Most Overrated Book?
Submitted by mwilliams on Fri, 2008-03-14 19:33.Vladimir Nabokov declared that “Don Quixote” was “cruel and crude” and that “Death in Venice” was “asinine” His onetime friend Edmund Wilson, on the basis of “The Trial” and “The Castle,” said he found it “impossible” to take Kafka seriously as a “major writer.”
What book gets your vote for being the most overrated?
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Ulysses, obviously.
You said A, then you have to say B, which is Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. :)
I say, Don Quixote. I haven't read any of the others that were mentioned. But Don Quixote seemed fairly pointless, and it sure wasn't funny. The only thing I got from that book was that everyone is an asshole, and I already knew that.
I never read Don Quixote, but if the main message is that everyone is an asshole perhaps I should read it.
I love Don Quixote, and it convinced me that writing and reading are worth it. I didn't get from it that everyone is an asshole as much as delusion has its value when .... um, when everyone else is an asshole. Wait, I want to refine that a bit ...
I do think Ulysses is over-rated, which is to say that you could still like it and say that the near-worship of it is a bit over-done. When it was named the Top English Language Novel of the Twentieth Century I really had to question it - I mean, is it really written in English?
Also, I really never got Proust. Or about half of Faulkner.
I never got the big fuss over Tolkien.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
But good old John opened up the whole genre we now know as fantasy, with its wizards and orcs which paved the way for DnD and other fun ways to kill time! As an owner of many polyhedric dice I think I owe JRR a big thank you for that.
I've always liked the books even though I concur they aren't literary hallmarks by any account, but they had an impact nonetheless. Tolkien was fascinated with languages primarily, and everything in Middle Earth is extrapolated from its rich linguistic heritage.