Your Most Hated Books

Parent Cafe
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Gosh, all the hate for some of my favorite authors: Marquez, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Eco, Dickens, Tolkien, Updike. The only book mentioned that I read and disliked was The DaVinci Code, a cheap knock-off of Umberto Eco’s plots and style, done with an anti-Catholic slant.

I have lots of books in the “meh” category, but far from hate. Three times, though, I was driven to shred a book. I found a copy of a book in the library of my fraternity by a pretty good science fiction writer. I got about 3 sentences in and realized “Dianetics” was something else, so it went out the window in pieces (apologies to any Scientologists).

The second was Isadora Duncan’s “My Life”, her autobiography. To paraphrase - I would dance, and the people would boo, but they didn’t realize I was a genius ahead of my time. Merda d’artista, fed to me in heaping spoonfuls.

The first though, I recall the story but neither the title nor author. My father’s first degree was English so our shelves were well-stocked. How this one got into the house is a bit of a mystery. It was about a kid, travelling into a dream world to do battle with a shape-shifting red-haired witch.It was interesting enough, and until that day I had a habit of finishing any book I started. The ending had the kid throwing a photo into the fire, and in the background of the photo was a picture of a fox who happened to be the shape-shifted witch. Did you all know that if you burn a picture of a witch, the witch dies?

It went into the garbage page-by-page.

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"The only book I’ve ever refused to keep in my home after reading it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula: I read it when I was nine, and was so supremely terrified by it that I made my mother throw the book out. (Because how did I know that he wouldn’t come out of the book at night?) "

OMG, Donna. I was traumatized by The Lost World at about that age. :slight_smile: Loved the book, decided that pterodactyls were cool, but the thoughts of jararacas and anacondas attacking me at night kept me awake until I finally figured out what I needed to do: stuff blankets and pillows between my bed and the wall so no nasty creature could crawl out of there while I was asleep! LOL.

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I was afraid to keep “In Cold Blood” and “Helter Skelter.”

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I read mostly biographies, autobiographies and historical books, so I haven’t read a lot of what’s on this thread. However, I’m soooo glad I’m not the only one who hated The Catcher In The Rye. Also, I wasn’t impressed by The Great Gatsby and I’m not a Stephen King fan either.

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Jack Ketchum’s “Girl Next Door” - this is likely the most disturbing book ever written. I was visiting a friend at the beach and picked it out of a stack of books on my way to the beach. I maybe got half way through. Horrible book, do not subject yourself to it. Stayed with me for months.

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Helter Skelter freaked me out. I was reading it alone late at night, heard strange sounds outside, and thought (completely nonsensically) “They’re coming to get me!!”

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Helter Skelter freaked me out, as well. I was the right age for Charles Manson to be THE bogeyman.

Girl Next Door seemed to stalk me from the kindle shopping list for a long time, but for some reason I never chose it. I guess I’m glad I didn’t.

Have any of you read any of the books by William Peter Blatty? The Exorcist is actually a very good book, as was Elsewhere. Legion was fine but not quite as good as the other two.

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That’s tragic.

@HImom, I loved Rifle for Watie when I was a kid! Also his book Komantcia, which is excellent. Howard Keith wrote great historical fiction for kids.

Re A.S.Byatt, loved Possession, and have read most of her other books, absolutely hated Babel Tower. Couldn’t finish it. (I also hated that she killed off my favorite character in Still Life, but that’s different.)

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^Your first remark is my favorite part of this whole thread! :slight_smile:

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Yes, tragic. Go back to it and hate Darcy all you want. Imo, it’s worth it to get to the end.
But I immensely disliked the Keira Knightly movie. That Mr D was too attractive. Lots of the P&P films have this problem, jmo.

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And Colun Firth wasn’t too attractive in the BBC version?? :wink:

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Too attractive. I just can’t name them all.

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Oh, Colin Firth was just right attractive. :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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As far as “50 Shades of Gray” goes, the reason it was published is it was published as an e-book, it sold like 100,000 copies, became a phenomenon, and a publishing house bought the rights, and the rest is history. I haven’t quite figured out if all the sales were people curious, if it was a bunch of sexually repressed housewives having it as a ‘naughty’ secret (one other theory put out there), but whatever it was, it fed on itself. In terms of the plot, it is pretty much a standard romance plot, the broken person fixed by love…I think that a lot of it was the (mostly women) reading about sex as a kind of play and seeing something different, and for that, I can’t totally trash the book , and hopefully there will be better written books put out there that treat sex in all its forms:)

One thing I would tell people, don’t think that all romances are necessarily the same as Harlequin bodice rippers of the past, there are a lot of people writing romances these days that know how to write, and while they follow standard romance forms, actually have characters and plot that them fun to read…so I wouldn’t be so fast to denigrate someone writing romances, they ain’t what they used to be (and some of them, despite being relatively formulaic, are fun, like Kirsten Ashley,cause she has fun characters).

Generally when I hate books that are fiction, it is because I can’t get my head around any of the characters or care about them, Gone Girl was like that, there was no one in that book I liked, or even could admire as a bad guy (anti heros are fun), Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations come to mind. I also hate books that are badly written but also have this pretension about them (anything Ayn Rand wrote was like that, it was piss poor writing, the characters were cardboard, and that is not even getting into the meaning, or lack thereof of the books).

There are books that aren’t great literature I can enjoy reading, as badly written as they were, I enjoyed the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer books, and I absolutely loved reading Robert Ludlum…but neither ever pretended they were anything but what they were. Books that in the reading, you can see the author smugly standing there looking over your shoulder proclaiming how great they are drive me up the wall, too, anything that sets itself off as ‘great’ likely isn’t…people have claimed that about Hemingway, but while I don’t necessarily turn to him for easy reading, I never got the sense of it from his books, even though he was a world class ego.

With non ficition, books that generally end up on my hate list are books that seem to spend a lot of time, not on the subject at hand, but showing how others who have written on the subject were so wrong and they were right. I enjoy when they discuss other’s takes and talk about their own and contrast them, but when they spend time, as a book on WWI I recently tried reading did, with “the Guns of August”, trashing what others wrote over trivial details, it will earn my ire. I hated most of Stephen Ambrose books, because I think he was so into hero worship and projecting himself into the ‘glory’ of his books (most specifically, his books on WWII), that it seemed more about him and his hero worship rather than telling the story of the people who actually were there. I also hate books of history written by history professors that seem to think writing a book of history means it has to be boring, written for Mycroft Holmes or something (and for them, I would tell them to read “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, by MacPherson, written by a professor, but not boring)…

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The very thing I hated about Hemingway, when I first read him, was exactly what I later adored.

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I thought I was the only one who was afraid to keep creepy books. I had to put “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris in the recycling bin halfway through. Didn’t finish it, so I can’t say I read it, but I really detested the part I did read.

I loved The Exorcist, though I couldn’t sleep in the same room with it. I was reading it at night during college orientation and got to a part that completely freaked me out, so I went in search of company and wound up meeting my best college friend. So thanks to William Peter Blatty for that and a great read.

257

You guys are reminding me of how much The Shining scared me when I was a kid.

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I thought the first 20 or so pages of The Devil Wears Prada was one of the most poorly written collection of words that I’ve ever read and couldn’t bring myself to read anymore.

What gets me about 50 Shades of Grey is that people think that that book is the “best” of fanfiction when there’s actually a ton of truly wonderfully written fanfiction out there–there’s just also a lot of junk because there’s no gatekeeping whatsoever.

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and…wait for it…the worst book of all time, translated from the original Norwegian and assigned by my high school teacher…Giants in the Earth, by Ole Rolvaag…our hero freezes to death at the end after eating many potatoes. trust me, this would not be a spoiler alert, but only blessed relief, if you were ever to attempt this book.

Oh, thingamajig this is one of my all time favorite books. But then, I also love Heart of Darkness, and I adore Moby Dick. I may like it even more than Giants in the Earth.

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Some books should only be read in daylight. :slight_smile: One reason I often have more than one book going at a time is because some books are NOT good bedtime reading.