Just a couple of things. This is all my personal opinion. If you absolutely love one of these books, more power to you. They're just books that garnered tons of praise, all kinds of award, and when I sat down to read them, they fell flat. The writing style was obnoxious, the narrator was real didactic, the characters were annoying, or the plot just had too many holes. Now I'm not saying these are the most overrated books ever. These are just the ones I have read. That's why you won't find any of the Twilight books on here or War and Peace. I'm sure I'll find plenty of welcome additions to this list over the years.
That said, here they are in no particular order (except the last one which I hold a special grudge against):
1.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Often
considered a cornerstone of gothic literature and modern horror, Dracula is responsible for popularizing
the vampire, thus, inspiring several movie franchises, book series, and one of
the most famous accents. The book itself starts out strong with real estate
agent Jonathan Harker travelling to Count Dracula’s castle. Everything it
there: the wolves, the famous lines, the chilling atmosphere, the three slutty
vampires eating an infant, but it doesn’t last. Most of the book is a series of
letters between Lucy and Mina and it is boring as hell. Dracula and the
psychopath Renfield are the most fascinating characters but they don’t get much
time in the novel. It mostly centers around Van Helsing, Jonathan, and the two
women. Though he’s be reinterpreted as vampire-slaying badass in recent movies
and comic books, he’s more of a doctor here and really doesn’t have much depth
or a good back story. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but for a villain of
Dracula’s caliber, I felt a little cheated how easily he was defeated. The
horror is definitely there, but in small amounts. The rest of the book just
drags too much to be a classic.
2.
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D.
Salinger
I
think I read this book for the same reason many other adolescents have picked
it up: it was controversial. The book was a sensation when it came out, it has
been pulled from libraries, banned in schools, and was supposedly what led the
crazed fan Mark David Chapman to shoot his idol, John Lennon. It continues to
be part of our culture: a musing probe into teenage insecurity, anger, and
melancholy. I guess, but I was pretty underwhelmed. I’m probably supposed to
identify with Holden Caulfield, a lonely boy who – recently expelled from
another prep school – wanders about New York City getting drunk and talking to
random people, but he just comes off as a whiney emo brat who doesn’t realize
how privileged he is. “Oh, woe is me!” The story has little focus and little
conflict; it’s like a pretentious bastard recorded every genius thought he had
as he ran errands in New York City. I don’t necessarily object to unlikeable
protagonists, but I really don’t think Holden carries the novel well. I’d like
to get to know Jane or Allie better, but we’re stuck with Holden. I guess I
appreciate what the novel did for modern fiction, but I personally can’t stand
this book.
3.
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia
Plath
Often cited as a landmark in
feminist and twentieth-century literature, The
Bell Jar is a thinly disguised autobiography that centers on college
undergrad, Esther, who has been born with no personality. The Bell Jar is supposed to be about her mental breakdown but it
really just sounds like the whining of a privileged rich girl. Nothing leads up
to the breakdown; it just comes out of nowhere and when it does arrive, it’s
not very interesting. She doesn’t change or discover anything about herself and
the cliffhanger ending where she just goes into a doctor’s office and the book
ends is infuriating. The first half is filler. I guess it’s meant to show what
her life was like before the breakdown but nothing she does reveals anything
about her character and the other characters that are introduced have nothing
to do with the story and are never heard from again. Keep this one on the shelf
and pick up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest instead.
4.
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
I’ve found that most of
DeLillo’s books are like the Colorado Avalanches: both the novels and the games
start out strong but get weaker and weaker as they go. One of his later novels
- Mao II – opens with a pretty
spectacular mass wedding in a baseball stadium, evoking questions of
individuality, conformity, religion, and entertainment. White Noise opens with college students moving into their new
dorms. As commonplace as that sounds, it’s about as exciting as this novel
gets. There’s an assassination, a chemical leak that forces a town to evacuate,
and a mysterious drug that eliminates the fear of death, yet somehow it all
seems incredibly boring.
I think it comes down to the
characters. DeLillo’s characters are just mouthpieces for his own reflections.
Granted a lot of authors do that and there’s nothing wrong with having a
character being defined by their beliefs (Dostoyevsky does it well in The Brothers Karamazov), but in White Noise, that’s all the characters
are. They have no dimension, they discuss death and modernism as dully as a
philosophy dissertation, and when they’re in peril, I really just don’t care.
There’s just nothing likeable or human to attach to. This isn’t the first book
to talk about commercialism and it’s effects in Suburbia and certainly not the
best.
5.
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas
Pynchon
“My book is an impenetrable
labyrinth of literary masturbation. No one on Earth can understand it. It must be profound!”
6. A Confederacy of Dunces, by
John Kennedy Toole
This book isn’t awful; it’s
really just a mediocre book. The reason I’m listing it here is because it has
such a huge following. Toole couldn’t find a publisher and committed suicide.
Lo and behold, ten years later it’s published and wins the Pulitzer. People
claim this novel is hysterical, but it really isn’t. I chuckled a couple of
times, but that’s it. Toole creates a colorful cast of characters but aside
from the mother, they’re pretty one-dimensional. Ignatius, the main character,
is a loud-mouthed, preachy, self-inflated bum. He’s a lot of fun as an
unlikeable main character, but the problem is that he, too, is a one-note
character. As in The Bell Jar, he
doesn’t change, he doesn’t learn anything about himself, he just keeps on being
an annoying leech only with his girlfriend instead of his mother. The end
doesn’t resolve a lot of plot points and I remember thinking, “Really, that’s
it?”
7. The Lord of the Rings, by
J.R.R. Tolkien
*dodges
bullets* I’m
sorry, I’m sorry. I had to put it on here. This is another book where I
appreciate what it did for the genre much more than I appreciate the book. I like that the various cultures of
Middle Earth have their histories and languages and that there’s definitely a
world created beyond the four corners of the page, but Tolkien just couldn’t
edit it down. There are massive long-winded descriptions of fields, how the
elves make win, and the lineage of dwarf kings. The plot and the characters definitely
take a back seat to the setting. It’s hard to get emotionally involved when the
story is interrupted by a five-page tangent on a forest.
This is one of my few
exceptions to the rule “The book was better than the movie.” Peter Jackson’s
film trilogy surprisingly does a better job developing its characters and
establishing its plot than the book does. Tolkien has his moments – Gollum is a
great character – but The Lord of the
Rings reads much more like a history textbook than a story. This should be
no surprise since Tolkien was a linguist, historian, and Oxford professor, but
he managed to pull everything off with The
Hobbit, I just don’t know why he failed to do it here.
8. The DaVinci Code, by Dan
Brown
This book only became a
bestseller because it was controversial. The actual history of how the Catholic
Church got started and how the religion changed over time is pretty fascinating
and I think a lot of people wanted to look at some of the origins of their
beliefs but the research is incredibly sloppy. First and foremost, the Prior of
Scion was disproven as a hoax by a Frenchman trying to claim he was descended
from Christ in the late 50’s. Brown gets a lot of basic facts wrong like his
assertion that the Olympic Games were in honor of the Sacred Feminine with the
pentacle as the symbol. Actually, the games were meant to honor Zeus and the
games had no emblem until they were revived in France in the 19 century. When
the author is constantly getting his facts wrong, it’s hard to take the book seriously.
Still, The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction. So what if some facts are
skewed? Well, the book fails there as well. The tone of the narrator is
preachy, always pushing his social opinions and often, it’s hard to tell if
where in Langdon’s thoughts or the narration. There’s all these holes in the
story. Why didn’t any of Sophie’s family try to find her if she was allegedly
from the Merovingian bloodline? Do the police just not think to take her and
Langdon in for questioning? Really, nobody found that tomb when they were
building the Louvre? Not to mention all the “Well, that’s what they want you to think” logic.
9. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
This is another terrible book that was flooded
with awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer. This
book takes place in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic so it should have had
a interesting sense of culture but instead we just get tons of “Spanglish,”
slang, and footnotes which really don’t add anything to the already thin plot.
The sense of place just isn’t there. Also, the narration is choppy and real
difficult to get into. The copious footnotes are just distracting; why can’t
they be worked into the narrative?
Furthermore, Díaz
inserts as many references to nerd culture as he can but his main character –
the comic book living Oscar – feels flat and lifeless. I feel like he’s not
trying to describe a character, but just trying way too hard to be clever. The book has no sense of flow, the
narrator rambles on, and the writing is just plain bad. Half of this book could
be edited out. Díaz is just trying to
write in the flashiest prose that he can but utterly forgets his story and his
characters.
10. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
Rand
has experienced a surge of new readers among conservatives and libertarians in
the wake of Glenn Beck and The Tea Party. She’s sort of this bizarre pop
philosopher that goes in and out of style depending upon the current political
climate. She wrote dozens of essays and books about her philosophy,
Objectivism, and really that’s what she should have stuck with. Her books are
just dry and boring as tax codes, overwritten like a Russian novel (she did
emigrate from the Soviet Union), didactic as a Baptist preacher, and have the
overdone drama of most romance novels. There really aren’t characters so much
as manifestations of ideas all competing. They’re thinner than cardboard and
are nothing like real people.
The Fountainhead centers around an architect
named Howard Roark. He’s a genius (Rand makes sure to hammer this into his
head) and care about nothing but himself and his buildings. In the first few chapters, I thought,
“This character is kind of a dick. I’ll bet he has a life-changing experience
or meets someone who makes him realize the world doesn’t revolve around his
ego.” But no, this is Rand’s notion of the ideal man! Her books champion
individuality, ideological and artistic freedom, and being true to yourself –
which are all fine things that need to be defended – but Rand sees the world
entirely in black and white and takes these ideas to the extreme. When a firm
makes some changes to a building without Roark’s knowledge or consent, he
dyamites the building to the ground. Another character buys a statue from a
museum then throws it down a laundry chute and destroys it so that no one else
can have the pleasure of looking at it.
Everything
in the novel is framed as Roark vs. everyone else, selfishness vs. altruism,
the individual vs. the collective, the lone genius and the masses of jealous
ignorant leeches who want to bring him down out of jealousy. It’s a 600-page
lecture on the virtue of selfishness (the title of one of her books,
seriously), greed, and morality that ends at the tip of your nose. Charities,
environmentalists, and humanitarians are wasting their time. This is one of the
few books where I hate the writing style as much as I hate the message. Ayn
Rand’s message may be popular among Tea Partiers now, but it’s nothing more
than a childish, egocentric philosophy: a philosophy of half-truths with no
place for compassion, friendship, or the outside world. I imagine Rand must
have died an admired writer, but without a single friend.
