These Are The 20 Most Overrated Books of All Time, And Yes, List Include Bible, Ernest Hemingway, Paulo Coelho, And Mark Twain

A new piece from the editorial board at GQ fashion magazine says, the Bible, yes the Christian Bible, is one of the most overrated books of all time.

In the first spot, the piece tore into “Lonesome Dove,” one of most well-known and highly regarded works of Larry McMurtry. When discussing “Lonesome Dove,” author Lauren Groff points out the trouble with its rigid masculine emotional landscape, glorification of guns and destruction, and misogynistic gender roles in McMurtry’s book, and suggests reading “The Mountain Lion” by Jean Stafford instead.

The Bible doesn’t fare much better. Novelist and poet Jesse Ball suggests reading “The Notebook” by Agota Kristof instead, calling the Holy Bible “repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.”

Other books on the list include Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord of the Rings, The Old Man and the Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, and “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. But as the editors explain at the beginning of the piece, the list is actually just 20 books. Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is listed twice.

These Are The 20 Most Overrated Books of All Time

1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
3. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
4. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
6. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
7. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
8. John Adams by David McCullough
9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
11. The Ambassadors by Henry James
12. The Bible
13. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
14. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Life by Keith Richards
18. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
19. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
20. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
21. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift