pretentious's dumb and long and lame and bad and lacking comma sentences.

Thanks for reminding me. I hate Flannery O'Connor. Yes, I know there are some inbred crazies in the South, maybe more than elsewhere, but you don't have to fetishize it and borderline approve of it. She's utterly incurious as to why they are as they are. John Berendt does a much better job, if the book is anything like the movie.

But in general I hate southern writers. You lost. Deal.

Isn't Ragtime by Doctorow? I remember liking that book, especially the brother who joins the Mexican Revolution. Also the closet batin' scene.

I haven't read through this whole thread, but I'm catching up.

I never got what the big deal was with "Catcher in the Rye." So much so that my self-righteous 17 year old self wrote an essay for the high school lit magazine about why worshipping Holden Caulfeild was silly.

I also HATED "A Color Purple" which my liberal-arts-college standards is an omg, revolutionary piece of literature

Stevo, that Catcher in the Rye parody was brilliant.

I always liked the book, though less and less as I grew more and more annoyed with Holden. At least it was a fun book to teach, not like some of the glop in the curriculum.

That parody was brilliant. But I must admit that Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby are among my favorite novels.

I like some of Asimov's stuff, but oddly enough, the more popular/mainstream it was (Foundation series, for example) the less I can get into it. His earlier stuff, while not great SF, is at least entertaining.

I loved Asimov's stuff when I was younger (and read most or all of his SF and a goodly fraction of his nonfiction), but I was just never enthralled by the Foundation books. I never thought those were his best writing or his best SF.

really? i love fc.

it's the literary cousin of illuminatus with a dash of borges.

when da da veeeenchi hit i pulled out holy blood holy grail and said "you should read this fucknuttery" and for some reason people never thought that was funny.

"Oh, you like Asian cinema? You should really watch Men Behind the Sun." *snicker*

Foucault's Pendulum is one of my favorite books, and I fully acknowledge that reading it is mostly an exasperating effort to find the point.

But the payoff at the end is just fantastic. There was a point to all the misery, and the whole thing really amplified the impact of the conclusion. A better description of the conspiracy mindset has never been put to paper.