Anything by Faulkner, I don't care what any of the literary critics say Faulkner sucks. Most of the books I read in high school English including Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Ethan Frome and the Great Gatsby.
I loved "The Great Gatsby" one of my first jobs after college was at a book club and I could get books for 50cents. I used it as a chance to read up on some of the "classics". I learnt to appreciate Fitzgerald, Twain and Steinbeck --- but I never really got Hemingway
Agree, The Great Gatsby is one of the few high school required reading that I actually enjoyed. I hated The Great Expectation, it puts me to sleep.
Nooooooo, nooooooooo. Me Talk Pretty One Day is hilarious. My girlfriend (now wife) read that book to each other. There were many times that I couldn't read because I was laughing so hard.
Make that a 4th on Catch 22. I saw the thread title and Catch 22 was the first book I thought of. I could not finish the book. It is overwhelmingly sarcastic. The worst book I actually finished was A Beautiful Mind. The content was interesting enough to keep me reading, but the prose was horrible. It read like a very long research paper, including footnotes every few sentences.
Hmmm, methinks so people mistake difficult and antiquated as worst. However, using difficult as the prerequisite, I would have to say A House for Mr. Biswas by V.J. Naipul. 700 pages of people complaining to each other. It had its moments though, and I wouldn't call it a bad book. Using badly written as the prerequisite, I would say A Time to Kill by John Grisham. Clumsy dialogue, cliched characters and the unforgiveable habit of having terrible things happen to characters and then never mentioning those characters again in the book.
Jane Eyre was pretty good, I mean keeping psychotic ex wives locked in your attic for years, that's good stuff.
The Client by Grisham. Nice formula you got there, buddy. Tommyknockers by King. I try to pretend he didnt write this crap.
I felt the exact same way about GE and Wuthering Heights. I don't know which was worse. SO BAD!! EDIT: Almost forgot, 1984 - Do not read that book, it is complete crap.
"Their Eyes Were Watching God", by Zora Neale Hurston. Christ, you monotonously-yammering one-syllable hack, my eyes were watching ESPN instead of reading your soporific cliche-a-minute drivel. If it hadn't been for ol' Zora Neale, I might have actually finished the English portion of my UT degree as an undergrad instead of ditching the double-major routine. OK, that's harsh, I'll just say she sucks.
I usually find at least some redeeming qualities with the HS required reading. I would never read most of them on my own, but they tend to at least be ok. The exception, however, was the Scarlet Letter. Now there's a good that was just plain horrible. The most painful memory of English class.
Heart of Darkness. You get the message that the book is trying to convey like in chapter 1. And then the rest of the chapters just retell the same idea over and over again. Yes, I get it - we are all evil savages underneath. I liked the other book about the same theme - Lord of the Flies much better.
