Ideally, the books you list aren’t merely bad (bless your heart, Chuck Tingle and Ernest Hemingway), but they’re very likely over-celebrated classics. They’re not just the classics that left you feeling meh (but if you have a good explanation for why… like the ending completely went off the rails), take a shot. Maybe not just the much-hyped but completely, personally disappointing sequel to that one book everyone loved. Have at it. I mean, if you just want to say pooh on Ulysses, excellent; someone needs to disagree? Maybe we should all be reading Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent, not Crime and Punishment.
Knock some of those (fictional) “must-haves” off the shelf. War and Peace may be amazing, but we could read all of Steinbeck’s short novels for the same investment of pages, and have room for that Chuck Palahniuk we've always been meaning to get around to.
&c.
by SconeBracket