Most Overrated Books of All Time
From Zeugma
Maybe it's just me...
Sandra Cisneros. House on Mango Street. Why is everyone teaching this book? If you can only read at a 4th grade level, well, that's one thing. But otherwise read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying instead. It's so much better.
Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie. American Realism--ugh. If I want realism I'll turn on the news.
Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet. Anyone who's read his brother's hilarious book, My Family and Other Animals, simply cannot take this guy as seriously as he takes himself.
George Eliot. Mill on the Floss. Things are great until Eliot gets stuck and decides to drown everyone at the end. To my mind that's cheating.
T. S. Eliott. The Wasteland. The first stanza is good, but anyone who includes his own footnotes at the bottom of the page belongs on a list like this without question. And has anyone ever actually read parts II, III, or IV?
Everyman. This turgid play is anthologized in every English Literature series as an example of medieval drama. But it's not medieval and it's not even originally English, so what gives?
John Fowles. The Magus (2nd ed.). He should have stopped with the first version.
Goethe. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Try reading it in the original German. It's even worse.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure. I got to the part where Sue's children all hang themselves ("Ded, because we are too menny") and just laughed. Fer cryin' out loud!
James Joyce, Ulysses. And Finnegan's Wake. Never let students read this stuff. They'll start trying to write the same way.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover. Booooring. And where's the sex?
Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman. Bah--American realism (see above). This is the book that made me shun lit classes for three years.
Milton, Paradise Lost. Okay, so it's not really overrated. I just don't care for it, I guess. I mean, "He for God only, she for God in him"? Yikes. And this work is supposed to "assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men"? Hmm.
Anais Nin. The Lover. What's "sensuous" about an affair between a teenager and an exploitative millionaire?
Sylvia Plath, Ariel. The beginning of an entire movement in self pity.
George Bernard Shaw. All of it. This stuff is seriously overrated.
William Carlos Williams. The Collected Poems. I ate the plums. They were good. Big deal.
Wordsworth. Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Such ego: "What is a poet? ...a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed common among mankind..." This is the man who told Coleridge "Kubla Kahn" was laughable, you know. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
