Bwahaha!!!

The Bible. Completely incoherent, repetitive, utterly amoral. All the stories have lousy endings.

Shakespeare: plagiarist who wrote stuff in the teenspeak of the day just to make a buck.

I hate Steppenwolf. Yes, we're animals, yes we're intellectual beings, human nature encompasses both, get the fuck over it! sheesh.

Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Was his editor off drunk with the Algonquin crew that week?

Anything by the Brontes.

Atlas Shrugged. I recall a half-baked soap opera chock fulla rants. Come to think of it, the story might have been interesting if the characters mouthing such invective were Luke and Laura.

Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, Nexus, and any other rambling, self-glorifying, cheap-shock-mongering volumes that Henry Miller happened to crap out along the way.

Also: Anne Bronte. Why? Weren't Charlotte and Emily enough?

Dickens. Dusty, dry and dull. Have never managed to finish a single one of his books.

Tess of the d'Ubervilles is one big snore-fest.

The Scarlet Letter! Man, I went through a two week depression while reading that book. I know that Hawthorne probably wanted the reader to feel that way, but I still hated every miserable page. And yet I read them all.

I actually find Rand comical (the courtroom rant in Atlas Shrugged makes me laugh it is so god-awful), although as literature (and political philosophy) it is complete garbage. I don't think I could be in a relationship with someone who thinks Rand is decent reading (or someone who molests wallabees - those are my two red flags).

Dickens was pretty bad as well (ToTC reads like a bad soap opera); it is definite bubble gum reading, which isn't so bad if you like bubble gum.

I wouldn't say Twain sucked, as he was amusing as a humorist, but I was never that impressed with his novels. Mark Twain was a fairly average story which somehow became a classic.

Every victorian/regency romance novel ever written also sucks foul, festering, caseous, necrotic bodily fluids through a twisty straw.

I really did not like "Utopia" by Thomas More; maybe it's just because I would not want to live in the society that the book describes, but I just did not get into it.

I also have to agree to some extent about the bible: the misogynism in the text really gets on my nerves (except in certain books---I thought Judith was hardcore awesome, for example, and there are a few other passages that I like, mainly in "Wisdom" and "Song of Songs"). I know it was standard for the time, but it just really annoyed me A LOT. I also think that a lot of the text is easily misinterpreted by fundie radicals and is the cause for religious-inspired violence, prejudice, and hatred. I might be a bit biased since I'm a lapsed Catholic/agnostic and politically/socially liberal, but that's how I feel about it. It also drives me crazy that people take the bible (and other religious books) verbatim and ignore the spirit of the words. It's a very easy book to twist around to your own purposes.

I'm also not keen on most American writers, especially not today's writers. There are some exceptions of course (for example, Pound, Merwin, Faulkner, and Dickinson, among a handful of others), but for the most part I prefer writers from other places. America just doesn't seem to have it together creatively, artistically, qualitatively, or otherwise; few American creative endeavors measure up to those of other nations in my experience.

And I also agree about the Austen sisters: I go to an mostly-female college and they are the rage on campus; I think they're overrated and I could never really get interested in them.

Utopia by Thomas More was probably meant to be a complicated satire to be published in a police state which, in an interesting twist, he was knighted for helping to run well and then beheaded for saying "no" to the leader of. I usually hate the idea (per New Historicism et al) of having to know a bunch of stuff in order to read something, but It certainly reads better that way. More himself couldn't have been happy in the "utopia" he invented! Anyway.

Threw Bleak House by Charles Dickens out of a window the first time I read it nearly to the end. Have read it a few times since, and I get it but I don't like it.

Agree on Ayn Rand too.

Anything by James Fenimore Cooper (I haven't read it all thank God, but I know instinctively that it all sucks) Nathaniel Hawthorn, Emerson, or Thoreau. Knowing that they are becons of early American writing makes me sad to be an American. They are all self aggrandizing pricks. They seem like the guys who might seem really smart and appealing while your drunk at a party, but the next morning you're sober and lying in bed with next to one of them wanting to brand him on the face so everybody else knows to stay away. I particularly hate Thoreau's On Walden Pond. HE LIVED WITHIN SIGHT OF THE RAILROAD AND HAD PEOPLE BRING HIM SHIT! I wish he had died as an infant before he could talk and rip peoples souls out with his self righteousness.