I'm probably just echoing a a pretty common place, no-brainer sentiment on this one, but this first book that comes to mind is Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. I'm not the first person to think that i would have made a killer short story, but as a novel it was long-winded and meandering. Don't get me wrong, the themes and situations are wonderfully conceived, but the craft is completely lost in wordiness. It's like when you were in elementary school and you had to write a full page describing an apple as a writing exercise. Good literary workout, piss-poor plan for writing a book though. If you want to see purple prose and flamboyant, almost tediously descriptive language done right, check out late 19th century Euopean literature like Huysmans Against Nature or Conrad's Heart of Darkness (two very contrasting styles that manage to do what Hawthorne failed at in The Scarlet Letter). I just think that if you're going to beat the reader over the head word with your words, at least by artful about it. Like, set some sense of tone or convey a message with it....that's kind of what makes novel writing a more specialized skill than simply writing. The onyl reason we study Hawthorne in American schools is because he was the only pre-Twain/Poe American author who wasn't a carbon copy of European style like Melville, it's certainly not because any of his books are very well written.
