Recently I've been trying to read some of the all time classics, and I have to admit, some of them I can't get into...

1) Moby Dick: Made it halfway, couldn't stand it
2) Great Gatsby: Overrated
3) Tale of two cities: Made it halfway, couldn't get into it.

The one's I liked so far:

1) For whom the bells toll: Pretty good!
2) Treasure Island: Outstanding

What famous books do you recommend I check out next? and which ones to avoid?

The Divinci Code - I couldn't read more that 3 pages.

Catcher in the Rye, Salinger's depiction of teenage angst via Holden is so over-the-top it comes off as a parody to me.

Great Gatsby is slightly overrated, but Tender Is the Night is one of the greatest American works, ever.

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

I was told time and time again that since I traveled so much I would love the book. I though it was terrible and stopped about 3/4ths the way through.

Check Out:

Richest Man in Babylon
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Outlaw Journalist (Hunter S Thompson's Bio)
The Art of Power (Thomas Jefferson's Bio)
How Language Works by David Crystal
Sherlock Holmes
Anything by Hemingway
Anything by Jack London
Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
Alice in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass
KING SOLOMON'S MINES (BEAUTIFUL SHIT I FUCKING LOVE IT)
Picture of Dorian Grey
The Illiad
The Aenied
The Odyssey
BEOWULF
Ivanhoe
Anything by HG Wells
Anything by Charles Dickens (but you don't like Tale of Two Cities :/)
Tales of 1001 Nights


Avoid:

To Kill A Mockingbird
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Quicksand
The Good Earth
Diary of Anne Frank
The Joy Luck Club
Perks of Being A Wallflower
Running With Scissors
Girl, Interrupted
(the last 3 I haven't read but seeing what kind of people read them, I would stay away from them)
The Book of Mormon (Barely even finished the first part. The Qu'ran is more entertaining than it)
Heart of Darkness (SUCH A BULLSHIT "CLIMAX")
Scarlet Letter
The Good Soldier (Could not finish it, the narrator is a fucking waffling little faggot)

I second Catcher in the Rye. Maybe it's cause I read it in my 20s and not as a teenager.

The Great Gatsby is a very good novel. It's storytelling is tight, the pacing is solid, and the overall themes about materialism still ring true. You just has to take it for what it is.

I forgot about "on the road", I hated that one also....

I actually thought Jurassic park was a good book, and some of the Stephen King stuff when I was in High School...

Hemingway bores me to tears. It feels like reading a Phillip Glass composition. Which is ironic, because I like Phillip Glass.

A Dead Bat In Paraguay.

Quote: (07-10-2013 08:05 PM)2Wycked Wrote:  

A Dead Bat In Paraguay.

The OP said "famous."

Naked Lunch by william s burroughs

AYN RAND . anything by ayn rand. extremely derivative. very intellectually facile. As a rule of the thumb, mostly any philosophical/sociological works written by a woman tends to suck.

any philosophical work by Martin Heidegger.

the KORAN. does not have the intellectual depth of the bhagavad gita or bible or the talmudic texts.

Ulysses. By far the worst insufferable piece of shit writing Ive ever wasted my time on.

Anything by Dickens. He's past his sell-by date.

On the other hand, Plato's Republic is well worth reading.

Quote: (07-10-2013 08:16 PM)Sp5 Wrote:  

Anything by Dickens. He's past his sell-by date.

On the other hand, Plato's Republic is well worth reading.

I loved Plato's Republic, on the other hand The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky has been an extremely difficult read to put it mildly. I'm only 1/5 in so I can't really say it sucks, and there have been a few passages here and there that are funny, amusing or extremely intelligent but with so many characters, each character with different names, so many different stories and plots, the way he drags the action, etc., that I find myself reading and reading and not having any clue what's going on or just bored.

Quote: (07-10-2013 07:56 PM)horn Wrote:  

Great Gatsby is slightly overrated, but Tender Is the Night is one of the greatest American works, ever.

Gatsby is perceptive writing that validates game.

He's a Beta with Oneitis who thinks he can win Daisy purely through social status and an excessive display of wealth, but simply can't compete with Tom, the self-interested AMOG.

Anything by Faulkner, Mailer, Henry James, Hawthorne,Dickens and a lot of late 19th century to mid 20th century American writers I find unreadable. Also , almost any science fiction.

Books I recommend highly:

Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn -Henry Miller. The adventures of a player in Paris and New York.

The Odyssey-Much more exciting than the Iliad and speaks more to modern readers

Almost anything by Hunter S. Thompson, especially, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole. One of the funniest novels ever written. And if the reader is familiar with New Orleans, it's even funnier

92 in the Shade-Thomas Mcguane-dark doings in sunny South Florida

The collected works of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The two finest American writers of horror and science fiction

The Ginger Man- a rascally player in Dublin in the 1950s. A famous book in its time, it was banned for obscenity. Very funny and the main character would fit in well on this forum.

The Inferno-Dante Not dry at all as you might assume an old classic is, it moves fast, is lurid, and almost cinemagraphic in its imagery

Several Elmore Leonard mystery novels

Gargantua and Pantagruel-Jean Rabelais- A weird and bawdy work set in the later medieval period that's hard to describe but fun when you get into the spirit of it

Almost anything by Tom Wolfe-the best living American writer

The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges- Start with the collection "Ficciones" Mindblowingly great and original and unlike anything else really.

Blowup and other stories-Julio Cortazar-really fine post modernist short stories

Justine-Lawrence Durrell .Set in 1930's Alexandria, it has a beautiful style and exotic and erotic atmosphere

7 Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales- Isak Dineson. Fantasy stories for dark winter's evenings

The Story of O-hehe

The Way of a Man with a Maid-anonymous. Victorian style erotica


lI agree with your opinions about the books you mentioned except for Moby Dick. I failed too the first time I tried to read it. I suggest waiting 10 years then trying to read it again, that's what I did and now it's one of my favorite books.

I couldnt chew through One Hundred Years of Solitude. Just too fucking dense with names and families and such. Nah thanks.

I did enjoy a lot more Love in the Time of Cholera, though. Beta dude with oneitis learns game by macking on everything that moves...not gonna spoil it. Worth reading, and he has a lot of catchy phrases that had gotten me laid more than once.

Also overrated: The Koran. Meh. Lot of hatin' going on. Kinda makes sense with the times, but jeesh, lay off the hatin'. I liked the baghada vita a lot more (the ending is crazy).

A Wrinkle in Time. Singlehandedly got me off reading books for several years (when I was like in 4th grade)

Quote: (07-10-2013 08:12 PM)Nemencine Wrote:  

AYN RAND . anything by ayn rand. extremely derivative. very intellectually facile.

+1

Also unreadable at an older age:
The Scarlet Letter
Anything by Jack London

Don Quixote by Cervantes. Dull, dull, dull.

Harry Potter 5 ruined reading for me in 5th grade.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was painful to read. Someone trying to phonetically sound out black southern drawl in a book? Terrible.

Ken Keseys' One flew over the cuckoos nest and sometimes a great notion. The movies are ok

its already been seconded, but Catcher in the Rye, holy shit Holden.is the least interesting and unpleasant character ever.

the bible