Me Before You, by JoJo Moyes. (I will never get those 15 hours back.)
And I couldn’t finish Ove either.
Am I the only person here who has read “[illegimate child] Out of Carolina”? (Sorry, I know it’s against the TOS to try to circumvent the bad word checker, but I hope you will agree that this is an unusual circumstance. 
)
The scene where the mother chooses her BF over her child really, actually, did make me throw the book across the room. Not metaphorically.
I’m not a fan of Mary Higgins Clark–if you’ve read one of her books, you’ve read them all. That being said, someone must be a fan because she gets $12 million per novel. She’s now 89 years old.
@consolation, I read BOOC a very long time ago. I think it may have been an Oprah book club pick, I read a lot of those before I realized I didn’t really like her taste in books! I don’t remember it very well, except that I didn’t like it and I may have even bought it so waste of money too.
Hated Gone Girl and Jody Picoult but I think my most despised novel of all time was “Lord of the Flies.” Incredibly bleak view of humanity that seems to have been written mainly as a classroom (torture) exercise for high school students.
@MomofJandL --Lol at the “no books with the word we” rule. I’ve jokingly been saying for a while that I won’t read books called “The _____'s Wife.” They started popping up all over the shelves after The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I actually loved). Started to seem like a very lazy way to name a book–and besides, why do all of these characters need to be defined by their husbands??
^ I decided I wouldn’t read any books entitled “The [surname] [abstract word]” --The Bourne Identity, etc. Seemed like in the 70s to 90s they were rampant.
Also “Verbing Placename” (Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, etc.) (Okay, those were movie titles… but still.)
Well, I didn’t throw it across the room but I bogged down in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and just couldn’t finish it.
I love all the different viewpoints and approaches as to what to read or not read. Fun thread.
Just finished “The Book of Someday” by Dianne Dixon last night. Literally reading the last five pages thinking “Okay, THIS I’m gonna post on the throw-book thread on CC.” It’s like her contract said she had to write 312 pages (or whatever it was) and on page 298, she decided to wrap it up. It had book club discussion questions at the end and one of the questions concerned the ending; her answer was as unsatisfactory as the ending. Ugh!
Also just finished “Camino Island,” John Grisham’s new book. I’ve read all his books and like most of them, but this one was just stupid.
@cgpm59 Camino Island just came off my library ebook hold list and I started it last night. I’m looking for something diverting that doesn’t take too much brain power, but I was hoping it would rise above “stupid.” I think I’ll keep going since I like the plot – stolen original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts and see if it’s just too utterly dumb to continue with.
I just finished “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. She usually writes fast read, silly girl lit (which I enjoy), but this book was just amazing. It’s the story of two French sisters during WWII and that’s all I will say. I could not put it down.
Oops, wrong category. I definitely did not want to throw this book anywhere except on to the must read pile.
Well, if I’m allowed to interpret “throw it across the room” as just a feeling of frustration – and if the book doesn’t have to be a best seller – then I vote for Within A Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way, volumes 2 and 3 of In Search of Lost Time (Proust). I struggled through Swann’s Way, but ended up loving it, so I aspired to read all seven volumes. I found the next two extraordinarily difficult, much denser than Swann’s Way. When you have to read one page-long sentence over and over to understand the meaning, the “throw it across the room” feeling builds and builds… I felt the same way about Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann.
Others have mentioned The Alchemist. I didn’t want to throw that book across the room, but I shake my head wondering how it could ever be rated one of top 100 novels of the 20th century (I’ve seen it on such lists). It’s in the same vein as Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince, and just as insipid. Not a fan of CS Lewis, either.
I liked The Secret History a lot, and recently bought a copy for my kid. I like to expose him to authors and see how he responds. For instance, he latched onto Paul Auster and Richard Powers because of me, but he didn’t like Kafka, Hemingway, or Cormac McCarthy*. It’s all a matter of taste, I guess.
- I imagine that lots of people throw Blood Meridian across the room, but I think that it's great/terrifying. I regard Cormac McCarthy as the best living American writer.
Oh, and about Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy), I really liked it, but I can see how one could want to throw it across the room, if bleakness due to fate is repugnant. Jude and Tess though are even more bleak and fate-ridden, IMO. The saddest and most tragic line that I’ve encountered in literature is from Jude: “done because we are too menny.”
The Pilot’s Wife. It put me right off reading anything else by the author.
@whatisyourquest – Agree that those are sad, somber books, but beautifully written and true to much of real life, especially of their time. So though I probably won’t reread Hardy, I appreciate his mastery.
“Jude and Tess though are even more bleak and fate-ridden, IMO.”
Yeah, when the central theme is the punishments a woman needs to suffer for the unforgivable sin of being raped…that’s a pretty bleak book.
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become only more clear to me, that that is not what Hardy believed; it’s what Angel Clare believed. Hardy was describing the reality, not what he thought was right.
Angel Clare, though, was a monster.