Books You Like That Everyone Else Seems To Dislike

Post Reply New Topic

I love reading The Silmarillion [by J. R. R. Tolkien], but a lot of people seem to think it's boring. I like dense fantasy novels, and my own fantasy novels that I write are often a bit too dense sometimes.

I've had The Silmarillion in my collection for almost a decade but not got around to it yet, I'm due a re-read of the rest and have the two towers in a pile alongside several other piles for an imminent re-read by next summer! As for books I like that get a bad rap, nobody gave much of a crap for the sequel to chocolate factory (work of genius) by Dahl, the great glass elevator is just as far out as that monument reached, I adore it and would have it no other way, it's charming beyond measure, the next logical step is space when you've blasted out of a kooky confectionery factory, I do believe the plot is kinda err... loose but how do you succeed the first book's premise when you more or less solved it already lol!

I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (as well as the BBC miniseries adaptation). I thought it was incredible. It was a bestseller... But most of my friends who read SF and fantasy can't understand why anyone would like a book written in a 200 yr old writing style that is "so slow."
I don't think it's slow, it's brilliantly, deliberately paced...

I like Jane Eyre, although the constant Bible-quoting is a bit much sometimes.

I don't think this is unpopular at all. Same with The Mr. Clarke book.

^Really? Oh. Oh, well.

If it's called a slow book it will most likely have more of a neutral response towards it than a boisterous one.

Fahrenheit 451

It's actually fairly popular, but most people didn't like the ending (and I'm coming around to it): The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. I'm in love with that book.

Gormenghast.

...OK, not /everyone/ hates it. But at an SF convention last year, I was trying to argue in favour of more descriptive, discursive prose writing as opposed to the full-steam-ahead, cut-all-the-adjectives style currently in fashion. I citied Gormenghast as a good example, and promptly got dogpiled on for my appalling taste.

But Gormenghast is the /only/ fantasy novel my Dad likes.

^I never heard of that, so I decided to look it up. I much prefer descriptive prose writing; it's the only way I can write. Many authors these days seem to writing tv scripts with barely any description. What's with that?

As a kid, I didn't like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" half as much as "The Great Glass Elevator." Something about Vermicious Knids clearly spoke to me. Twenty years on, I think Dahl may have been making an obscure zoology joke there. Most kinds of animal are basically "vermicious" or wormlike- they have a mouth, a tubular gut and an anus. But Cnidarians (jellyfish, corals etc.) just have a bag for a stomach with a single orifice leading out and in, so they are as non-vermicious as you can get.

My taste in books is in accord with whatever I'm fascinated with at the time. I think many people would think the books I like are weird.

i was the weird kid who read mein kampf my sophomore year of high school. never got in trouble for it, but i got the looks.

i got to find out who the neo nazis and skinhead jr's were.

more recently i read a sociology book on millenials, required for an english class last year.

i wouldn't go as far as to say others disliked it, but i was completely enraptured by it and read further ahead than most in the class.