The books you hated!

[AwkwardlySet]

We have plenty of threads about our favorite movies, books, songs, stories, food, beverages, socks, umbrellas, and so on. Well, I thought I'd start one about the books we hated, for whatever reason. Maybe a good discussion opens up, who knows! (Yeah, right... )

Anyway, I am at the midpoint of reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman after postponing its reading for years. Well, fuck me, this has to be one of the most frustrating books I have ever taken into my hands. How can one author be so amazing at some aspects of writing yet suck so much at others? At times I am really enjoying it, only to start groaning just a few pages later. I know he is supposed to be an acclaimed author and this is the first book of his I have started reading (likely the last as well ) but more often than not I seem to be disappointed by these "bestsellers".

Share your own frustrations or discuss those that others post at will.

 

[Agent0069]

Atlas Shrugged, or however it was called. An example on how not to write, how not to get your point across, and why it’s best to resolve your childhood traumas before you start writing a book.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

The Great Gatsby. Supposedly the classic class division struggle but I just found it a melodramatic soap. Had some strong imagery and description and a couple of intriguing side characters (and a gay beard situation cleverly hidden) but it wasn't enough. Big bag o' meh.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Atlas Shrugged, or however it was called. An example on how not to write, how not to get your point across, and why it’s best to resolve your childhood traumas before you start writing a book.

Is that the one that they made into a movie a couple of years ago?

 

[AwkwardMD]

Is that the one that they made into a movie a couple of years ago?

You might be thinking of Cloud Atlas

 

[AwkwardlySet]

You might be thinking of Cloud Atlas

Mmm yeah, that's right. I guess that's not the one he meant.

 

[ericalauren]

I once bought an ebook anthology of erotic stories on Amazon. It's by an author I had never heard of. I read the first two stories but had to stop because of the author's misogyny. It's one thing to use gendered slurs in erotica, but this author wrote things to the effect of "she could not go to college because she was just a stupid sl*t and no better than that". That really bothers me.

 

[ElectricBlue]

"Hate" is a bit of a strong word, for a book. How about, "Well that one sucked, won't read that author again."

It's no wonder folk get excited about so much around here, if they bring that much emotion to everything they do. I'm with @pink_silk_glove on this - "Meh" works just fine.

Having said that, Amor Towles is my great disappointment. I really enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow, but The Lincoln Highway?? It's not often I give a book up after fifty pages - and I spent full dollar to buy the bloody paperback. Shoulda gone to the library.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Ethan Frome, my English teacher owes me several hours of my life back.

Same with The Great Gatsby. It wasn't well regarded at all when it was first published. Only like 30 years later did the English Professor Mafia decide it was a great book and start forcing it on everyone else.

They did make a movie about Atlas Shrugged a few years ago.

 

[TomTeacher19]

The last book of the four in that dumb ass sparkly vampire series. Worst thing I've ever read by far.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The last book of the four in that dumb ass sparkly vampire series. Worst thing I've ever read by far.

How did you make it to four? I applaud your fortitude, a lesser man would have bailed after 3 chapters...

 

[MK_Whimsy]

I struggled to read Anna Karenina. It felt like a slog to get through. It may be that I don't have the attention span for that particular style of writing.

 

[TomTeacher19]

How did you make it to four? I applaud your fortitude, a lesser man would have bailed after 3 chapters...

I am cursed with too much optimism and too little sense of reality.

I hoped the books would get better.

I hoped having read them would make more of the ladies who also read them want to hook up with me.

I suppose the lack of the latter also is why I had spare time to finish them..,.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Anyway, I am at the midpoint of reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman after postponing its reading for years. Well, fuck me, this has to be one of the most frustrating books I have ever taken into my hands. How can one author be so amazing at some aspects of writing yet suck so much at others? At times I am really enjoying it, only to start groaning just a few pages later. I know he is supposed to be an acclaimed author and this is the first book of his I have started reading (likely the last as well ) but more often than not I seem to be disappointed by these "bestsellers".

You sure picked a time to start reading Gaiman :-/ I'd recommend not getting too emotionally invested in his TV adaptations right now, but it sounds like tha

I read that one almost exactly 23 years ago. (I recall buying it shortly after 9/11.) Up to that point I'd been a "buy everything he writes" level fan, but I think that was about the point where I started cooling on his work. It didn't make me groan, but definitely felt a bit bloated. If I were to re-read it today, I suspect I'd be a bit more critical of some aspects of the writing.

Share your own frustrations or discuss those that others post at will.

Only ever made it a page into The Da Vinci Code, but criticising that book feels like shooting fish in a barrel. Very rich, armour-plated fish.

Not going to name the other one, because the author's not a big name and I'd feel mean dumping on somebody who's not Dan Brown level successful. It was a romance novel that was recommended to me because of a bunch of ingredients that should've appealed to me. Plot was "autistic woman hires an escort"; I'd written my own autistic-woman-hires-escort story around the same time, so I was interested to see her take on it. The portrayal of autism was okay, but...

As well as being an escort, he teaches martial arts at the family dojo. She gets mad when she sees him wrestling with a teenage girl there, even though it's part of his role as an instructor, even though she knows the girl is his own sister (no this is not an I/T story), because she can't stand the idea of him being physical with another woman.

They break up for a while, and during that breakup she dates a guy from the office, and Mr. Right gets so mad about this he ends up beating up that guy. (The guy is a douche, but he's not beaten up for being a douche, more for being a rival.) IIRC he also does stuff like sending her tons of flowers even after she's told him she doesn't want to see him again.

It just felt like the author didn't know how to convey "these people love one another" except through toxic levels of jealousy, and I didn't find that at all appealing.

The sex-work part also really annoyed me. It felt like the author went "what can I do to make him exotic and damaged goods? I know, let's make him an escort" while not actually having respect for real people who do that kind of work, and without doing the research. A lot of that aspect didn't feel very realistic and felt like she was trying to say "he's not like all those other dirty whores, he's just doing this because he's emotionally damaged and will get out of it when her love heals him", and likewise "she's not like all those creepy women who hire gigolos, she's DIFFERENT". Bleah.

You might be thinking of Cloud Atlas

Maybe, but there also was a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged a few years back. In three parts, no less... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged_(film_series)

 

[DarkWhispers2U]

James and the Giant Peach springs to mind and I didn't even read it. My second grade teacher read it to us during art time. Reading us that book was pretty much the only thing I recall disliking about her.

 

[THBGato]

Second (or is it third?) The Great Gatsby. I'd also add The Catcher in the Rye. Poor little misogynistic rich boy, woe is him. Fuck off are you getting my sympathy Holden.

Weirdly, American Gods was the first prose novel by Gaiman I read (I'd already read his Sandman graphic novels) and I loved it. Maybe it was good I read it before his others then...

 

[BornNorCal]

Three Body Problem. It felt disjointed and I didn't feel like there were any redeeming qualities about any of the characters. It made me care so little I didn't read the rest of the series and don't regret it.

 

[MrPixel]

What? We're limiting this to modern literature? I nominate A Tale of Two Cities. I was force-fed this in 6th grade (!!!) and, frankly, it put me off reading classic fiction pretty much for the rest of my life. What an awful thing to do to an 11-year-old. Yeah, I may have been reading at 3rd-year college levels at the time, but that certainly didn't mean I could understand or appreciate the excruciatingly-written social commentary. Bleah.

I did browse Atlas Shrugged because Mom was an Ayn Rand fan and left it sitting around the house. I was curious since I sorta liked trains at the time and it was supposedly a story about the railroad industry. What little I read was unadulterated utopian poppycock which left me wondering "What are you thinking?" about Mom.

 

[Kitty_so_frisky]

The last book of the four in that dumb ass sparkly vampire series. Worst thing I've ever read by far.

I am cursed with too much optimism and too little sense of reality.

I hoped the books would get better.

I hoped having read them would make more of the ladies who also read them want to hook up with me.

I suppose the lack of the latter also is why I had spare time to finish them..,.

Oooh the 4th book was practically a fucking masterpiece compared to Life and Death, her gender-swapped rewrite of the first book. It was such a slog to get through, it took months of forcing it down bit by bit. My beautiful niece loves the franchise and gifted me a set of the original books to me when she was a teenager because she knew I love reading too, so of course I read them so I could talk about them with her. After over a decade, I was curious how the author may have grown as a writer, since she was not a strong writer to begin with, and called herself more of a “storyteller.” The rewrite was so fucking terrible, way worse than the original. The end was slightly improved, but the journey was tedious. I was basically hate-reading it in the second half.

Second (or is it third?) The Great Gatsby. I'd also add The Catcher in the Rye. Poor little misogynistic rich boy, woe is him. Fuck off are you getting my sympathy Holden.

Weirdly, American Gods was the first prose novel by Gaiman I read (I'd already read his Sandman graphic novels) and I loved it. Maybe it was good I read it before his others then...

Catcher in the Rye is my least favorite too. I hated both the character and his “voice.”

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

Classic: Possibly a controversial one but I disliked To Kill a Mockingbird. We read it in English class and it neither contained anything relatable to an British schoolgirl nor did it catch my attention as an interesting plot, especially as the first half is really just autobiographical reminiscences. I'd switched off by the time anything interesting happened. By contrast, I enjoyed Dickens, Eliot etc. and I read Anna Karenina and enjoyed it as an older teenager.

Modern: One of my friends recommended Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin recently and I really did not enjoy it. I ended up reading it all the way through through a combination of 'surely it must get good at some point' and masochism, but really I should have trusted my instincts and abandoned it at the beginning. The plot is completely absurd and none of the characters are at all interesting.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Second (or is it third?) The Great Gatsby. I'd also add The Catcher in the Rye. Poor little misogynistic rich boy, woe is him. Fuck off are you getting my sympathy Holden.

Weirdly, American Gods was the first prose novel by Gaiman I read (I'd already read his Sandman graphic novels) and I loved it. Maybe it was good I read it before his others then...

I remember Gatsby being a bit tedious. It read like that genre of books desperate to be made into a film script. Fortunately we only did it in sixth form (last two years of school) so didn't have to write any essays about it.

I read Catcher in the Rye at the same age, and it was OK, just totally unmemorable. So you're a whiny teenager with rich parents you don't like, lacking a girlfriend? Got loads of those round here. Meh.

Whereas American Gods I love dearly. I read it when it came out, after previously enjoying Neverwhere (a much shorter novel) and Sandman, despite my generally never liking graphic novels and needing the Sandman Companion to understand lots of it.

I was sadly disappointed by the TV series, though - looks beautiful, Ian McShane was born to play Wednesday, but so damn slow! And it gets worse, adding extra material to s2 and then I gave up a few episodes into s3 even just having it in the background. You could easily cut a third out of each episode and lose nothing - there was one bit where Shadow took about 5 minutes to walk across a car park in real time. Yes it was very atmospheric and ominous and the puddles were all lit beautifully, but get on with it!

Back on topic, more recently I've never been able to finish Ancillary Justice (let alone the sequels). I ought to like it, and the storyline with the clones and Raych government was good, but the trekking through snow and other storyline was just pure tedium.

 

[PennameWombat]

I will only say this about "Catcher in the Rye." Holden didn't get beaten up anywhere near enough times.

Moving on. Most books I hate, I simply DNF. One recent one is "Blackwater," by Michael McDowell. Interesting premise about a water sprite. But it's set in backwoods Alabama and the level of "Southern gentility" was just way too thick to deal with. Fortunately I'd gotten it free on some sort of Audible deal, and it'd been sitting in my library for a long time.

Of books I finish, I find a consistent issue with author Mira Grant (aka, Seanan McGuire.) She does horror and science fiction under the pen name, and urban fantasy under McGuire. I'm always taken by her horror premises ("Parasite," about intelligent, genetically engineered tapeworms; "Feed," a zombie novel with an actual basis in semi-possibility). But, oh my, I every time come to absolutely despise her characters. Every last one of them. Both of the books I mentioned are the beginnings of trilogies, and I've never made it past the first book. I forced myself to finish, hoping something would redeem them for me. But, alas.

I'll end by mentioning "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," by Neal Stephenson. Way too long, and his imagined "uploaded consciousness" world was, well, I would be very interested in a take on this by someone who didn't grow up in a Western environment where Christianity is the dominant cultural background. Because, well, *spoiler*, he just assumed that human intelligence being rebooted would essentially just reinvent that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I was sadly disappointed by the TV series, though - looks beautiful, Ian McShane was born to play Wednesday, but so damn slow! And it gets worse, adding extra material to s2 and then I gave up a few episodes into s3 even just having it in the background.

I was lukewarm on S1, but I did think Mr. Nancy's introduction was a fantastic piece of work. I had intentions of catching up with S2 at some point but when they did Orlando Jones dirty I lost what enthusiasm I still had for the show.

 

[onehitwanda]

I was lukewarm on S1, but I did think Mr. Nancy's introduction was a fantastic piece of work. I had intentions of catching up with S2 at some point but when they did Orlando Jones dirty I lost what enthusiasm I still had for the show.

Anansi Boys is well worth reading if you haven't already.

My second-worst book? Eragon. I think two pages in it starts reading like bad Wheel-of-Time fanfiction, and Wheel of Time is already bad. ( @AwkwardlySet )

Worst though? I've read some truly awful 80's era AD&D books, but even those swamps of malevolent mediocrity cannot compare to "The World Rose" by Richard Brittain. About the most charitable thing I could say about it is that it was published.

(I have to confess I didn't read all of it. The first couple of pages kill me every time I try.)

 

[Plathfan]

Why focus on bestsellers? There are plenty of award-winning or ridiculously highly-rated stories here that, for some odd reason, I couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs. I guess that’s just me.

Any long piece, no matter how well-written, has dull or less successful sections. The key is to spot those and skim through them skillfully, without missing the occasional profound lines or phrases.

I’m not sure you'd want to know what Neil Gaiman would think of your writing.