Ed Ranks 8 Classic Books that are Horrible

Some things become "classics" for absolutely no reason at all. They are horrible trash that should have been forgotten long ago. The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a famous metaphor for the loss of irreplaceable human culture and knowledge. If these 10 books had been thrown in a fire before anyone read them, we'd be all the better off for it. Why do schools force children to read these terrible books? No wonder kids don't actually read them and turn to SparkNotes or Wikipedia instead. Going three pages into any of this drivel will instantly make you jealous of those who are illiterate.  These are the eight most horrible classic books, with #1 being the most horrible of all.

8. The Scarlet Letter - This book opens with a clumsily-written, 44-word run-on sentence. It doesn't get any better from there. I mean the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities is super long too, but at least it's iconic and people only remember the "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" part. Nothing memorable here. I honestly think teachers just assign it because it's relatively short. I guess it's supposed to include "symbolism" for children to learn about, but The Scarlett Letter beats a dead horse with its symbolism, finds a magical resurrection potion to bring the horse back to life, and beats it to death again. 

7. Great Expectations - Don't get your expectations too high. Sorry Dickens.

6. The Iliad - The Trojan War is a famous story about, among other things, (1) the birth of an almost-invincible demigod and the un-changable prophesies about him; (2) the Judgement of Paris, where a man hosts a beauty pageant with three goddesses and is given the world's most beautiful mortal woman as his prize; and (3) the 10-year war that said beauty pageant sets off, eventually ending with the Greeks sneakily breaking into Troy (through the famed Trojan Horse) and massacring everyone inside. The Iliad is famous for being "the story of the Trojan War." Guess how many of those things that I mentioned happen in The Iliad? None. The Iliad is a boring piece of shit about a couple of weeks during the war when Agamemnon and Achilles were feuding with each other about women who they kidnapped as war prizes and constantly raped. I can see why Brad Pitt wanted to take his movie version in a slightly different direction.

Go ahead, read all about this for 400 pages

5. Moby-Dick - Ever wanted to spend about 70 hours reading an encyclopedia of whaling terms because you want to know all about the various equipment associated with 19th Century whaling and the respective differences of oil yield between the blubber of different species within the Infraorder Cetacea? You're in luck! This book exists, and it is awful.

4. Don Quixote - "Such a classic!" says everybody. "Remember when he fought the windmills?" If you talk to anyone about Don Quixote, they will mention the windmills fight thing to you. Why? Because that happens near the beginning of this 1000+ page novel (technically two novels - with a Part 1 and Part 2). I'm not sure anyone has actually made it all the way to the end. About two chapters after the windmills, most readers will be like, "Oh, I give up. He's stupid and he thinks he's a knight even though that hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years. Hasn't this just been the same joke over and over again every single chapter?" Well, it is the same joke, over and over again. After a while it just feels like we're making fun of a guy with autism.  Some readers might skip a few hundred pages forward to see if the joke has changed at all, or if the story has moved on. It won't and it doesn't. Don Quixote would have been an excellent and funny 3,000 word short story. Instead, it's a 400,000+ word mega-book, usually with additional citations and footnotes just as long as the text itself explaining all the obscure references.

Behold, an asshole who wrote three novels about himself

3. The Divine Comedy - Dante is a petty asshole. This is actually three books instead of one, and this is how it goes: "I'm Dante, I'll make myself the main character in my own novels. Everyone who I dislike or who disagrees with my beliefs is in hell, and everyone who I like is in heaven. My guide through heaven is a dead girl named "Beatrice" who I had a crush on but who friend-zoned me. I have an incredibly unhealthy fixation on her." Who would you guess the primary residents of hell are? According to Dante, it's pretty much just Popes. Hell is, like, PopeTown, in Pope Provence, in the Country of Pope. And what are the chances that Dante DIDN'T dig up this Beatrice girl and have sex with her dead body? Come on, you know he did.

2. Atlas Shrugged - Summary: "Poor people are terrible, rich people are good." Hopefully you were never actually assigned to read this book in school. But who knows? Maybe your teacher was just as awful as this book. I think writer John Rogers' analysis is the most succinct: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." But then again, John Rogers' actually wrote that quote on blogspot, so you have to take quoting blogspot for what it's worth. If the co-writer of Transformers and Catwoman calls you a bad writer, well, it's over.

Man's deadliest instrument of suicide - apparently a sled

1. Ethan Frome - Reading this book will make anyone want to sled into a tree and die. Oh wait, is that absolutely the stupidest method of suicide conceivable? Yes it is, which is why it doesn't work. This is the literary equivalent of an emo kid talking about how suffering and pain is the only thing that they can feel anymore. I am almost certain that "Edith Wharton" is the pen name for a 12-year old girl who locked herself in her room and wrote about wanting to die after she learned that the lead guitarist of My Chemical Romance had a girlfriend, and therefore wouldn't be able to marry her. "I want these characters to be in love, but they can't be together because the world sucks, so they go to kill themselves, but even then they can't kill themselves right and live as cripples for the rest of their life! Just like my heart has been crippled by you, Ray Toro!"