The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read
It takes a very complicated algorithm to determine what balance of critical history, publication volume, and content makes a book “overrated,” and I’m sure you’re all dying to see that math — no? I should just go ahead with the list, and you can cheer me on as I pander to your sympathies or curse my name as I skewer your old favorites? God, I love list entries. So with the cold calculation of science, I present to you what are undoubtedly the most severely overrated written works you’ve probably had to read — or at least pretend you read:
10. THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA by Friedrich Nietzsche
Alternatively “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” or for all I know “Zarathustra Once Said” in some translations. Friedrich Nietzche wrote a number of responses to what he saw as centuries of dense, incomprehensible moralizing texts, but Thus Spoke Zarathustra is by far the densest, most incomprehensible, and most moralizing of his offerings. Discontented undergrads have quoted it for years, usually without reading the whole thing, and who can blame them?
Apart from some entertaining cracks about everyone being monkeys and God being dead, there isn’t actually anything there except for hundreds and hundreds of pages of puns on words like “under” and “over” that don’t translate out of the original German. The selections in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations are more than ample for anyone who wants to sound like a pretentious asshole, which satisfies 99% of the population that might consider reading this book and therefore earns it a place on the list of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read list.
9. IVANHOE by Sir Walter Scott
Imagine everything about stories set in some unspecified “medieval” land of knights, castles, and chivalry that we as hip, sophisticated, cynical, post-modern readers like to turn our noses up at. Ivanhoe didn’t really start all that, but it certainly perfected it, and the blow is the more crushing because Walter Scott is generally considered the inventor of the modern historical novel.
It’s hard to summarize Ivanhoe because it reads sort of like a full season of a particularly schizophrenic HBO series: we have jousts, fights, abductions, love affairs (boringly chaste, don’t worry), religious and racial tensions (insofar as Saxon and Norman are different races), and some gratuitous Robin Hood bits all jammed together by Walter Scott’s unflaggingly turgid prose. This used to be a required staple of the public school canon, and is thankfully on its way out (unfairly, most objections are based on the portrayal of the Jewish love interest rather than the fact that it’s an awful goddamn book.) Still, its influence on the cultural consciousness and continuing presence on some required reading lists clinches it as one of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read list.
8. ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
The title of Rand’s seminal work evokes the mythical Titan who held the weight of the world on his shoulders, but we’re thinking maybe he was just carrying a couple copies of Atlas Shrugged instead. It weighs in somewhere over a thousand pages depending on your edition, over a hundred of which will be a single speech by a single character — practically a novel in its own right, except for the absence of plot, character, dialogue, or anything else enjoyable to read.
In this day and age Atlas Shrugged would vanish among the heaps of other “distopian” novels that exaggerate a single aspect of modern government to make a very heavy-handed point (I once saw these categorized as “bitchtopian novels,” much to my delight), but in 1957 it was pretty radical stuff and so we’re still stuck with the damn thing half a century later. Whether you share Rand’s belief in the free market or recoil in horror from her work (a reasonable reaction to what she clearly thought were sexy love scenes but are pretty much just graphically-described rape), you can’t get away from the fact that there’s not much plot and no detailed characters, making this unquestionably one of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
7. HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by Dale Carnegie
This is apparently still a popular gift to freshly-minted MBAs (presumably from other, older-minted and therefore slightly tarnished MBAs). I don’t know if anyone else still has to read it, unless they spend their time making lists of overrated books, so perhaps its time on this list is limited? We should be so lucky — Dale Carnegie’s classic work is equal parts a guide to being a complete square and to being a goddamn liar (which is an impressive feat of personality juggling when you think about it).
If you’ve ever dealt with one of those middle managers who never say anything nice but won’t stop smiling? Yeah, they read this book. It will teach you how to sound sincere and earnest about everything, including where you’d like to go for lunch, which will help you become a person who sounds sincere and earnest about where he/she wants to go to lunch. Do you want to be that person? Do you even want to know that person? Apparently a vast percentage of the population does, if overall sales are anything to go by, making this very definitely one of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
6. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS by James Fenimore Cooper
To put things in perspective for modern readers, James Fenimore Cooper was basically the Steven King, Robert Jordan, etc. of antebellum America in terms of sales and impact on the popular culture, and he was about as concerned with consistency or quality in his work. I feel a little redundant panning any of Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” tales since Mark Twain did it earlier and better in an essay called Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, but his opinion remains the minority in the public schools at least — they keep assigning the damn books, with Last of the Mohicans leading the pack (presumably because they made a movie of it, thereby providing the teacher with a solid four days of uninterrupted smoking out back while the class watches the video).
Suffice it to say that Natty Bumpo remains one of the more overpowered and under-characterized protagonists in the traditionally overpowered and under-characterized annals of genre fiction (and this at a time when “genre fiction” was at least a century away from being a well-defined category). There were a lot less books in 1826, so desperation gives the original audience some grounds for forgiveness, but the book’s enduring popularity confirms its place as one of The Top 10 Most Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
5. GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES by Jacob and Wilheim Grimm
We’ve thoroughly backlashed against the Eisenhower era by now, so everyone knows that early fairy tales were a kind of Victorian Quentin Tarantino thriller, right? Well, no. Setting aside the fact that the Bros. Grimm were Victorian by neither nationality nor publishing date, most of the stories also weren’t all that horrific by anyone’s standards, modern or otherwise. Outrage with the “Children’s Stories” mostly centered around the allusions (veiled) to sexual activity and the presence of dense scholarship alongside the stories, not the violence.
Modern readers looking for the “real” version of Disney favorites will be disappointed to find out that a) Most Disney movies aren’t based on Grimm stories and b) The “sanitized” modern versions often aren’t all that different from the originals. They’re still stories for children, and therefore pretty simplified moral lessons with the same familiar cast of character archetypes. In honor of disappointed eyeshadow-wearing middle schoolers, I’m proud to christen this as unquestionably one of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J. R. R. Tolkien
Sure, we could get worked up about details like implied racism or the absence of female characters, but why bother when Tolkien’s beloved trilogy suffers from the much greater flaw of being really fucking boring? The influence of Icelandic epics and Norse sagas on The Lord of the Rings is clear and well-documented, and sure — back when Beowulf was hot shit, it was important to know what Hrothgwang gave to Hrothswanger, because you lived two hills over from Hrothwanger and probably wanted to know that someone had given him a giant fucking sword to hit you with. But there is no justification for that shit in 1954.
Remember that the “trilogy” was written as a single work weighing in at multiple thousands of pages, and that’s after Tolkien realized that he was going to have to make substantial cuts before anyone would touch the thing. Many of those pages are filled with interesting characters, epic battles, and questions of good and evil — but many, many more are filled with the genealogies of made-up kingdoms and descriptions of the different cloaks worn by different Elf-Kings, earning The Lord of the Rings its place on the list of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
3. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
For those of you who don’t take the time to click through to the Wikipedia entries on these titles, here’s a snippet from their summary:
“…The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingualpuns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.”
That’s a polite way of saying that this landmark work is completely fucking unreadable. And yet it remains the critical standard by which all other works, including some very fine ones by Joyce himself, are judged and found wanting (at least by pretentious wankers the literary/academic elite). I can’t offer you a summary because there isn’t one — outside of a few generally agreed-upon plot points, even dedicated Joyce scholars haven’t been able to translate the text of the book into a meaningful narrative.
There aren’t even Cliff’s Notes, because the people who write Cliff’s Notes aren’t equipped for the kind of analysis it takes to get of meaning out of Finnegans Wake. Nonetheless, some of the greatest writers of the 20th century have declared this a work of genius, and it remains required reading for the true lit-crit snobs, thus allowing it to place in the final heat of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
2. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
Before the outrage begins, let me remind you that this is a list of overrated books, not bad ones. I quite like To Kill a Mockingbird myself, but it will always remain a children’s story no matter how many talk-show hosts hail it as one of the great American novels of all times. Like many first-person narratives it falls into the trap of establishing a character for the narrator that the prose cannot possibly reflect — in this case a rurally-educated six year-old girl, whose narrative voice frequently varies in the space of a paragraph from broken and folksy to sweepingly poignant and well beyond a first grader’s vocabulary or emotional understanding.
Perhaps the book’s popularity stems from its ability to touch on difficult social issues like racism without becoming difficult or confusing, which to me suggests that it’s not doing a very thorough job of portraying those issues — and for kids, that’s fine. But as long as people insist on treating this like a work of serious literary weight, it remains high on the list of The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read.
1. THE BIBLE by *
I know what you’re thinking — yes, it’s an oversized series of works purportedly by a single author (but actually written in his name by a host of credited and uncredited ghostwriters), chronicling the career of a single destined savior with miraculous powers and just about every relative or associated character they could come up with a prequel/sequel/spin-off for, but is Star Wars The Wheel of Time the Bible really a bad work? Maybe not. But taken as a whole it certainly tries to be too many things at once, until the reader is left wondering just what they’re holding — is it a historical record? An instructive moral text? An epic adventure? Any one of those answers gets bogged down with the others, making it hard to like the completed product.
There are parts that make very fine reading, and parts that are incomprehensible, which is not altogether unusual or noteworthy. Were it anything but the most published work in all of written history, the Bible probably would have been spared a place on the list altogether — but that kind of hype is very hard to live up to, and so it rests atop The Top 10 Most Absolutely Overrated Books You’ve Probably Had to Read, which you’ve just finished.
Finally something I can have an opinion on. Although I have been mercifully spared from the majority of this list – I can’t agree more with Ayn Rand’s inclusion. My favorite part is the thirty pages radio broadcast which reiterates her whole philosophy for those not paying attention to the first 420 pages of it smacking you in the face. I did enjoy Ivanhoe, though.
I admit the title is a bit disingenuous — most people probably haven’t actually had to read all ten of these. But they’ve probably heard of most of them, perhaps in that tone of voice that implies that educated human beings OUGHT TO HAVE read [overrated book here], and that was good enough for me.
In the interests of full disclosure, even I have not read Finnegans Wake cover to cover, and I may have skimmed here or there in the Old Testament as well.
You’re a fucking statist idiot if you didn’t like Atlas Shrugged.
and your a soullness philistine if you did
Oddly enough, I read at least 3 of these for the first time between fourth and 8th grade, and all more or less of my own accord — Ivanhoe, which I actually kind of liked, but maybe it’s a book best enjoyed by a younger and hopefully less cynical reader; The Lord of the Rings, which confounded me (with the boredom you mention) at age 10, only to return and finish it (and mostly enjoy it) a few years later; and Last of the Mohicans, which numbers among the very few books which I began but never finished (I definitely didn’t enjoy it).
I may have also first read To Kill a Mockingbird in that time, but I don’t actually remember (or care that much).
But mostly (as far as I am able to judge for books I haven’t read) this seems a pretty reasonable list to me.
P.S. Maybe you could do a follow up on Newberry books that even the dullest child couldn’t love. They’re all mostly viewed through the lens of elementary school (and that aweful 6th grade L.A. teacher we both had, who’s name I forget) so I’m not 100% behind this statement, but I remember a few of them being pretty aweful.
P.P.S. What’s the difference between “who’s” and “whose” and did I do it right in the first post script? I found myself hung up on it momentarily and decided I’d ask you rather than agonize over it.
Odwarka [sp.], and “who’s” is the contraction form of “who is.” So you wanted to use the other one.
Hey, no dissing LOTR around here there might be rabid fans about. You know, the ones who have never read the books but swear by the movie that they are the best thing ever. Yeah, gotta watch out for those.
I was more worried about rabid Bible fans, frankly. but so far so good!
No such thing.
they can’t possibly compare to anti-Bible fans anyway.
Yeah, gotta watch out for the the rabid clueless Lotr movie fans. They can get pretty ticked off. But it’s nothing compared to the wrath of the hardcore Tolkien readers!!! Yes, the do exist. And the one that is typing this right now is pretty fucking pissed off at whoever wrote this article. Seriously, as soon as she saw lotr listed as number four on the list, she screamed, and when she saw the ‘fucking boring’ shit, she chucked her tablet at the wall. but she must learn to respect other people’s opinions, so she will rant no more.
You should be worried about rabid fans of To Kill A Mocking Bird, it’s the best book on that list.
Well, like the entry says, “overrated” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad.”
I hate to kill a mockingbird. It is the worst book on that list. It’s stupid & boring! It doesn’t even deserve to be capitalized. The only thing the stupid fans of that abomination should be worried about is me kicking their ass 7 yours as well. You people are so fucking stupid. to kill a mockingbird is way overrated, and totally deserves to be on that list! Any dumbass could write a retarded book like that. You should shut up. In fact, you will go to hell, & all the fans of mockingbird will go to hell too! The Lord of the Rings does not deserve to be on that list! It’s fucking awesome, just like Harry Potter!
This is to whatever shithead said “You should worried about the rabid fans of mockingbird…
I hate to kill a mockingbird. It is the worst book on that list. It’s stupid & boring! It doesn’t even deserve to be capitalized. The only thing the stupid fans of that abomination should be worried about is me kicking their ass 7 yours as well. You people are so fucking stupid. to kill a mockingbird is way overrated, and totally deserves to be on that list! Any dumbass could write a retarded book like that. You should shut up. In fact, you will go to hell, & all the fans of mockingbird will go to hell too! The Lord of the Rings does not deserve to be on that list! It’s fucking awesome, just like Harry Potter!
The only one I’ve read in this list is Mockingbird, and I didn’t think it was a bad story at all, but it wasn’t the stunning work of literary brilliance I was expecting based on the opinions of…well, pretty much everyone I encountered who talked about it. I tried reading Tolkioen’s LotR, for about ten minutes, but it was so boring I couldn’t continue. I have Atlas Shrugged in my personal ebook library, along with other works of Ayn Rand, and at one point I wanted to read it, but I keep hearing rumblings in book-reading circles about the 90-page speech by a single character, and the 30-page broadcast, which I wouldn’t ordinarily mind, except that in every disgussion about these parts of the book, people keep mentioning that all they do is repeat the philosophy that can be found in the other thousand pages of the book, and add nothing new. I have repeatedly tried reading parts of Finegan’s Wake, and cannot find anything understandable in the thing.
One more thing: Why isn’t Great Gatsby on here? Surely the simple mention of the book will leave former high school students groaning with the memory of interminable English classes where they were forced to go over every single metaphor and symbol in the whole damned book. I liked the story when I read it the first time, even though it isn’t much more than a glorified soap opera, but became sick of it when my English class read it soon after. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happened with Mockingbird. The first time I read it, I liked it. The second time for English class, I became bored with it. The third time, which I didn’t have to do, but felt I should so as to make the essay I was writing as good as it could be, I hated it for a few months.
Where’s “the great gatsby” on this?
Where’s Harry Potter?
Fuck you, Mike! Don’t you dare put Harry Potter on this list! Harry Potter books and movies are the best things that happened to this world! To Kill a Mockingbird definitely deserves to be on this list though. I wouldn’t give it a 1/10, let alone a 10/10. To kill a mockingbird is retarded & does not need any imagination or creativity, whatsoever. Anyone could write a book like that. Harry Potter, however, deserves 10/10 for all the books and movies! It is magical, powerful, creative, imaginative, genius, kick-ass and just plain awesome. The girls kick ass in Harry Potter. In mockingbird, they degrade women. to kill a mockingbird doesn’t even fucking deserve to be capitalized. Plus, it’s boring as fuck. Go fuck yourself, you dumb shithead! You will go to hell, Mike & anyone who thinks like you will go to hell too! That is why people like you suck! The reason so many things in the world suck are because of idiot people like you being born! You don’t deserve to live! Later, Bitch!
trolololol
You forgot “Catcher in the Rye”! J.
“Sure, we could get worked up about details like implied racism or the absence of female characters, but why bother when Tolkien’s beloved trilogy suffers from the much greater flaw of being really fucking boring?”
Sure, we could take into consideration Tolkien’s upbringing and culture, and the nature of the society he was brought up in, but why would we do that? It would be mildly practical.
Sure, we could try to appreciate the fact that people’s opinions of ‘boring’ might be different to yours, but why would we do that? It brings perspective.
Actually, I completely agree with you re: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I was recently thinking about doing a serial series based on classic fairy tales (since Once Upon A Time and the much-overrated Grimm are doing well doing so). I figured a good first step would be going my homework — i.e., reading the classic Grimm’s Tales. I downloaded the volume off of Amazon (they and the Hans Christian Anderson stories are free there, by the way), and found that most of them were simply … boring.
I’ve often criticized Disney for simply white-washing classic stories and adding music, but now I give them credit for actually making these stories ENTERTAINING to watch. They certainly weren’t to read. Yuck.
I can’t really comment THAT much on Tolkien since I’ve never read them (I know), but I give him at least some credit for basically starting a genre. His books may not be great in and of themselves, but they provided the bromides for what is now a flourishing genre of fiction. Unfortunately, some of the bromides that survived in epic fantasy are the boring ones, like, pages and pages spent on genealogies, kingdoms, and info-dumping. (Hence why, despite being a total fantasy geek, I don’t read much epic fantasy.)
With regard to To Kill A Mockingbird, I always thought the narrator was an older Scout telling the story of what happened when she was six, though in that case, the book’s closing sentence STILL makes no sense. I do think the book is overly morally simplistic (while considering myself a fan of it), a fact which has bothered me for years — so much so that I wrote a book about it.
Since it seems that you do, apparently, read your comments and I’m almost certainly amused by this post, which I never DID read when it originally came out, I’m going to comment now, and rules of internet importance (anything older than a month is dead) be damned.
I like the comments here…the impassioned statements of some people and the thoughtful arguments or notes of others seem to mesh together rather well. It’s overall a good subsample of the internet:
Angry ranting, with occasional grammatical mistakes, and intellectuals with a purpose, trying to amuse themselves in a seemingly uninteresting daily life.
But, as to the books:
I almost completely agree. Overrated, as you’ve stated, isn’t the same as bad, but there are a few things I’m still not convinced on. When I read Ivanhoe, I was told it was long, difficult to muddle through, and of mediocre quality, only interesting due to its age and cultural messages….
And it was almost exactly that, though a more compelling story than I’d been lead to believe (even if the main plot, and main characters, lack any sort of depth). So, overrated? I don’t hear particular praise, and even in a college English program, never really heard particular affection for it. It’s hard to think that others are particularly convinced of its worth, at least currently. Perhaps it held more clout in the past, but not it seems less kindly looked upon.
I’m also a diehard fan of several books on this list…Tolkien is one of my favorite authors, and I do in fact enjoy To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’ll easily give you that they’re overrated.
Tolkien, when I first read it, was like reading, well, the bible! I didn’t care about the character’s great grandfather’s land holdings, and I wasn’t nearly as interested in the finer details of the house the characters were staying in as I was in the main plot, which progressed at the pace of a very lethargic, possibly inebriated snail. And TKAM, in its own way, has been claimed as a heroic story so many times that reading it I was expecting myself to experience a great epiphany, and rise above my meager life in a new found sense of glory…only to be disappointed by the enjoyable, yet relatively simplistic, tale.
The bible, ABSOLUTELY, deserves first place.
I’m not even getting into the religious context of my statement…but the book is ‘The Book’, it’s supposed to define man, define our relationship with the universe, it’s supposedly the basis for over a billion people’s lives, it’s the most read and most printed thing in existence…and have you EVER tried to get through that thing? I mean, you think Tolkien writes ad nauseam, at least take a gander at the book of Numbers, and tell me you aren’t ready to leap from a tall building in boredom.
However, the one MAIN thing I’d state would be this:
I think Atlas Shrugged needs to be higher on the list.
It’s not that the book is bad (though, I think Ayn Rand’s philosophies and thus subsequent writings are simplistic, ignorant, poorly articulated and of course, remarkably selfish) it’s more that the book is heralded as the SINGLE GREATEST THING ON THE PLANET by people who do love her. It, and ‘The Fountainhead’ are so often praised and revered that I read the book expecting, again, epiphany, not boredom, moral disgust, and constant curiosity about her command of the English language.
Not actually saying you should change it, nor anything of the sort, just thought you might find it an interesting or worthwhile argument, if the main goal of the article is to talk about overrated books you’ve been told, pressured, or made to read.
And hey, if an article from the past is still getting new comments…doesn’t that seem a good thing? Maybe some people stumble on the site, enjoy it a bunch, and follow it up by reading all your past posts. I’ve done that on sites I particularly enjoyed!
^^^ Pretty much all of this, haha. Yep. Sums up my thoughts thus far on the post (and the comments).
A difference: I actually never finished the Hobbit, and because I knew people who insisted I read things “CHRONOLOGICALLY!!!!” I never got to the trilogy itself. (I’ve since realized that I don’t really get the whole ‘chronological’ thing, which I believe to be as over-rated as some of the books on this list… sometimes it’s better to read things in other orders – i.e. The Chronicles of Narnia – which has it’s own shortcomings – is WAY better reading in the order they were originally published than the order they took place – which is how modern editions are published.*)
I would also like to strongly second the suggestion that Atlas Shrugged would do well higher up on the list, and to issue a warning: never talk about it at a boring party. It can only go two ways: a) get more boring because someone repeats why they love it over and over and over and over or b) gets way more exciting but in a dangerous fashion because now a die-hard rand-fan wants to see you publically humiliated in truly horrific ways for DARING to suggest it’s not as perfect as they think…
*I know that sentence makes little sense, and I’m sorry, but I’m waaay too lazy to fix it right now…
I’d love to see Catch 22 on the list. It bothers me that when I say I enjoy Vonnegut, someone invariably says, “You probably loved Catch 22, no?” “No,” I reply, “it was a turd, a one joke effort by a gum snapping smart ass.” A novel should have a theme more profound than “The military’s stupid,” and, if it doesn’t, it should at least have something more interesting than a failed and unbelievalbe attempt to portray an absurd situation.
BTW, I enjoyed Gatsby.
I’d really like to add this article as the number 1 thing I’ve read I wish I hadn’t
The Bible wasn’t written to be some form of ‘fine entertainment’ (as the criteria of your critique is apparently based upon), “…is it a historical record? An instructive moral text? An epic adventure?” It can be all of the above. But it is indeed the most published and most widely read book on earth for a reason. That isn’t “hype”, as you mis-stated. Hype is when a TV network gives a glowing review to one of its shows before the public has seen it. The public has seen and read the Bible for centuries, and it endures. There’s a reason, a good reason, for it.
^That.
“is it a historical record”
Now that is funny.
Do you say that (implying that you don’t believe this) because you can prove otherwise? Or do you just find it ‘difficult’ to believe? There are a lot of things in life that are hard to believe. But that doesn’t necessarily make them untrue. Why do you find this “funny”?
It’s either a testament to your prose or something (very disturbing) about me, but after this list, I actually want to read some of these titles.
Agree thr bible is definitely oveerated
*deep breath in then exhale* I do not want to know the shitstorm from including the Bible in here.
Anyways, one that I would put in here is Pride and Prejudice – again, really really boring. I was forgetting what happened and what was said just a page or two after I had read it. I ended up just using Cliff Notes for it (high school assignments make mediocre-at-best books even worse).