(Not Really a) Review: The Five Most Overrated Novels

After many weeks of struggling I've finally given up on War and Peace. I made it to chapter forty-seven. Honestly I shouldn't have bothered reading forty-seven sentences of it, let alone chapters. So, inspired by that disaster, I've made a list of the five most overrated novels I've suffered through.

Already reviewed here. From what I've seen, Leo Tolstoy either wasn't a good author, or the English translations of his novels do him a disservice. After being bored to tears by both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, I'm inclined to think it's the former.

Already reviewed here. Unlike the other examples on this list, Great Expectations is actually a good novel. It's just not as good as some people claim. And it's certainly not the best of Dickens' works.

Already reviewed here. The Turn of the Screw is the least frightening, most boring horror novel I've ever read. And it drags on for aaaaaaaaaaaages. It can't decide if it wants to be a novel or a short story, and only succeeds in being too short for one and too long for the other.

I can sum The Great Gatsby up in one word: Yawn. Heavy-handed symbolism, threadbare plot, revolting characters, interminable dullness... In short it has everything I don't want in a novel. Of course, those flaws are probably the reason it's considered a classic, because some people believe only the most boring books ever written should become classics.

Middlemarch was one of the books I read out of morbid curiosity rather than interest. The miniseries adaptation was so bad that I thought the book had to be better. It isn't. If anything it's worse. Nothing ever happens in the entire sorry saga. Chapter after chapter it stumbles along without even trying to keep the reader's attention. Eventually I gave up in despair.

(Of course there are many more novels I consider overrated, but these are the five that immediately spring to mind.)