27-03-11, 11:03 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 9,037
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Books not to read
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5 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence
Infamous, explicit tale of an aristocratic woman and her gamekeeper that’s pompous and verbose more than it is naughty.
6 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Not nearly as bawdy or easy to understand as your English teacher promised (“Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth…”). Plus no cover puff from Stephen Fry, so probably not worth reading.
7 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Jay Gatsby is not as great a character as everyone thinks he is. Neither is this book, or the author, or the million of people who pretend to like it. Full of people doing tedious things, breaking off only to sleep with each other’s wives.
8 Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
See above. Bizarrely, was given as a present by Michael Howard to woo his future wife. Even more bizarrely, it worked.
11 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Like trying to get to grips with seven generations of your Colombian exchange student’s family tree.
12 The Outsider by Albert Camus
Read by generations of schoolchildren in the original French, this slim volume is solely to blame for the ability of thousands of A-level students to regurgitate rote-learnt essays on existentialism – and their inability to ask the way to the Louvre.
15 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A touching story of doomed young love to some; a big steaming dollop of self-pity for others. Young Werther is in love with a girl and works himself up into such a frenzy of misery that he eventually shoots himself. Read this, and you may be tempted to do the same.
19 The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
When superior life forms come to write the history of the extinct human race, they will cite this distinctly unhelpful self-help book masquerading as literature as a turning point in our decline. Stunningly trite, it has sold more than 65 million copies in 56 languages and was highly enjoyed by Madonna.
22 Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
A defining moment in Jewish American literature now most famous for a masturbation scene featuring a piece of liver. Disappointingly, this is not as interesting as it sounds.
25 A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
No, you haven’t read it either.
28 Polo by Jilly Cooper
Skip straight to page 61: a sex scene in a helicopter.
31 Does Anything Eat Wasps? by the New Scientist
Yes. Does this book make your loo library look erudite? No.
32 Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
No, they are not. And Gray is from Texas, which tells you all you need to know.
35 Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
A lucrative, eloquent, teeth-pulling exercise in stating the obvious, including the fact that New Yorker journalists who have a successful book with a catchy title under their belt are more likely to have another commissioned.
38 Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
The thinking man’s Stephen Fry. Still annoying, though.
39 Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
A lovely book about an Irish childhood, although indirectly responsible for a decade of misery memoirs: “No, Daddy, not there” etc.
44 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Loved for its description of wartime Cephalonia, but now ruined by the constant appearance during civil partnership ceremonies of the passage about tree roots.
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Actually I can't think of any very good ones - I have such a short attention span that I don't finish anything that starts getting boring. Ten years later I still have no idea how The English Patient ended.
Didn't A Child Called It come before Angela's Ashes? I remember reading a copy of the former that someone had put down in Jersey Airport and thinking "Well this isn't even coming close to satisfying my repressed, bourgeois sado-masochistic impulses. The footballer gang rape stories in the Sun are better." Very boring place, Jersey Airport.
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