“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

The Morning News has compiled what may be the new Garfield minus Garfield - a culling of sublimely surrealist cultural artifacts - in the form of its Lone Star Statements.  These are a selection of one star reviews of classics - specifically works that are so classic as to have achieved a place in the canon that is Time's list of the 100 best post-1923 novels.

Quick quiz- See how many of the following classics you can identify by their one-star reviews (courtesy of Lone Star Statements):

  • “While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”
  • “When one contrasts Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with this book, it’s like comparing an Olympic sprinter with an obese man running for the bus with a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other.”
  • “1) I’m bored. 2) He uses too many allusions to other novels, so that if you’re not well read, this book makes no sense. 3) Most American readers are not fluent in French, so to have conversations or interjections in French with no translation is plain dumb. 4) Did I mention I was bored? 5) As with another reviewer, I agree, he uses a lot of huge words that just slow a person down. And it’s not for theatrics either, it’s just huge words mid-sentence when describing something simple. Nothing in the sense of imagery is gained. 6) Also, to sum it up, it’s a story about a pedophile.”
  • “This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.” (The hilarity of this entry, written about a famously opaque author, is compounded by the fact that it was through my ex-boyfriend that I discovered Lone Star Statements.  Thanks, M!  Sorry if I strutted and fretted my hour upon the stage from time to time back in high school....)
  • And of course, the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies award goes to this review: “The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”

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