An overhyped classic you really didn't like

[Hyacinth Bella]

I really did not like Wuthering Heights. I read it when I was younger, maybe in the first year of highschool, and it did not kept me turning the pages. I just found it really boring.

[Couchpotato_kingh]

What? That book was a literal classic, although I will admit that I loved his other books more.

[Akshobhya B]

Eugénie Grandet is one of the most popular books by Honore De Balzac and is considered a french classic. But I didn't like it much and thought that it was over-rated. It isn't a bad book just not as great as everybody says.

[Courtney Hughes]

I hated Catcher and The Rye so much that I only managed to get 3/4 of the way through it. I didn’t care at all for Holden, if anything he was annoying. He was so negative about everything!

[Sarah Eliza]

The Scarlet Letter. Morally repulsive, boring, and just plain unnecessary. I had to read it for school and had no interest in it by the 5th page. It seemed that there really was no point to the book but to bash religion and shock the reader.

[Rizki Pradana]

The book Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is the one that I feel overhyped because the story was really boring.

[Darrell Ingrum]

I enjoy reading most classics, but Henry James' The Turn of the Screw was pretty blah. I read the whole book, which I guess suggests it wasn't all that bad, but literally any modern horror tale is likely more enjoyable. Its prose and dialog are so incredibly stilted, I think, is what ruins it. Maybe it should be "translated" into American English.

Ironically, nearly as soon as I finished reading it, I learned Netflix was featuring a series adaptation called The Haunting Bly Manor, which I thought might modernize and redeem the novel. But...nope...the first episode was even more boring than the novel.

-D.

[Elendu Ekechukwu]

I really didn't get To kill a mocking bird. Maybe I would read it again

[Meenahhhh]

Romeo and Juliet. Two teenagers fall in love and die, what's the big deal?

[Frank Mutuma]

I never really cared for lord of the rings. For me they seemed really tedious

[ABaker97]

Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare has so many better plays. I believe the concept and story are both horrible. I think that the main characters lack development, and the plot is just, “meh”.

I’ve also taught this story within the past two years, and it’s actually painful. The students come into thinking it’s the greatest, partly because of DiCaprio, but the more they read it, the more their minds change. Once you realize that they “fell in love” and died, in two weeks, it’s kinda crazy and twisted. It’s hard because you see similar behaviors in teens today, and you know it isn’t healthy, and I will say the kids recognize it in the story and they don’t approve, but it doesn’t change their behavior.

Stories like Romeo and Juliet seem sweet if you don’t understand the context, but I think the influence it can have is worse than the story itself, and we should be teaching and showing kids better than that.

Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.

[ej_author]

The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I disliked the book more than any other book I've read to this day, and I read it 10+ years ago. I can't stand Victor Hugo's writing style and the story is just...awful. I get the true point of the book, but it really just felt way too dismal to me. Yes, life can be horrible and the way that good and noble people are mistreated every single day in our world is absolutely tragic, but I'd much rather read books that give hope rather than just having everything end up in flames.

[Robert Obikanyi]

I think we consider Stephen King a classic author at this point. So no, except for Misery, I didn't enjoy any of his book, nor most of his short stories.

[AvishaJain_13]

The Catcher In The Rye! I really did not understand the hype about it as it mostly seemed like the rantings of a teenager

[Huck_Finn]

The Alchemist. It felt like a self - help book which eventually never helped.