<p>What's your reaction? Do you try to figure out what is that doesn't make the book or movie just click with you? Do you just plug in and finish it, just for sake of it? If not, at what point do you decide to toss it?</p>
<p>Lord of the Rings, for me. The first ~200 pages were so dull for. I don’t really like hobbits and wasn’t into all the singing and dancing and stuff. Apparently they were on a tense escape from evil pursuers, but maybe it was just Tolkeins writing style, but yawwwwn. I skimmed through a lot of that first chunk that didn’t seem important/backstory
But then once some new characters like aragorn/the elves were introduced I got really into it…for me I only really enjoy books when I can connect to the characters. Watching the movies helped, too. But yeah, I guess I just keep reading until I find a character I like. I’ve pretty much come to accept that if there aren’t any characters I find interesting, no matter how acclaimed the writing style is, I’m not going to genuinely enjoy the book.<br>
Sometimes its just the writing style thats hard to get by with older books, but a lot of the books I struggled with at first ended up being my favorites (the count of monte cristo - i watched the movie first and found the characters/storylines that I really liked and that made the book much more enjoyable because I was familiar with things and knew what to look forward to) once I find the characters I like. But I guess everyone reads differently, so maybe you look for something else in books?</p>
<p>The only books I can remember completely giving up on were “Heart of Darkness” and “Portrait of the artist as a young man”. But part of that may have been the whole senior year thing…honestly, though, got nothing out of them. I dont even know what was supposed to happen.</p>
<p>I hated “The Scarlet Letter”. I don’t know why. But the main character ticked me off a bit. And I ended up getting a C+ for my literature class (first C in high school!) because I messed up on the 100-question multiple choice test for the book. So it brings back bad memories.</p>
<p>I can’t even begin to explain how dull and redundant The Scarlet Letter was.</p>
<p>I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter, but LOTR was a snooze-fest for me (though The Hobbit was good). There are lots of movies that are really popular that didn’t live up to the hype for me, like Citizen Kane (which was thoroughly boring) and Amelie (which I was just indifferent about).</p>
<p>I’ll quit if I’ve been watching for an hour and still am not into it. For books, if the writing’s too difficult anyway, I’ll let it go. But most of the time, I feel mild annoyance at myself for not being able to derive so much pleasure from a book that’s supposed to be a classic, so I’ll force myself to chip away at it, which actually makes no sense because I’ll just have wasted a few hours of my life. :(</p>
<p>Oh, and The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man… What the heck was that?!?</p>
<p>Lots of so-called “classics” suffer from Jerry Maguire syndrome. Meaning that every says how great they are so you go in excepting to be be amazing and when it is very goof not but not great even though you didn’t dislike it you were disappointed by it. Very very common.</p>
<p>As for Classic Books, all of Charles Dickens… Just horrible to read, so many unnecessary words which actually makes sense considering he was paid by the word.</p>
<p>^I love Charles Dickens. His sentences were fun, despite all the unnecessary words.</p>
<p>I generally try to get through the book, just in case. Sometimes I’ve hated/laughed at/ been excruciatingly bored by a book in the beginning but ended up awed by it. Farewell to Arms, for example. Sometimes I put it aside but read it later and LOVE it (Madame Bovary and the Theban plays, picked them up months after I started). Most of the time I book I hate in the beginning I keep at and end up still disliking (I’m looking at you, Heart of Darkness). But if there I’m just completely disconnected and there are over two hundred pages left, I toss it (this has happened twice. Pamuk’s My Name Is Red and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). I still aspire to read both of them someday though.</p>
<p>I agree with Charles Dickens… the best thing to attempt to read if you need to sleep. So boring and there’s no good plot. Id say the biggest one for me was “The Watchmen” everyone loves this book and I just dont understand it at all. Its so stupid</p>
<p>Yes! I <em>hated</em> Tess of the D’Urbervilles. i could go on and on about that book, but I’ll spare your eyes the agony of having to read it…</p>
<p>^^ The comic “Watchmen”? I thought it was AMAZING…</p>
<p>nah, I don’t think the watchmen is all that awesome either</p>
<p>Great Gatsby, Titanic (I guess, because I knew how it would end), Citizen Kane (how does anyone hear him say “rosebud”? that ruined everything for me), Star Wars movies.</p>
<p>^ Great Gatsby was an AWESOME book. What are you talking about??!</p>
<p>I second the Scarlet Letter being an awful book. Plus it was soo boring…and It got myself, along with my class a terrible grade on the final exam (i only did well on the essay part) :/. The only fun thing I remember from it was how my english would call the baby “creepy pearl” lol.</p>
<p>@the OP/Keilinger: I watched Amelie in my French class. It was weird as hell .haha.</p>
<p>“Uncle Tom Cabin” was such a bored and the dialogue was so confusing. I only read up to chapter 16 and I was done with the book. I didnt enjoy “The Jungle” for the first couple of chapters, but then I was forced to read the book because I was behind in the class, and I ended up loving it. I also loved reading “The Picture of Dorian Gray” but hated the original vision of the movie.</p>
<p>^^the great gatsby is boring, why is everyone all up on daisy? she seems like an idiot. and then it’s just like the moral is “rich people are dicks”</p>
<p>I am a person who can read any kind of book, but I literally could not get past the first page of LOTR.</p>
<p>Moby Dick,
so many pages about whales. It almost killed me, but finishing it made my week!</p>
<p>I hated Things Fall Apart by Achebe.</p>
<p>I understand that he was trying to introduce the world to Igbo culture through story, but to me, that didn’t excuse the fact that the plot was nearly non-existent for the first two-thirds of the book. Outside of the main character, Okonkwo, nearly all of the characters were interchangeable and had no personality.</p>
<p>Plenty. As somebody whose favorites books and movies tend to be older (or downright ancient), I have no problem giving a classic a try. I also have no problem tossing it aside if I see no value in it. Here are some “classic” movies I did not care for (or even hated):</p>
<p>Breathless
L’Atalante
North by Northwest (and I’m a huge Hitchcock fan)
Adventures of Robin Hood (I keep trying to like it but I don’t think I do)
Battleship Potemkin (technically innovative, but just not a good movie)
Le Million</p>
<p>Novels:
Pride and Prejudice (I’ll give it another try one of these days)
A Separate Piece (…of crap)
Stranger in a Strange Land (I slammed this turkey shut after a hundred and fifty pages of waiting for it to stop being painful)</p>
<p>Jane Eyre. So boring.</p>
<p>The Godfather: I thought it wasn’t worth ALL the “unbelievably AWESOME” credit it’s given. Sure, after seeing it more, it seems like it’s quite a bit better, but I don’t think it’s the ultimate “BEST MOVIE EVER!!!”</p>
<p>Titanic is not even a classic. And I hated it.</p>
<p>Scarface. Hated it to the bone.</p>
<p>Works of James Joyce, as a whole. Dubliners, Ulysseus, and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.</p>
<p>Pride and Prejudice</p>